Back To the Moon — In Four Years 292
braindrainbahrain writes "Gene Grush, a former division chief at NASA Johnson, has written a series of articles on how the U.S. can return to the Moon in four years. He says not only can we land there, but we can actually build a base on the Moon as well. How is this feasible? A public/private partnership between NASA and a private space company. Quoting: 'The biggest obstacle is the lack of a rocket, called a super heavy launch vehicle, to lift it off the planet. NASA is working on one, called the Space Launch System, but the agency is constrained by its budget and the likelihood of it flying in that time frame is slim. But there’s an interim solution: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which will have its maiden flight this year and can supposedly launch up to 53 metric tons into orbit.'
'[I]f NASA makes lowering launch costs its highest priority, escaping the bonds that hold us to Earth will be financially feasible. We don’t do this by controlling the design so much as the frequency -- we are the customer, after all.' 'The development of a lunar base could be a catalyst for lowering our launch cost to space and accelerating the development of automation and robotics. ... If America doesn’t step up to the plate, China’s ambitions for the moon may establish it as the “go-to” nation for space exploration. Many nations of the world privately say they want the moon to be the next step in space exploration -- but they can’t get there on their own. They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead.'"
'[I]f NASA makes lowering launch costs its highest priority, escaping the bonds that hold us to Earth will be financially feasible. We don’t do this by controlling the design so much as the frequency -- we are the customer, after all.' 'The development of a lunar base could be a catalyst for lowering our launch cost to space and accelerating the development of automation and robotics. ... If America doesn’t step up to the plate, China’s ambitions for the moon may establish it as the “go-to” nation for space exploration. Many nations of the world privately say they want the moon to be the next step in space exploration -- but they can’t get there on their own. They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead.'"
NASA needs SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't need NASA. (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't claim that NASA isn't serving as a conduit between the dollar printing engine and SpaceX and providing some land facilities, but aside from that, NASA hasn't been able to get back to the moon in 40 years. Assuming there's a good reason to do so (H3 is good enough for me, even if it's a bit soon) SpaceX can conceivably raise the funds on their own and find a jurisdiction friendly to their launch requirements. Even if NASA weren't interested, SpaceX would still get to the moon in relatively short order - even if only as a testbed for Mars landings.
Re:NASA needs SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't need NASA. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm assuming you meant He3, but it is worthless without a working fusion reactor, of which we have none. The only value of a lunar base would be as an intermediate port for assembling large ships for longer journeys. Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
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Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
You mean on the far site.
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Would it not work better in permanently dark craters at the poles?
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Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
You mean on the far site.
Or perhaps he means in a crater near one of the poles, like Shackleton crater [wikipedia.org]. These are known as "craters of eternal darkness," by the way, which obviously sounds way cooler than "the dark side of the Moon."
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Don't forget fuel depot - I believe there are at least a handful of scientifically vetted plans for mining and refining chemical fuel on the Moon, which could then be delivered to Earth or Lunar orbit for a fraction of the cost of fuel lifted from the Earth' surface, enabling far more sophisticated orbital space programs, even if we were never to go beyond Earth's local space.
And for longer-range flights there's the fact that the vast mass of the material leaving Earth's orbit would be fuel, so reducing the
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Assuming there's a good reason to do
A moon base means learning how to survive without a magnetosphere.
You are now aware that we are over 500000 years OVERDUE for our magnetosphere to falter, disappear, and be rebuilt in the opposing polarity. Saving the fucking world should be enough reason for any sentient race to seek self sustaining off-world colonization. In fact, if ending the assured threat of extinction by making sure all your eggs aren't in one basket isn't your #1 priority as a species, then are you really sentient, or just a bunc
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Trying to get governments to fund a measure that is that kind of VERY long-term is difficult when so many are facing much more immediate problems. It's sort of like the heat-death of the universe. Sure, we know it's coming, but my kids need to eat TODAY.
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A moon base means learning how to survive without a magnetosphere.
Except that we already know how to do that: use shielding.
