What If the Apollo Program Never Happened? 756
astroengine writes "In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972. Between then and now, NASA's small space shuttle fleet filled in for space travel, but astronauts could only venture as far a low earth orbit — at an altitude much lower than the early pioneers reached. If there were no Apollo crash program to beat the Soviets to the moon, would we have planned to go to the moon eventually? But this time with a commitment of staying? Or would we never go?"
What if Slashdot never happened? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What if Slashdot never happened? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What if Slashdot never happened? (Score:5, Funny)
Even in plain text you're a better actor than him.
Re:What if Slashdot never happened? (Score:4, Funny)
You mean we won't know until we open the basement?
Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
He's probably gen-X. That stupid Alanis song ruined that word for an entire generation.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
He's probably gen-X. That stupid Alanis song ruined that word for an entire generation.
I doubt that. Do you realise how many times it's been pointed out by various parties how ironic it is that all "Ironic's" examples of irony aren't?
They've probably heard that more times than they've heard the song itself...
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Now that's ironic . . .
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
Tragically, the impact of that song continues to this day. While (re)introducing irony to tenth graders, I asked if anyone knew what irony was.
"It's like having ten thousand spoons when you need a knife," yelled one of my little scholars.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
It seems reasonable that debating moon travel 40 years after Apollo might be considered unexpected. What am I missing?
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
It seems reasonable that debating moon travel 40 years after Apollo might be considered unexpected. What am I missing?
Pedantic flair.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ironic? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry, but pendantic flair is an example of an oxymoron, not irony.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Informative)
And what's it called when your pedantic point is misspelled?
That would be irony...
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
Ron Paul on the ballet? Dear $DIETY I don't want to see him in tights...
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem wasn't the creation of the Saturn V, but rather the cancellation of that rocket and shutting down the factories that built it. Werner Von Braun had the vision for an extensive program built upon mass production of that rocket, with the test stands in Texas, Alabama, and the facilities in Florida built to send hundreds of copies of that rocket into space at a rate of about one per month. There was even an "Apollo II" capsule design that could have held up to seven astronauts at the same time.
I've argued in a "what if" situation that for the money spent on the Space Shuttle program, an equal number or even larger number of astronauts could have flown on the Saturn V, build space stations much larger than the ISS, continued with manned exploration of the Moon, and might have even made the trip to Mars by now. Had the Space Shuttle never happened, the infrastructure to do everything else would have been in place. Skylab alone would have remained in orbit for likely another decade, or at least a couple more missions before its septic tanks finally filled up. Perhaps the Skylab backup that is currently sitting in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC would have flown rather than rotting away as a tourist curiosity.
Some changes needed to happen and the same tempo that was going on in the late 1960's did have to change, but the Saturn V did not need to be abandoned. The Soyuz rocket and capsule, designed during the same era, is still going today and has proven to be a genuine workhorse of a vehicle. There is no reason why Saturn I/V rockets could not have been allowed to continue in their production queue once the infrastructure to make them had finally been built and the cost of making those factories had already been paid for.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
If America closes its frontier completely and doesn't move out to the rest of the Solar System...
And there I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The reason America has both dreams and handwringing about space in the first place is that it still is living on dreams of a frontier - and on an economic system adapted to 500 years of exploitation of that frontier. But the frontier has long closed. And yet, the frontier-capitalist hyper-growth model - "there's always somewhere new to move to" - has now been exported to the rest of the world. That's a problem.
We can't solve this, realistically, by going back into space, because space just isn't an exploitable frontier in the same way that the Americas were 500 years ago. It might become such a frontier in the future, but we can't get there from here using the exploitative, expansive, unsustainable economic systems we currently have.
We'll have to build closed life-support ships-in-bottles to do long-duration spaceflight, and those are likely to be the exact opposite of frontier communities unless we have some kind of near-organic magitech, on the order of Star Trek's Genesis bomb, which can insta-smelt biospheres out of lunar regolith. And if we had that on Earth, we could make the deserts bloom and bring back the whales first.
Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know. I think nobody expected it to take 50 years to get back (assuming Newt can do it, which even if elected he can't/won't) or more (see previous parenthetical)
And that thought amuses me in a sad kind of way.
44 years to return to south pole (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Newt. Nobody calls me Rebeca, except my brother (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't that more or less how the US went to the moon the first time?
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Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
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That's some delicious coppery right there, sir. Boots off!
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think OP would have been wiser to say potential, as eventually we will cap ours in the current surroundings, might not be for a while though. $ fuels the space endeavour and there needs to be a reason behind the $ channel, the Russians were such a reason, but what is it now? China maybe? But what are we proving to them?
Make peace not war (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of our military spending is really about government contracts for private companies. A kind of stimulus package, except that to justify it we have to keep having wars and exaggerating threats. Not only is space is a much more worthy subject for funding, and if we tolerated even 0.01% of the losses we do for the military we could get people on Mars in a decade.
