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Space Science

NASA Will Have To Wait For Mars 154

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-where-did-we-put-that-lander dept.
mattg writes, "Auntie is covering NASA's timetable for recent explorations of Mars has been called "wildly optimistic". Dr. Carl Pilcher, leader of NASA's planetary exploration program (whose sweater at the time said "Obey gravity: it's the law") has admitted that they do not know if they have the technology to bring rocks back yet. The report into the loss of the Polar Lander is due out at the end of the month. "
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NASA Will Have To Wait For Mars More

NASA Will Have To Wait For Mars

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  • The really neat little tidbit from that story: Eros contains more raw mineral tonnage than has been mined from the earth to this point, and more than ever could be mined from the earth's crust.

    Screw Mars! Let's go get that other rock!

  • I'm hoping the private launch firms can push reduced costs, and make a Mars trip possible, but so far the only one that looks like it has funding is Beal.

    Regarding NASA, I don't know. They've been waiting for the second coming of Apollo for so long they can't conceive of doing business any other way. Thus were the gains of Apollo squandered and the funds going to the shuttle's massive operations budget more or less wasted.


  • That 112 billion dollars in today's money was however spread out over ten years or so. Roughly 11 billion a year, if you want to put it that way.
  • Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" dealt with this issue, though it was a one-way trip to Barnard's star rather than to Mars.
  • >You know, film an entirely bogus Mars Mission in some warehouse in the desert SW and show it on the nightly news and news specials as 'real'.

    Like the 1978 movie Capricorn One [imdb.com]?
  • The US government should just stop wasting money. Throwing good money after bad. Close down NASA and open up the space industry to anyone that wants to take part.

  • Am I the only one who thinks that their method of even planning out these trips is off? It seems to me that the first set of the process is to establish a permanent communication site on Mars. Simply designing a construction a medium grade interplanetary communication satellite and sending 10 or so of them into Mars orbit should be the first step. They can be largely boiler plate designs without any scientific alterations. The planning stage consists just of how to get them into orbit and get communications established. (Too bad the irridium satellites can't just be relocated.) If you are really good you build them with large data storage node capablity so that you can use them to provide good data streaming when the probes generate more data then can be uploaded to earth in the time windows. They also would be able to communicate to one another to provide for probes on the far side of Mars at any time. If we got enough of them there we could even set up a Mars GPS which makes guiding semiatomous robots much easier. Further, they themselves could provide to make a IPPS (interplanetary positioning system) which would make delivering probes into proper orbit a snap.

    With such a system the cost of sending a probe drops incredibly. You don't need to design earth contacting hardware from the surface of Mars. Instead the hardware need be little more powerful than a headset and still have good data rates.

    Instead we send a spattering of probes which we must get full scientific data out which serve communications only as a second purpose. The loss of these communication satellites wouldn't bee a big deal as we can always send other to take its place.

    --Karl

  • How dare you sully the good name of Clarence Carter by quoting him in your obnoxious post? Have you no shame?
  • Another country or private entity will take the ideas that Nasa has and rework them to achieve the this mission to mars. If Nasa wants to stay a leader it needs to regroup and make it work.

    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]
  • You can only expect mistake like the lost of the probes will happen you don't really know what is out there. What would by very interesting if some little tiny country beats the United States to mars. I think in my life time I will see a manned mission to mars. Hopefully I will get to a least go into outer space in my lifetime.

    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]
  • I've been a Lockheed Martin employee, and have a bit of familiarity with the rocket business.

    The idea that we don't have the technology to get to Mars is utter pap. We had the technology in 1970, for Pete's sake!!!

    What we lack is the national will to do it. Fine. I've been saying for years now, that if our government offered a $1.5 billion bounty (I started with $1 bil five years ago) to the first commercial entity that successfully landed humans on Mars and settled them there for, say, one month, would get the money. No enough of an incentive? Ok, how about if we say that the first company to do it gets to run the planet for ten years, no questions asked. That means that ALL revenues, entertainment-related and otherwise, go to this company.

    Sheesh, there's enough investor money running around in the economy now that if we pulled together a company called 'Mars or Bust', and IPO'd it as an entertainment outfit, we'd probably attract $4 billion in capitalization.

    This talk of lacking technology to get to Mars is crap. Here is a whiny NASA-crat who is forced to live in a dwindling NASA budget.

  • I suspect that there would be a certain amount of political opposition to this kind of a "solution." Although, it's not all that different to the kinds of decisions made when exploring distant lands ~300 years ago.
  • mod this down! i tried --
    instead, hit "underrated" --
    not used to mouse wheels

    (clicked "troll" on the menu,
    kept my pointer over it,
    wheeled down -- voila!)

    the true point of this
    is to post a message that
    clears my errant mod
    --
  • I'd love to see them mine that.. Maybe we'd figure out just how fucking useless trading gold around is. Yeah, a gold standard made sense at one point. Now, all that precious metals acomplishes is being an unstable market.

    On the other hand, if there's a lot of titanium, that's a metal with some use.
  • Two words:

    asteroid belt

    the mars-jupiter asteroid belt contains litrally millions of times more resources than planet earth.

    Eventually, we will need a mars presence, even if its only for a mining colony with some kind of docking station in low orbit.

    And anyway, those moons your on about are alot further away than mars.. lets do one thing at a time
  • Mars Direct is amazing. But even more amazing is NASA's inability to grasp a program like this that, to most experts, is posible within a fraction of NASA's budget, most which are lost in programs that will end nowhere... as you post. Very nice post indeed. :)
  • Duh...women are from Venus. Why would they want to go to Mars?

    To get laid, of course.
  • There's an easy solution to this. Send people but don't bring them home. Shielding them during the trip wouldn't be as important, because cancer 20 years later wouldn't be an issue. Damage due to long-term 0 G space travel would be minimized, since you don't have a trip back to Earth.

    I'm sure we could find more than enough volunteers to goto Mars on a one-way trip. I would almost consider it myself.
  • Everyone interested can invest in a private space development company, SpaceDev. SPDV is its stock symbol. It's not quite big enough to be on the NASDAQ, and there's almost no liquidity (like, 0 shares traded most days). But, they're only $2 a pop last I checked. Actually, they may be massively overvalued, since the $2 price gives them a market cap in the ~5 billion range. (Around AMD, as a comparison for all us nerds)

  • no (Score:1)

    by Wah ( 30840 )
    Use that link, tell him what you think, and put the pipe down.

