NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program 351
cmansley writes "NASA Ames Director Simon Worden revealed that NASA Ames has 'just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,' with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. Worden said 'Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, "Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?"'"
yikes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:yikes (Score:5, Interesting)
A billion here and a billion there, who's counting?
What one really should notice about this is they can get someone on Mars for $10 billion; why the fuck haven't they started yet? 20 billion dollars poured into the US economy, into research and development and finally into production would probably have done a heck of a lot more than the trillions wasted on trying to save a few fat cats.
Re:yikes (Score:5, Interesting)
The key points of the mission were
This still seems to me to be the most sensible and effective way to put people on Mars. Preliminary back-and-forth trips to the moon not needed. Establishes a genuine human presence instead of just planting a flag. And at a cost which in the light of numbers being thrown around during the financial crisis which looks like a bargain.
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Hydrogen isn't the type of fuel that lends itself well to long storage and bringing it down on some planetary surface. In fact, it's probably close to most problematic in those regards.
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Flammability is the least of problems. Bigger issue is how it is "very" cryogenic and of low density (necessitating large structures, especially problematic when trying to perform an atmospheric entry) - there are good practical reason why no booster needing to remain viable in space for more than a few days (or even hours?) used LH2.
Re:yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
QUICK! WRITE TO NASA! (Score:4, Insightful)
OMG! They will waste billions and kill American astronauts in the process!
No... to late... if only you were there to point out that Wikipedia article to them sooner.
Come on...
BESIDES the fact that the Hydrogen payload is going AHEAD of the rest of the mission so the fuel for the trip back is already there when astronauts arrive - don't you think that they would you know... include the proper safety measures for landing 6 tons of H2 and a FUCKING NUCLEAR REACTOR ON THE FUCKING MARS?!
Since the contemporary political reaction to any insufficiently large disaster is to create the conditions for truly massive failures (aka. the "stimulus), the big hydrogen clouds on mars must look pretty attractive to Obama ...
Oh! I'm sorry... Didn't realize you were a troll, just going about your daily business.
Terribly sorry about. Didn't mean to offend your race or culture or anything.
There are some nice political stories coming up in the Firehose. You might like them.
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Or a few tons of reaction mass for some sort of nuclear powered ion engine (for example), which never has to deal with landing on the surface, at most aerobraking gently.
Re:yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
Absent an imminent threat, real or perceived, the average voter doesn't want to fund anything, especially in today's political climate. It's easy to campaign for increasing military spending because of the evil terrorists. It's easy to campaign for keeping Social Security because nobody wants to see grandmothers starving on the streets. In contrast, it's very difficult to win elections running on platform of increasing our efforts in space. Most voters don't understand why we're even up there and wouldn't care if they did because it doesn't impact their day to day lives or their perceived sense of security.
So, when we decide we want to cut money from the budget, NASA and other programs like it are the first on the chopping block. We cut a billion here and a billion there from various programs, but won't touch the programs that take the largest bite out of the federal budget: the military, social security, and medicare. We could fully fund a mission to Mars right now just by cutting out a small portion of the money the military wastes on various projects it doesn't need or even particularly want, but that's never going to happen because to the average voter failing to fund whatever Congress thinks the military wants is anti-American and will cause the terrorists to win.
Our government has consistently shown that the way to win elections is to increase military spending and cut education and science research, including space exploration. This should tell you where our priorities are as a society, and why we're unlikely to make it to Mars or anywhere else in our lifetime.
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The issue really seems to be the lack of a space race. So how do why drive the Russian and Chinese to compete in space and forget this competing militarily crap. Perhaps the meme driven over and over again, he who dominates in space dominates the world, driven over and over again might work.
You know, the first country with a manned expedition to Mars get to keep it along with the idea that Terra forming Mars would not be all that difficult.
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Absent an imminent threat, real or perceived, the average voter doesn't want to fund anything, especially in today's political climate. It's easy to campaign for increasing military spending because of the evil terrorists. It's easy to campaign for keeping Social Security because nobody wants to see grandmothers starving on the streets. In contrast, it's very difficult to win elections running on platform of increasing our efforts in space. Most voters don't understand why we're even up there and wouldn't care if they did because it doesn't impact their day to day lives or their perceived sense of security.