What we don't know how to do is deal with the social and economic consequences. But a moon base would provide no useful information for that.
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magnetosphere to falter, disappear, and be rebuilt in the opposing polarity
It will not disappear - it will become more complex and less effective at blocking solar radiation. But that shouldn't matter to those of us on the ground, since we have the atmosphere to protect us. The folks in the space station might have a problem, however.
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Anyone who doesn't realize we don't have the tech to build a self sustaining off-world colony... is an idiot. We can't even build a closed loop ECLSS that will keep a handful of people in O2 indefinitely without outside support - let alone all the other infrastructure of an industrial society. We barely have a handle on the known unknowns. And given the example of terrestrial colonies, it's not at all clear it's even possible to build a fully self supporting colony. (And for a lunar colony, unlike terre
Re:NASA needs SpaceX. SpaceX doesn't need NASA. (Score:4, Insightful)
He3 is fuel for reactors we don't even know how to build yet. The moon is a very useful place to have a base scientifically (Great for astronomy in all bands) but commercially, not much use. There's no money in it. The ore isn't good enough to pay for the cost of getting it, communications and earth science are better done in more-affordable earth orbit, it's too far to transmit power. It could serve as a good waypoint for longer journeys, manufacturing fuel in the shallow gravity well, but there's no commercial possibility further out either. Lofty dreams of colonising space don't pay the bills.
We'll probably still be saying that when the meteor hits.
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NASA hasn't been able to get back to the moon in 40 years
It's not like NASA has been trying to get back to the moon and has been failing. NASA hasn't been back to the moon in 40 years due to political reasons, not technical ones.
Lets divert some military funds (Score:5, Insightful)
You know just 1% of our military budget diverted to NASA could do amazing things.. imagine if we diverted half of that budget!
Re:Lets divert some military funds (Score:4, Insightful)
But honestly, what do you think would happen if the US military were suddenly defunded? Do you think the other countries would be like - good for them! We don't need militaries any more any how and certainly not a single one of us big countries with our current militaries would ever dream of using our forces again the US, even as defenseless as they are right now with all their resources and food and two coastlines and pop music...
All snarkiness aside, I agree with your sentiment and wish we had interplanetary spacecraft and bases on more than one moon
And I almost actually believe that even if the US military were to shrink hugely that we would not be attacked, because I don't think the average citizen in a non-us western country would want to attack/invade another civilized country. No, not the people, but the governments of those countries (governments are things which function almost like independent living entities themselves seemingly making their own decisions) are what there is to be concerned about.
Yes, civilized countries maintaining huge military powers is just the way it is right now. In the future when countries don't have militaries anymore I'm sure we will look back on our time the same way we look at the american old west: we will understand that the environment of the time required that everyone carry a pistol, and that the harshness of the climate (ecological, financial and social) resulted in far more altercations than would seem reasonable - but they will understand.
And they will probably make a ton of movies about our time too.
And they will probably watch them on their fancy-dancy moon bases.
whatever. good for them.
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Most people refuse to believe this because their evil is just on a smaller scale. There are actually countries that aren't greedy and don't think the only way to survive is to grab as much as possible.
Re:Lets divert some military funds (Score:5, Insightful)
The US military budget is the same as the next 10 biggest national military budgets put together. Yes, that includes China- and 9 more. Put together. And that's forgetting the fact that the US military isn't just the military of the US- it includes all of the NATO forces (which is fully 5 of the top 10 spenders, and 23 other non-top-10 members), as well as functionally close allies like Japan and South Korea (numbers 5 and 12 in the "top spending" rankings).
The US would be in no great danger if it lopped 5% off of it's military budget. You could cut the budget in half and it would still be larger than numbers 2 and 3 (China and Russia) put together. Again, not even counting NATO.
To put figures on it- the Apollo programme was estimated to have costed $109 billion in 2010 dollar (accounting for inflation). That's for the full 15 year or so programme. The US was estimated to have spent $682 billion in 2013 on the military. So to pay for the entire Apollo programme all over again, you would only need to divert roughly 1.2% of the annual military budget each year.