    --
    ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
    ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
  • Just goes to show how much I know!
  • What the hell do you call DARPA?
  • we're just seeing its remnants thrash about cluelessly. when does anyone ever recall NASA saying "we dont have the technical means"...hell..if we dont have them - go ahead and invent them dammit. unfortunately the drive is lost and the budgets going down the tube - anyone else wanna volunteer to replace nasa ?
  • You're right. We do need to educate people as to why the space program is a good thing. You know what I think would be the easiest, quickest way to shoot ourselves in the foot though? Start calling people 'sheeple'. Frankly, nothing is going to make people stop listening to anyone faster than being condescended to. Its not just you, I see the attitude here way to often that people who have other interests other than the posters are 'sheeple' or 'sheep' or 'morons' or 'induhviduals'. And I really think that we're doing nothing more than shooting ourselves in the foot with that attitude.
  • As Sagan used to say, billions and billions.
    Sagan didn't used to say that. Carson spoofing Sagan used to say that.
  • Pretty far off topic, but something that /.ers would probably like to know... Jerry Doyle, who played Garibaldi on Babylon 5, is running for congress as a Republican in California's 24th district. As most geeks already know, when it comes to realistic depictions of space exploration, Babylon 5 made Mission to Mars look like... well, Mission to Mars. NASA folks loved it. Doyle, who has a degree in Aeronautics, is a huge booster of both fictional and real space technology.

    Details about the campaign are sketchy. (www.jerrydoyleforcongress.com [jerrydoyle...ngress.com] is a placeholder right now.) My guess is, he doesn't have a chance. But it's a pretty safe bet that he'd be one of NASA's loudest supporters if he made it.
  • The problem with trying to get that drive back is the total lack of a "THEM" to beat. There's no one out there to make the US look (and feel) bad enough for the whole country to get behind the massive push to achieve. On top of this, I don't think the public is cohesive enough to ever get solidly behind a new space race, or even to really accept any new menace that absolutely must be beaten for "the american way of life" to survive.
  • Greens would probably be afraid that rocket exhaust was damaging the atmosphere...

    Well, they are. The shuttles' boosters do rather large amounts of damage to the ozone, and I'd think (anyone got numbers/data?) that the air quality around Canaveral's probably not well balanced for the area's population.
  • I don't know about B5. Never understood how the pilots survived some of the turns they pull off. How the hell do they pivot 180 degrees then stop perfectly to start firing at the guy chasing them?
  • Well, I don't think they do share the same cg. They always show the pilot as being near the front of the ship so they can do that pan back through the glass of the cockpit until the whole thing is visible. I'm especially sure that the ones that are larger than a single pilot craft contain people far enough from the cg of the ship that someone should at least be yelling about the spin. And if I spun my chair as fast as they spin those ships, I'd have to grab a shelf or something quite hard to stop the spin quickly, and I think I might just lose my balance as my chair and body tried to keep going.
  • I don't think China could work. The Americans had (have?) a belief in the inherant superiority of all things American, with little good reason for it beyond the belief itself. With propaganda running rampant about the "red menace" giving the impression that something as un-American as Communism (not that most people understood what it meant) was capable of being a critical threat to everything American, it had to lead to doubt and uncertainty. Can't have the commies beating us to the moon! After all, we're better than they are!
  • Hmmm. I guess I forgot about my original point about why China's no good...

    "Them" has to be mysterious, barely known beyond "not like us" to really work the same way as communism did. There's too much basic knowledge in America today for basic propaganda campaigns about an unknown enemy to really work. Some mysterious alien menace might do it, but I don't think anything terrestrial will. Even then, the propaganda's going to have to be a lot more sophisticated. I suspect 12 year olds would just point and laugh at the idea of hiding under a desk or newspaper to protect oneself from nuclear destruction...
  • and how will you get to the stars in real time? warp drives or screwing 7 of 9...? so what if the commies had beat the us to the moom? how much did the us spend and what was the cost-benfit? china and india are going to mine the moon and asteroids for what exactly, that could not be mined here on earth far cheaper? russian will re-assemble the soviet union and do what? are you on drugs or just stupid?

    I meant "conquer the stars" as a figure of speech, you stupid dumbass. Jeez, people like you--who flame at the drop of a hat and have nothing intelligent to say--are the reason I abandond USENET. And *this* get's a Score: 1?! Guess I'll have to raise my threshold to 2. . .

  • It would be way too easy to say the U.S. is "in a period of sloth and introspection". Let's face it - when the bottom drops out of the current stock market we're in for a bad time. This country is finished - doomed.

    Well, now, I wouldn't go *that* far. ^_^ Besides, just because we're not interested in space *now* doesn't mean that future generations won't have different ideas on the subject, especially if the private companies or other nations really start making a profit out there. Besides, I've noticed that historically for Americans it's usually a crisis (Slavery, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor) that provides the pin in the bum necessary to get us going.

  • I agree. Can't go to Mars and bring back a few rocks in an entire decade? That is abysmal. It is time to privatize. Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses). Just get government out of the way.

  • Re:war (Score:1)

    by jlb ( 78725 )
    Good summary. I was in a hurry when I posted that and didn't think it all through clearly. But the main point is hopefully the same, that war and conflict was what really pushed us to make that achievement.

    Haven't there been studies that talked about war being the source of most major technological booms and accomplishments? Directly or indirectly.

  • I get so sick of these dollar values used in place of weight or volume. Gee, let's see if when you bring back that much ore, if it's still worth 20 f'n TRILLION dollars now that there's so much, the value has dropped.
  • we're just seeing its remnants thrash about cluelessly. when does anyone ever recall zurk saying anything usefull in his posts. unfortunately the drive is lost and the budgets going down the tube - anyone else wanna volunteer to replace zurk?
    _________________________
  • I remember when I was a kid I went to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in DC and they had a display with a small sliver of a moon rock you could actually touch. What a thrill for me! If only enthusiasm could be built up for the space program again. It seems we could get to Mars in my lifetime (I'm 31) if the desire was there. I bet if China sends a mission to Mars we'd be there in a minute.
  • I for one would like to applaud the priorities set and decisions made by NASA. The scientists at NASA have consistantly demonstrated that their commitment is to science, and not to publicity or electioneering.
    The space program put people on the moon in the 60s. Today, NASA has satellites in orbit which are providing us with fascinating insight into the nature of the universe.
    Sure, if everyone really wanted to, NASA probably could send people to mars in the next few decades... but if they did so, they would have that much less money to spend on real science.
    I for one consider the Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory to be far greater achievements than placing a few people on the moon was, or placing a few people on mars would be.
  • According to this Nasa Document [nasa.gov], the cost ,at the time, amounted to around $25 Billion -- or around $95 Billion in 1990 dollars.

    According to this link [cjr.org], $95 is around $112 in 1998 dollars. Assuming 2% inflation for the last two years, that would put the cost around $116 Billion dollars.

    Point of comparison, the Defense Department budget for 2000 is around $290 Billion.

  • Why the hell is it flamebait just because someone dares to have a right-wing point of view? I didn't realize that Slashdot was so incredibly left-wing that a moderator felt he had to warn the rest of the site when someone posted a right-wing comment.

    Or maybe the moderator was just an idiot.

  • Unfortunately I'm not the person to give you an accurate comparison of the two amounts. I'm pretty sure the Apollo program cost around 1 billion dollars. I'm not sure if that included things like Skylab though, which I'm sure had a big price tag. I have no idea how much it would cost to get to Mars.

