How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable? 211
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger published a piece that touched on one of the most vexing issues surrounding NASA's "road to Mars," that being that of cost. How does one design a deep space exploration program that "the nation can afford," to coin a phrase uttered by the old NASA hand interviewed for the article? The phrase is somewhat misleading since one of the truisms of federal budgeting is that the nation can afford quite a bit. A more accurate phrase might be, "that the nation is willing to spend."
Robots Only (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously the least expensive in terms of consumables.
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The long-term goal should still be human habitation, but there is a huge amount of work that needs to come first.
This is the understatement of the century.
People came to america because it was "the land of plenty" (Pretty much the opposite of Mars)
People go work on oil rigs, the arctic, deep sea, etc... because it's "temporary misery for great (pay/research/experience)"
Mars is neither "the land of plenty" or "temporary misery for great pay".
In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies.
Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara w
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People came to america because it was "the land of plenty" (Pretty much the opposite of Mars)
Well rather a lot of them were running away from something. That side would be true of Mars volunteers too.
not just the few crazies.
With a world population of 7 billion, there's plenty of people that want to go to Mars, and yet are not so crazy they can't be allowed to go.
Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell.
Right. And instead of visiting the moon they could have... But I'm glad they visited the moon.
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Right. And instead of visiting the moon they could have... But I'm glad they visited the moon.
Yeah, it put a feather in our hat but that's about it. That's why we haven't been back. But, more importantly, there is a HUGE difference between a one week trip to the moon and back and a 6 month+ trip to mars. I would much rather spend money trying to figure out how to make the trip cheaper than I would trying to get there with current technology. I think the first step would be to get launch cost to under $100/pound. A space elevator might be one alternative. If you could get stuff to space for $10
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Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell.
Yes, that makes perfectly sense. Because as we all know sahara is immune to all extinction level events.
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Yes, that makes perfectly sense. Because as we all know sahara is immune to all extinction level events.
What type of global extinction level event are you talking about and how many people are you going to send?
Many of them would also affect mars and/or would not affect something at the bottom of the ocean.
Let's say by some miracle you get 1000 people to mars and they are self-sustaining. That's still probably
not enough to prevent extinction. Much better to spend the money to get launch cost down first before
wasting money trying to send a few dozen colonists to mars.
Kindof like sending a generational ship t
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There's a 1001 things that could go seriously wrong on Earth without it affecting Mars, and very few that would affect both.
Gamma ray bursts and something wacky happening to the sun are the only things I can think of were a Mars colony probably wouldn't help.
The list of possible extinction level events on Earth were a Mars colony would help - asteroid collision, supervolcano, nuclear war, sudden rapid climate change (>8C change), airborn virus with long (contagious) symptom free incubation period and ext
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if we keep putting off doing ANYTHING, nothing will ever happen.
We are doing plenty. We are developing better materials, robots, and lower cost launch vehicles. Those things are way more important for long term space colonization than a one-off mission to send some meat to Mars.
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"In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies."
Hummm... maybe that's the hidden agenda of some politicians... Just making this planet less and less palatable (wars, global warming, famine, religious bigotry...) so people WANT to go to somewhere even as inhospitable as Mars.
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Getting 100,000 people who want to go to Mars would take about the amount of effort it takes to put an ad in the proverbial paper. You don't need to convince people to go with a conspiracy, they already want to.
I'll grant that if everything is perfect on Earth, people might find less interest in going, but honestly, most people don't want to leave to get away from Earth, they want to go so they can go to Mars.
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"In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies."
Hummm... maybe that's the hidden agenda of some politicians... Just making this planet less and less palatable (wars, global warming, famine, religious bigotry...) so people WANT to go to somewhere even as inhospitable as Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You know it is possible for someone to see the value in extending human civilisation beyond Earth, but recognise that Mars has no role to play in that process.
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movie set, just like the moon landings.
It's simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Just cancel the F-35 project. That will buy you about 5 trips to Mars.