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Are these unrelated? If you believe so then I've got a unicorn to sell you.
The military budget is overwhelmingly funneled into private coffers, especially during wartime. So yes, yes they are unrelated. Stop handing the money to rich white corrupt fucks in exchange for warmachines and you can spend it on something positive.
Re:Lets divert some military funds (Score:4, Interesting)
The US military budget is huge. Plus they can't be attacked, for they have nuclear weapons. If China invades and come close to looking like they might win, no more major Chinese cities.
A huge slash in military spending won't threaten the US directly. It will lessen their force projection abilities - their power to invade somewhere like Afganistan and Iraq. The threat of the US doing that is enough to keep some countries in line - it's the reason Israel hasn't been invaded, and why North Korea hasn't done more than sabre-rattling against the south. Consider it the 'Pax Americana' - the various oppressive dictators of the world know they are free to oppress their own people, but start invading their neighbors and there will be an American bomb* coming through the palace roof. Except for Russia, for obvious reasons.
*With 'Made in China' written on it.
Re:Lets divert some military funds (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need to slash the military budget to fund NASA. What you need to do is give NASA a budget of the amount they currently have, and let NASA choose how to allocate it. Let them pick the research, technology and contractors, and just give them a general mandate of scientific exploration of the solar system, and maybe a secondary one of "advance manned space flight".
Currently they have the ridiculous situation where congressmen pick the projects, and somehow wind up picking the technologies (solid fuel boosters are *clearly* the best choice, because they're made in my district you see!).
Re:Lets divert some military funds (Score:5, Insightful)
But honestly, what do you think would happen if the US military were suddenly defunded?
A lot of bullshit pork contracts would have their fat trimmed, we'd murder less people for profit, or both.
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the US is like one of those muslebound body builders, with plenty of muscle but almost no fat
hahAHahAHAHAHaHAHa
and also
BAhaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Etc.
I can see why you didn't log in.
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Funding a new moon shot and colony would make a new economic boom. The last Space Age gave us a lot of useful items. Another moon race, this time with tech from this decade instead of 1960s technology may bring about a lot of useful side projects.
At the minimum, it would bring a renaissance to both embedded programming and computer development in general (mainly because there is no room for error, and shipping an "early alpha" as release code just won't cut it.) It might even result in software developme
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You know just 1% of our military budget diverted to NASA could do amazing things.. imagine if we diverted half of that budget!
To put that in perspective, you're talking about diverting about $5 billion from military spending, which would increase NASA's budget by about a quarter. If they put it all toward space stuff, it's an even larger increase. Check out the NASA 2015 budget request summary [nasa.gov]. No, seriously, check it out, it's actually a really interesting document with pictures, details, and progress of all of their programs.
Whenever people talk about cutting or diverting budgets, it usually means shaking up and losing jobs,
Yeah, too bad there's no real reason to do so.... (Score:2, Interesting)
The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
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I would say that it's entirely likely that the amount of water you could get from a single rocket trip to the moon, would be less than that which yo
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I said "in an asymptotic sense". If you're not familiar with asymptotic analysis, then the response you were looking for was "*whoosh*". Nobody's talking about a single rocket trip to the moon.
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Or are you so used to setting up strawmen and burning them that you got carried away?
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Step1) Launch ship into space
Step2) Refuel from the Moon
Step3) To infinity and beyond!
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Most current space ships have to lift the fuel out of the earth's gravity well, which means they have practically none left to go anywhere at speed. instead they drift along without any engine providing thrust.
So yes there ARE practical reasons to go to the moon.
P.S. Your argument itself is flawed. People said the same thing about the Louisiana purch
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Helium 3 *might* be useful if fusion research goes the way that many people expect it to. But considering that a lot of those same people expected us to have a useful fusion reactor by 1990, I don't put a ton of stock into their opinions.
