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."
Are we going to build it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither: we're going to cancel it outright, a month after the next President gets sworn-in.
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You might be right; a better question might have been "So what is the next President going to spend the money on with an 'Executive Order'?"
Do you even have to ask? Tax cuts, bailouts, incentives or whatever they call now the payback to the corporations or rich individuals that bought, sorry, "contributed" to his campaign.
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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.
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Both you and the AC that replied to you before me are equally right, and at the same time both wrong.
In the current state of affairs and absence of sufficient collective awareness and conscience, private entities not beholden to the tug-of-war of politics are the only entities likely to be able to fund a continued space presence (much less an expansion of that presence).
On the other hand, the consequences for the human collective if such an infrastructure is left in private hands would be nothing less than THE END of any chance of reigning in the One Percent that nearly controls everything now. Can you imagine the "network neutrality" debate translated into the infrastructure required for space exploration and colonization?
Never mind that ALL discussions of so-called network neutrality are a deliberate mis-frame, because the only true neutrality would be public ownership of the infrastructure - the wires - and THAT has never even been part of the main discussion; it's only been unimportant people like me with no voice even mentioning it at all. (Meanwhile the government in Australia finally gets something right that doesn't repeat our political stupidities, with its plan to buy back their wires as part of its own broadband initiative.)
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.
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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.
I don't have all the answers, or even a fraction of them. But, what you advocate here could only turn out well if basic human nature suddenly and totally changed.
As long as government is the all-encompassing megalith it's become over the last 100 years, mortgaged up past it's eyeballs with fingers in every pie and control over everything, thereby guaranteeing massive corruption by anyone that has money, the space program (and all other worthwhile works) will only go as far as the politicians (and those who
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations only have the amount of power they currently enjoy and can only act as criminally as they do without real fear because the government has power they can co-opt, and are able to do it safely because of the sheer size of government. If the government wasn't so all-encompassing and huge, corporations wouldn't have the power they do.
This makes absolutely no sense.
It's not capitalism that's given corporations the power they have these days as so many like the OWS protesters scream about, it's a too-large government that by it's very nature of being so large & powerful, attracts corruption and covers up corruption in it's labyrinthine maze of finger-pointers, always blaming something/someone else and muddying the waters such that curbing corruption is impossible. It becomes a circular self-reinforcing system until it collapses and leaves the poor sucker citizens to suffer the consequences.
And this is akin to saying "the problem with all this crime is that we have laws!"
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More's the pity that the truth in those words isn't clear. It's the reason why no solution is possible at this time, and perhaps ever.
Thanks.
Some don't want to understand those truths in my post above for ideological reasons, nor do they want anyone else to hear such truths. To accept & acknowledge those truths invalidates their entire worldview. They do the mental equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and going; "I can't hear you!...lalalalala!" while attempting to silence any dissenting views. There's simply no arguing with these types, as they've drank the kool-aid. They live in an armored ideological echo chamber. The
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That's because you fail to understand that centralization of power provides a simple one-stop-shop for corruption to exercise power over the entire system. In addition,
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Corporations are, simply, organizations chartered by governments to act according to government policy. Vis. the East India Company. Their use was expanded in the 1800s to accommodate the need for organizations that rose from new technology - railroads, telegraph, etc. - to be able to attract capital from non-governmental sources (public investment) at a new large scale, and to build the administrative structure required to run national-scale business operations. Single individuals could no longer collec
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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.
I'd like to agree with you, and I would have, once. At present it doesn't look like governments can afford to 'own that infrastructure'. They're all so in debt. I agree they could probably find some way around that but governments don't seem to give a shit about space anymore. When people started yawning at yet another boring shuttle shot it meant the end of more stuff for politicians and that meant the end of exciting space shots ie those carrying humans to exotic places which is a critical part of get
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thanks for mentioning that.
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.
