Apollo Veteran: Skip Asteroid, Go To the Moon 191
astroengine writes "It's 40 years to the day that the final mission to the moon launched. Discovery News speaks with Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt about where he thinks the Earth's only satellite came from and why he thinks a NASA manned asteroid mission is a mistake. 'I think an asteroid is a diversion,' said Schmitt. 'If the ultimate goal is to get to Mars, you have a satellite only three days away that has a great deal of science as well as resources. The science of the moon has just been scratched. We've hardly explored the moon.'"
The National Research Council came out with a report a few days ago which found that the inability for the U.S. to find a consensus on where to go is damaging its ability to get there. Bill Nye spoke about the issue, saying, "I believe, as a country, we want to move NASA from [being] an engineering organization to a science organization, and this is going to take years, decades. Now, through investment, we have companies emerging that are exploring space on their own and will ultimately lower the cost of access to low-Earth orbit, which will free up NASA to go to these new and exciting places."
Ralph says (Score:3)
"Alice, yer not going to an asteroid, but to the Moon!
Re:Ralph says (Score:5, Informative)
By 2020, and it's a private venture. [newsday.com]
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There is a huge difference. If you land on the moon, you'll have to go over 2000 meters/second to leave. Also, the moon has a 14-day light cycle and hundreds of times more resources. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect it to be possible to build solar-powered railguns that can sling processed materials to orbit for construction of ships or stations. It could also be an excellent place for large telescopes. The only down side to the moon is that it's not entirely stable. It has quakes [wikipedia.org].
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so all ths "dust" will just stay on the ground unless it is disturbed
Which happens quite often, every two weeks due to electrostatic forces and the rising or setting of the Sun. And if you have anything moving around? More dust.
in which case it will drop back down just as fast as a hammer would
In lunar gravity. And dust bounces.
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"lunar dust"? You mean dirt? There's no air on the moon, so all ths "dust" will just stay on the ground unless it is disturbed (in which case it will drop back down just as fast as a hammer would because there's no air to keep it buoyant).
There's a regular solar wind bombardment from the Sun, causing a very thin atmosphere made of electrons reaching up to a few meters from the surface of the Moon, and there has to be the corresponding positive charge. That happens to be the tiny grains of dust. Consequently, there's a potential (pun intended :)) for some of the lighter grains to levitate due to the effect of the spatial charge and to redeposit somewhere else. (Of course, every now and then, a place gets hit by a micrometeoroid and the ejecta
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"lunar dust"? You mean dirt?
No. Dirt is weathered. Lunar regolith is not. The lack of atmosphere on the moon means the dust is extremely sharp, extremely fine, and can work its way into fine joints, cause problems with life-support, and you can't just brush it off your EVA suits. The Apollo astronauts' suits, from just a couple of hours jumping around, were nearly black with dust from the knees down. Imagine doing major construction work, for weeks.
Meteor impacts mean the lunar regolith is a mix of tiny sharp nickel-iron filings, tiny
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The dust was in fact a very large problem for the Apollo missions. It clung to everything electrostatically, and got into just about everything.
Which is why, for the Mars mission, they should set the sound stage up in a clean room.
Pull a few Billion... (Score:5, Interesting)
out of the defense budget, and go do both. The US is already the dominate military power on the planet, bar none, so I am sure they could trim the military budget by a tiny percentage without anyone who doesn't wear a brass hat noticing. Whats the saying? "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon your talking real money?"
Its nice to think that private enterprise will provide the means to get there (for whatever values of "there") but although its happening, its not happening overnight. NASA needs to continue doing it all themselves until business is established in orbit - otherwise we waste a few decades waiting for it. As well, think of all the scientific discoveries we might make during this moon mission series. The last one turned out pretty well didn't it?
Re:Pull a few Billion... (Score:5, Insightful)
Politically speaking, about the only way to do that would be to get the defense contractors on board (since they all but own Congress outright). Unless Congress puts Northrop Grumman in charge of building the craft, Blackwater (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) in charge of moon security, and KBR in charge of moon logistics, you can forget diverting any money from defense.