Get some convincing shots of a "global killer" that's "20 years out" and lots of geeks saying it's a "99% guarantee to hit the planet" and you'd get your funding real quick. Then, when it "misses" (because it wasn't there) and the geeks say "oh, this was an imperial unit asteroid, we were doing the calcs in metric. Our bad. But look, we got cool space ships!"
Sounds like a plan to me. Call Spielberg, we need a consultant.
Tell me this - how different is this hoax scenario than "Too big to fail" as far a
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to what end? (Score:2)
All the spending items you mention have some clear immediate need they are addressing. Sending people to Mars does not have a clear immediate need.
silly asses! (Score:2)
Are you going to argue with him?!
What more reason do you need?
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It's still not unreasonable to establish a permanent base on the moon, on the other side where the planet will shield a potential observatory to be built there from various types of signal pollution from Earth. We could learn about building and maintaining bases for low-G, low-pressure environments before we go to Mars and deal with entire additional categories of problem like windblown fines. On the other hand, sightseeing trips to the moon are totally worthless at this point.
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Doesn't work that way... (Score:2)
Mars Direct (or Semi-Direct) plan can't be used for the Moon on account that Moon has no atmosphere.
Which would be the source of the fuel for the trip back home.
Also, most things that were a part of the Mars Direct plan were there because they are an issue if you are going to MARS. Not Moon.
Prolonged exposure to 0-gravity, fuel, launch window every 1.5 years etc.
Take a break and watch the documentary [youtube.com] about it for more info.
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Also we haven't really explored the moon. Frozen water likely exists in craters which are continually in shadow. Water = oxygen & hydrogen.
If Columbus had explored as much as we have explored the moon he would have landed, collected few seashells, walked around on the beech a little bit, took some sketches of the inland areas then returned home and never came back.
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It would be a great accomplishment to go to Mars, but that is all it would be - just a feather in our cap. The talk of colonizing is just spin to gloss over the fact that the when we to the Moon just for the accomplishment of it, that the space program kind of went into the toilet afterward.
A serious space program, if it were truly interested in colonization, would focus on the moon. The moon comes first if space colonization is really a goal. The moon comes first for mining and commerce.
There is no reason
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they can get someone on Mars for $10 billion; why the fuck haven't they started yet?
They also said that was the price tag for a one way trip. While I have no doubt that you could find many volunteers for that, even if they had no hope of survival past the point of the canned air running out, politicians don't have the guts. Remember the second part of Kennedy's moon goal, "and return him safely to the Earth". It would take a real change in our culture before the majority would support politicians who sup
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Well there is one way to save significant amounts of money, volunteer labour. One of the greatest expenses in the space program is the custom production of limited numbers of items which all must be hand made to exacting specifications. Seek people to make this items for free, individuals, companies and countries can all contribute to an open space program.
Some big ticket items still need to be paid for but there are likely billions of savings in all those bits and pieces, just put the specs up on line a
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This presumes that everybody will volunteer to make little, critical components, and only 2 or 3 people will volunteer to be the astronaut.
Maybe we should open source the whole thing - that way when there's a problem, Apollo 13-style, the volunteers on earth can get on the radio and say "I don't work for you, you have the code & the specs - figure it out your fucking self. Did you even RTFM?"
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If AMSAT [amsat.org] is a valid example, volunteer work can make miracles happen on the cheap. Amateur radio folk have launched dozens of volunteer-built satellites [amsat.org] as ballast on existing launches. They have recently started making birds large enough to be primary payloads. The money for the launches is donated.
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But the OP's idea of building a major space initiative through volunteer machining work is just worlds apart from reality.
"send people one way to Mars" (Score:5, Funny)
In other news: Google To Expand Outsourcing
Cutting Corners (Score:5, Funny)
"Ok astronauts, we had some budget cuts so you will have to hold your breath once you get out of our atmosphere..."
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They said $1 billion to get TO mars. (Score:2)
Hey cheer up Mr. Smith you will be the first man on mars. The bad news is you will die on impact when your capsule crashes into the planet at 40 times the speed of sound. Budgets cuts and all that we can't afford to slow you down, or bring the supplies needed for you to survive and return. Nobody every said making history was going to be easy.