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Too bad this was downmodded. The parent isn't making an anti-semitic comment - he's saying that the "new left" or whatever has a deep vein of anti-semitism running through it, though they attempt to misdirect with clever language. To many on the loony left (and I have first-hand knowledge of this - if you want to experience this for yourself, go to an Occupy camp somewhere and hang out for a while), the "one percent" == "the Jews".
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It's no surprise - the "new left" are the quickest to silence any dissent, and they love their mod points. I can trash the far-right all day long and get maybe one "troll" mod which gets balanced out by multiple "insightful" mods. But make a negative comment about the far-left, and you're downmoded into oblivion within seconds. I expected to be downmoded, but it needed to be said.
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Sure worth repeating: http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html [airspacemag.com]
P.S. Elon looks a lot like Pavel Chekov!
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are we going to build it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Elon Musk isn't doing SpaceX to profiteer. He is doing it because he wanted to launch payloads to Mars and all of the previous alternatives tended to suck.
He needs to turn a profit on his launchers so he can plow the money back in to R&D to work on the next steps in the technology. The SpaceX business model is totally the right one, and it has NOTHING to do with the OWS and the 1% strife. We should be cheering him on for putting a bunch of aerospace engineers back to work in California, and for pouring over NASA's engineering docs from Apollo through now and preserving and building on all that hard won knowledge.
One reason NASA is completely dysfunctional is Congress and one president after another keeps forcing them to change their designs and even their goals every 4-8 years, they force them to do things with more focus on which states the jobs programs will be in, Florida in particular being an important swing state, rather than if its the best design for the goal. The Chinese might be able to make the state funded model work since most of their politburo is technocrats and engineers. Letting a bunch of clueless lawyers run your space program⦠really bad idea.
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Letting a bunch of clueless lawyers with delusions of grandeur run your space program⦠really bad idea.
FTFY :)
There are few things more dangerous to society than the opportunity to have a monument named after you.
Budget Cuts will doom it (Score:4, Insightful)
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If they agreed to stop studying climate change the GOP would probably let them have their funding back.
Re:Budget Cuts will doom it (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't be budget cuts, but the lack of political will. If SOME politician in charge would just give NASA a well-defined mission such as "10 years for a working moon base" or "15 years to land humans on Mars" they would find a way to pull it off, even without budget increases -- provided that the next guy doesn't just change or the mission. But this takes guts, and the willingness to stand up to the inevitable chorus of of naysayers and space-hating dullards who will keep yammering about budget deficits, etc.
So instead, they end up spending a considerable amount of money on ENDLESS reorganizations and PowerPoint presentations while they lose engineers who are tired of the Sisyphean nature of working on projects that are prone to the whims of yearly budget cycles.
Sometimes I feel like the politicians are AFRAID of letting NASA accomplish something grand, lest they attract the (unwarranted) attention of the aforementioned naysayers.
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Um please read this and come back. it's quite as simple as you think..
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/ [ucsd.edu]
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It won't be budget cuts, but the lack of political will.
Don't those amount to the same thing? "Political will" == a large and sustained budget.
Re:Budget Cuts will doom it (Score:4, Informative)
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Add to that a civilized landing rather than a terrifying rescue at sea.
I think you mean 'terrifying near-crash with no chance of survival if you missed the runway'.
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.
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Because right now we're fairly certain they'd die - and not at the end of their natural life.
A lot more research, development, and money would have to go into the program to actually believe we'd have some chance of establishing an actual colony, never mind a self-sustaining one.
Re:Why return mission? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why return mission? (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll die right here on earth too. I guarantee that. Maybe theyll get hit by a bus. Maybe have a heart attack at 50. Maybe develop cancer by 55 and In 50 years time no one will even know they existed.
That's okay because eventually, anyone who could have known they existed will be dead too. So you see it's self-correcting.
I mean it doesn't make much sense to say [slashdot.org] we over-value human life and then worry about the partial memories of those lives. The life itself is more valuable than the memory; if you recognize no other reason for this, then at least because it can continue to make more memories.
I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself. Otherwise I agree with you about having balls and understanding that exploring new frontiers might mean facing new dangers and this is not a good reason to give up. It would make a lot more sense than dying in some pointless undeclared war against a foreign nation that isn't really a threat to you.