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And you can just bet that those contractors are giving the military the "best" deal they could too, not padding it any way. Trim those costs down a tad then :P :) (I don't believe in private armies)
As for Blackwater, I am just fine if all of their employees get shipped to the moon - one way
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> (I don't believe in private armies)
Believe in them or not, they are allowed under the second amendment.
appropriations expropriation (Score:2)
Don't we all love to assign misspent money to our favourite cause? And they worked so damn hard for their misbegotten windfall. Suck it up DoD. We going to space. Cry babies.
A mall cop by any other name is still a mall cop, and the credibility gap endures.
It strikes me that space exploration is not the highest priority when your home planet has a burgeoning fever unless you're the sort of person p
Re:Pull a few Billion... (Score:4, Funny)
who said anything about sending air tanks along with them?
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Re:Pull a few Billion... (Score:5, Insightful)
and who is going to build these spaceships? Toyota?
The defense contractors were the ones who built apollo. Northrom Grumman built the moon lander outside of NYC
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Yep. The Lunar module was built by Grumman (way before Northrop got involved with them) on Long Island, and the Command and Service modules were built by North American Aviation in Downey, CA. NAA was taken over by Rockwell, and eventually became part of Boeing.
The Saturn V rocket was built by Boeing, NAA, and Douglas, with the guidance computer being built by IBM.
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Yep. The Lunar module was built by Grumman (way before Northrop got involved with them)
And Grumman subcontracted the rockets on the LEM to TRW. So when you see the Grumman weenie on "Apollo 13" whining about how the LEM rockets weren't designed to fire and cold soak, fire and cold soak, but it worked out fine anyway, it's because TRW made awesome rockets that were better than they needed to be.
Then Northrop and Grumman merged, then I worked for TRW and was really proud of working for the company that made the awesome better-than-they-needed-to-be rockets instead of the company with the whiny
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IIRC, Gene Kranz and a couple others from Mission Control have stated that the CYA guy from Grumman was a cinematic invention by Ron Howard. And that Grumman actually distinguished themselves quite well during the mission.
They damned well better have, considering the towing bill they sent NAA:
http://everything2.com/title/Apollo+13+towing+bill [everything2.com]
Re:Pull a few Billion... (Score:5, Funny)
> and who is going to build these spaceships? Toyota?
I heard that Nissan put a Pathfinder on Mars.
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Or, we can just stop being the world's police force, keep our defense budget up (note: I said defense, not police budget expenditures), and put those savings toward NASA. Additionally we can pull hundreds of billions in foreign aid and put that into our domestic scientific, engineering, and manufacturing base instead. Or, how about this: axe federal spending, slash taxes, and let the people keep their money, and allow unfettered private companies to develop this stuff commercially? I'm sure there are many w
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It might be hard to pull a few hundreds of billions out of foreign aid because our total foreign aid is about $52B a year. That includes "military" foreign aid.
That's for 2011, and it is about $4B greater than 2010. Unless we added another $48B or so in foreign aid in the last year, it is going to be hard to trim $100B from a $52B budget.
Even trimming $100
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Even trimming $100B from a $683B Military budget might be hard.
Especially when the people controlling that budget have unlimited access to snipers...
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The US would still be the world's dominant military power if we cut the defense budget in half. We should do this, and give it all to science.
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How about we just cut the budget 10% across the board for starters? With $16.3 Trillion in debt (and growing), we need to stop wasting money.
The whole "take from this and give to that" doesn't work long term. Back in 1972 when Project Apollo was canceled, the excuse was that we were "spending too much money in space". (Think about that for a minute -- I'm pretty sure all the money was actually spent on this planet.) Ultimately, the "why spend money in space when we have hungry people on Earth" crowd won out
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Re:Pull a few Billion... (Score:5, Insightful)
> The US is already the dominate military power on the planet, bar none, so I am sure they could trim the military budget by a tiny percentage
I'm not really disagreeing, but I do think there's an important point people overlook when discussing things like this: Military dominance is all about spending. It's quite like a bleeding edge computer. You spend thousands on the best of the best, and in a year's time anyone could have the same setup from a quarter the price. You're then either with the Joes or spending more to stay on top. You can't really step back and say 'okay, we spent enough'; it's literally an arms race and staying ahead is expensive.