Yes, I can send someone for 2 billion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes, I can send someone for 2 billion (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they've already got the speech ready:
http://watergate.info/nixon/moon-disaster-speech-1969.shtml [watergate.info]
Wow, a whole $1 million? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that should pay for the catering for a year.
But seriously, I know DARPA and NASA are just fulfilling their primary missions here (i.e., dazzling the press with PR), but is there anyone out there still gullible enough to think that ANYTHING will ever come of this, that this is anything more than pissing $1.1 million down a hole? With changing administrations, there is no way that DARPA or NASA could ever mount even a 10-year campaign for anything anymore, much less a 100-year.
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It's not the trip itself, but the science that's important. Learning how to send a small group of people to a distant location with limited supplies and not having them all starve/kill each other/go crazy is important, not just for traveling to Mars, but for life on the ISS, or in the Antarctic, or at the bottom of the oceans.
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This is, unless I misunderstand, 1.1 mill to establish if there is a feasible way to get the costs down.
Not to actually build it, or ACTUALLY make the tech cheaper - just to see if it is feasible.
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I know DARPA and NASA are just fulfilling their primary missions here (i.e., dazzling the press with PR)
NASA maybe but DARPA? For every gee wiz DARPA project that you hear about there's 5 boring ones that no one cares about, the media doesn't exactly care about things like a smaller form factor for a military radio or a system for improved telemetry during test flights, regardless of how much they advance the state of the art.
Re:Wow, a whole $1 million? (Score:5, Insightful)
Irony
Definition: Someone bashing DARPA on the internet, a global network that grew out of the ARPANET project funded by DARPA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wow, a whole $1 million? (Score:4, Interesting)
DARPA never "abandoned" ARPANET. (Score:5, Informative)
DARPA deals with cutting edge technology. Like the first packet switching network, telepathic spies, and cars that can drive themselves.
By 1975 ARPANET was no longer cutting edge pure R&D but rather a growing production system. As such control & funding of ARPANET was transfered to the Defense Communication Agency. No matter how massively sucessful ARPANET was (or could have been) DARPA was never going to fund it forever. That isn't how DARPA works. It is a incubator for technology. Those technologies are either abandoned (like telepathic spies) or move on to production systems (like APRANET).
Similarly today DARPA is doing research into autonomous vehicles. However someday when those vehicles are in production DARPA will move on to other projects.
I grant you research into telepathic spies wasn't the most productive but is a misnomer to say DARPA abandoned ARPANET.
ARPANET remained functional until 1990 (although by 1983 the military nodes had broken away to form the isolated MilNET).
It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
-- Requiem of the ARPANET
NASA and the rest of the industry unable to do it (Score:2)
NASA and the rest of the industry would be unable to do it. The entire industry is oriented around project based operations with a defined start and end. Where is the "end" of a one way colonization ship? If an accident wipes them all out? Its incompatible with the whole corporate structure and mindset. Example, after the project ends, you get evaluated and perhaps promoted, on a project that never ends, that means you never get promoted, I'm sure they'll love that.
That's also why the cost concept is p
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An example of the difference: Military recruiting is a program that never ends (just like the one way colonization ship) but there are many projects that people work on that do end like this year's USMC recruitment TV comm
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Average members of our specie had lots of practice in abandoning friends and family; we can cope with that. And in this case even a decent communication would be possible, if a bit far from realtime.
Too bad the financing in the style of New World colonists probably can't work, there'll be probably nothing which could repay the debt in a reasonable amount of time. At least there's always place for "spiritual" reasons, I guess - which faith is willing to claim the Mars for itself with a first temple/etc.? ;p
At present, NOBODY's able to do it. (Score:2, Informative)
No method has yet been created (as in, put into practice) to enable human bodies to withstand prolonged microgravity. Physiologically we're just not built for it. Our bodies have grown in earth's gravity, our blood vessels below the chest have grown to return blood against gravity back to the heart. As yet, there's no viable method for keeping a human able to do what they need to do in microgravity for a very long period and enable them to function properly once they reach the surface (and gravity environme
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And there is a very easy fix for that [wikipedia.org]. This is not a new concept. E.g. you would have noticed it if you watched 2001 [wikipedia.org] attentively.