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I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself.
And why isn't that in itself sufficient justification for the practice?
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I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself.
And why isn't that in itself sufficient justification for the practice?
I'm not concerned with justifications or the need to make them.
... which is why I pointed that out ... I would say it's because that need/desire is manifesting by putting a spin on another subject (space travel), instead of just honestly expressing itself on its own terms (the human experience and dealing with mortality). Long before there were rockets, people wrestled with these same questions.
But otherwise, to answer what I think you are asking if the need for justification let go of
Wanting to lea
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Wanting to leave some kind of legacy is not really an answer to how to cope with mortality because anyone in the future who would learn of this legacy are themselves as mortal as you were.
Except that we see it is. Dealing with mortality via high power rocketry and space settlement may be suboptimal, but it's definitely a cool way to do it.
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Re:Why return mission? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Just send a couple of guys there and make it a one way mission. They can start colonising immediately and start building stuff."
Unfortunately there are no Martian princesses there for these couple of guys to breed with, so you are gonna have to include some females in the crew.
"Pioneers used to do that sort of thing all the time in the new world"
"
The new world (the Americas) had a lot of advantages that Mars does not:
Breathable atmosphere
Climate suitable for growing stuff
Fertile soil with plants and animals already there
turkeys, cranberries and mashed potato for dinner (and locals to tell the colonists how to cook them)
Trees for making wooden structures out of
fresh water
mineral resources
etc
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"Pioneers used to do that sort of thing all the time in the new world" " The new world (the Americas) had a lot of advantages that Mars does not:
Breathable atmosphere Climate suitable for growing stuff Fertile soil with plants and animals already there turkeys, cranberries and mashed potato for dinner (and locals to tell the colonists how to cook them) Trees for making wooden structures out of fresh water mineral resources etc
The Americas also had by some estimates 90 million humans living there already http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas [wikipedia.org] - who taught the 'pioneers' about the local flora and fauna - who bred with them and so on. The Americas had humans living here for somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 years - probably much longer, just not in the numbers needed to leave behind obvious signs of habitation.
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http://www.universetoday.com/14544/one-way-mission-to-mars-us-soldiers-will-go/ [universetoday.com]
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...so let's get those expeditions going already.
Sitting around and saying 'oh it's too hard, better send up some eventual missions first' isn't going to get the job done.
Re:Why return mission? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we put this whole pioneer bullshit to rest? Pioneers were going into a world where there would be food, animals, materials for shelter, the same gravity, and AIR. Mars has none of these (although if you insist, I will grant you rock for shelter). Traveling across space to Mars isn't like traveling on the ocean to a new continent. Sure those guys had balls to risk traveling to a new land they had never seen, but they understood that they could take fish from the sea if they were hungry and could distill water from the ocean if they needed water. Space is empty, you cannot refuel your supplies from the cold vacuum of it. So the trip isn't bad. Let's get to Mars, see what you need then. You may argue that you can grow your own food, produce your own oxygen, and create your own shelter. If you're going to live on the ship you came in on, that's fine, just means you only have a few hundred feet to walk around in for the rest of your life. If you want something bigger, you need infrastructure to build it. And I mean massive infrastructure, because there are no hardware stores on Mars. Hell, there are no trees on Mars, so you better be building with rocks. But then you need massive tools to cut and move the rocks. And to seal them, because it's not like building a stone hut on Earth, you need that shit to be air tight. And as for air, you need a system to replenish your air, permanently. Unless, of course, you don't care to breathe. And you'll need redundancy, because that's not something that can go down for a weekend. So that's even more stuff you need to pack. Food. Grow your own, sure. But that takes space. And light. Assuming the biology of plant growth works decently on Mars, you still are getting less sunlight than normal. Growing in your own greenhouse would take significant space to feed people for a year, and if you have a particularly bad crop, there are no Indians to come and help you. And finally, Mars has roughly 1/3rd the gravity of Earth. That will cause problems to your body, and there's no way to fix that currently.