You might have missed it in the newspapers, but people went to the moon repeatedly in the late 60s and early 70s. They brought back a ton of rocks for analysis. That analysis showed that the moon contained a bunch of worthless rocks that were very similar to the worthles
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The moon consists of a large amount of helium 3
Well... relatively. It would still take processing hundreds of tons of lunar rock to get useful amounts of He3, which in turn means hundreds of tons of equipment, fuel, etc, especially since you're going to want lots and lots of the stuff, not just a sample.
a wonderful fuel source that can easily be used to go pretty much everywhere else in the solar system.
Easily? You know we do have He3 here on Earth right and we still aren't at the point of firing up a fusion reactor with it. Granted, if there were a large and steady supply it would certainly lead to more research into He3 reactors (right now He3 rea
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Unless I'm much mistaken, helium-3 is useful only for nuclear fusion. As controllable cold fusion is *still* "40 years away", and as hot fusion (aka nuclear warheads) are still banned in space under international law (and of unproven use as a propulsion method anyway), then there's still no reason to go to the moon (yet).
IF we ever get cold fusion working, and IF the method of cold fusion we get working could usefully use helium-3, and IF mining the stuff from the moon is cheaper than making use of earth-bo
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Agree. The moon's dust problem alone makes it problematic. I'd argue for L4 or L5 before the moon. There's still some dust at L4 & L5, but the sheer amount of it is much lower, and the gravity well to get there (and leave again) is much lower. It's not as inpsiring to say "we're on L4!", but it's also a first-person-gets-it kinda situation...you can have multiple moon bases, but really only one at L4 or L5.
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I agree with you on the most part as long as we are thinking of things in the sense of economic/investment value.
Think of anything really and ask yourself whether it makes more sense to build/do such in space or down in another gravity well.
But for raw science, I would hope that we start deploying (very) large telescopes on the far side of the moon.
Re:Yeah, too bad there's no real reason to do so.. (Score:4)
H
And lastly, give this generation something to shoot for. Something other than the newest Angry Birds or social media app. Something to shoot for, to make history, to inspire a new generation like JFK's speech on going to the moon. It will happen. The question is, will they speak Chinese or American?
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... We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
We have limited resources to throw at space because we have limited resources down here - but I know a place with ~limitless resources and it's called space. True, it's full of mostly nothing, but where there is something there tends to be a whooooooole lot of something.
What's on the moon anyhow? Rocks? Are you sure that's all? We can't really be sure unless we look.
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The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant.
Colonies are the reason. We need to get some of our eggs out of this Earth-shaped basket. Having a colony in Earth orbit is the easiest place to start, and the Moon is the easiest place in Earth orbit. It has gravity, so there's no need to tether everything like there is on ISS, and it has ground, which is a good source of building materials and momentum. Digging out a decently-sized lunar colony (robotically, or course) would be far easier than crafting the same size colony in free space.
Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
These are all shor
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This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
Did you brush your teeth with toothpaste? How about have some clean sanitized water from the tap or to bathe in? Look, I can run down a list of hundreds of other NASA creations that benefit all of the world in your every day lives, but I don't have the time. Google exists. Stop being a fucking idiot.
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The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
It's relatively close, placing a colony underground is cheap and easy radiation protection, the presence of gravity will reduce the amount of required exercise (and avoid the other issues with zero-g environments), it would be inspiring in ways that robotic explorers are not, and it will provide us with experience extracting resources from and growing food on other planets, which is critical for humans to become a space-faring species. And this is something we can do with today's technology. Sure, at some
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Uh, the moon has significant quantities of iron, water, and radioactive isotopes. All in a significantly smaller gravity well than the earth.
Those are the raw materials for creating a sustainable environment outside of the earth. A fission based robotic/industrial base on the moon would be the ideal location to build the structural elements and fuel for future large scale space projects (space stations, interplanetary expeditions/etc).
Then you only have to boost fairly lightweight items out of the earths gr
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So, I'm sure that you'll have no problem coming up with a single concrete example where it's cheaper and easier to do this on, or from the moon, rather than Earth....