> Its nice to think that private enterprise will provide the means to get there (for whatever values of "there") but although its happening, its not happening overnight.
I'd point out that NASA isn't exactly doing anything overnight either. As long as it's taking for private enterprise to enter the game, they seem to be moving faster once they're in it. Honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if the next exploration mission is privately funded at this point.
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The US also spends so much because it's allies do a fair amount of freeloading. The US spends so much on the military that countries friendly to it can spend less since they count on US power making up the difference. That means that the US military budget as a ratio to the rest of the world is even higher (not only does the US spend a lot, other parts of the world spend less than they would if the US wasn't doing so). Heck even unfriendly (to the US) nations benefit from the US military keeping things like
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Freeloading ? What a load of crap.
More like America coming over to your house and ordering fiber to your door and then paying for it. Then America gets hungry and orders pizza for all your friends at the now burgeoning LAN party. Give me a break.
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Do you really think that, say, Australia's military budget wouldn't have been higher if it wasn't under the US's nuclear umbrella?
But I already said that the US doesn't do that because it is trying to be nice - it derives benefits from it. Two paragraphs was too much for you to read?
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Most of the wars in this world are made in the USA
How did the US make the Second Congo War [wikipedia.org] which is the largest war since the Second World War? There are other big wars like the last stage of the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iran-Iraq war, where the US took sides, but didn't make the war.
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Are you mad, or do you believe what you just wrote. 2 wars have bankrupted our country and you come here to lecture us about the Congo wars...
Clearly, you need the perspective.
It didn't make the war? The US took sides???
Yes, one can take sides in a war without creating that war.
Most of the wars in the past 40 years, weather outright declared or not ARE CAUSED BY THE US!
I already showed that assertion was wrong in my previous post. Maybe if you use ALL CAPS all the time rather than some of the time, you'll be more correct next time. Heh.
an American who does not watch Fox
Good for you.
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There is no arms race. You spend 90% of the worlds military budget and if you devoted half of that to feeding the starving on this planet and not to war you would probably have no enemies either.
And you would be wrong. No "probably" about it. There are two things to remember here. First, war isn't about food. Lack of food can be a trigger for a war, but the underlying cause is simply that someone thinks they can get away with doing or taking something via force.
Second, how is that money going to turn into fed people? The key problem now isn't that we don't have enough food or money spent on food, but rather that corrupt and failed governments are preventing people from getting enough food.
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It's not magic. It takes a lot of work to build up the infrastructure that keeps corruption at bay. But it can be done even if someone rich and powerful doesn't want you to do it.
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It's just not that hard to figure out what creates stable and strong governments even starting with the poorest regions of the world. We have
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Vietnam - Lost by USA
Afghanistan - Lost by USA
Iraq - Left stable by British, destabilized by USA, work in progress, eventually will be lost by USA
FTFY
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You can't really step back and say 'okay, we spent enough'; it's literally an arms race and staying ahead is expensive.
We can because we have nukes. No-one will invade us because we can nuke them. We still need a military to defend our borders from small scale invasions like the Falklands in the 80s, and to participate in peacekeeping etc. But we don't need a massive military with a fleet of ships and planes and hundreds of thousands of men.
Or at least we wouldn't if we didn't keep starting wars, but that's a need of our own making.
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Security and defense is not just about large scale deterrence. There are smaller level threats out there that, over the long term, are extremely dangerous, but which there is no way you could justify using a nuclear weapon on civilian centers to solve.
Take for instance religious extremists. On one hand, if they are sincere, they think they can win any engagement because God is on their side. The confidence it gives you is like having a working missile defense system without actually to actually build one
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That is because the top ten big spending countries aren't spending very much to begin with.
The UK, it has what, one teeny assault ship carrier and one carrier building?
France has one carrier
The US has fifteen.