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If a sentient species goes extinct does it make a sound? How about an electromagnetic noise?
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that space is HARD. It's really expensive to get there and it is a high-vacuum radiation hell. It would take a long time and an expensive, sustained effort to construct off-planet habitats - a *tremendous* amount of effort and money before there is any payoff at all.
On the other hand, for example the asteroid 16 Psyche contains enough metal to construct a solid cylinder fivekm in diameter stretching from here to the Moon. Or cover North America in a layer 280 meters thick.The resources available to an outer space civilization are great enough to insure that if outer space habitats do reach the point where they can expand and grow, the payoff would be big enough to sustain life past the death of the Sun [wikipedia.org].
We are half-way through the era of animals on Earth. There have been at least a half dozen mass extinctions [wikipedia.org] since animals first started evolving a half-billion years ago; there will be more. The glaciers [wikipedia.org] have grown and retreated dozens of times over the last two million years; they will return. Yellowstone [usgs.gov] is going to explode again. And again. And again. Time is not unlimited.
But we have time. Abundant fossil fuels, and the internet - we are right now living in the decades of maximum wealth. At some point, within a few decades, we will either run out of fuel [wikipedia.org] or we will run out of the capacity to sink carbon emissions [wikipedia.org]. When this happens, it will mean the end of a way of life. Maximum wealth *right now* means that *right now* is the best and possibly the only time to lift off. Life on Earth only gets one pass at the fossil fuel heritage; if the next extinction event brings us to a place where launching is not possible, life will have missed its chance.
I'm not a nutter, I am a realist. I'm certain that outer space settlements will not solve our current growth vs. environment problems - the payoff will come way too late for that. None of our current issues will be solved, or even mitigated, by vigorous and immediate launches into the great expanse. Nonetheless, if DNA is to avoid extinction we need to start moving now [space.com] as rapidly as we can. Nothing else matters.
The cocoon we call Earth is going to wither; whether or not she gives birthbefore she dies is entirely in the hands of human civilization. Our civilization,right now, we're the only chance. Sure, leaving Eden is a horrible burden. Suckit up. We have to go. Now.
Or, we can continue toasting marshmallows at the planet's one-time-only oil burning party [wikipedia.org].
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Our civilization,right now, we're the only chance. Sure, leaving Eden is a horrible burden. Suckit up. We have to go. Now.
People who say stuff like this usually have no idea the distances involved. It would probably take us MILLIONS of years to reach the nearest planet that's even remotely habitable. We don't have any kind of technology that could possibly survive that long, much less that could keep fragile human bodies alive that long.
We're just stuck here. Don't feel bad, though. We're going to go extinct eventually, even if we made it out into space. If an asteroid doesn't get you, the heat death of the universe certainly will.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Succeed at that, and then we have a few billion years to find a way to get to other stars.
Succeed at that, and then we have time to explore ways to deal with the death of the universe [wikipedia.org].
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the other bodies in our solar system is habitable by humans. Terraforming is a silly fiction. Think about it. If we had the level of technology to radically transform an entire planet's atmosphere, generate soil and water, etc. it would be a LOT easier to use it on earth in the wake of anything short of an earth-SHATTERING asteroid than to use it on Mars.
Humans should make the most of our time here, and stop worrying so much about all the silly ways we can imagine our doom.
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Nobody was ever able to terraform a planet either. All evidence supports that building the habitat is easier.
But I don't think we should go to space first, and learn how to create habitats later. I really think we should send just our machines, and study how to create those habitats here on Earth...
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None of the other bodies in our solar system is habitable by humans. Terraforming is a silly fiction. Think about it. If we had the level of technology to radically transform an entire planet's atmosphere, generate soil and water, etc. it would be a LOT easier to use it on earth in the wake of anything short of an earth-SHATTERING asteroid than to use it on Mars.
Humans should make the most of our time here, and stop worrying so much about all the silly ways we can imagine our doom.
Terraforming Mars 101
0) Get political buy-in to spend the resources on the project (the basic stumbling block to most large scale programs that do not involved "killing the enemy", or "cheating our own death through healthcare")
1) Redirect water rich comets into collision orbits (decades to execute, not practical on Earth for the obvious reasons)
2) Seed appropriate microbes / plants to convert CO2 atmosphere to a reasonable mix of oxygen, wait a couple of hundred years (not necessary or helpful on Earth)
3)
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Well when you say that the Earth is going to become less habitable and try to then say that is why we should go to places even less habitable makes one think you are a nutter. Why couldn't we use the same technologies that would allow us to live on, say, Mars to live on Earth as it becomes less habitable?
I'll watch on Mars while you experiment on your own planet, thank you very much.