Fuck you and your colonist ideals. Early pioneers took great risks but they weren't idiotic. To assume that they would willfully head off to settle a land that is impossible to live in just states your ignorance. If you still can't get your head around it, then explain to me why no one's built a house on top of Mount Everest. It'd have quite the nice view.
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Can we put this whole pioneer bullshit to rest?
Why? What's it to you?
Fuck you and your colonist ideals. Early pioneers took great risks but they weren't idiotic. To assume that they would willfully head off to settle a land that is impossible to live in just states your ignorance. If you still can't get your head around it, then explain to me why no one's built a house on top of Mount Everest. It'd have quite the nice view.
I guess we'll have to figure out how to make it possible then. Good thing our entire human history is chock full of demonstrations of our ability to figure out how to do hard things that some people say are impossible.
As to Mount Everest, I gather the land is government owned (on both sides), hence one can't build there. Further, there's little interest in living there (from both an individual and societal points of view). It's worth noting here that few mountains actually have hous
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I think there are many people who, given a 50/50 chance of living a year, would accept the challenge to go to Mars. It doesn't matter whether you think they are idiotic - they don't agree. In fact, I would bet that there are enough such people reading this thread to populate such a mission. And twice as many if there were a reasonable probability for follow-up missions bringing additional explorers/settlers/whatever you want to call them. And given the capability to launch the inaugural mission, it wo
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I'm no less close minded than you. Your plan would kill people and create a monetary sink hole that would destroy any future space program. It's a never ending system that either ends with the most costly care packages ever created, a failed mission that requires the colonists to come home, or the death of the colonists. I believe in a future in space and I wish to god it would hurry up, but space is not that easy, and if you thought about it for a minute, you might see that sending people on a one way t
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While I agree with your overall point - space is not easy, baby steps, etc. - the question of whether we are ready to prepare for a permanent off-Earth colonization process is one that is best answered by letting those who are most interested work to prepare a justifiable 'business plan' with a reasonable chance of success, and provide government where appropriate. (The support of Ferdinand and Isabella for Columbus' first expedition made Spain for a time the wealthiest nation on Earth. Of course it also
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i never understood why NASA insists on making the Mars trip a return mission.
Because the public (who would be asked to pay for it) would never support it otherwise.
They can start colonising immediately and start building stuff.
With what, and out of what? How much stuff do you think we'd be able to send there with them, on top of the necessary oxygen, water, food, and fuel?
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]
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They're colonists.
They can send someone with balls:
In that case, they better send some with pussies, too. Otherwise the colony won't last long.
Re:Why return mission? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica is actually a great example, thanks for bringing it up. It's entirely dependent on the outside world for supplies except for air and water. Everything, and I mean everything is shipped in. There's no self-sufficiency to speak of.
We think of Antarctica as an inhospitable place, but it's a tropical paradise compared to anywhere we can land people in space. It has unlimited oxygen and and water, no dangerous radiation, earth normal gravity, unlimited water, vast mineral deposits, and temperatures that can be survived with nothing more than some warm clothing.
Nonetheless, if external support was cut off from the south pole station, then despite having all the existing buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and a staff of hundreds of brilliant scientists and researchers, everyone there would die.
Let me reiterate this: your examples of 'colonies' are all places where the people there are supported by enormous external supply chains, and would die if those supplies are cut off. On Earth, we can keep the supplies going because we can afford to, and because it's worth it -- the relatively low overhead of air freighting in everything is small compared to the valuable science that can be performed in Antarctica, or the money people are willing to spend to climb Everest.
All of these are expeditions, not colonies. They're not self sufficient, and it wouldn't be cost effective to make them self sufficient.
Shipping stuff on Earth is cheap. Air freight to a frozen desert in the middle of nowhere is a negligible overhead when compared to sending stuff to Mars. Even in the wildest, most delusional dreams of space fanatics, there is no way to do it for less than about $100 per pound.