    However, I can tell you that even with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the cost to go to Mars is surely much greater. It isn't so much new technology that is required to go to Mars, but the vast amount of resources. Mars is a similar size to the Earth. We've all seen what it takes to escape earth's gravity. Imagine having to transport the equivalent of a Saturn V to Mars.(The space shuttle wouldn't be practicle as it only reaches low orbits.) It isn't that I high level of technology would be required to get it there, it's just that it would take a lot of rocket fuel. That rocket fuel translates into money. That would be the real cost in going to Mars.

    Wigs
    --I just got skylights put in my place. The people who live above me are furious.

  • Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy.

    One problem for NASA is the current demand for it to launch satellites. It's rocket science, which makes it a difficult and expensive mission. Currently NASA's manned vehicle program includes the Space Shuttle. For interplanetary space travel, NASA needs a new vehicle. Unfortunately this just isn't included in the current budgets. The demand for NASA to assist in sattelite launches and other earth bound tasks with the Space Shuttle is big. This costs NASA money, movey that could be spent elsewhere.

    Hopefully some of the other companies that have been mentioned(Cerulean [nvinet.com], Pioneer [rocketplane.com], Kistler [kistleraerospace.com]) will help lift this burden. The other company mentioned, Kelly [kellyspace.com], is one that I think has the greatest chance for success. Their website demonstrates their towing concept. This has many great advantages over traditional launch methods. For one, the craft can carry a payload approximately 7 times greater than one carried in a rocket. The cost to get that same payload up in the air with the 747 isn't that expensive either. Kelly has realistic goals to be flying their first craft in a few years.(There are three crafts, each becoming progressivly larger.) I only glanced at the website, but I believe it fails to mention that this is a proven concept. They successfully modeled a test and then actually had several test flights. A C-141 [af.mil] towed an F-106 [nasa.gov]. I was fortunate enough to see a video of this. It was pretty impressive.

    Wigs
    --Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?

  • "Private industry couldn't fund the rail system in the 19th century, it took tax dollars to do that in the form of land grabbing from farmers and massive infusion of money into the rail monopolies."

    Nonsense. Government funding of railroad construction amounted to 10% of total cost. What's more, those railroads that recieved federal funding were the most likely to go bankrupt. Three continental railroads that were built with government assistance went bankrupt within 20 years. James Jerome Hill built the Great Northern from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound without a single penny of government money and the railroad didnt go belly up.

    Most of the original stretches of roadway in the US were built with private funds, collected by members of car clubs, like the AAA. The problem with privately funded highways is that there is no means of collecting a return on the investment without exacting tolls. Besides, as Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations, there are some projects that are worthy of great nations in encouraging development. The building of roads, airports, public utilities, etc are direct benefits to everyone, and contribute to even more indirect benefits.

    Public expense to support private profits is bad? Do you live in a major city? Ever think how that milk got to you? Ever thought how much you'd be paying for it if it wasnt for the highway system? Have you ever gotten a package from UPS or the USPS? Ever consider how long it would have taken that package to reach you if it wasnt for the highway system or federally subsidized airports? What anti-capitalist flamers like yourself always seem to forget is that companies get their profits from individuals forking over their cash for products they want. Greedy evil companies provide a service, if they dont provide a service that someone is willing to pay for, they arent in business anymore.

    Derek
  • When was the last time you went to a party caucus? Ever volunteer your time for a tax payers rights group? Ever write your Congressmen? Ever made your opinion known by writing an OpEd for the local newspaper? Ever VOTE?

    If you dont do anything, you have no grounds to bitch.

    PS: corporations are run by people. corporations have an interest in not having the government tax them out of existence just like you. Obviously the people on Boards of Directors are a lot smarter than you, because they make their voice heard.

    Love that Freedom of Speech thing.

  • Another thing too.

    Corporations dont vote.

    If you dont like the way your representative is doing things, vote him out. Try the next schmuck politician on for size. Or, run for office!
  • After watching "Mission to Mars" it makes you wonder if its all worth it. I mean there are so many things that can go wrong. I hate to be pessimistic but it will take a few tragedies I'm sure before we get it right. I mean look how many airplane tragedies there are a year and yet we all still fly. I guess we will have to accept some losses when it comes to space travel and exploration otherwise it will probably never get off of the ground.


    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
    www.npsis.com [npsis.com]
  • Opinion : 1. NASA projects often fail, that's to be expected given the difficulties. The real issue is that their political vulnerability and economic dependencies translate the lost missions into further failures of strategic leadership and vision. 2. NASA is simply not set up to be a risk taking/entrepenurial venture, which, is what we, the people, of earth, need. 3. I believe the evidence supports reasonable concern that our species, is at significant risk of extinction, while we remain isolated on an unguided oblate spheroid, trusting to blind chance to let us avoid Earth crossing asteroids. 4. Space has effectively infinite natural resources available for exploitation, with low/zero pollution impact. Take a look at the recent results from NEAR Shoemaker, from Eros. 5. I am not aware of any credible plan or program, from NASA, or anyone else, for the incremental economic buildout and exploitation of space. As a species, we need a business plan. I sincerely believe that the engineers, technologists, scientists, et-al, of Earth have the capability to exploit space. To discover, assess, access, colonize and make use of the abundant material resources. Oh and along the way, learn how to expand humanity into space as necessary and desirable. The game then changes from deciding who gets blamed for the next firework display over mars, to filling out the expense voucher for the next mars shuttle, Spacemiles (tm) ;-). What we clearly don't have, is the required leadership and economic incentives to make that happen. The dinosaurs never saw Chixculub coming, we may end up just as extinct, and a whole lot dumber, because we let a leadership failure defeat our intelligence. Suggestions : 1. NASA apparently can't, or won't, cut it, so lets relieve them of the problem, politically, ethically, legally, as nicely as possible, give em a useful role, make em feel good, but out of the way. Sometime yesterday would be good. 2. It's time to get some serious players get into the game, the best incentive is a clear potential to make obscene quantities of money. Vast uncountable wealth. Whatever the moral implications, it's worked in the past, so it should work again. Space has that incentive, so lets cut the profit factor loose and go get it. Yep there's some serious risk, many good people will probably die trying. Yet, many of us die for a lot less strategic reasons every day. As a species it's not a zero sum game, the upside potential for our race is effectively infinite. Think about that, the upside is unlimited resources, unimaginable technological leaps and survival, any of which are quite literally, priceless. It's not about who gets rich along the way, it's about whether or not humans get to go to the stars. I'm a human, I'm for us, I'm in!. IMHO the stars are the best possible gift, for our children. So, were all geeks, rumour has it we are marginally, smarter than most dinosaurs. How about we start using a few of those smarts to lead a little, obtain the necessary political influence, bend policy, so that there is a credible, incremental buildout, driving economic, exploitation of space. The goal, is the stars. Sound good?
  • Considering NASA keeps wanting to crash things in space I don't know how much I'd want to fund them either. The new idea behind nasa is "make it cheap and hope it works"(maybe I should TM that?). Anyways ... The cost behind a project to send a probe to mars have it walk around pick up rocks re-dock itself then takeoff from mars would be a huge project that would take tons of funding. Not to mention in the 2 years it would take it to get there the technology would already be so much greater there'd be some idiot on TV wondering why they used such old technology.