One. Just one real example.
Re:Yeah, too bad there's no real reason to do so.. (Score:4, Funny)
This time we will send an African. And we shall call it "Black to the Moon".
For the sake of humanity... (Score:2)
That's great and all... (Score:3)
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Your environment shapes your evolution. Humans have the ability to live in more environments than any other complex lifeform - and some environments that even the simple lifeforms can't live in (virtual worlds for example). If you live subterranean, you become subterranean.
Maybe that's ok: whatever works is another of evolution's favorite sayings. After all, subterranean life has some real advantages: the naked mole rat doesn't get cancer and lives for a very
Launch costs are expensive for a reason (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the fuel that's expensive, it's the thing you put it in. And that rocket has to function perfectly, 100% of the time, across a giant temperature, pressure and acceleration gradient. And it has to be "man-rated," in other words, made survivable in case of a failed launch and prepared for atmospheric re-entry, which are some of the most extreme conditions known to mankind. Most of the costs that are being complained about are due to the absolutely necessary safety culture built into the manufacturing of these vehicles, stacked on top of amortized R&D (hint: SpaceX didn't need to do nearly as much R&D as they did to get the Saturn V off the ground).
Re:Launch costs are expensive for a reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Potentially China has a huge advantage: A looser idea of 'man rated.'
I can barely make ends meet (Score:2)
I'm working my ass off just to support my family. I already can't afford to save up for my kids' college, and our medical bills are extensive.
Ask my how much I want to be taxed to send someone to the moon right now.
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And yet you're fine spending a hundred times more on defense budget?
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1) A trip to the moon costs about $150 million dollars. (http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/45399-how-much-would-it-cost-to-go-to-the-moon-and-live-there-as-a-civilian/)
2) There are over 300 million people in the US today.
Conclusions: Either
a) You are woefully uniformed economically which probably explains why you can't afford to save for your kids college.
b) You realize a mission to the moon would cost you about 50cents but are so cheap you won't spend it.
or most likely c) You are the kind of
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Perhaps $150M isn't out of reach?
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And just to provide even more perspective: A trip to the moon costs $150 million. The US military budget for 2014 is $526.6 billion. So a moon trip is 0.02% of the military's budget. Or, if we divide the military's budget into 365*24 chunks to get an hourly budget, the moon trip would cost a mere 2.5 hours of the military's budget. Even if we doubled this an used 5 hours of military budget-time it would be a bargain.
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A trip to the moon costs about $150 million dollars
Considering that a typical space shuttle launch to LEO ran about $600-$700 million, I would *SERIOUSLY* question those figures.
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Also, advocating for single-payer healthcare might solve your medical bills problem.
Perhaps an expansion of social welfare programs might alleviate the burden of supporting your family as well.
Somehow, I don't think these are the answers you wanted to hear.
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So why did you have kids you can't afford and why is that our problem?
So it's only valid to have kids so long as we can afford an unnecessary moonshot?
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I'm in a similar boat to you but I still support spending money on the space program over a lot of the other garbage on which our government spends money.
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I'm in the same situation and yet I'd love to have more of my tax dollars put to use in getting people to the Moon (and all the scientific and engineering accomplishments that doing this would entail) and less of my tax dollars put to use in buying new bombers, missiles, and the like. Even if the first Moon trip was 90% PR and 10% science (having the astronauts "live tweeting" from their suits somehow, live HD feeds streaming in online, etc), it would be a better use than Yet-Another-Device-To-Kill-Lots-Of
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Ask my how much I want to be taxed to send someone to the moon right now.
Its really more about priorities. The USA has effectively prioritized all forms of police state activities above basic infrastructure, science and other investments in the country. Rather our local governments are going broke maintaining police force/population ratios which have no bearing on crime rates, and our federal government hasn't seen a "homeland security" project they didn't have to buy into. Be that massive aircraft carriers
Savvy (Score:5, Insightful)
"They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead."