International Collaboration (Score:2)
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Just cancel the F-35 project. That will buy you about 5 trips to Mars.
what? cancel the joint strike paperweight?
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Most drug use may be cannabis, but those other drugs are horrendous. Not to mention that when most people are cured from a disease, they usually don't feel the urge to reinfect themselves. Hard drug users can represent people who have behaviors that make them frequent flyers for health care. Fix them up, and they are frequently back in later, having fucked themselves up again. That may not be a problem for pot, but it sure is for a lot of other drugs.
Also, smoking pot is *smoking* and most people smoke
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"Americans also spend $586.5 billion a year on gambling."
That is bad, but it does employee a lot of casino folks. And if you think the casinos are making an insane amount from that, you can always but stock in MGM Grand, Wynn Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, etc and take your share of the profits.
I would like to see alcohol and tobacco taxed at a rate where they are health neutral. i.e. The amount spend to treat related problems equals the amount spent creating them. Therefore those who choose to drink and s
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"I would like to see alcohol and tobacco taxed at a rate where they are health neutral."
Then all you get is a black market. You can only tax those things to just before the point where it becomes worth it for organized crime to get involved. That will never get you to the point where they are health neutral.
If you really want this all to break even, the best thing you can do is deny certain benefits to people who engage in high risk activities. Of course no one will do that. And I am not even suggesting that we do. Health care is a black hole. You will never get back your investment. Yo
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"You can only tax those things to just before the point where it becomes worth it for organized crime to get involved"
I agree, but you could probably tax alcohol and tobacco more before you reach that point. And as you increase taxes, consumption should decrease. Then you have more $$ to take care of less users. If its $10/pack for cigarettes, I'm sure less people would smoke, and most smokers would smoke less. The biggest roadblock would be the tobacco and alcohol lobbyists and not knowing how high you can
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The thing is, we can't control what people are going to do with themselves or what they are going to consume. If you illegalize it, that often has the effect of raising the spending.
We can however control what the government spends its money on.
It's not affordability, it's safety (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
If you want to make Mars at all realistic, you need to start by building a set of space and mars-dust hardened machinery capable of doing remote controlled construction. What we send would need to have the ability to tunnel, create cement from Martian soils, smelt, and construct buildings. All to create an environment that might be capable of sustaining life. This is because keeping astronauts alive is orders of magnitude harder than anything else we might conceivably do.
Technologically, we're no where near there yet. Counter-intuitively, the hardest step is the first one: getting out of our own gravity well. The minimal amount of material that we would have to get into orbit to be able to construct a settlement is considerably larger than the International Space station, which is, I remind everyone, the most expensive human construct - at $100 billion dollars. The next most difficult stage would be landing on Mars with precision, not breaking anything.
Re:It's not affordability, it's safety (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
I think you greatly underestimate the public's appetite for risk. We've been willing to watch our sons and daughters die by the thousands to take villages and hilltops only to give them back a week, a month or a year later with zero long-term achievement and right now politicians running for President are advocating to ramp that up.
I can't imagine that the public would be turned off by deaths associated with a Mars mission failure. What are we talking about -- 5 people? 10 people? 100 people? And it wouldn't be for some shit patch of dirt it would be to explore space and expand human horizons. That would inspire people, not intimidate them or discourage them.
Exploration has always been risky. People willingly entertain the risk of dying climbing, sailing, diving, parachuting, flying small planes, racing motorcycles, cars and so on. Because somebody might die is a lousy reason not to explore.
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"The public" has had no appetite to go to war; when people support war, it is because politicians tell them that it is necessary for their own safety, and because it's mostly not
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If you mean putting humans on Mars isn't needed for mapping or geology missions, you're right. But exploration isn't just bringing back the facts of remote places for scientists to go over. Exploration is also humans going to places and being there and seeing it for themselves because, if we're serious about the survival of the species in the very long term, that is exactly what we will have to be able to do.
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If you mean putting humans on Mars isn't needed for mapping or geology missions, you're right. But exploration isn't just bringing back the facts of remote places for scientists to go over. Exploration is also humans going to places and being there and seeing it for themselves because, if we're serious about the survival of the species in the very long term, that is exactly what we will have to be able to do.
we can transport our criminals and/or irish people there.