    Here's where we get the funding. First off we make the mission GPL. Then we take all the command protocols and run them from Linux. We'll use a whole bunch of Alphas and just stack them together and then we'll get RedHat to be a sponsor for it. So now we've got Compaq and RedHat as sponsors. Now let's get AT&T to provide the communications for it. Hmmm then we need to televise it. And who better to televise something that is "out of this world" than Fox networks. Then of course we could have people pay $10K to have their name engraved on the side in extremely small letters. So now we have the whole Linux community behind it. Simpsons fans behind it. Long distance callers behind it. Simple computer users. And rich people with way too much money. And what's best ... NASA. Then of course we'd have to make sure NASA promised not to intentionally crash it so we could see how big of a cloud it would make. (though we all know the scientists had a poll going).

    /. :-)

  • and how will you get to the stars in real time? warp drives or screwing 7 of 9...? so what if the commies had beat the us to the moom? how much did the us spend and what was the cost-benfit? china and india are going to mine the moon and asteroids for what exactly, that could not be mined here on earth far cheaper? russian will re-assemble the soviet union and do what? are you on drugs or just stupid?
  • it seems like there should be something that a resonably motivated and technologically competent group of people could do to push, even if only a little, for further program for mars? i'm thinking something like open source mars mission design. if you take what the Society for Mars is doing with its initial mission specs and open it up to the public. first start with small steps. design hardware and software using something like open source, open design philosophy, you'd have specialists all over the world looking it over, contributing and bug fixing, writing simulators and contributing ideas. here needs to be some money behind this, perhaps from corporate sponsors. and some thing more organized than an internet opensource project. but it doesn't have to be a corporate entity, or a government agency.
  • Sidenote: I love conversations sprinkled with comments like 'moron' and such... Keeps the house warm...

    Anyways, I was referring to public or private undertaking where it wasn't incremental, wasn't assured, and wasn't a random outgrowth of something else. The Hoover Dam and the Interstate system were designed and built for the purposes they are being used for.

    The Internet is something completely different, being the accidental outgrowth of another project. It didn't start out as a way to connect everybody and allow an unprecedented level of expression and communication, or whatever its supposed to be doing today. It doesn't detract from the 'awe and majesty' of the whole thing but its a different way of accomplishing something.

    The Hoover Dam? They wanted a big dam. They built one. It was big and hard and took lots of time and money. They built the dam.

    As somebody else mentioned on this topic, you don't explore and expect no failures. You don't send mechanical things (or humans, I'd bet) any significant distance and expect things to always go right. Triple redundancy on triply redundant parts, backup plans for those, and a jigger factor of about 2-3X... And you get prepared to do it more than once. You are a long walk from a repair... And screwups on the way to Mars are usually gonna be a bit difficult to correct.

    All that being said, I volunteer... I'll take a one way ticket, I'll take that risky ride to Mars. Why? Its something new and exciting, and you need fools for that sort of thing... All the smart ones stayed home... (Having been said all through history, why leave Africa (or where ever they say the migrations started), why leave Europe? Why Leave Earth?..)

    A death of the pioneer spirit... But thats nothing new, its as old as man.

  • I wish we would put *SOMEBODY* on Mars anytime soon... I'm 25 and I'm pretty sure that I can give up on that. I grew up on science fiction (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, among others..) and the concepts and such are already here. Get some good engineers working on it, give 'em a decent budget, and lord knows what miracles they can perform. NASA with its safety (not human life, job/income/political) at any cost mentality and a populace that increasingly doesn't attempt the large scale project (where are our Hoover Dams, interstate systems, etc) has taken a country that put people on the moon and made them barely able to manage LEO decently. International Space Station, what a joke... *sigh*

    "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken

  • Oh! Oh! Me! ME!

    I'll volunteer to replace 'em... Gimme da budget! *chuckle*

    I think the answer is private money. We already have private companies working on good workhorse lifters to orbit. Get the heck out of LEO as a place to work, add a decent space station for a handy orbital construction and operations base, get your hands dirty with some good "no immediate payoff" research... Lets get the ball rolling... Anybody willing to ante up 5% of their aftertax income to fund a startup? We'll add a dotcom and make a mint on the IPO...

    A few Hollywood flicks and a good advertising campaign later, I'd have me a fleet of Mars bound Space Winnebagoes...

    "If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense. Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them - that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or a the thought of Hell. The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache." H.L. Mencken lecture at Columbia University January 4, 1940

  • It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.

    You are absolutely correct. Much of the rank and file of NASA is highly competent, particularly the folks at JPL and others behind the unmanned exploration probes. But the middle and upper management do things for truly bizzare reasons.
    My favorite example: Back before they got bought, Macdonald-Douglas put together a small team who did an absolutely crack job on the DC-X program. It was fast, it was cheap, and it did what it was designed to do and built hardware that worked. So when it came time to select the contactor for the next phase of the program, NASA in its infinite wisdom ignored the proposal from the MacDonald-Douglas team (which would have built on the things they had learned and done already) and selected the X-33/VentureStar program proposed by Lockheed. Why? Because the Lockheed proposal provided the greatest technical challenge and involved developing the most new technology.
    Last time I checked, the X-33 was grossly overweight (including 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose, to balance out the engines, which were too heavy), has had its speed envelope reduced by nearly half, was way behind schedule and over budget (of course), and was having a host of fabrication problems (primarily with their "revolutionary" new tank technology).

    Sigh. It's things like this that have convinced me that NASA is not the place to look for cheap space access, or much of anything else except the occasional really cool spaceprobe.

    As an aside: if your interested in cheap space access, check out the Rotary Rocket Company [rotaryrocket.com] to see how it might of happened (if they hadn't run out of cash). And then check out X-Cor Aerospace [hughes-ec.com], which is all that's left of Rotary Rocket that's actually doing anything.

  • Man, with the *high* quality of the post so far in this article, it must be friday night. Looks like somepeople just can't wait to let loose after work, course they haven't been moderated yet, cause all the moderators are getting drunk. (some things never change). Anyway who cares, I need a beer. (_a beer_? HA), well maybe one or two more.

  • you already CAN see mars rocks. the ones that were blown into space by meteor impacts with mars' surface and later captured by earths' gravity. such as the famous ALH84007.
  • "I think it would be more interesting to land on Jupiter or Saturn anyway..." could you be anymore stupid? you cannot 'land' on jupiter or saturn. they are made of gas! you would just keep falling in untill you were crushed by the pressure and incenerated by the heat. "Really we learned about all there is to learn about mars" heh, yeah and everything thats going to be invented has been invented already, right? and whats with equating homosexuality with undesireable things your topic title 'mars is gay'? grow up, loser.
  • It would be way too easy to say the U.S. is "in a period of sloth and introspection". Let's face it - when the bottom drops out of the current stock market we're in for a bad time. This country is finished - doomed.
  • well, as another libertarian (in thinking; not in party) I *would* say "privatize it" - the same response I'd give to 90% of government. (other than military and judicial functions, there's not much else that the government should be doing, IMO) But I'd happily toss my own money at a Mars rocket. Or a space station. Or a Lunar base. Which, after all, is how I think it should be - I spend my money where I want progress. Btw, my wife and I saw Mission to Mars last night. It was better (more fun) than I expected - she felt the same way. It was like a "more fun" 2001, A Space Odyssey. (less thinking, just enjoy) Recommended. - Al -
  • Not to call you stupid, but just to point it out...
    The RTG's that are used in spacecraft aren't nuclear reactors, those would be much too heavy.
    What they use is the energy released from decaying radioactive elements.