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Of course we don't have the means right now. We're not going to develop the means if we sit on our asses playing Angry Birds and looking at Facebook instead of getting out there and developing those means the hard way, by pushing the boundaries of manned exploration. That means building habitats on other worlds, learning how other environments affect human life, developing solutions for problems we encounter, developing nuclear rockets (a moon base is a good place for building and testing such a thing--no
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Except that space is HARD. It's really expensive to get there and it is a high-vacuum radiation hell. It would take a long time and an expensive, sustained effort to construct off-planet habitats - a *tremendous* amount of effort and money before there is any payoff at all.
Studies were done for sustained underwater habitats (cities under the sea), conclusion: impractical, unsustainable, and that's with an easy source of water, food, air to breathe, short travel times, etc.
Or, we can continue toasting marshmallows at the planet's one-time-only oil burning party [wikipedia.org].
It's my party, and I'll _______ if I want to....
Seriously, look at what percentage of the planet can't think past next Friday's paycheck, (or next Quarter's stock payout...) Do you think that these people can even conceptualize that their actions today have consequences for their grandchildren? Of the mino
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Seriously, look at what percentage of the planet can't think past next Friday's paycheck, (or next Quarter's stock payout...) Do you think that these people can even conceptualize that their actions today have consequences for their grandchildren? Of the minority that can actually hold that thought in their head long enough to potentially take action on it, what percentage of them do you think actually care?
Lots of them apparently. Look at how popular things like animal welfare in farming, the reduction of pesticides, better conditions for factory workers in developing nations, fair trade for poor farmers, greener and lower carbon footprint products... Given a chance to make relatively easy decisions people do support things that are in the long term good, even if it costs them a little bit more right now.
Even when it comes to the harder stuff as soon as you get past the Party A/Party B bullshit at the heart o
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The heat death of the universe is a very, very, very long way off. It'll be about an order of magnitude beyond the current age of the universe before the current crop of red dwarf stars even start to die off.
Anything you've ever done to avoid your own death has only delayed the inevitable. Looking back at all those times you breathed and ate food and didn't just give up while driving and drift into oncoming traffic, was it worth it? If it was, then why do you argue against applying that same principle to th
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Free healthcare does solve all this. So does cutting taxes.
I'll work out the details after I'm elected. It may take more than one term.
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What is with all these dumb comments every time a space story comes up? Is education in the US really that horrible?
If a meteor crashes into the earth, and it's a huge meteor, it'll be like the K-T extinction event: it'll cause a massive dust cloud and the ensuing famine will kill off most of humanity. Eventually, some other species may arise that finally learns the lesson about not having a good space program, as both the dinosaurs and we didn't. It won't "hurl the earth into the sun". How stupid can y
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Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Travel Vs Base (Score:5, Interesting)
In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
How is that ironic? Establishing a base versus traveling to are two fairly different goals in magnitude with one totally encompassing the other. Aside from that, I don't think it's ironic that 40 years have passed and we need to reevaluate a moon mission. It's seriously still a nontrivial problem today, it's not like riding a bike. In my mind, the fact that they did it forty years ago doesn't take away the danger and knowledge involved with such a feat but instead just proves how badass and ahead of their time those people who worked on the Apollo Program were (yes, yes, Wernher von Braun and Nazi scientists, I'm aware).
And as far as it's being "debated" I challenge you to name one thing that requires government spending that hasn't been debated off and on over the years. Oh, the massive Department of Defense spending, right, for some reason nobody debates that ballooning military industrial complex and that's about it. Wouldn't want to look "weak" going into office now, would we. Speaking of which, I'm all for a shift of some of those funds to space exploration. It took a space race with 'the ruskies' to get us to the moon maybe another 'rah rah USA' race with those other 'commies' will help us establish a presence and research lab?
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"I challenge you to name one thing that requires government spending that hasn't been debated off and on over the years. Oh, the massive Department of Defense spending, right, for some reason nobody debates that ballooning military industrial complex and that's about it"
Umm, liberals and others rally against .mil/DOD spending all the time. You are doing it right now.
Re:Travel Vs Base (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you may've overshot a point here. Yes, he could just order it shut down, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't amass very powerful entities. If Congress or the Senate or another committee hates the President, they're petty enough to vote against all of his initiatives regardless of merit. If you run afoul of the CIA, then no matter who you are, that's going to cause problems for you. Members of Congress have forced each other into voting for pork by attaching it to defense bills and attacking their opponents for lacking patriotism. The fucking NSA and DoJ have been caught conspiring to ruin lives [newyorker.com]. Robocalling. Filibusters. These are not people who fight fairly.
Did you assume that corruption went no further than simple bribes and kickbacks of lobbying, with no defences should they get caught? How do you think ACTA got so much support from inside the government? The depth and complexity of corruption at the elected and senior levels far outstrips what we see in the newspapers. The system is so utterly entrenched that there is very little hope of fixing it.