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I think you greatly underestimate the public's appetite for risk. We've been willing to watch our sons and daughters die by the thousands to take villages and hilltops only to give them back a week, a month or a year later with zero long-term achievement and right now politicians running for President are advocating to ramp that up.
I can't imagine that the public would be turned off by deaths associated with a Mars mission failure...
You surely know that what you're saying isn't true. War deaths, even pointless ones like Iraq, are tightly knitted into the Nation's ego by nationalistic rhetoric. The public's acceptance of those deaths isn't because of an "appetite for risk", it's due to their belief that these deaths are a sacrifice the nation must make to maintain "their Freedom." "Freedom" being a word that has had its meaning twisted rather horribly in recent years. Hence every patriot has a "Support our Troops" bumper sticker, etc. O
ITN (Score:3)
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One way I can see to make things cheaper is to use the Interplanetary Transport Network [wikipedia.org] to ship the bulk of the material needed for a settlement. But I'm quite sure someone better qualified than I am already took this possibility into account. The ITN has already been used to send probes, after all.
but then you have to worry that you'll run out of 32 bit interplanetary transport protocol addresses
How much the nation is willing to spend? (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
Re:How much the nation is willing to spend? (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, China is extending over it's neighbors and other "contested" areas. Russia is trying to recreate the soviet empire, then there are a lot of countries trying to develop nuclear weapons while led by sociopaths ...
If you discount so easily the need for military might, then history has nothing for you.
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That's what Obama said. Has it worked? Russia, Chi (Score:2)
What you said is essentially the Obama doctrine. It kinda sounds nice. Has it worked? Are relations with Russia better? Is China better? Is the middle east more stable?
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Because Bush & Blair hated each other? Got ur (Score:3)
Our relationships with the UK, Canada, and Australia have improved under the Obama doctrine? Because Bush and Blair hated each other?
In international relations, there are two major ways tight alliances are formed. First, economically- you like other countries to buy stuff"from you, because that gives you money. Second, you know they've got your back - that they can and will come to your aid militarily. Those are the big two.
Canada doesn't really have or need a military navy, their na
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I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
every country seems to bloat their military. In Russia, every railway clerk or uniformed doorman for an apartment building is part of the "militia". In Egypt, the military runs everything from farms to appliance manufacturing. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages... [jadaliyya.com]
Solution is simple... (Score:2)
How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
By not sending people when there is no compelling reason to.
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Maybe we should wait until the "private sector" can manage to do what the US government did over half a century ago...put a human into orbit.
The "private sector" can't find it's ass with both hands, tax breaks and a Federal Reserve subsidy in the form of 0% interest rates. How is it gonna make it anywhere near Mars?
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The private sector isn't putting people in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars, because it's a colossal waste of money. And it was a colossal waste of money half a century ago as well.
Hopefully it isn't, because there is nothing of value on Mars, and there is no value in settling Mars at this point.
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I am against a manned mission to Mars. I'd rather see the money spent on something that will do some good, like infrastructure investment.
We didn't do the moon missions until after the interstate highway system was built and we had Social Security and Medicare. We have to prioritize better.
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Social Security and Medicare are financed separately from discretionary spending. They are also heading for bankruptcy.
Furthermore, the "interstate highway system" is never actually "built"; it is something that requires constant upkeep and continuing spending. But Congress chooses to neglect that and instead hands the money to politically connected business
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"Rational policies"? I'm going to have to ask for a citation there. Anything in the past decade will do.
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I'm sorry you misunderstood. I'm not interested in debating with you the degree of rationality of the private sector in general, the "rational policies" we are talking about here are the pursuit of manned space flight.
So, my citation is you. You stated that manned space flight is irrational; the public sector pursued manned space flight, the private sector chose not to. Which of the two actors acted more
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Rational? I don't know about that. But I do know it's the public sector's job to do the things that the private sector is unable to do. Things that don't show immediate profit.