Now, you'll say, "Well the US can cut to have six and they will still be better than France and the UK", but that's not really true. The US maintains a large carrier force so that it can maintain constant patrols in parts of the world, while the other ships refit and resupply in port. Because the US
Re:Pull a few Billion... (Score:4, Insightful)
The US is already the dominate military power on the planet, bar none
I know I'm not going to be terribly popular with what I'm about to say but I think it bares saying anyway. The power of a nation's military is not in its present inventory of weapons. They are here one day and blow to bits the next. The power of a nation's military is in its manufacturing capability and the ability to maintain the supply of raw goods to them in a time of war. All of these high-tech weapons are nothing but a flash in the pan if they cannot be replaced at the pace at which they are consumed, or faster. Bleeding edge, billion dollar bombers are worthless if there's no fuel to get them into the air. Blueprints for matchless weapons are worthless if manufacturing capacity cannot supply but a trickle to a rapidly depleting inventory. A gun without bullets becomes peer to a steel pipe in the hands of the person that wields it.
Now tell me, who has the largest and most rapidly expanding manufacturing and logistics capability in the world? It sure as hell isn't the US. Take a random sample of the objects presently surrounding you and look at their "made in" label. Notice a theme? What oil field does your fuel come from? There are strong odds against it being Texas.
Consensus on where to go (Score:2)
I'm not sure there's any difficulties finding that consensus: People tell me where to go all the time!
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We've always known that the population was aging, and that the baby boomers were going to need the services they already paid for. It's been planned, and we've been paying in to it so we could feel as though we'd be taken care of in our retirement. With our own money.
If the government can't get their financial act together, then it shouldn't affect the people who pay their own way. It's got to come from other places.
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We just need to combine these two things.
Space exploration using oldsters. Problem solved.
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Hey, I'll go!!!
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If it is between space and keeping old people from dying, space is going to lose, every time. It's pretty stupid of you to frame it this way [wikipedia.org].
Well, unless, of course, you don't give a fuck about space and just want to sneak your personal wharrgarbl into a thread that has nothing to do with it.
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What you're saying is that the Baby Boomers' lives were used up making the rich richer, and have a lot less wealth for themselves to show for their enriching the rich... The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. When the employees make the companies rich, but the employees themselves see little increase in wealth proportionately, this means the wealth at the top has been leached from not just the employees, but also the public at large as customers. I see articles about Facebook, GM, Apple,
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we are an aging society that is cannibalizing its stored wealth to lavish retirement and health care benefits on the older citizens
LAVISH retirements and health care benefits?? If I had to live on SS alone I would be in dire poverty, and anyone who lives on SS alone is dirt poor. LAVASH health care? If that were true, AARP wouldn't be selling medicare suppliment insurance.
Lavish, my ass. Compared to civilized nations like Sweden and Norway and Germany, the benefits geezers get are disgustingly niggling.
Re:Source? (Score:4, Informative)
You know, your argument would be more persuasive if you knew the difference between a million and a billion.
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"You know, your argument would be more persuasive if you knew the difference between a million and a billion."
Absolutely. The story makes a pretty big claim of $47.9 billion in improper payments reported in 2010 (*) so it seems unnecessary for the argument to inflate the $112 million in "improper payments" for rehabilitation wheel chairs over a 6-month period.
Also the testimony is very unclear as to what percentage of these "improper payments" were actually fraud or wrongly awarded. The numbers include docu
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What we have to do is enforce the agreements.
Can't squeeze blood from a stone.
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We know where the money is.
Well, that depends on whether it's still there or not. That is the fundamental problem with private pension plans that can't cover their budget. The companies behind them, can't either cause they spent it already.
Or, if you're referring to Social Security, whether the money is better off helping the people of the US, not getting collected in the first place, or going to rich retirees rather than the people who are currently paying into the program.
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The money is where the computer says it is
Employees, vendors, bond and dividend payments, rent, etc.
I mean really, if a bank robber, the CEO for instance, lost his stolen money in Vegas, would you 'repay' him, or the accounts he robbed, and then demand the remittance from the thief?