Look around your house -- really look -- and for everything you see, ask yourself: how many pounds is that?. Could anyone afford to live like this if it cost $100 per pound more than it would otherwise? How many pounds of water do you use? How many pounds of air? What does your house weigh?
Try that again with the current, realistic cost of sending things to Mars of $10,000 per pound.
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This is over-simplifying it though, since Antarctica has a number of things which mean we haven't even really tried to colonize it.
For one: it's close. Really close. A few hours flying from Australia or New Zealand. It is not that isolated. The marginal cost of trying to establish infrastructure, compared to just flying stuff in means a lot of things aren't worth the setup cost.
Secondly: it's considered a nature preserve. There are treaty commitments and scientific interest in not contaminating for signific
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When the Antarctic treaty expires in the near future, then the ball will really go up for grabs since suddenly it'll be legal to declare Antarctica sovereign territory and to go after it's natural resources.
When does it expire? The Wikipedia article and the 1959 treaty [wikisource.org] make no mention of this.
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The moratorium on mining lasts until 2041 [2041.com], and the current analysis of the situation is that a lot of countries are building stations for "scientific" purposes which have been very slow in putting scientists in them - i.e. the real issue is looking ahead countries are trying to stake out territorial claims.
Both the US and Australian governments periodically rattle the tree about an earlier end to the ban as well.
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You left out one other key point about Amundsen-Scott: no one goes there as a one-way trip (at least not on purpose). Every single person there right now remains a citizen of Somewhere Else, and intends to return there. Most of them will return (at least temporarily) in just a few months. The supply chain that stocks the South Pole station with food and fuel also circulates people in and out.
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One other key point mostly touched upon earlier, but I think well worth mentioning again in a more specific context:
In spite of some substantial real estate availability in the area roughly surrounding, it is illegal to the point of having the military of several nations come and pick you up if you decide to set up a commercial enterprise or for that matter do much of anything even close to Amundsen-Scott or even McMurdo. If you happen to be lucky and find a huge deposit of platinum-group metals or for tha
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The difference is that Mars can be made self-suffient much cheaper and easier than the south pole. WHy? ELEMENTS and reactors. What elements are available at the pole THAT WE CAN GET TO ?
Parts of Antarctica aren't covered by ice. The atmosphere is breathable. There's also large populations of animals such as seals, penguins, and fish.
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Read about expeditions to the North and South poles. Read about guys who climb mount Everest.
Comparing a colony on Mars to one anywhere on Earth is absurd. The cost, complexity, and technical difficulty are off by many orders of magnitude.
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i don't think he was referring to COLONIES as he specifically said EXPEDITIONS. His point, I believe, was that despite the new national (corporate) pastime of avoiding anything that even smells like risk, there are still people out there willing to follow in the footsteps of the first guys to the poles or to the top of Everest, even if it costs them their lives, to be the first ones there. The ultimate first post I guess.
On a side note, the
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Explorers on ships did. What do you think would have happened to Columbus if he got lost out there, or hit a storm that broke a mast, or an extended period with insufficient wind? You can't drink seawater. Sure, he could at least count on an endless supply of oxygen, but that's cold comfort to someone dying of dehydration in the middle of an ocean.
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it rains, even in the middle of the ocean.
It doesn't, in outer space
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Or on Mars.
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Also the reality is, if we put our minds to it "oxygen" is a pretty easy problem to solve. There are plenty of ways to use electrical or solar energy to make O2 from CO2 (plus the old fallback of "use actual plants").
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1) Radiation. Once you leave the earth's protective magnetic field (and don't cite the moon, you are still in it when you go there), you'll die of radiation exposure from the Sun. They'll need a signficant radition shield (few meters of lead for instance) to keep them from dying and getting something that heavy up there will be expensive.
This is an overstated problem when it comes to space travel.
The Sun, and space, does not contain an abundance of highly penetrating radiation like gamma rays. If it did, then life on Earth would be just as irradiated as anything in space, since the atmosphere has a very limited screening effect. In addition, the Earth's magnetic field, would have no protective effect since magnetism doesn't deflect EM radiation.