No matter who had been elected President, he or she would be receiving the same blame. If anything, the rest of the Democrats let the new guy take the fall. Obama's short and bland track record suggests he was a relative outsider, and that he faced a great deal of adversity when his rhetoric fell upon the ears of the all-too-established old boys' clubs when he got in the door—although I guess you could say that Fox News's lack of pre-election hatred for him might have been some kind of foreshadowing that this was going to happen; either they knew he'd comply, had no chances of winning, or were too afraid of being accused of playing the race card.
Perspective... (Score:3)
The Apollo Program cost was estimated at $24.5B in 1975. This is $150-$170B in 2007 dollars.
About one half what the Congessional Budget Office estimates the 2008 bank bailout has cost taxpayers.
The bank bailout was spending money here on Earth where it could be put to good use. The bank bailout saved the economy, stopped the recession, kept unemployment low, stopped all the foreclosures, uhhh...
Nevermind!
The Moon or Bust! Uhhhh....
The moon and bust!
As long as the people printing the money are in
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Haha, good use -- you mean keeping the wealthy class wealthy, and the senior bank execs in charge?
Also when we went we discovered the moon sucks (Score:3)
Ok so it doesn't suck, but it really isn't that useful a place to go on its own. There's nothing there. I could see a base there as being useful for launching further deeper space missions, but then we first need to solve some other issues. Really right now the space research we should be focusing on seems to be launch costs. It costs WAY too much to put shit in space. Like $10,000/pound. We need to bring that cost down, then maybe we can look at putting more things (like a moon base) out in space.
Once we g
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It's seriously still a nontrivial problem today, it's not like riding a bike. In my mind, the fact that they did it forty years ago doesn't take away the danger and knowledge involved with such a feat but instead just proves how badass and ahead of their time those people who worked on the Apollo Program were (yes, yes, Wernher von Braun and Nazi scientists, I'm aware).
My dad worked on Apollo (and Mercury and Gemini and the space station and shuttle) while we lived next to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He died a while back from cancer, but during his life, he was the consummate cool engineer: loved to solve problems, never said much, very calm, worked very hard. He focused on the electrical systems, and he just worked on it all the time. He turned down promotions, because all he wanted to do was be an engineer, solve problems and get the systems working.
So when
Re:Travel Vs Base (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that and the fact that he happens to be campaigning in Florida this week.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Society has become too risk adverse to do anything as innovative and risky as the first moon landings. The minute something goes wrong everyone immediately starts arguing about whose fault it was instead of acknowledging the entire venture is risky so don't be too surprised if a couple of things blow up. The rocket disasters in the early space program did not shelve the project until endless analyses could be conducted to guarantee 100% future success. The astronauts who participate in the space program certainly understand and are willing to take the risk and as long as that is the case we should continue pushing outwards. Thousands of years ago people blindly set off to sail the oceans when they thought the world was flat but they went anyway and eventually new discoveries were made, Early scientific minds were willing to chance being charged as religious heretics in order to study and eventually publish information about the solar system and basic physics models. We can't depend on any politicians to say or support any risky venture because they are afraid of being blamed for any failures. The only way the US will get back to the moon is if China (or any other country) starts working in that direction. Then the politicians might be willing to fund and promote a risky project in the sacred cause of national security.
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The rocket disasters in the early space program did not shelve the project until endless analyses could be conducted to guarantee 100% future success.
The early Apollo disaster that killed three astronauts did, in fact, set the program back time-wise, and put more focus on safety. It forced NASA to take a good, long look at a number of substandard and unsafe systems and redesign them for the better.
Also, I think you give modern society too little credit. We lost two shuttles in pretty horrific and spectacular disasters, and we kept flying them. Public support didn't evaporate. It's just that the shuttle fleet is too old at this point, and for lots of
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Society has become too risk adverse to do anything as innovative and risky as the first moon landings.
No it hasn't. Yes, we've minimized risk where possible, but not minimizing risk as much as you can for a particular feat is just stupid. But people still bungi jump, climb mountains, do extreme motocross and snowboarding/skateboarding, drag racing 200mph in a quarter mile, etc.
The minute something goes wrong everyone immediately starts arguing about whose fault it was instead of acknowledging the entire venture is risky so don't be too surprised if a couple of things blow up.
I take it you weren't yet born when Apollo 7 blew up.
The rocket disasters in the early space program did not shelve the project until endless analyses could be conducted to guarantee 100% future success.
What early rocket disasters? Yeah, a lot of UNMANNED rockets blew up, why do you think they were unmanned? Apollo 7 set the program back by two years rather than their saying "well, accidents happen, let's launch another one."
Thousands of years ago people blindly set off to sail the oceans when they thought the world was flat
Sailors knew the world wasn't flat, as they coud see the land slowly sinking into the horizon as they got farther away.