What happens is pretty well established. You pay back what you're obligated to pay back, assuming you can. If you can't, then it's bankruptcy court and the parties get what they can in the order that such payouts are made.
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As I see it, the entire developed world has spent to some degree more than it makes, piling up huge debts. Those governments ca
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No it wasn't. Not even close. Simply because a fund is running a surplus doesn't mean it is fully funded. The simple fact of the matter is that the promises made were always much larger than the taxes being paid in, even allowing for growth of those tax dollars over time.
When first rolled out, the payroll tax was a whopping 1%. Even with the shorter life spans, it wasn't enough and the designers knew it.
Drive New Technology (Score:2)
forget going back to the moon as the purpose of NASA is to drive the development and use of new technology, which means the asteroid is the better choice. Heck it even gets us a foothold in space as the best way to build the vessel for that mission is in LEO (low earth orbit). Expand the god damn ISS into a proper space station folks and lets get working.
Moonopoly (Score:5, Funny)
Skip Asteroid, Go To the Moon
Do not pass the LaGrange point, do not collect $2bn.
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Damn right! L5 4 lyfe yo!
we should totally build a whorehose at L5 (Score:2)
They got a lot of nice girls there. AH!
And maybe a gambling house at L2. That should keep Bender busy. Just keep the stupids away from the flare guns.
Skip the Moon too..Mars and Beyond. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just gear up and go to Mars, better yet concentrate and figuring out how to build the Fastest damn spaceship possible, something that can reach .5 the speed of light or faster, load some people on board for a one way trip and aim it at a nearby star. Lets stop wasting time looking at blurry pictures through telescopes and just get out there and see what we find.
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better yet concentrate and figuring out how to build the Fastest damn spaceship possible, something that can reach .5 the speed of light or faster,
Were you planning on fueling that with magic pixie dust? Seriously, accelerating large masses to those sorts of speeds, even in space where there's greatly reduced friction, is significantly beyond what we can do now. Going to the moon, or Mars, or even anywhere else in solar system, is simple by comparison.
Of course, if we ever figure it out then we can and should go to the stars, but it really isn't what you'd call a sane short-term or even medium-term plan. It requires the existence of things that we've
Data Center on the Moon (Score:2)
Let's put a data center on the moon and get the whole world in on the project much as with the international space station.
Both Tea Party and Left would end NASA (Score:2)
Embrace the power... (Score:2)
....of AND!
Why is it an either/or? Theres a lot of people and a lot of space to expand into. Asteroid mining means collecting resources, already in space. In the short term, it will take a lot of resources to grab and start, but long term, every ton of iron prepared and used in space, is a ton of iron that doesn't have to be lifted out of our gravity well to get out there.
Clearly, the moon, as a huge satelite that already exists....hell yes. Lets get a colony up there already.
I always find it amusing all th
Robots can collect rocks, let's go (Score:2)
...somewhere different. Plus, an asteroid gives us practice for visiting Phobos or Deimos.
does't matter (Score:2)
The problem is NOT Obama (Score:2)
So, why do I bring up the neo-cons? Because they want to waste money on Constellation, and now on the SLS., all while working hard to kill off private space. Throwing money at the
-1 improper invocation of Godwin (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, Godwin's law in only 9 minutes!
Oh, no,no,no. It would have been a Godwin if he said that "Going to the Moon is what Hitler would have done." or "NASA acts like a bunch of Nazis."
But by making an implicit Ad Hominem attack on the GP, you are acting just like Goebbels [wikipedia.org].
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Re:If Nasa is about Science, lose the men altogeth (Score:5, Insightful)
What could we learn about an asteroid from sending a person there that we wouldn't learn from sending a modern robot there? What could we learn from the moon or mars today that we couldn't learn from a robot?
Quite a lot actually. Now, part of that is simply the reality that a manned mission is going to be orders of magnitude larger and more complex, just by definition.