You want to put someone on Mars for $2 billion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then offer $2 billion to put someone on Mars. The Chinese probably won't take your money for political reasons, but I'm damn sure India will, probably buying Chinese rocket parts off the shelf.
Oh, wait - you meant, how can we give $2 billion to Americans to do it? Well, forget it - you need to spend that much just on the Oversight Steering Committee Review Board's annual team building retreat to Aspen.
nothing on starships (Score:2)
I was expecting to read some radical plan for getting to the Gliese 581 star system with some kind of Orion nuclear pulse starship built from a moonbase. Instead I read about interplanetary travel and even airships. Interstellar travel is exactly what we should be planning. We've already mostly explored our own system with robotic probes. Time to move on. I picture large scale uranium [popsci.com] mining on the moon similar to the mining operations in the film Moon, and a huge spaceship manufacturing base. Something lik
Re:nothing on starships (Score:5, Insightful)
With current technology (and current technology discovery rates), anything we send past the outer planets will, almost certainly, be overtaken by something else that we send later way before it ever makes any new discoveries. The speeds and distances involved mean that waiting 100 years (twice as long as the entire history of spaceflight) is more sensible because then we'd be able to build something that would overtake ANYTHING that we could send today. And, to be honest, it's quite probably that even THAT would be overtaken LONG before it got anywhere interesting (e.g. nearest star).
If we tried to catch the Voyager's NOW, it would take probably 15-20 years if we could use all the best technology (and assuming everything just worked as we expect it to). By that time, they'd be another 15-20 years in front. And the point at which we overtake them will be a point at which we could probably launch something from Earth that would get to the same point in much less time (and probably, again, overtake both!).
Interstellar travel is nonsense at the moment. It's a waste of money to put even one remote probe out that far because by the time it gets to anything interesting from an interstellar point of view (Voyager took nearly 25 years to get out of the solar system), we could build something that would launch, travel and pass it and have better sensors too. Any notion of sending these 20-generation, half-the-speed-of-light fanciful starships to other stars is a waste - unless you WANT your great-grandaughter to watch someone overtake them, waving as they go, and realise you are several generations away from your destination, several generations away from the home planet, AND you never got to any real interstellar science while you were travelling.
When something is possible in a generation (or possibly two) then it's worth doing. But it's really embarrassing to spend billions in order to be overtaken by a faster, better, cheaper probe that will get to your destination years before you ever do anything useful and was sent by people who've not had to do with food shortages, oxygen problems, radiation, muscle-weakening, etc.
Re:nothing on starships (Score:5, Insightful)
First, the obvious conclusion of your argument is that we should never send anything into space because we will always be able to overtake it 20 years later.
Second, you ignore the benefits of the first 20 years of using the thing (i.e., knowing things 20 years earlier than we otherwise would have).
Third, building the initial improves our ability to build a successor. Without building one now, the one we build 20 years from now might be ten years behind where it otherwise could have been. We might as well not build anything we can send into space until we've got FTL travel down cold.
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Your first assumption is wrong. Because there is a point of diminishing gains at which it can ONLY be worthwhile to go then. That's *not* now. Give it a few generations (more if the US wants to dismantle more of it's space budgets).
Second, those benefits will be few. Because, for a start, interstellar communication will be incredibly lagged and slow and unlikely to yield enough useful data. If it was useful, a probe would be much better. How are the best probes we've ever sent into the deepest part of
Re:nothing on starships (Score:5, Interesting)
In a perfect world, you would be right. We would just wait until we are ready.
The problem is that is not how it works. First, you need to not only build up competency, you also need to build confidence that we can do things like this. No one will want to launch an interstellar craft without having tried something that goes some substantial fraction of the way. There are practical reasons for this, but also morale reasons. No one is going to feel confident in going interplanetary to interstellar in one single program even if the theory is solid. Considering that we know absolutely nothing about interstellar space first-hand, it is not an unreasonable attitude to take.