Early scientific minds were willing to chance being charged as religious heretics in order to study and eventually publish information about the solar system and basic physics models.
Yeah, that's why Leonardo spoke in code.
The reason government isn't sponsoring moon exploration is because there's no need for government to do so, especially since robots seem to be doing a pretty good job on Mars and other planets.
We're not going to ever leave the solar system and colonize another one unless someone discovers a way around the lightspeed limit, and if it ever happesn it will be generations from now.
Politicians aren't afraid of dead soldiers in Iraq, or dead Navy Seals in Afghanistan and Somalia, are they? So why would they be afraid of dead astronauts? Rather than parrot what you hear, give it a little thought.
We'd have never gone (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of what got our country into gear was JFK's death. JFK was even trying to covertly kill the program by rigging it so Republicans would kill it for lack of favorable earmark kick backs and similar games.
Scientists did not want to send humans... (Score:3)
Re:Scientists did not want to send humans... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the only reason the US sent *people* to the Moon was because the Russians had already beaten them to the punch regarding both farside orbit and robotic softlanding. Manned landing was the only milestone left.
No space race, no manned moon landing (Score:4, Insightful)
The Cold War and the sudden and unexpected advances the Soviets made in their remarkable early space program (thanks to the sadly underrated and largely forgotten genius of Sergei Korolev [wikipedia.org]) where the primary motivators that led to Apollo. Without the strong desire of the U.S. to have a major "first" in space over such a military rival, it's very unlikely the U.S. would have ever gone beyond LEO. Unlike LEO, there was relatively little to gain strategically or technologically from a manned moon mission. It was mostly a nationalistic pride thing. Apollo was designed to show that the U.S. was capable of space firsts too, and everything about the mission--from its highly public nature to the planting of the U.S. flag--was meant to highlight that.
Re:No space race, no manned moon landing (Score:4, Informative)
Sergei Korolev is very popular (cult) figure in Russia and city next to Moscow is named after him. That's not exactly "largely forgotten".
How about something eveyrone would get use out of (Score:4, Insightful)
I know Newt is just making vaporous campaign promises and that there are "trickle down" benefits for ordinary people from the space program, but if you are going to spend big to have new technology why not do something more people can benefit from directly?
- a national network of bullet trains?
- a "space race" for an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car and that can be recharged in under 10 min?
Re:How about something eveyrone would get use out (Score:4, Insightful)
Because compared to those two, a moon base is easy to achieve, for different reasons
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills"
- John F Kennedy
and we know a moon base can be achieved with current technology
and the Japanese don't have bullet trains?
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Kennedy lied. Not about that going to the moon was hard (it was and is), but that that's why we were doing it. We were doing it to beat the Russians.
They have bullet trains. They don't have electric cars which can recharge in 10 minutes and have the sam
Electric cars (Score:3)
We're falling behind! (Score:3)
We need to invent warp drive by 2063 to meet the Vulcans, but it's 2012 and we can't even get to the moon!
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To be fair I never saw any moon base in the movie..
Re:We're falling behind! (Score:4, Informative)
That was an alternate universe. In this universe, we don't meet the Vulcans, and we never progress as a species to interstellar travel.
I need to figure out how to invent an interdimensional travel device like on "Sliders", so I can move to the alternate universe where humanity didn't turn into a bunch of losers like this one.
What if ...? (Score:5, Interesting)
For one thing, we might have practical fusion power by now.
The Apollo program taught a lot of lessons, but one of them was "If you're a government-funded research program, DO NOT SUCCEED." Congress began axing the budget for space exploration about ten minutes after Armstrong's "One small step for a man..." After all, we did the job, beat the Rooskies, hallelujah now we can quit wasting all that money.
I've noticed one thing about fusion: it's *always* "twenty years off" and has been since the early fifties. Tiny little steps, "we need more funding", and "maybe we'll get something in (this year+20). And over the past forty years, a lot of bold proposals for testbeds that, while crude and inefficient, might actually have WORKED so they could be improved, have been shot down. (cf. Bussard's proposal to use heavy, water-cooled high-strength magnets to brute-force a solution.)
See you in 2032, when "We'll have fusion in 2052." will be the rallying cry.
Have you *seen* the ITER budget? (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, anyone complaining that fusion research doesn't get any funding hasn't seen the budget for ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Last I checked it was around 15 Billion dollars. That also isn't the only fusion research going on - there's the National Ignition Facility for one, and I think a couple others too.
Re:Have you *seen* the ITER budget? (Score:5, Informative)
I.e. the US in all likelihood pays less than 50 million a year towards it. (Less than the cost of a single fighter jet per year, not a big sacrifice when you already have 3000...)
China's turn (Score:3)
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If China did it, it would just be to prove that they have arrived. As soon as they did it, they would end up dropping the program the same way the U.S. and Soviets did. There is little to gain from it. It's really more symbolic. And once you've done it, you've made your point.