    --
  • Are you talking about the same privately-funded internet I'm thinking of? ok.
    What he's talking about are great government-funded projects to give everyone 'go fever' towards a specific challenging task.

    --
  • One word... Tang (!)

    --

  • So where are the private launch pads? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm still waiting on the so-called "energy of Capitalism" to push into space. Hasn't happened yet and it won't because private industry needs the government and public funds to set things up for them. Private industry couldn't fund the rail system in the 19th century, it took tax dollars to do that in the form of land grabbing from farmers and massive infusion of money into the rail monopolies. Private industry couldn't build the Hoover Dam or the highway system, again it had to come from Uncle Sam and your tax money. And don't think your going to get any return on these investments. Oh no, that's Communism! Remember, it's public expense to support private profits that defines Capitalism!

  • Re:war (Score:2)

    by craw ( 6958 )
    Yes and no, IMHO. The politics of the Cold War space race is well documented. The Soviets were the 1st to put a satellite in Earth orbit. This was a major event that really kicked the US in the butt. What ensued was a lot of rhetoric and some action to improved education in the US. As a side note, this was also the acme of the role of the scientific advisor (and committee) to the President. But more significantly, the ability to place a satellite into orbit == the ability to place nukes world-wide in the view of the politicians. The moon had no relevance in this regard.

    The Soviets also put the 1st man into Earth orbit. This was also a major bummer as far as the US was concerned. How do you top this? Kennedy promised a man on the moon, and NASA was more than willing to comply. Take that back, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about was more than willing to comply. Flashforward to today. International Space Station? Money to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and their subcontractors. Money for science? Here's a dime kid, go buy a candybar.

    The amount of money that was spent to win the Cold War is difficult to comprehend. As Sagan used to say, billions and billions. But to me at least, the Cold War came to an end as the US bankrupted the Soviet Union. I have no idea how historians will view this, but to me the Cold War probably was unique in it being more of an economic war instead of a major blood thirsting conflict. Note: I'm not saying that economic sanctions will win a battle. No, I'm talking about no holds barred, spend, spend, spend.

    Some ppl have said that the proposed SDI (Star Wars missile defense) was the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't necessarily agree with this, but I can't disprove it.

    Back on topic. When space exploration returned to the realm of science, the funding level dropped to a level commensurate closer to other scientific projects. If funding for space exploration increases, then you have to suspect lobbying efforts by the prime contractors will be of some significance.

  • Zero Gs is really harsh on the human body (bone loss, and worse), there are little if any plans to deal with a medical 'situation' in space (how do you perform even basic medicine when blood turns to aerosol?)

    Easily solved, don't do the trip in zero G. Get the upper stage of your booster, tether it to the habitation with a piece of cord, and set it spinning. Artificial gravity.

    and the problem of background radiation is even worse given that shielding is heavy and fuel is scarce.

    It's just not that bad - the maximum probable dose is about 50 rem over a two year period. This is not lethal over the short term, and poses only a slight additional cancer risk in the long term. Robert Zubrin, a vociferous and convincing advocate of Mars exploration, suggests using smokers for the crew, but keep tobacco out of their cargo. Quitting smoking would reduce their cancer risk far more than the radiation dose!

    Check out The Mars Society [marssociety.org] or read Dr. Zubrin's book The Case For Mars for more information.

  • You know, film an entirely bogus Mars Mission in some warehouse in the desert SW and show it on the nightly news and news specials as 'real'. A lot of folks would probably fall for it and be a real ratings boost too - heck, even some controversy over whether it was real or not would just attract more attention.

    I'm wondering if even the recent March MM (that's 2000 in arabic) issue of Scientific American's article on MM (that's Mission to Mars) was also tied into the M&M movie (sponsored by the 'Mars' candy company) in an attempt to drum up taypayer interest, ala Sputnik in '57 CE. Even the first photo says, "FIRST WALK on Mars would be even more dramatic if dust storms were swirling nearby", which to me sounds dangerous, like saying, "FIRST WALK on the moon would be even more dramatic if Neil Armstrong stepped out and got pelted to death in a meteor shower".
  • The same way you spin in your desk chair and stop perfectly to grab that can of Jolt from the shelf behind you. The axis of rotation runs thru your center of gravity. If the ship and the pilot share the same CG, then snappy rotations don't put any stress on the pilot.

    Now translations, of course, are a different story...

  • When I talked to some of the old timers who worked on Apollo, they always mentioned that the budget was much higher in those days. There was enough money to design and build high-quality equipment, and to document and test it thoroughly. There were also many more people. More than enough people to get the job done in a complete and professional manner. It also allowed for specialization. You could be the expert on left-handed widgets, after having worked with them for years. There were many more permanently funded positions that didn't disappear as soon as a task was completed. In later years this would be called "fat" and "overhead", which was true to a certain extent, but cutting the fat also cut quality and reliability. Later budget cuts put most of the people out on the street and slashed the wages of those who remained. Television news stories on aerospace engineers driving cabs served to scare away many bright students. Today's NASA is just a thin shell of civil service contract monitors overseeing an unstable, shrinking and underfunded collection of contractors.
  • I read in the New Yorker, in an article on long-term space travel, that one of the big problems that NASA has with human travel to destinations like Mars is that they don't have any idea how to deal with human physiology and space travel. Zero Gs is really harsh on the human body (bone loss, and worse), there are little if any plans to deal with a medical 'situation' in space (how do you perform even basic medicine when blood turns to aerosol?), and the problem of background radiation is even worse given that shielding is heavy and fuel is scarce.

    The people this article interviewed, including a NASA human physiology expert, said that they were actually less put off by the 'hard' technology obstacles of a mission to Mars (not that they're trivial) than they were the human physiology obstacles.

  • If the current snail's pace is considered reasonable, then I want to see us get "wildly optimistic". Maybe we'll see put a woman on Mars before my grandchildren are dead of old age. I'm 27.
    --
  • How much (in todays terms) did it cost to get to the Moon? How about an estimate of the cost to reach Mars now? Surely with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the costs must be at least equal?

  • Ah, yes, good, old-fashioned Capitalism.

    Isn't there a company that was trying to buy Mir so that it could be used for tourism? This might be the way to go with Mars -- get a bunch of long-sighted VC firms and invest in a large scale tourism plan for Mars. There are many countries on Earth who exist solely on tourism revenues; there is no reason that missions to Mars can't be funded in the same way.