Second, even if we accept that approach and are willing to wait until the theory tells us we are ready, we are making assumptions about the rate of scientific and engineering advances that may not be justifiable. I know people love that we are in an age of increasing, even accelerating scientific and technological achievement, but there is absolutely no reason that such a rate of change has to continue. For one thing, the simple fact of the energy crisis is a clear and present limiting factor to advancement. Without almost exponentially increasing amounts of available energy and resources, we are unlikely to be able to sustain forward momentum at the present rate, let alone at an ever increasing rate. Beyond that, I hope I don't have to explain the effect of any one of the developing global conflicts on the possibility of a slow down, or even a dark age in our future. It is entirely possible that any ship that can be launched *will* be the one that arrives first.
Any interstellar journey that has a reasonable chance of success is going to be the most important thing mankind has ever accomplished to that date. Any reasonable level of success means that humanity's eventual extinction ceases to be an absolute certainty. I can't see why we wouldn't want to launch as soon as possible, even if after 20 years or so, one of our later designs drops out of warp in front of the ship and picks up the crew before they have even gotten a tenth of the way there. And no one can tell me that twenty years of studying interstellar space itself is not worth the effort even if it is not the primary mission.
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With current technology (and current technology discovery rates), anything we send past the outer planets will, almost certainly, be overtaken by something else that we send later way before it ever makes any new discoveries. The speeds and distances involved mean that waiting 100 years (twice as long as the entire history of spaceflight) is more sensible because then we'd be able to build something that would overtake ANYTHING that we could send today. And, to be honest, it's quite probably that even THAT would be overtaken LONG before it got anywhere interesting (e.g. nearest star).
So when do you decide it's good enough?
I mean... We launch now and in 100 years we could easily overtake them.
So we launch in 100 years... And 100 years after that we could overtaken them...
So we wait 200 years to launch... But 100 years later we can overtake them...
So we wait 300 years...
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There's always the idea of planning for your current ship being overtaken by the next wave of the fleet [wikipedia.org]. That way, each ship would only have to be completely self sufficient for 20 years, and the first ships wouldn't have to be inhabited at all, they could just be loaded up with a huge amount of some important resource (water, nuclear fuel, whatever you're going to need). And if propulsion really improves as fast as you seem to think it will, the ships could easily request what resources they will need;
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That ignores how many interesting targets beyond outer planets are well within 100 years of probe travel with current capabilities. How speed of Voyagers was determined by their mission and budget, not only technical limitations (a Saturn V with NERVA upper stage and on the probe, borrowed from the Soviets, ion xenon thruster with nuclear reactor could all give a much higher speed, and nothing worse from what we can do few decades later; but it would actually limit their usefulness, limit flyby times during
Eheh (Score:3, Interesting)
So you would tell the wright bothers not to bother, because someone is sure to come along with a better design soon, a better design based on... oh wait.
I don't think you got how science works. For the next generation X, you need the current generation. This ain't a game of Civ were you can cheat your way from the stone age to the exodus.
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Pioneer mostly. Probes to gather data about this very slight anomaly would need to be almost dedicated, to have long periods of cruise without the use of thrusters. And this very slight anomaly, if it exists, might very well not have much impact outside of our understanding of cosmology...
Serious question here ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why have we not started a project based on a scaled up(more fuel) ion-propulsion engine to send something out of the solar system? We have our ears craning to the sky to hear a 1/2 watt voyager signal, but we could be sending something else deeper, faster, more powerful and with a lot more scientific instruments on it.
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Please define that better than "send something out of the solar system".
Voyager won't see anything more for 300,000 years, even at 100x speed a new craft won't see anything for 3000 years.
There are a lot more interesting things to study than the heliosphere right now, than to send a craft out there just for that.
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Voyager won't see anything more for 300,000 years, even at 100x speed a new craft won't see anything for 3000 years.
Ion engines don't have this constant velocity problem. I'm unqualified to revise the math, though (somebody please do so).
There's also the unsolved problem of the lack of deflector dishes so a spec of dust doesn't obliterate the probe 200 years from now.
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I don't know what you're talking about. If you have an unimpeded path through vacuum you're going to have a constant velocity.
Any self-propulsion system has exactly the same problems due to the limits imposed by the rocket equation [wikipedia.org]. Basically, an ion engine can reach a higher velocity only because its exhaust velocity is much higher, but it's still far from practical for interstellar travel. For that you need to get your rocket to about 0.1c, which
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Serious answer, which will probably sound partisan...