Solar radiation is mostly particulate radiation. It is composed of helium nuclei, protons and ele
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Columbus faced risks of death due to starvation and dehydration if he didn't reach his intended destination (India) or something similar enough for survival (the Bahamas). Mars colonists would face those risks even if they did. See the difference?
Not gunna happen this way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Spacecrafts??? (Score:5, Informative)
The plural of spacecraft is spacecraft.
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While "spacecraft" is the standard pluralization, "spacecrafts" is also an accepted spelling.
On a somewhat related note, octopi, octopuses and octopodes are all accepted variants.
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I think it's a bad investment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's think about all that we have learned from our manned space program in the last 30 years. And now let compare that to everything we've learned through our unmanned space program. What amazed us more, pictures from Hubble, or pictures from the ISS? Or was it shockingly detailed infrared pictures of the universe's first light? Or was it the ISS? Was it the amazing Mars landers? Was it the fact that a human-made probe made a soft landing on freaking TITAN??? Well it turns out that the ISS was more expensive that all those missions put together. That's largely because human exploration is just expensive and it's getting more expensive all the time. Alongside, robots are quickly closing the capability gap on us, and in 20 years I'm confident that they can do more on Mars than humans could.
In the 60's our robots sucked, lives were cheap, the Soviets were scary, the economy was pumping, the politicians were united behind NASA, and the Moon was close. Yes, that was the single coolest and most amazing thing that any space program has ever done. But we're fooling ourselves absurdly if we think that in the present day we can get our glory back by doing Mars. The conditions are different in every way.
And I think it would be terrible for the space program as well. Just like the ISS ate up an ungodly chunk of each year's Space budget (for what?) as serious and far cheaper science experiments got vetoed, a Mars mission would just *be* the NASA budget for three decades. It can't be denied that it would primarily be a prestige mission. There are much better ways to learn each and every one of the things we would learn on such a mission. But I think Americans want to do it because we feel like we're on the decline, and like all aging men, we want to get back on that horse and show that we've still got it. It's like the old dude who reminisces about that time he was 24 and hooked up with a model, and ends up buying a Porsche and a mountain of Cialis because he thinks he can relive those glory years. Yes, we're looking for an excuse to whip out our cocks again and scream madly about how we can piss all the way to Mars. But it's more than a little pathetic, not least because there is no political way that our political system could produce the huge volume of steady funding that such a project would require. If we try it, it will be mentioned in every two minute version of the history of the American empire, right at the end.
Re:I think it's a bad investment. (Score:5, Insightful)
re: ISS.... for what?
Proof of concept. Practical engineering: making things work when they don't. Up until Vostok, a manned _anything_ in space was only a concept. All the manned efforts through to ISS have been a stepwise move to develop the kinds of knowledge and know-how needed to go further. Robots are pretty neat and do some good work; they'll definitely improve. But history shows that where explorers go, some will eventually want to follow - whether for adventure, profit, or to live.
I suggest thinking multi-facet, long-term, various kinds of return, for fun and profit. I don't care much for the "either-or" kind of thinking that crops up often in discussions of 'most anything - I think it tends to limit perception and possibilities.
I also have a long-standing bias that the long-term survival and flourishing of humanity requires being on more than one planet, in one solar system. Whether that survival is possible or desirable is for each to decide. Short-term, I'm thinking mostly science, and resources - helium-3, the vast treasures of the asteroids in all kinds minerals, and continuing to develop the engineering and other know-how needed to keep on truckin' - whatever the blend of man and machine that gets it done.
And, yeah, I've been reading and thinking on this since the Fifties. I admit to being heavily influenced by Heinlein, von Braun, Ley, O'Neill, and others. Maybe I'm impatient. Maybe I'm selfish. But I'd like to see some more progress while I'm still here.
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Robots are the explorers, we are wimps in space, they are built for it. The only way any of us are ever following them to live is either as robots (or GEd roachmen) or after they have built enough infrastructure to actually let us survive. Humans suck at space exploration, that is not something you can will away.