    I'm only half kidding, by the way.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • No, seriously.

    I can't think it is my party, the Libertarians, because NASA is part of the government. (Incidentally, NASA is one of the few things I like about our government, but I expect other Libertarians to say "privatize it!")

    Republicans won't want it because they never want to increase the budget for government programs. (Unless it was turned into part of the military or law enforcement.)

    Democrats probably want to take the money out of NASA and put it into social programs.

    Greens would probably be afraid that rocket exhaust was damaging the atmosphere, and environmentalists would certainly object if a nuclear reactor was used to power the craft.

    Socialists would probably be similar to Democrats in their thinking.

    So, I was wondering if anyone, in any party has said, "Mars before 2035!" or something similar.

    We need a pro-tech lobby in Washington.

  • Actually, I think the moon mission was intended as a display of power (i.e. if we can put a man on the moon and bring him back safely, think how accurate we can be with our warheads.)

    Actually, it was the commies who started the space race with Sputnik. (In Danse Macabre Stephen King pointed out that that was a pretty scary that the Russians had gotten to space first when he was a kid.) So maybe we don't need a war or a cold war, just someone to show NASA up and really rub our faces in it.

    Of course, I'd rather it didn't take national humiliation to get us to Mars...

  • According to one of my professors, when we landed on the moon, we actually had the capability to land on mars. he was part of a project that built and tested nuclear powered rockets that were capable of sending humans to mars. of course this was all stopped because the government thought that the moon was good enough.
  • I'm sure we could find more than enough volunteers to goto Mars on a one-way trip. I would almost consider it myself.

    There are major political problems with that. Remember, so far, no human has yet died beyond Earth's atmosphere. I think Wernher von Braun said it pretty well shortly after the launch of Sputnik II:

    "With existing IRBM hardware we could put a man into orbit in a year. But don't ask me how we'd get him back. If a man would be ready to sacrifice his life by being fired into orbit it would answer some of the questions about space flight, but even if one volunteered we probably couldn't find anybody willing to shoot him up there." (source [lifemag.com])

    --

  • war (Score:2)

    by jlb ( 78725 )
    All we really need is another good war, or even a cold war. The only reason America got to the moon so fast is that America was afraid the commies would get there first and somehow leverage this ability for power.

    I didn't say it made sense.

  • I don't get it. Every self respecting GeekBore (TM) that you ever meet at a party goes on about how we put men on the moon with less technology than what's in a pocket calculator these days, and here we are, saying we can't get rocks back from Mars because we don't have the technology?

    For crying out loud, there are people that admit to using their Palm pilot while they're on the toilet.

    And as an aside - if we did send people to Mars, it could get pretty boring on the trip - better get a couple of those IBM drives [slashdot.org] stacked up with MP3s

    "Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"

  • Robert "Mars Direct" Zubrin gave a colloquium at U. Melbourne (Australia) last Friday. The question was put to him ... he was a bit coy, but he did say that the Mars Society [marssociety.org] has had useful discussions with all the major candidates (or their staffers, anyway). Unfortunately, the most positive response came from John McCain ... oh well.

    You might expect that Gore might say some pro-Mars stuff, given the VP's involvement for the space program (or has that changed now?) as well as his supposedly tech-friendly record. I guess Bush Sr. did this after becoming President, trying to drum up enthusiasm for a manned Mars mission in 1989, but nobody much cared ...

  • The hardware needs to be developed, obviously, but its sorta hard to have it in advance if you aren't working on it.

    You seem to imply that the space program is not going to help problems on Earth... You mean like the fuel cell and solar technology bringing clean water, food, and power to remote areas, communications technology helping us tie the world together, plastics (need I say more?), etc etc etc. The space program has generated so much more in the way of advances in earthbound applications than it ever consumed in funding.

    As for club swinging, speak for yourself... I've moved up to the axe.

    "Nature abhors a moron." - H.L. Mencken

  • If a clear winner of all the different single-stage-to-orbit designs is ever made, it would really help the space program by making it efficient to haul lots of materials to build future in-space launch facilities. This would make the actual long-distance space veichles much more efficient (not having to deal with great stresses taking off from earth). What we need is an efficient, large-capacity workhorse of a SSTO craft.

    --
  • I just saw Dr Robert Zubrin give a talk last night (he's in Australia at the moment) about his Mars Direct proposal. With regards the recent loss of two Mars probes, he mentioned that previously, duplicate probes were always sent, acknowledging the fact that accidents happen and things can often go wrong. Redundancy was previously built into the mission design. Expecting near perfection, every single time, from mechanical devices operating at relatively great distances from earth in harsh environments is ridiculous. The same people who believe that probably never back up their hard drives. On a side note, I recently saw a documentary on the International Space Station (Real cost: ~$100 billion and rising). For the cost of the station, we could have literally flooded the solar system with thousands of redundant probes. But I'd hate to see the world (or at least the US) give up its manned space program.
  • I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.

    If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"

    It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 [nasa.gov] project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace [kistleraerospace.com] and Rotary Rocket [rotaryrocket.com] are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.

    It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X [nasa.gov] rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.

    On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.

    On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.

    And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American [sciam.com] spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct [nw.net] Plan outlined in The Case For Mars [isbn.nu] and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.

  • Reuse the damn designs! (Score:3)

    by davek ( 18465 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @06:00PM (#1194571) Homepage Journal
    I have just one question: why don't they take the designs of the probes that have been lost, and rebuild them? Isn't most of the cost of these million dollar probes the research and testing that goes into their design? Didn't somebody write that stuff down? Both missions were failures because of us humans, the hardware seems to work just fine.

    I say GPL NASA. Can't hurt.

    -davek

  • Re:Government Programs (Score:3)

    by ronfar ( 52216 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @06:05PM (#1194572) Journal
    It's an odd philosophy within government departments I've known about (I've had members of my family working in civil service for many years) that however much money you get in your budget, you'd better spend it all because if you have money left over your budget will be cut next year.

    Of course, this is the exact opposite of a desire to economize, people will try to come up with anything they can think of to use up their budget to use it up. I won't say they waste money, exactly, but let's just say they always have enough office supplies.

    I think, therefore, that the reason why NASA has been economizing is the fact that the axe had already fallen on the budget, the people at NASA knew it, and they wanted to put the best face on it. So, my question is, do you think the desire to do thing on the cheap is coming from within NASA or primarily from forces outside NASA who are putting the screws on it?

    I figure its the latter, because i can't imagine anyone in any government department wanting to have budgets which shrink every year.

  • Re:Sounds good to me (Score:3)

    by samantha ( 68231 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @04:49PM (#1194573) Homepage
    If you actually bother to know any history and to compare current situation to the past you would know just how huge a difference science and technology has made. I am not going to sit around on this rock listening to morons like you tell us why we shouldn't do anything much but wring our hands indefinitely.