If you doubt that there was profit from the Apollo program, I suggest looking at the device on which you are reading th
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The private sector isn't "unable" to do them, it is unwilling to do them because it isn't rational to do them.
There was lots of "profit" from the Apollo program: all the military contractors that got government han
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The private sector is quite capable of investing things that do not show immediate profit.
Case in point: All tech start ups.
And in that case, they're quite capable of investing in things that never show a profit.
The reason that the private sector does not engage in human launches and human landings and such is that it does not have a path to profit where the risk is worth it yet for companies that new. They need to build up their capabilities and income before accepting those sorts of risks.
The difference
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Whoa there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They're certainly working at it. However, they're not going to the Moon, let alone Mars.
I think working at commercial spaceflight is not only positive, but necessary for the future, but what they're doing barely qualifies as spaceflight.
I suggest a novel approach (Score:2)
Power it by the massive amounts of BS produced by politicians.
We can harness sunlight, wind and waves etc for electricity so this should be our next big step for green affordable energy.
It's not money it's a vision thing... (Score:2)
Defining "what for" for one.
Also the conquest of space is not a game for short attention spans. The distances are great and the challenges are monumental.
The "game changing" technology that is needed is self replicating resource and infrastructure.
We need to put a lathe on the moon and a robot to work the thing.
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Somewhere out in space is a great big rock heading our way. It might not hit for ten million years, or it might hit this decade, but it will hit eventually.
The long term aim should be to establish a sustainable colony somewhere. That isn't possible right now, the technology is still a long way from ready. We can lay the groundwork though - develop new technologies, gather data on how they perform, refine designs, study the planet. The first steps that later generations can build upon, because it's going to
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It would take lots of ships, of course. You'd be building an entire industrial infrastructure from scratch in a very harsh environment. It's not going to be cheap, and it's not going to be fast.
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Somewhere out in space is a great big rock heading our way. It might not hit for ten million years, or it might hit this decade, but it will hit eventually.
The long term aim should be to establish a sustainable colony somewhere. That isn't possible right now, the technology is still a long way from ready. We can lay the groundwork though - develop new technologies, gather data on how they perform, refine designs, study the planet. The first steps that later generations can build upon, because it's going to be the most expensive undertaking in all of human history to date and someone has to be willing to make the first payments even if they will never see the ultimate result.
the biggest thing is get familiar with what it's like offworld. And education is always expensive, one way or the other. so, no surprise there.
Re:It's not money it's a vision thing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is exactly why as a space systems engineer, I'm working on Seed Factories ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... [wikibooks.org] ). Fully automated self-replication is hard. Instead, a Seed Factory grows grows from a starter set by three methods rather than one:
* Diversification - making new machines not in the starter set
* Scaling - making different size machines (usually larger), and
* Replication - making exact copies of what you already have
Your starter set allows you to make *some* parts and materials locally. The remainder is imported. As you add more machines, you can do other processes and make other products, and reduce how much you need to import.
Rather than try to make it all automated, you use remote control and *some* live humans where necessary. Thus an asteroid processing plant in near-Lunar orbit, or robots building a Lunar base can mostly be controlled from Earth, with occasional human visitors to fix things. Once you are producing food, water, oxygen, fuel, etc , then you can bring in more permanent occupants. The same goes with Mars. Start with a control station on Phobos, which is close enough for real-time VR. The crew remote control surface robots who prepare the landing site. Once enough equipment is set up down there, humans can follow.
Other people are working on finding asteroids and how to bring them where you need them. That's why I'm working on self-bootstrapping factories. Once you have the raw materials, you have to make useful products out of it. Launching whole industrial plants is too heavy and expensive. So you want to make most of the equipment on-site if you can, out of the materials you are mining.
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Point well made...and the mix of tele-operate and autonomy is the proper unsurpassed role for manned missions.
Capsules and rockets are 60s science. Organization will conquer the solar system.
More money for NASA robotics.
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3 to 22 minute communication delay makes it very hard to tele-operate.