For instance, sample return is basically built into a manned mission. If you add a sample return objective to a robotic mission the cost numbers are suddenly much closer (still not close exactly, but closer). The rate of exploration is also much, much higher for a manned mission. The Mars rovers, for example, were designed to move just 600 meters over their lifespan. They've obviously exceeded that, Opportunity has driven 20km so far after all. Apollo 17, on the other hand, covered that distance in a matter of days. A prolonged human presence would allow us to explore a larger area in much more detail than would otherwise be possible. Not to mention the possibility of bringing a real chemistry lab along for the rid (as opposed to the 'lab on a single camera' setups that robotic missions use).
Yes, a lot of those advantages would disappear if you spent the same on a robotic mission as you did on a manned one. But you also have to remember the human factor. Humans can perform repairs, investigate problems, spot things in the terrain, cover more ground, look at things from different angles (in a matter of seconds), etc, etc. Designing a robot that can do everything that a human can do as well as a human can do it, even ignoring the light speed communication issues, would probably be more expensive than just sending the human in the first place.
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Quite a lot actually. Now, part of that is simply the reality that a manned mission is going to be orders of magnitude larger and more complex
You answered the question that was asked, but not the question that should have been asked: Which brings more benefit per dollar spent . The robots are the clear winners. We may learn twice as much from a manned mission that costs ten times a robotic mission, but for that price we could launch ten robotic missions.
Another standard defense of manned spaceflight is that it keeps the public engaged. But I think the opposite is true. Every Friday I help out at my son's elementary school, and sometimes we
Re:If Nasa is about Science, lose the men altogeth (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, Curiousity is actually doing something other than just moving in a circle around the Earth.
Would the kids be more interested in Curiousity than they would be in six men on Mars?
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Would the kids be more interested in Curiousity than they would be in six men on Mars?
Wrong question. Better question: Would the kids be more interested in six men on Mars, or dozens of robotic missions to all corners of the Solar System that we could afford for the same money.
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"Better question: Would the kids be more interested in six men on Mars, or dozens of robotic missions to all corners of the Solar System that we could afford for the same money."
There's absolutely no question they would be more interested in six men on Mars. If not for the Science, it would basically be an amazing reality show, with real, proper heroes on a desolate and hostile planet, millions of miles from home. If done right, NASA would have several hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) of people
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it would basically be an amazing reality show, with real, proper heroes
People said the same thing about the ISS. Sure people will tune in for the landing, but by the third day of watching rocks being analyzed, they will tune out. Everyone watched the Apollo 11 landing, but there was little interest in latter missions (except for 13, but only after it looked like they were going to die).
I wouldn't be surprised if the total revenue (advertisement, DVD/Blueray sales, merchandising) went a long way towards actually paying for the mission.
You need to get a grip on the costs involved. A one-way manned "go-to-Mars" mission (which the USA has ruled out) would cost more than $200B. A "go-and-return" mission would cost more than a
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The problem with low-cost, low-benefit science is decreasing returns. After a while, you've basically learned all you can without sending a manned mission.
Just look at Mars. Sojourner brought back a lot of data. Spirit and Opportunity sent back even more, but were also more expensive. Curiosity is sending back yet more, but at yet higher costs (the wheels on Curiosity are about the size of the entire Sojourner rover). Pretty soon we'll reach the point where sending people will be *cheaper* than sending a ro
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They're more interested in Curiosity because Curiosity is on Mars. I can't speak for your kids, but I think I'd be a lot more psyched about *anything* we send to Mars over a bunch of guys in a tube in Earth orbit.
That said, I would be ten times more psyched to have men on Mars than rovers. If we had the money and the know-how to put men on Mars and we decided to put rovers instead, it would be very disappointing. Rovers are a great idea for recon and doing the necessary science, but I'd prefer to do mo
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I would be ten times more psyched to have men on Mars than rovers.
Then your enthusiasm is too low by a factor of forty. The Curiosity mission cost $2.6B. A manned go-and-return mission to Mars would cost over a trillion. That is 400 times more expensive.
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Thanks! I have turned my my enthusiasm up to 400.
Seriously, I'm already a little annoyed that people think it's good enough to put a rover on Mars. I think it's awesome, but it's definitely not good enough. I was mostly enthusiastic about it because it demonstrated new ways to get bigger objects on Mars, as well as more effective exploration.