More pandering from candidates (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's pretty easy to verify that Gingrich has been a "space nut" for a very long time. This isn't a one-time "pander to the folks in Central Florida" thing. He read Jerry Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" back in the 80s, and was sufficiently interested by it to contact Pournelle personally to discuss the ideas in it.
(Rants about Pournelle's politics, Gingrich's politics, are entirely beside the point I'm making here.)
Space not pandering for Newt (Score:5, Insightful)
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far.
The idea of a more permanent return to the moon is something Newt has talked about for decades, and also pushed forward a bill or two on.
Newt has been really "into" space for a long, long time. I agree the timing of talking about this is pandering but fundamentally Newt really is interested in furthering space exploration.
How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending?
Here is where your ignorance shows. You didn't even finish reading the SUMMARY much less the actual story!
Newt wants to take some small portion of the NASA budget to issue X-Prize style prizes that move private industry forward in the goal of a lunar space colony.
When put the way he actually means, does it sound so crazy? The tax payers pay very little, private industry takes all the risk. It would accelerate the already growing private space industry but with a very beneficial focus beyond just "going to space".
Regardless of who actually becomes president this is a very good idea to support private space travel and to reduce government spending in space at the same time.
Moon and Mars are pointless. Go near Earth orbit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, the moon and Mars are a waste of time and money. Near earth orbit, in constrast, has a lot of potential for power generation, enhanced telecommunications, earth observation and eventually, permanent, self-sustaining living environments. As "cool" as it would be to get to Mars or the moon (again), there's just no compelling reason to do so that's not served better by near earth orbital stations and satellites.
Re:Moon and Mars are pointless. Go near Earth orbi (Score:5, Informative)
As for the gravity well. Remember the saturn V? That was required to get men *to* the moon. Remember the small box at the bottom of the lunar lander? That was the rocket required to get men *back from* the moon -- with room to spare for a light truck, no less. The gravity well on the moon is much, much, much much smaller than that on earth. The technology used in linear motors on rollercoasters is more or less perfect for launching satellites from the moon, using the same type of solar panels you would be exporting as your power source.
Empowering private industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the economic incentive for private industry to build/support a moon base? Without government funding, what's the return on investment? More moon rocks? Mining what minerals? A good view of the ocean? Seriously. Companies don't really invest in altruistic endeavors without a profit motive.
Dare I say it. (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, the humanity! *sob*
Let's beat the Chinese to something useful (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like a politician to bring up a massive government boondoggle which might have some scientific benefits, but which provides no possibility of a payoff in practical terms.
I propose a different science/engineering race with China:
The first to build and get patents on associated technology for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor [ted.com]. China announced a year or two back that they had begun.
LFTR most likely would provide a trillion dollar+ payoff to whoever gets there first and can deploy it both domestically and sell exports to other countries within the lifespan of the patents.
Or how about the closely related WAMSR - the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor [youtube.com].
Those look both doable, almost certainly cheaper than a moonbase (though possibly still somewhat expensive), and would have enormous benefits for mankind.
But, no doubt Republicans would decry a program to rapidly get the LFTR or WAMSR up and running as a socialist, big-government program. . . but somehow, a freaking moonbase isn't. Oh, I know why - because there's no actual money to be made on a moonbase, so the private sector doesn't care about it and thus doesn't need "protection" from government programs.
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We'd be in a lot better shape. (Score:5, Interesting)
'Waste anything but time'.
These are truly magical words to a bureaucracy.
When they were uttered, NASA became an enormously powerful agency, with a massive budget, and the resulting craft was guaranteed to be ridiculously expensive, and optimised entirely wrongly for an ongoing space program.
NASA then set the precedent for the 'right way' to do space - which proceeded on, helped by space being seen not as a place to do things in, but a convenient way to feed aerospace companies welfare.
For example, NASAs last attempt to 'reduce the cost of space launch' (x33/venturestar) had not one, not two, but three completely untried technologies on it.
SpaceX - by doing it in a much leaner manner, have developed a rocket and engines for a tiny fraction of the budget of what NASAs estimation tools say it'd cost them.
And you know that it'd have overrun in reality.
If you look at a typical NASA procurement requirement, you do not see 'Must deliver cargo of mass M to position P with speed S'.
You see a long list of requirements that are only incidental, but so happen to require expertise only available from the two or three 'usual suspects', meaning only they can make credible bids.
The lack of funding, and the clear utility of satellites may well have lead to much cheaper rockets being developed a lot sooner.
Can't prove a negative (Score:4, Funny)
What-if scenarios such as this one are pointless. What if the American revolution hadn't happened? What if the Romans had had an industrial evolution? What if Hitler had won the war? What if 911 never happened? What if a hacker had a girlfriend?