Do I have to do all thinking round here? (Score:2)
Crowdsourcing, 3d printers, and Elon Musk. Managed by Donald Trump using software written by Lennart Poettering.
Budget? (Score:2)
I have looked and I can not seem to find a complete budget for the road map. Before we ask if it is affordable we need to ask how much will it cost.
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Even with a "budget" it's not that easy. Most money government spends isn't lost. It's just recirculated in the economy. You pay scientists and engineers, and they pay tax, and they buy things in stores that pay tax etc, and the GDP goes up. For sure the hardware that is sent to Mars and the energy used to do it is gone. But most money spent isn't.
it's sent to space. Opportunity cost (Score:5, Insightful)
You've understood an important point, but missed a critical companion point. You're correct that cash doesn't normally disappear, it circulates. But the money represents _value_, resources. _Value_ can disappear , resources CAN be squandered.
If scientists spend $1 million of their time doing anything else, such as working on vaccines, you end up with $1million worth of vaccine research done, and still they spend their salaries on stuff. If the engineers design safer cars, we get safer cars (millions of them), and the engineers still spend the cash. On the other hand, if the engineers spend their time designing a space probe, we get a space probe (one) and then literally send that value off into space.
When we say "spend $100 million on mars " what that means is "spend $100 million worth of engineer's time, rather than spending that time on making cars safer, making high speed internet more affordable, etc.)
You CAN argue that it's better to spend that money (engineering time, etc) on a mars probe than to spend it on anything else. And that's exactly the argument you have to make. Because we only have a certain number of engineers , and they only work a certain number of hours. Dollars are a way to put a consistent number on all of the different resources used up in a project, including people's time.
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Sure, but honestly, how much value is actually being lost in this manner? Are you wasting the time of engineers or physicists? No. This is what they do. They're not going to turn into people who grow crops for a living or medical doctors.
Most of these engineers and scientists *want* to work on this stuff. Some could go either way, I'm sure, but I'd say that most of them would be proud to say they work on the space program. They don't want to work on cars. They don't care about high speed internet.
still confusing cash vs what it represents (resour (Score:2)
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. To clarify, let's use two synonyms for money - cash and resources (or if you prefer, dollars and value).
Cash (dollars) REPRESENT resources (value). Those are two different things. Resources (time, gold) are real . Dollars are just notes on paper which represent a claim on resources.
When we say "spend $100 million" what we really mean is "use up $100 million worth of resources". If you buy a car for $20,000 and light it on fire, the dollars still exist, while the
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If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
Absolutely wrong. Every penny you paid those engineers was recycled into the economy.
Again you think a penny is work? (Score:2)
I said you're confusing cash versus work, resources, value. You replied:
> > that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
> Every penny you paid
You're STILL thinking they are the same thing.
I buy a car for $20,000. I light the car on fire. Did the value of the car go up in smoke? Yes, that value is gone. Even though the cash I paid to acquire that value still exists.
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The "ten years of work" is the actual time they spent out of their professional careers, and the work is used up. They won't get that ten years back, and when they were working on that project they weren't working on another. The money is just accounting here.
So argue that it's better than $100 million elsewh (Score:2)
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
So we've established that a mars mission does in fact use up resources which could have been used elsewhere. Now you can argue that the Mars mission is (or isn't) the BEST use of those resources.
The nex
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We need number so we can make a valid decision. Do we have enough tax money to divert to this project without crippling government services? Without numbers we have no idea.
The thing about paying scientists and engineers and then reaping taxes is that it is diminishing returns. The money is not gone from the economy but it is gone from government control. We may not have enough tax money to fund things like health care, roads, etc. Most things are built to further growth. Material sent to Mars just becomes
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Sorry, wrong "broken window theory". I meant this one [investopedia.com].
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Even if that objection were true, it doesn't apply here in that this isn't destruction, it's construction, in the long term we get a Mars Outpost from it, and in the short term we get lots of science and the off-shoots of that science.
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in the long term we get a Mars Outpost
Which has no economic benefit to Earth and in fact has a drain as it has to be maintained by future missions.
in the short term we get lots of science and the off-shoots of that science.