    Pollute space with ourselves? Excuse me, what do you thing is out there? Heavenly angelic beings? As far as we know all of it within reach is a barren wasteland without life at all. Exactly what would you be polluting?

    Take your human hating vitriol and your cynicism and crawl deeper in your hole if you wish. The rest of us can find something better to do.

  • It's the Infrastructure, stupid.... (Score:3)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @05:30AM (#1194574) Homepage Journal
    To paraphrase the last couple of US presidential elections, "IT'S THE INFRASTRUCTURE, STUPID!". To whit: while we have far better technology than we did in the Sixtys, we don't even have the infrastructure to put a man on the moon today.

    Consider:

    Day after tomorrow, the 20th of March, every nation on earth receives the following message, clearly origonating from the moon:

    People of earth, greetings! We represent General Products, an intersteller retailer. We'd like the opportunity to do business with you: we have total conversion, FTL, nanotech computers, a complete breakdown on protein folding, an Open Source replacement for DVD, and can probably crack the genetic codes of every living thing on your planet. We just want interstellar distribution rights to some of your Great Works (Shakespere, Tolkein, you know).

    Just to reassure you, we are absolutely forbidden to take anything by force or without your permission. We are also absolutely forbidden to do business with any race that isn't a spacefaring race, so here's the deal: You have to meet us here, on the moon. We're a hundred meters away from your Apollo 12 landing site. Once you've sent a representative of your race (living, not a machine), we can deal.

    We'll be here for one year. After that, we have to leave. We look forward to your business.

    Now, let's suppose that the message is confirmed absolutely genuine. No doubt about it. My point is, that even under these circumstances, with the entire world pulling behind the mission, we couldn't get a man to the moon in one year. We just don't have the infrastructure to build a launch vehicle and landing craft that could get to the moon. I assert that even if we were willing to sacrifice the man we sent - give him a one-way ticket and a pat on the back - we couldn't get him to the lunar surface in one piece and keep him alive long enough to do anything of value. Let alone Mars.

    Now, I know I am preaching to the choir here, but most sheeple think that the Space Program is a huge waste of money, even while they are talking on their cell phone in their car with radial tires and checking their stress level with their pulse-detecting watch. What we in the pro-space community must do is tirelessly try to educate these downers (read Larry Niven's Sprials for the reference) about why spending money on the Space Program is A Good Thing.

  • If we ..... (Score:3)

    by |deity| ( 102693 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @03:43PM (#1194575) Homepage
    ... had the same drive that got us to the moon. We would already hava landed on mars and had a research station on the moon. Sending robots to mars is a great way to learn about the planet, but the only way people are going to get excited about mars missions is when a person is on his/her way to Mars.

    The way our country and society is heading I would volonteer to be the first to go. Let the MPAA try to serve me with a warrent on the moon.
    The interplanatery lag would suck but I wouldn't have much competition for bandwidth.

  • The World Won't Wait For NASA (Score:3)

    by meckardt ( 113120 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @05:03PM (#1194576) Homepage

    Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy. A number of up and coming private companies (including, but not limited to Cerulean [nvinet.com], Pioneer [rocketplane.com], Kistler [kistleraerospace.com], and Kelly [kellyspace.com]) are working on inexpensive launch systems. One or more is certain to manage it in the next few years.

    Once we have this cheap access to space, there are any number of Entrepeneurs waiting to exploit it. Most well known is Bigelow [bigelow-aerospace.com], but there are others.

    Space, and our activities therein are popular with a lot of people. The growth of such private organizations as Permanent [permanent.com], The Mars Society [marssociety.org], and Artemis [asi.org] is strong evidence of this.

    NASA may not be prepared to go fetch some rocks from Mars anytime soon, but they may find others already there when they do.


    Gonzo

  • election year (Score:3)

    by rnd() ( 118781 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @04:06PM (#1194577) Homepage
    As someone who has a friend who
    is voting for the most "pro mars"
    candidate, I think it is important
    to note that Mars is a very big
    issue in the geek community. I would say
    it's probably number two right now,
    with crypto legislation being number
    one.

    This is an election year, folks. Who is
    the most "pro mars", anyway? I can picture
    the dirty campaign ads -- accusing Al Gore
    of inventing the Iridium system.

    Three cheers for earth!

  • NASA does a better job than (Score:3)

    by el_guapo ( 123495 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @05:08PM (#1194578) Homepage
    most people give them credit for - IMNSHO - these guys have, arguably, one of the toughest jobs on the planet - and while they certainly aren't the epitome of efficiency, they pull off some impressive stuff. Think about all the stumbling blocks in their way - CONSTANT media scrutiny, government beurocracy (ok, i totally spelled that wrong), budget constantly getting jacked around by congress. I'm certainly not implying that there's not considerable room for improvement, but given the fact that the deck is TOTALLY stacked against them, I think they do a better job than most people give them credit....

  • I saw this on the Discovery channel. (Score:4)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @03:41PM (#1194579) Homepage Journal
    It was great. The first mission had some problems. They lost contact for a while. But finally the decision was made to go on a second mission in the back-up Mars Transport Vehicle&copy(tm). And thank God they did. Not only did we make contact with an alien race (who had mastered holographic recording techniques), but we rescued the poor chap WHO HAD BEEN LIVING ON THE SURFACE FOR A YEAR IN A CANVAS TENT!!!!!!!

    --
    ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
    ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
  • But future generations may have other ideas. I believe that right now we (Americans) are in a period of sloth and introspection, and do not have anymore what our ancestors had--the drive to explore, to challenge, to test ourselves. We're comfortable, the economy's going good. . .why bother with all that space stuff, y'know? The only reason we went up there the first time was to beat the Soviets to the moon. Once that was accomplished, well. . .

    But the U.S.A. isn't the whole world. Even if we over here remain too fat and lazy to get out there and conquer the stars, other nations may not. China and India are just getting their space programs off the ground, for example, and later they may decide that mining Luna and the asteroids for their minerals or building a solar power satellite to beam solar energy to earth would not be a waste of money at all. Also the Russians could always put themselves back together down the road--never count Ivan out for long! And of course there's Japan, the European Space Agency with their Ariane (sp?) booster, and last but certainly not least, all of the privately run space organizations that an above poster mentioned (Rotary Rocket, XCOR, etc). So I'm not giving up hope just yet--you'd be surprised how fast things can change.

  • There was a time when we did things like this "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

    The only way to acquire the technology to bring rocks back from Mars, is to stop talking about it and actually try to bring rocks back from Mars.

    The year after I was born, we walked on the moon. Now, 31 years later, it's considered an impressive feat of science to grow tomatoes in low Earth orbit.

    It may be about time for us to disband NASA entirely. If we aren't going to give them the money, resources, people, and most important of all, the popular mandate to do the job right, there's no sense in pretending to do the job at all.
  • It gets worse than that. I've worked as a systems engineer for 10 years on NASA contracts, and lately, the "faster, better, cheaper" has exacerbated what I have always considered to be the worst problem in the aerospace industry: underbidding.

    When NASA issues a request for proposal (RFP), the bidders have a good idea of what the proposed cost should be in order to have a competitive proposal.