The political will to spend that sort of money on this sort of mission, isn't there.
Republicans, especially classic Republicans who tend to favour small government, would see such a program as a needless waste of money. It's not like the 60's, when the Space Race could be linked in the mindset to defence, security, and anti-communism, three things that will invariably be supported by Republicans.
While the Democrats tend to have less problem funding big ex
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Plus, we already have more than one mission examining the edge of the solar system; missions inside the solar system might produce more useful data in less time on a smaller budget.
nuclear accelerator (Score:3, Interesting)
The perfect engine would generate 1G of acceleration over a multiple year period.
With this engine, a trip to Mars should be a rather shorter endeavour.
Anybody have any idea what it would take to build such a thing, Or how fast such a thing could get to Mars at it's closest approach assuming 1G of acceleration?
.
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Of course NASA has pondered using Ion propulsion [nasa.gov] to get to Mars.
It seems how long it would take to get to Mars using ion propulsion depends on a number of considerations. But a figure bandied about last years was 39 days [universetoday.com].
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Because accelerators are horribly inefficient?
When they call you (Score:2)
Beaming energy (Score:2)
To beam energy to a vessel, you have to cross the atmosphere. Methinks you're not just going to only heat up the vessel.
How much? (Score:2)
$1,100,000 is hardly enough money to get the stationery and logos printed up. It hardly constitutes the "funding" of a program.
I think it's sad how the US government can print up trillions of dollars to reward select banks and companies like GM by taking away the consequences of screwing up, and yet they keep NASA worse than starving by giving them these paltry amounts. Either shut it down, or fund it properly. These halfway measures are just an utter waste of money.
You have 100 years? (Score:4, Informative)
Turning US$ 2 Billion into US$ 100 Billion in 100 years is no big deal. One just needs a 4% return above inflation. That is trivial for a good asset manager with a long term outlook.
In fact, make it into the "120 year starship program" and we will have US$ 220 Billion to play (don't you love compound interest rates?).
Star Trek is now the model for our space program? (Score:2)
So we are to assume that Gene Roddenberry had more insight on space travel and engineering than actual NASA engineers?
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So, tell me again... (Score:4, Insightful)
...what the point of getting humans to Mars is? It's not science. We have robots and will soon have better robots. It's not resources. There's nothing *there* worth bringing back from a distant gravity well. If we're going that far out, why not just do a mining survey of the asteroid belts and find out which ones might be heading our way at the same time.
Sounds like NASA doing what it does best. Avoiding practical real world missions at all costs. Guess why people want to cut their budgets?
Re:So, tell me again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did it occur to you that my point was just as valid for the moon in 1968? What have we gotten from the moon?
The moon landings were cold war political theater. There's little technology that we couldn't have gotten by other means.
Had we put up long term near-earth stations designed for say, power generation, zero g manufacturing, etc. it would have made sense. The moon? Just another gravity well.
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Colonisation to prevent the death of human civilisation if the Earth gets pegged?
How is this better served by a Mars mission than a long term zero g station at L5?
Potential discovery of life/fossils, which would have massive implications for exobiology and evolutionary theory?
Interesting, yes. Critical? No. I'd focus more on the bits that will keep life going on *this* planet, eh?
A better platform for space telescopes than Earth? (the Moon would be even better, though)
At risk of repeating myself, how is thi
Waste of Time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this just a wish-list by NASA considering the current lack of any way to actually implement it given how Congress seems to mess things up and change their mind every term?
Until we fix this problem, we're going nowhere. We need to lock in funding and missions for a few decades instead of a a couple of years at a time. Having a bunch of idiots in Congress who know nothing about science and engineering changing the game plan more often than we change Presidents is just crazy.
There is no way anyone would volunteer (Score:4, Funny)
If the maximum distance from the Earth to Mars is 401.3 million km, then the statuses that they read on Facebook or Twitter will be no newer than 22 minutes. This does not include the initial HTTP request.
With the time and money that NASA puts into researching issues as minor as "how are astronauts supposed to poop in space without gravity", I'm sure that this "gotcha" has not been overlooked.