That science could also be obtained by spending much less money on direct funding of that science rather than as an offshoot. I also wonder how the science and design around many of the technologies needed in space will have application on Earth.
I would rather spend 10% of the Mars costs on direct research that waste the 90% on science for science sake.
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Which has no economic benefit to Earth and in fact has a drain as it has to be maintained by future missions.
How small minded.
That science could also be obtained by spending much less money on direct funding of that science rather than as an offshoot.
You simply can't say that.
I would rather spend 10% of the Mars costs on direct research that waste the 90% on science for science sake.
I'd rather boost the economy by spending on the big project.
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We need number so we can make a valid decision. Do we have enough tax money to divert to this project without crippling government services?
The question implies a falsehood. There isn't a limited tax fund from which different things must be picked. Tax is a flow, not a cost. And keeping it flowing is beneficial to the economy. The moon programme for example expanded the economy. Without the moon program, the US would be poorer.
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There isn't a limited tax fund from which different things must be picked.
On a year by year basis there is a limited amount of money that is received by the government through taxes. How can you say that is not a limited tax fund?
The taxes that are currently flowing in to government are currently flowing out of government and more. That is what is called a deficit. That deficit has to be paid back eventually and interest on the accumulated debt paid. Governments get in trouble when significant portions of the tax flow are diverted to pay interest on accumulated debt.
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On a year by year basis there is a limited amount of money that is received by the government through taxes.
Of course it's not limited. The more the economy grows, the bigger the tax take. The bigger the tax take the more the government can spend. The more the government s[pends the more the economy grows. It's a virtuous circle.
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About what the NASA budget is now. Currently they are spending several billion a year developing the SLS and Orion. Once their designs are done, they can turn to making the other necessary hardware and launch costs. The ISS is supposed to be retired in the 2020's, so that part of the budget can be reassigned to other missions. Don't think of it as a fixed project cost, government agencies don't work that way. Rather, they have an annual budget that is approximately the same from year to year, and proje
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Don't think of it as a fixed project cost, government agencies don't work that way. Rather, they have an annual budget that is approximately the same from year to year, and projects are spread out to fit within that budget.
You do need a project cost so you can figure out how many years the project will take. For example, if the plan calls for missions every 2 years but the cost divided by the budget can only afford a mission every four years then there is a problem. Missions to space only work on a schedule.
What of the project cost for the next 50 years would eat up the budget for the next 100 years? I don't know if that is true because I have not seen a full project cost.
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It is more important to me that the money is consistently budgeted from year to year and kept on track than for any "date" to be set for the end of the program.
If you spend $1 billion (or its inflationary equivalent) on this program per year, we will get to Mars and colonize it. What we should not be saying is that, "if we can't do it in 50 years, it isn't worth budgeting for".
Going to space regularly is going to cost a colossal amount of money, but it need not all be spent in the next ten years. I would
Roughtly $2T for the mission in today's dollars (Score:2)
Apollo: 25B
STS: $200B
It's not unreasonable to estimate that a major space undertaking will be an order of magnitude larger by the time things are done. I could be shy by 20-30%, but I think 2 Trillion is a fair over-under cost.
It will never happen with the current budgets. Even if you stripped out all the pet projects and tail chasing and gave over all the launch vehicle research to private industry you'd still only have 3-5 Billion to spend. There are many technical challenges which exist which still need
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"I think 2 Trillion is a fair over-under cost."
What's that? Three years worth of military budget? Four?
The cheap way to Mars is through Hollywood. (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to go to Mars? How about Saturn? Or a neighboring star or galaxy? Maybe even skip to an alternate universe all together?
Hollywood does it every year for $50-200M a pop. Most of the people in this country believe all the impossible stuff they do in the movies is real anyway, and couldn't tell if even the basic physics was so screwed up as to be laughable. Heck, even the school systems and police - you know, the "smart ones" we let teach our kids and the experts on explosives - get all their bomb identification training from Hollywood.