It is definitely worth a trillion dollars to put people on Mars, as long as they maintain that momentum. If you can put people on Mars, you're probably a good deal
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The inevitable cost overruns of any human mission to Mars would pare down its science objectives to those now found on the ISS: attempt to do little more than keep the people on the mission alive. The main things such a mission would achieve would be to plant a flag, take postcard-worthy snapshots, and impede future science by contaminating Mars with a fecal microbes.
Most likely the other main benefit would be the gripping drama of the astronauts trying to avert disaster caused by one or more technical fail
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If the end goal is to drive rovers around on Mars and never actually, you know, go there, then they can feel free to shut down the Mars program, because I honestly don't give a shit if there is life elsewhere in the universe if I am never going to meet it.
I've got a clue for you: With 99.999999% probability, you aren't ever going to another planet, whether NASA pays for a manned program or not.
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NASA is about science, but it's also there to put people on other worlds and to bring them back again.
Says who?
For all you people who want to spend 10X the money on space exploration to get fewer scientific results because you insist on including a dog-and-pony show, I think NASA should sell pay-per-view tickets. If they get enough money to fund your stunt that way, then great. But don't make the taxpayers fund this Hollywood-style entertainment.
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Sending people to stand next to flags on other planets is not a "worth goal". Sorry.
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I really think we should have a dual focus, neither of which involves Mars:
1. Permanent manned presence on the moon. It's ridiculous that we went there, poked around a little bit, and now we have folks saying we should basically forget about it and send manned missions to Mars? Huh? What a crazy waste of an opportunity to test out long-term space solutions nearby, where we can monitor things closely and have round-trip human travel.
2. Robotic exploration and mining of asteroids. It's silly to expect that ev
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I think you've got your timeline of aviation backwards. It started as tinkerers in the back of their (private) bicycle shop, was pioneered by (private) individuals flying (private) planes in long-distance challenges to win (private) prize money. Now the two main builders of civilian aircraft are a huge conglomerate dependent on government contracts (Boeing) and an outright government-sponsored industry (Airbus).
here's how we solve the space budget allocation (Score:2)
FIGHT!
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Yes, a lot of those advantages would disappear if you spent the same on a robotic mission as you did on a manned one. But you also have to remember the human factor. Humans can perform repairs, investigate problems, spot things in the terrain, cover more ground, look at things from different angles (in a matter of seconds), etc, etc. Designing a robot that can do everything that a human can do as well as a human can do it, even ignoring the light speed communication issues, would probably be more expensive than just sending the human in the first place.
That's assuming the public allows such a robot to be deployed too. I think purely autonomous space missions are going to be among the first victims of a genuine AI scare. At least on Earth, one can unplug the computer or heat it to the point it ceases to function. When it's on Mars, there's no such controls. And that's going to be scary.
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In fact, why are we sending a clone of Curiosity to Mars, when we could send it to the Moon instead? About all that would be required is an extra retro rocket (to replace the parachute, not the skycrane), and preferably some different instruments. (Atmosphere samplers not required.)
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Actually, it does make him pretty well versed in what is possible to do in space, it just means he's not a very good climatologist.
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Okay. He also wants to go to the moon in order to mine Helium-3.
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Actually, as a PhD geologist (the only scientist who ever went to the moon), he is eminently qualified to talk about the geological origins of the moon.
His positions on climatology and global warming... not so much. I think those just came along with getting involved in GOP politics. He was a republican senator from NM, and his wackier positions have all emerged since then. Apparently, he believes that environmentalism and global warming are not only "communist", but also "a stalking horse for Nazism". Mayb
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The problem is that the Moon has only two reasonable uses at this time:
1. A stepping stone to further exploration. Getting to the moon is a pain, but once you are there, you can construct facilities, shipyards and and use its resources and you don't have the gravity well issues you do with Earth. This is probably the best reason I can think of to not bypass the moon immediately. If you want a permanent space presence, you really want to build up the Moon as a convenient anchor for space infrastructure.
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