All of these questions are only useful in an entertainment sort out way (that's the only polite way I could phrase this). They aren't really answerable in any way that is useful in analyzing things as they currently are and where they appear to be going. Sometimes fun to think about of course.
What would have happened? Manned earth orbit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Space would have become a USAF business in the US. The USAF had the Dyna-Soar program (small manned craft, launched on a rocket, lands on wings), which was cancelled in favor of Apollo. The USAF also had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was a lot like Skylab, but earlier. The USAF would probably have sizable manned space stations by now, equipped with missile defenses.
The Gusmobile (the six-seat Gemini) might have flown. With both the Gusmobile and Dyna-Soar, the US would have had a solid low-orbit manned capability.
More robotic landers would have been sent to the Moon. The USSR sent several large ones, which explored more of the Moon than the astronauts did. But landing and retrieving humans from the moon probably would have been skipped. Face it, the place is rather dull.
Recoverable boosters probably would have been developed. (A parachute system almost went into the Saturn V.) At some point, a large shuttle might have been built. Probably more like Buran than the US shuttle. Although Buran looks like the US shuttle, it has no launch engines; it's purely a payload at launch. Buran was much less fragile than the US shuttle; the USSR once flew one to Farnborough for an air show. Also, it was realized after a few US shuttle launches that a titanium-based design could stand the heat load, which would have eliminated the ceramic tile headache. A more robust shuttle with mostly reusable boosters could achieve a respectable launch rate.
Bankrupt countries can't afford vanity projects (Score:3)
It doesn't matter what anyone says. There's no money to go to the moon or anywhere else.
The US can't go to the moon for the same reason Greece and Spain can't go to the moon. Bankrupt countries can't afford ambitious vanity projects.
Ob. el Reg: funniest. article. ever. (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/09/apollo_17/ [theregister.co.uk]
Go nuts.
Missing science from missing Apollo (Score:3, Interesting)
(I am assuming that all the unmanned missions would have been flown same as in the real world, and of course that is a big assumption .)
We would know very little about the formation and early evolution of the solar system. Apollo nailed that, and our current knowledge is largely based on Apollo samples. The Soviet Luna samples would help, but I don't think they would be enough.
We also probably wouldn't have any Lunar Laser Ranging (that's a harder call, but all of the early LLR was US, and I don't think that without the Apollo LLR
the French would have put retroreflectors on the Lunakhods). That, plus no Apollo ALSEP seimo network, would mean we would know very little about Moon's deep interior, such as whether or not it has a core.
I think that those are the two biggest ones.
Of course, if Apollo had never happened, Alexi Leonid would probably have been the first man on the Moon, but the implications of that are too far outside the reach of my crystal ball.
The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth* (Score:5, Funny)
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
* - I take no credit nor blame for this post.
If it had been our intention (Score:3, Interesting)
On the night before the launch of Apollo 11, Wernher von Baun made this comment about the future
“If it had been our intention merely to go to the moon, bring back a handful of rocks and soil, and forget the entire enterprise, then we would certainly have been history’s biggest fools.”
- Wernher von Braun
and yet, that’s exactly what we did
Would we have been in *better* shape? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a historian, physicist, or engineer so I'm going off of my layman's interpretations. But, we kind of had parallel "space" efforts with our rocket planes like the X-51 that lost out to rockets. Had we not gone with massive, wasteful brute force rockets and gradually transitioned into space with reusable rockets and aerospace planes, maybe we'd have grown our space program more organically from high altitude flights, to LEO, to the moon?
Change in requirements = Change in Apollo (Score:3)
I've always felt that the biggest issue for space exploration was when a certain U.S. president changed the requirements. It wasn't enough to send people to the Moon. People were already working on that. It had to be done before 31 December 1969. This made some approaches more viable than others. As a hurry-up job they didn't care about the post-Apollo future. Get them to the Moon, get them back, by the end of the decade. Only one way would work in the time available, a man in a can. And that's the way they did it. With more time they would have done it differently. Part of a system, a unified plan.
It's sort of what you might get if, for example, in 1935 somebody had said "we need an airplane that can carry 400 people, and we need it now". The resulting airplane might have resembled the Spruce Goose, a brilliant, but sterile, achievement. They would not have designed a 747, because too much development needed to happen first.
...laura
Re:What do you mean, "what if?" (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't ironic, it's sad, that 40 years later, there are people who honestly believe that the moon landings were faked.
The fact that you can see the landing site with a powerful telescope apparently isn't good enough for some people.
-- Stephen
Re:What do you mean, "what if?" (Score:5, Funny)
Every telescope made after 1971 has required federally mandated "Moon goggles" that are inserted just before the telescope is completed. It's plain as day, except visible at night.