You want these people to fork over real money for real science when fake science that makes them feel good can be had for $11.50 a seat and a $4 soda?
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The fact that most people actually believe we had men on the moon in 1968 is proof of that.
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I sincerely hope you are joking.
You don't know what you're talking about. (Score:2)
"a $4 soda"
There is no way you can get a soda in a movie theater for $4.
Cooperate with other nations? (Score:2)
In an international project?
Surely a few of them have a few dimes clinking around in their pockets?
OK, I'll bite (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
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If you'd seen me trying to fix the vacuum cleaner this afternoon, you wouldn't so proud. I was working in the living room (!) because I didn't want to miss any of the football game. I put newspaper down and was doing fine until I started up the dismantled vacuum cleaner with the hose and wand assembly removed for cleaning. A cloud of dust and other unspeakable stuff blew up in my face covering the furniture and the drapes. The living room looked like Mt
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Mars could be a great opportunity for cooperation and bridge building with other nations. A lot of people don't realize that the Kennedy was in talks to with Russian PM about doing a joint moon mission until he was assassinated. If he had lived it's likely that Apollo 11 would have had an American and Russian on board, both stepping off that ladder at the same time. The cost of the programme would likely have been a lot lower and shared between the two countries.
If the we want to get to Mars soon we need Ch
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You have no idea what the Soviet Union having the first satellite and the first man in orbit meant back then. Yes, the technology was about missiles, but the demonstration was about socialism versus capitalism and it was going to the moon that fixed that for good.
Nowadays you could get the impression that we're trying to win against idiots by out-idioting them. Never works.
maybe think a little outside the box... (Score:2)
I've said it before... what we need to do to make manned space travel a permanent thing and not an expensive luxury is to find and develop order-of-magnitude improvements in launch costs, lighter and stronger materials, and much more reliable systems.
The long pole in the tent on costs nowadays is getting to orbit. If your launch costs to orbit are tens of thousands of dollars per kg your mars mission, which would require hundreds of tons of material put into orbit, will rapidly eat up any imaginable budget
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Could the current NASA manage a trip to the moon? (Score:2)
I've often wondered if NASA could even get us to the moon again, let alone Mars. Typical of recent bureaucracies, I wonder if they could manage the finances as well as the technical development of another manned lunar landing. Heck, we can't even shuttle a person to the ISS today.
NASA seems to have stopped its ability to accomplish complex tasks as they have in the past IMHO.
Politics (Score:2)
Cut the pork (Score:2)
Let NASA build what it needs for the lowest cost without interference from the politicians. Stop treating NASA as a way to distribute money to the districts and spreading projects throughout the country.
We already know how (Score:3)
We know how to do this, and NASA has known how since at least the mid 90's.
Mars Direct [wikipedia.org] is the answer. This would get boots on Mars in 10 or so years, and if we cancelled SLS and put that money into Mars development and commercial crew, this could happen without even increasing the current budget.
The problems are NOT technical. They aren't even budgetary. The problems are political - spasmodic direction every term or two from new presidential initiatives, the use of NASA solely for vote-buying pork by congress, and the institutional dysfunction of NASA administration, favoring the most complicated, expensive, and high-risk technologies possible with these plans. If people get educated about mission profiles like Mars Direct, and start recognizing initiatives like "road to Mars" for the political pandering that they are, perhaps we can see some sanity restored to the space program.
Invent an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) (Score:2)
...and let it solve the problem. It can send tiny self-replicating nano robots to mars (and the rest of the solar system) and terraform those ugly, hostile lumps of rock and ice and gas to our heart's content. No need to send soft, squishy, inefficient bags of meat across several AUs when you can use a sturdy swarm of several trillion nanos to do the job.
And while they are at it they can clean up Earth too.
Just make sure we survive the singularity and won't turn into grey goo!
Good read on the topic of ASI:
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Send military (Score:2)
Apparently they have no budget problems, and happily deploy to remote shitholes for millions of dollars per day.
Show a potential for commercial profit (Score:2)
sponsors (Score:2)