If they are still considering investing in sending someone to Mars knowing full well about this hang-up, It is reasonable to conclude that somewhere, someone, has successfully developed an ansible, and that they are keeping this technology from us.
One Miiiilion Dollars! (Score:2)
$1 million will last about a week on a program like this.
It will also buy 1/6th of a bionic man.
Re:Sooo.... (Score:4, Funny)
How is Jefferson Starship a "starship"?
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probably because the winds of change have them knee deep in the hoopla causing them to go to deep space/virgin sky whilst leaving Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Starship_discography [wikipedia.org]
That would have been funnier if you hadn't used italics or provided the link. As it is, you just shouted "hey look at me, I made a FUNNY!"
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How are explorers of small area of cosmos relatively far from the nearest star (distance two orders of magnitude greater than the diameter of said star), generally aiming away from it (but AFAIK without the goal of finding oneself even on the "surface" of another one), an "astronauts"?
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"In a hundred years, we'll still be on Earth"
Yes, you will, and be dead on top. Then you won't bore us with that defeatist whining shit anymore.
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You should just go ahead and blame the last 25 years of administrations and congresses, not having a program to replace the shuttle isn't just a failure of the last 3 years.
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...if you use the subject line as part of your comment.
Er, anyway:
...without your manned launch ability.
That's a silly thing to say. You [probably] don't have the ability to build a car, but you can go out and buy one.
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2001 reference maybe? Put in subject to isolate it?
re: comment: if manned orbital launch capacity were as easy as buying a car, then I wouldn't have made the comment in the first place.
Re:Tiny Flaw In the Plan (Score:5, Insightful)
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You know what I've been thinking? I'm thinking that if the US doesn't go ahead eventually with the idea of a one-way trip to claim the title of First Country on Mars, that China, with their, how do we say, somewhat greater "willingness to sacrifice the individual citizen for the greatness of national prestige" (so to speak), is going to get to it first, and a lot sooner than we all think.
And seriously, since it involves space travel, I'm willing to say good for them.
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I don't think you'd want the title of first country to send someone one way. Your entry in the history book might be a little bit different than, say, Armstrong's. The achievement is sending someone and getting them back - which we can already do anyway. You wouldn't want to be known as the country that purposely sacrificed a crew of heros for a few billion dollars, would you?
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1) We cannot already "send someone and get them back" from Mars, unless you're a member of an extraterrestrial race, and in that case, greetings.
2) We still talk about the settlers who landed at Roanoke, and still pretty much give them the honorary title of "first," even though they all died. Catch my drift?
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Well, I think his point was, given history, the people who are willing to volunteer are using the ones you want to get rid of anyway. Just look at America -- the majority of the people willing to come here were the people that Europe was trying to get rid of, like Puritans and criminals (before there was Australia, there was Georgia).
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On the plus side: interplanetary that-what-we-don't-talk-about should live again.
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Inter-species erotica?
Honestly, by this point, I wouldn't care where the funding or direction would be coming from for interplanetary exploration, as long as it's done.
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How do you think most of serious colonization on this planet looked like? People generally weren't coming back.
It won't take direct journeys to other stars to form semi-detached human societies; most asteroids, moon systems around gas giants of our system (maybe except Jupiter), scattered disk or Oort cloud objects will be more than enough. Among the last group, some should eventually make the jump to Oort clouds of passing stars - but by then they could be at least a light year away already, not much point
Find someone dying (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds heartless right? However the person whos dying and is told "You can be the first person on mars and we will provide enough supplies and medication for the rest of your life and big chunk of money for your family and let you have the biggest blowout party in history but your not coming home". It aint such a bad deal.
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the person whos dying
We're all dying.
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there are plenty of healthy people who would volunteer for one-way mission, if supplies were sent periodically. heck, if most slashdotters were told their companion would be beautiful woman with bit of a nymphomaniac problem in need of frequent TLC, most would volunteer.
And the rest of slashdotters would volunteer if told companion would be beautiful beefcake with a bit of a Satyriasis problem......
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OT, but its good to know I'm not the only one that affects. I'd ask for links to the issue or bug reports but well, you know...
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Don't call me Shirley!
A starship to Mars is just NASA-speak for "please give us more money.