    In the old days, programs were "cost plus fixed fee" (CPFF). In other words, whatever the cost of the project in the end, the customer (NASA) would pick up the cost, and the contractor would get an additional fee on top of that (gotta make a profit, of course). But there were a lot of abuses of CPFF proposals, so there are few left (mostly DOE nowadays - check out the Savannah River operating contract). I never had the leisure of working on such a program, but I have heard some "war stories" from the older engineers, and some of the abuses were astonishing.

    So nowadays, programs are fixed cost. The original idea was to force the contractor to agree to a fixed payment for the program, and that price would have to include any profit that the contractor hoped to make. That lead to problems not with overbidding, as one might think, but to "no bids" and failed contracts due to cost overruns. So it was tweaked and the current policy is a fixed price contract, plus performance awards based on the programmatic, technical, and financial performance of the contractor. The cost of performing the work is agreed upon, and then NASA establishes another amount as a "carrot" to induce the contractor to perform well. If NASA doesn't like the contract performance, they can withhold part (or all) of the carrot.

    It works pretty well for NASA, so far, so they haven't changed it in the past 6 years or so... but on the contractor end, it leads to two things: underbidding on contracts to insure some profit, and overworking the engineers to maintain performance.

    The underbidding almost always comes in the labor category. In the task estimation process of the proposal, one "chunks" the project into small tasks like "design dunselhickey firmware," "design dunselhickey electronics," "design dunselhickey mechanical and packaging," "integrate and test dunselhickey," where the dunselhickey is an attitude control subsystem, or a sensor instrument, or something. (And I'm ignoring the contractor/subcontractor/vendor hierarchy to keep this somewhat short.) For even the simpler systems like Deep Space 2, these task estimates are huge efforts, and whole forests are sacrificed to them. Anyway, the point is that the contractor management knows ahead of time how much they want to quote for cost, so if the estimators (the engineers) don't come up with a small enough number, the managers (accountants, lawyers, and engineers with 30-year-old training) take a chainsaw to the estimate to trim it down to their target cost. When it comes time to perform the contract, the engineers find that there's not anywhere near enough money budgeted to perform the labor that needs to be done.

    Which leads to the next problem: overworked engineers. The contractor who wins the project faces a dilemma as work begins to fall behind schedule. Contingency was never a part of the budget, so any delays or technical problems, even in the early phases, directly impact the bottom line/delivery date. And in almost every contract, there are several areas where the budgeted money to perform the work is grossly inadequate. In order to avoid cost overruns and keep their performance award, management puts more and more demand on the engineers to take shortcuts and work overtime. Unpaid overtime, of course. Which leads to fatigue and the resulting errors and oversights, as tesserae described. And of course, they're always the engineers' fault. (As I like to say, "parts are derated; engineers are berated.")

    Faster, Better, Cheaper has only made this problem worse. There's less money budgeted for any given doowidget, but more performance demands. The leadership is out of touch with the technical demands of the performance requirements, and promise more for less. The technology only does what we tell it to do; if we take shortcuts in design and testing, we don't know what we're telling it to do. Engineers want to do things right, and know they can do things right the first time, but the available time (e.g. money) has been shrinking steadily.

    But at times like this, when I'm feeling most cynical, I can still take solace in the fact that I'm not working in a competitive commercial environment (like application software) where the situation is even worse. When I see that Win2000 shipped with 64,000 "issues," I know exactly what's going on... the politics and jargon may be a bit different, but it's still management's fault for promising more than they can deliver.

  • MTV's the "Real World-Mission to Mars" (Score:5)

    by yuriwho ( 103805 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @05:33PM (#1194583)
    At this rate an entertainment company will be the first to get a manned mission to Mars. The mission will be paid for by a 24 hour, cable/satelite channel that broadcasts the entire mission complete with space sex (pay per view for that tho) after the audience has developed close personal relationships with each of the characters on the mission (a bunch of photogenic 20 something astronauts) we will all get to watch them crash into Mars..live..in the greatest rating event ever. Given the extreme financial success of this mission, the sequel show will be launched immediately, this one lands and then everyone starves to death in a gripping drama lasting months with a strange plot reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.

    At least we would have landed humans on Mars.

  • I can see it coming (Score:5)

    by tesserae ( 156984 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @05:47PM (#1194584)
    The thing that annoys me the most about the loss of the last two missions -- and the thing that is probably not going to be blamed for the losses, in the end -- is that the hardware was actually pretty much up to the job; it's just the handling of the hardware by the humans involved that cost us those missions, and possibly this whole exploration campaign.

    The Climate Orbiter was lost because two people (one NASA, one from the contractor) were handling the entire trajectory; they were completely overworked (to the point failing to implement the backup planning which was already on the timeline, and which by itself might have saved the mission), with no one to even do basic sanity checks on their work -- and they missed not only the critical units conversion, but also the fact that their trajectory corrections weren't having the desired results. A college kid on a work-study internship, working ten hours a week, could have saved the mission. But it was faster-better- cheaper , so they didn't hire the kid...

    The Polar Lander appears to have been lost over communications failure between two test groups: when the lander legs were dropped, they apparently rebounded and triggered a ground-contact sensor in each leg; this set a bit in the computer, so that it "thought" the vehicle had already touched the ground, and it killed the engine as soon as it took control. The rebound happened regularly during testing, but the group testing the leg deployment didn't look at the bit's value at the end of the test (after all, it wasn't on the ground yet, so it wasn't their job...); and the group testing the final powered descent didn't bother to look at the contents of the register before they started the test -- they just reset the bit, so they'd have a clean test. All it required was some warm body to look at the test sequence as a whole, but no one had the time. Again, that single college kid might have saved the mission... but NASA was too cheap.

    What concerns me is this: they're going to spend their time and money worrying over the hardware issues:

    ...Dr Pilcher said, that in the light of recent events, the timetable was wildly optimistic: "The jury is out on whether we have the technological capability."

    rather than pay attention to managing what they've already developed. It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.

    It just really pisses me off! Pathfinder worked beautifully (despite a scary airbag system, which was what I figured would fail), and probably did so because of the long hours and very hard work everyone did; I know I did my share of 14-18 hour days on the little piece of it I had. It was so successful that NASA said, "Wow! That was really cheap! Let's see how much more we can cut out of the budget..."

    So here we are: decent, low-cost hardware, and crappy, low-budget management. But guess which one is going to get the tarbrush?

    ---

  • The problem with mars is that theres no obvious way to make money.

    I think we should first mine Eros (that's a near earth asteroid.) Estimates indicate that it has 20 TRILLION dollars [bbc.co.uk] of ore on it- its 3% metal! It has everything, gold, plutonium, platinum...

    There's nothing wrong with money. Money makes the satellites go around, and the sort of capabilities that you need to mine Eros will help get to mars- and probably pay for it.

    And besides we need need to be able to stop the next dinosaur killer asteroid [nasa.gov]... living on Mars won't help much with that. Chucking around lumps of asteroid will.

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