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It is unfortunate that manned mission advocate don't understand that what makes us human are our thoughts and desires, not our bodies. Insisting on hauling them in space is missing the point and a distraction from actual exploration.
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As for the ISS, it was sold as a science platform, not as an exercise in living / building stuff in space. Yet, the science results are not there. What little science they do is in
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Guys, we've got some good discussion going. I don't think we're so far separated in viewpoint that there can't be a useful merging of efforts. Thanks for the links, btw; I follow and read and try to learn.
@arose, Bomozai - yup, agreed, robots are our surrogates, if you will. That said, we've enough examples, given current and near-term forecasted tech, of how useful it can be to have a human on the scene. Whether, over time, that favors meatspace, teleoperators, humans' consciousness in the machinery, T
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Me too. :)
Re:I think it's a bad investment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about it this way: it's a heck of a lot cheaper than wars (by an order of magnitude), while still giving politicians and nations an opportunity to compare who's dick is longer. That's what it's all about. Paraphrasing Kennedy: "We don't do it because it's easy, we do it because we have to show our dick is much longer than anyone else's". I mean, Russia is recovering little by little, to such an extent that they're the only country in the world which can still reliably put shit into orbit, and they intend to land on Venus again in 2016, and this time spend a month on the surface, not a couple of hours like their previous missions. In the meanwhile the US is circling down the crapper. Sure, it'll take a long time for us to sink low enough to match Russia's current level, but unless we do something about it, we'll get there eventually. I mean, compare the Pentagon budget to NASA's. If we swapped them, in 10 years we'd get manned interstellar travel at the speed of light. :-)
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You shouldn't point at Russia unless you are willing to follow their example. Shuttles were sexy, but expensive; they can put shit into orbit reliably because they are using dirt simple tech to do it (i.e. they co
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It doesn't matter. Their shuttle was groundbreaking for its time (fully automatic flight and landing of a heavy, multiple-use spacecraft — no one, including the US, could replicate this until late 00s), but they were in the same situation as the US today — they simply couldn't afford it. They can afford to reliably sling a load to ISS every few months, manned or not. In retrospect, their decision to abandon the Buran was the right one, since you can launch thirty people and tons of cargo into or
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Not even human habitation - think of the opportunity with sample return missions for example. Figuring out if we could deploy automated rocket factory's on the moon or Mars for example would be a massive step forward in exploration, and require some considerable innovation in various manufacturing techniques. And, it would both open the door for manned exploration, and let us much more easily do sample return.
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).
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The article is good as far as it goes, but they left out one key idea: mine the asteroids. Depending which asteroid, you can get metals, carbon, water, oxygen, and just plain dirt for radiation shielding. You can bring back 20-50 times your fuel used to Earth Orbit, or wherever you put your extraction plant. The most important thing to mine for at first is oxygen to feed your electric thrusters. That makes the mining system self-sustaining in fuel, and reduces what you have to bring up from Earth dramat
Memo to NASA (Score:2)
Go there, pick it up, use it.
Re:Memo to NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Moon
2. Helium 3
3. ????
4. Working fusion engine
5. rocket fuel//profit.
Still no interplanetary arc. (Score:4, Funny)
What NASA needs to build is an interplanetary arc; a big spaceship complete with rotating sections for gravity, nuclear propulsion, huge areas of hydroponics and onboard shuttles for visiting planets.
With such a spaceship, visiting other planets of the solar system would be much easier.
The System is Broken (Score:5, Insightful)
How NASA projects should work:
President gives a mission to NASA
NASA estimates method and budget
Congress approves budget
NASA completes mission
Here is how it actually works:
President gives a mission to NASA
Congress chooses the method (maximum jobs) and budget (way too small)
NASA tries and fails to make congresses' stupid ideas work
New President cancels old mission in favour of a new mission that is "better" because he can take credit for it
Nine (Score:2)
Wake me after Deep Space missions 1-8 are over.
Re:sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
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