That leaves us (USA) out, sadly. Unless it can pull in advertising revenue, it ain't happening. I hope China does well with their moon exploration.
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So putting an SUV sized rover on Mars does not require technical savvy or resourcefulness?
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Well, "Lead" and "technically savvy" doesn't mean "doing the actual building." We're quite good giving money to china for building stuff. That SORTA fits the bill.
Yeah, how'd that Chinese moon rover work out for them, huh?
How many of our missions blew up on the launch pad or burned up in the atmosphere due to a conversion error or had mirrors ground to the wrong focal length? With every step you should learn something, even if its what not to do. To paraphrase Q: if your that afraid of risk you should go crawl under your bed and hide.
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Unless it can pull in advertising revenue, it ain't happening.
It could definitely pull in advertising revenue. Just send a black guy, and use the slogan "BLACK to the Moon!".
If only NASA stayed focused (Score:2)
Maybe, if the National Aeronautics and Space Administration focused on the actual Aeronautics and Space, without venturing into things like Muslim outreach [realclearpolitics.com] (to, and I quote: "help them feel good about their historic contribution to science") and research of industrial civilizations [theguardian.com] (collapse inevitable), they could scrape a few more bucks and deliver the rocket before Russia (or China) do...
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Maybe, if the National Aeronautics and Space Administration focused on the actual Aeronautics and Space, without venturing into things like Muslim outreach [realclearpolitics.com] (to, and I quote: "help them feel good about their historic contribution to science") and research of industrial civilizations [theguardian.com] (collapse inevitable), they could scrape a few more bucks and deliver the rocket before Russia (or China) do...
You seriously think those things even begin to dent the budget of NASA? Your rant is more about criticizing the damn liberals and their GUBMINT than it is about any serious problem with NASA. If you really want to see NASA accomplish things, get congress the hell out of their business and stop letting every new administration pull new mandates out of their asses. Or, push more support for the COTS programs, that produce far better results at far less cost, thanks to free market economics which work so well
Loses credibility with this statement (Score:3)
"three- or four-day notice of a missile strike off the moon"
Sorry but I really doubt that the moon is a useful military platform. As he mentions, you would get a three or four day notice of an attack; on the other hand an ICBM launched from a nuclear sub on a depressed trajectory has a flight time measured in MINUTES. The cost (and difficulty, and danger) of lugging a nuclear tipped missile (capable of crossing cislunar space) all the way to the moon (and maintaining it and protecting it against solar flares, cosmic rays, temperature extremes, and meteorites) would be enormous. His own estimates contend it would cost $300M just to put 8 tons on the lunar surface. Presumably the missiles wouldn't just lie around on the surface but would have to be dug in (excavation equipment, power requirements). And don't even solid fueled ICBMs need regular topping up of some critical elements? (batteries need to be replaced, tritium in nuclear triggers decays). So a supply chain stretching to EARTH must be maintained or the value of this deterrent (there's no way it could be used for a first strike, even today we've imaged the entire lunar surface to a meter resolution) goes away.
Unless he's proposing that the Chinese build an entire lunar colony with the industrial capacity to build robust launch systems, this is wildly impractical. On the other hand if the Chinese can manage to put a serious industrial infrastructure (creating solid fuels from lunar dust? mining uranium ore?) on the moon in a few decades then the U.S. will have a lot more to worry about than getting nuked by china. (Nuclear Bombs are the only practical weapon for something costing this much, "rods from god" are great when compared to chemical explosives but with E=MC2 a nuclear warhead has millions of times more energy per kg).
It would be great to see NASA use Space X's Falcon heavy instead of their own heavy lift launcher which seems like a huge waste of taxpayer money (and that's if it even gets built). Unfortunately, after reading his outlandish (jingoistic?) fears about China, I have to question the rest of his reasoning. No wonder why Fox News is publishing this.