Re:What do you mean, "what if?" (Score:5, Informative)
It's clearly impossible for an optical telescope on the Earth to resolve any of the Apollo hardware on the Moon, since the best systems, using adaptive optics in the near-infrared, can resolve details of maybe 0.02 arcsec. A lunar lander of width 5 meters, at a distance of 382,000 km, subtends an angle of 0.003 arcsec. The Hubble Space Telescope isn't appreciably closer the Moon, and its best resolution is about 0.03 arcsec in the near-UV. Not good enough. In fact, out by a decimal place.
About the best you're ever going to get without walking up to the hardware itself is such as you'll find in NASA image AS15-9377[P]. This shows a resolution of something like 15m/pixel - not enough to make out the hardware or its orientation, but enough to describe a low shadow thrown by the lander stage. And *that* was taken from low lunar orbit (Apollo 15 CSM).
Re:What do you mean, "what if?" (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a question of optical quality, it's a question of physics. You can not get an angular resolution better than sin [Theta]=1.220(lambda/D), where D is the primary diameter, Theta is the angular resolution, lambda is the wavelength used and 1.220 is the first zero of the Bessel function: this is used to resolve distance between two points. If the distance is less than sin[Theta] then the two points cannot be resolved (separated).
For a spy satellite to be able to read newspaper headlines over your shoulder, even in LEO, would require a primary several km in diameter and it would require that far UV is not absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.
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EDIT: first paragraph. Minimum required primary diameter can be calculated to resolve a diffraction pattern using that same formula. Using a larger primary does nothing to improve resolution, all that does is improve the *quantity* of incident radiation hitting the sensor.
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What gets me is that the religious conservatives are always talking about "family values" and such, and here they're electing a guy who dumped his first wife while she was in the hospital with cancer, and then openly cheated on his second wife and asked her for an "open marriage" so he could continue cheating, and when she refused, dumped her.
At least Palin actually practiced what she preached for the most part, even though she was a complete idiot and thought that Africa was a single country.
The US is the new UK (Score:4, Insightful)
The UK still likes to think of itself as a powerful country but it has a debt crisis that is worse then the Greek are facing while their spending is far higher and with a "need/want" to defend pieces of land on the other side of the globe. Yes, the Falkland conflict is back and the UK just had to sell of half its fleet but don't worry, they shall never be slaves or something.
The UK believed for a long time that the country side need not be ruined by efficient farms, the real food production could be shifted offshore and manufacturing followed soon after. The country that started the industrial revolution (according to the brits and who is going to doubt them) is now an industrial reject. Does it really matter if a sailing nation has its port cranes and ships made in China? No, surely not, all those workers can find different jobs, in service industries... any day now... jobs are bound to arrive in Manchester and Liverpool to replace those dirty smelly jobs with nice burger flipping and insurance sellling jobs... just give it a decade or two more, they already been waiting for half a century so a bit more can't hurt.
The economy is like a jenga puzzle with a time delay build in, so you start pulling blocks and think, wow I can remove whole sections and the tower doesn't fall over so it must be okay... and then the time delay kicks in and BOOM, it all comes crumbling down.
Take the Apple/Foxconn boycott discussion below, some posters actually excuse Apple for doing this because there are no factories left in the west that can do this kind of production... they might be right... so they are defending outsourcing as the right thing to do because outsourcing ripped production capacity that once existed from the west... godwin be damned but the nazi's put jews in ghetto's and then used the fact that jews lived in ghetto's as justification for the holocaust.
To far? The same story ALSO had people supporting Apple by saying that American workers no longer had the skills for that type of work... so you remove the jobs and then claim that since no Americans are doing those jobs, they can't do them anymore... NICE!
The UK still invents stuff but if someone then wants to produce it, China is the place to go and what is produced in China is copied in China. The top talent certainly still exists but the support base is gone. It can still be found in isolated places, that metal shop that can produce any spare part just from looking at the broken parts. That painter who can restore a 500 year old house... I seen them work. They are old men, old men working alone because nobody young takes it up anymore. But these are the kind of people that once could have produced the first steam engines, or build rocket engines from scratch. The Space Shuttle had plenty of production line work, just with workers who through the years became really good at their individual tasks. Now they are gone. Some retired, some finding other work but their skills are lost and no new kids are replacing the old farts, learning on the job.
The problem is that the economy is to fragile and small changes take to long to show their effect to leave it to the market. Or for that matter to politicians who can only see to the next election. There is a reason high speed trains were neither a commerical NOR a political project but rather the work of civil engineers. Goverment workers who could see beyond the next quarter and the next election and look for the long term benefits.
Leave it up to business or the politicians and you get Amtrak and British Rail... both disasters. A businessman asks"does it make a profit next yet" and public rail is about how it benefits the entire country (make the workforce more mobile, relieve congestion on the roads) not pure profit margins. The politician asks "if we delay maintence now, can I offer a tax cut to my voters" and that happens then for 2 decades until people start dying.
Move the factory and you can not longer produce locally, the workers will loose the skills and kids will seek