NASA's Next Mission: Deep Space 182
gManZboy writes "NASA's Mars Science Lab and Curiosity rover are the next steps in a long-term plan to travel farther and faster into space. Check out the future spacecrafts and tools that will get them there — including NASA's big bet, a spacecraft that combines the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle with the Space Launch System, designed to take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo 17 Moon mission in 1972. NASA will need 10 years to prepare astronauts to take Orion and SLS for a test flight."
Why return mission? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just send a couple of guys there and make it a one way mission. They can start colonising immediately and start building stuff. Pioneers used to do that sort of thing all the time in the new world.
People place too much value on human life. If the Chinese send anyone theyd do it that way.
I bet NASA could find a million volunteers to do it and id be one of them. Id do it for a single week on Mars.
Re:Why return mission? (Score:5, Interesting)
Read about expeditions to the North and South poles. Read about guys who climb mount Everest. If human history was left to people like you we'd still be living in primordial swamps
"im not climbing out onto land! its just fine here with these gills i've got"
Maybe dont put your name forward then. They can send someone with balls:
http://www.universetoday.com/14544/one-way-mission-to-mars-us-soldiers-will-go/ [universetoday.com]
SLS? No thanks... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SLS? No thanks... (Score:4, Interesting)
how about no thanks to anymore manned missions sponsored by NASA? WTF is being accomplished by the tens of billions they plan to spend? Jack. If there is something for "man" to do in space then the private sector will figure it out faster and cheaper. If NASA must exist, keep it to unmanned science missions, something they have at least shown some degree of competency with a relatively low budget.
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Interesting)
If America is going to get humans to Mars SpaceX is your best bet, not NASA. NASA is completely indifferent to actually building a new launcher. NASA's only goal is to keep Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hatch and Hutchinson happy with perpetual jobs programs in their states so their money keeps flowing. That's why they keep proposing launchers that are always 10 years away from ever launching.
The beauty of SpaceX is they get some money from Congress but they can probably support themselves on commercial and military launch contracts and ride out the sheer stupidity of America's political system.
Here is an excellent article on SpaceX in Air and Space Mag [airspacemag.com].
Elon Musk's goal is almost entirely aiming towards colonize Mars and disrupting launcher design so thoroughly that we can actually afford to get big things in to LEO and beyond.
Article has excellent stuff on the really innovative stuff they are doing, like their heat shield. They aren't patenting anything because they don't want to give China a HOWTO so they can rip off all the cool stuff they are doing. They also give the finger to all the existing aerospace companies that try to gouge them on parts. If the price isn't reasonable they build their own and often improve on existing designs. They are probably going to undercut China's Long March on LEO launch cost which is impressive with their plant being in very expensive California and having a relatively expensive American work force. They are beating China on cost using innovation.
A really compelling part in the article is an engineer at one of their competitors rooting for them to succeed. They are almost the only shot America has of recapturing the Apollo magic and beating China in the new space race.
The original Orion (Score:3, Interesting)
Whenever I hear "Orion" and "manned spaceflight", this is what first comes to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) [wikipedia.org]
Specifics on Maned Flights to Deep Space (Score:5, Interesting)
The current Scientific American has an interesting article on the path that manned exploration out of the Earth-Moon system might take. It employs aspects of the unmanned program to cut cots and to have a more flexible program. One interesting aspect is that the main spacecraft is parked in high earth orbit and human crews fly to it in a small craft. Once on the main craft, it does a swing by the Earth to get a speed boost. Its main engine is electric-power (off of solar arrays). While only part of the Scientific American article ("This Way to Mars," 12/2011 issue) is free, they do kindly provide links to its references at the bottom of the page. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=this-way-to-mars [scientificamerican.com] .
Apparently, you need about 100 tons in low Earth orbit for such a craft. That would be two launches of SpaceX's proposed Falcon Heavy. It seems way more likely to fly than NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS).
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly, we don't dare even allow Space-X or any single government to get a controlling foothold off-planet until we've evolved the necessary collective awareness and wisdom to prevent the result from reading like the plot from any one of dozens of dystopian science fiction novels. WE NEED TO OWN THAT INFRASTRUCTURE, all of us; it needs to be a co-op enterprise. The human push into space must be a SOCIAL endeavor, and by social I mean the entire human tribe, not just one splinter group of it.
No. Or at least, only in the broadest abstract sense, in which we truly already do collectively 'own' it. Imagine if the integrated circuit technology invented in the early-mid 1960s had been owned and developed collectively. We would still be running 128 K bit memory and 100 KHz processors, and disk drive capacity would be still approaching 10 Mibibytes. If (as so many of us believe) NASA in its post-Apollo structure has held back space exploration rather than advanced it, how can you propose that this, a particular expression of a collective approach, makes any sense?
No, progress has always and will always depend on individual creativity, risk taking and initiative. In fact I'm rooting for the first trillionaires, who will achieve trillionaire status by collecting $100 billion in investment and using it to exploiting the literally unlimited resources available to a space-faring civilization. They are the ones who will pull this off, risking their own and their investors' futures and their participants (employees etc.)) lives. Excellent examples - Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Jeff Bezos, Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow.
Do not forget for one minute that there is no technical difference (other than the pre-existing legal basis for shooting the opposition without repercussion) between a government and a corporation. The plain fact is that space is big - really big, and communications and transport are relatively slow compared to the distances. So it is inevitable that any future spacefaring civilization will be segmented and diversified, analogously to the world in the era of sailing ships when it could take months or years to get from Europe to China.
Whether the management of the various elements of a spacefaring civilization - planetary, asteroidal or orbital communities - are governments or companies is a rather unimportant distinction - in the end, both will act similarly to protect their interests. (A 'company' was, originally, a group of people who establish a contractual agreement to work in common - in some cases under a government or military regime, in others under a profit-making regime. But all 'companies' must make a 'profit' - acquire more resources than are spent - else they die.) Let the legal structure be developed and firmly established on the basis of a common understanding of the rights and responsibilities of humans, to prevent and minimize the impact of internal and inter-agency conflict and preserve human and other rights, and work very hard to establish a permanent philosophy and practice of ethical interactions, and there is a chance that most (not all) conflicts between groups will be restricted to activities within that broad legal basis. For example, there have been almost no significant deadly conflicts between the various states of the United States. California has not sent their militia to attack Oregon over water rights on the Klamath River. That is the best that you can hope for.