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Sorry but I really doubt that the moon is a useful military platform. As he mentions, you would get a three or four day notice of an attack; on the other hand an ICBM launched from a nuclear sub on a depressed trajectory has a flight time measured in MINUTES. The cost (and difficulty, and danger) of lugging a nuclear tipped missile (capable of crossing cislunar space) all the way to the moon (and maintaining it and protecting it against solar flares, cosmic rays, temperature extremes, and meteorites) would be enormous.
Turn in your nerd card, as you obviously don't understand that Sherlock can easily launch moon boulders into ballistic trajectories whose CEP is sufficiently small to wreak havoc on Earth cities.
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Turn in your nerd card, as you obviously don't understand that Sherlock can easily launch moon boulders into ballistic trajectories whose CEP is sufficiently small to wreak havoc on Earth cities.
Mycroft, not Sherlock. Accompanied by a demand for forfeiting a nerd card, that was particularly sad.
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Shit, I just lost my comments I was typing up so I'll just summarize what I was writing. If you do a little research (KE=1/2mv2, escape velocity = 25,000mph) you'll see that the energy dropped by a boulder from the moon still doesn't compare to that of an equivalent mass of nuclear weapons by about 1-2 orders of magnitude (I looked up the Trident missile warheads as a reference). (Also hardened warheads are much better at getting through the atmosphere intact than rocks: see Chelyabinsk which was a 50 ton
Oink, Oink (Score:2)
We already went back to moon last year!!!! (Score:2)
Crush works for SpaceX (Score:2)
NASA lowering launch costs? (Score:2)
I'm normally one to scoff at privatization of things like space exploration, but frankly finding the best ways to lower costs is precisely the kind of thing the private sector does best. Let 30 little companies work on the problem. There's plenty of a market in satellite launches to finance this. The ones with ideas that don't pan out will go belly-up, and the one or two that hit on good solutions will survive. There's no possible way a single organization (eg: NASA) can do that job properly.
NASA needs to
Where are the conspiracy types? (Score:2)
I thought this discussion would be full of people denying we ever went to the moon. I guess my brother doesn't read /.
New competition announced today (Score:3)
Back to the Moon. (Score:3)
Back to the Moon in 4 years.
Back to the Moon and back, 17 years.
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Not at all. They're the champions of Democrats-are-wrong, and since a Democrat administration isn't spending money on NASA, that must be wrong.
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Nice try. In the event that Obama were to adopt far right-wing policies, they would just go even *farther* to the right. We've already seen it on national security. Obama adopts the far-right position on national security, and Fox responds that he hasn't gone far enough.
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The fallacy is in assuming [conservative group] doesn't like liberal ideas because of Obama. Or that [conservative group] doesn't like Obama because of liberal ideas.
In reality, the #1 reason [conservative group] doesn't like liberal ideas or Obama is because they're on the other team. Likewise, [liberal group] doesn't like conservative ideas or G. W. Bush for the same reason.
And probably the real truth is that conservative and liberal politicians like each other just fine, they just want to be on opposit
kiss of the black orchid (Score:2)
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Re:Brought to you by Fox News (Score:4)
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Even if it's as you portray, that's preferable to say, CNN, which has points of view it *never* airs because it's against their political agenda.
Proof please.
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So...on those treasured occasions when Fox presents both sides of an issue, that's Bad? This must be coming from the same set of squirrel-reasoning critics who are responsible for the recent amazing reversal of leftist support for company commuter buses.
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Aren't they usually the champion of smaller government
No, they're the champions of Republicans who have little interest in 'smaller government.'
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Re:China being the lead in space... (Score:4, Funny)
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The only thing high orbit gets you for a kinetic energy weapon is acceleration in a vacuum ... you still need a huge rocket behind that metal bar with more energy in it's fuel than most nuclear warheads.
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They'd have a bit of a challenge though in maintaining control of the moon base though - either it's automated, in which case there's maintenance issues, or it's a self-sustaining Chinese colony physically cut off from the mainland, whose loyalty might be difficult to maintain over generations.
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