Boeing CEO Vows To Beat Elon Musk To Mars (bloomberg.com) 254
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg sketched out a Jetsons-like future at a conference Tuesday, envisioning a commercial space-travel market with dozens of destinations orbiting the Earth and hypersonic aircraft shuttling travelers between continents in two hours or less. And Boeing intends to be a key player in the initial push to send humans to Mars, maybe even beating Musk to his long-time goal. "I'm convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket," Muilenburg said at the Chicago event on innovation, which was sponsored by the Atlantic magazine. Like Musk's SpaceX, Boeing is focused on building out the commercial space sector near earth as spaceflight becomes more routine, while developing technology to venture far beyond the moon. The Chicago-based aerospace giant is working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop a heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System for deep space exploration. Boeing and SpaceX are also the first commercial companies NASA selected to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing built the first stage for the Saturn V, the most powerful U.S. rocket ever built, which took men to the moon. Nowadays, Muilenburg sees space tourism closer to home "blossoming over the next couple of decades into a viable commercial market." The International Space Station could be joined in low-earth orbit by dozens of hotels and companies pursuing micro-gravity manufacturing and research, he said. Muilenburg said Boeing will make spacecraft for the new era of tourists. He also sees potential for hypersonic aircraft, traveling at upwards of three times the speed of sound.
Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:3)
Having a plan to survive interruptions in logistical support is literally a matter of life and death -- not just for interplanetary settlers, but even for ones just crossing an ocean [wikipedia.org]. Rushing things when the support services are not yet developed is not exactly a safe plan. Bold, certainly, but quite possibly bordering on suicidal.
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Re:Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, this represent a major seismic shift in corporate ideology, a humanity saving shift. That shift is the change from a war industrial complex to a space industrial complex. Instead of turning in on ourselves in a egoistic orgy of self destruction through war for profit, that energy is finally starting to shift out into space. Instead of glorifying mass murder and the most brutal engines of destruction, that energy will be focused on better space craft, a full fledged Lunar City, colonies in space and even terra forming mars and that is just the start with hints already coming out about how to get past the FTL barrier. So a change that should be celebrated in every home, a shift from end of the species war to extinction to becoming a galactic species.
Likely many are just way to shallow, self centred and narcissistic to appreciate things which benefit humanity as a whole, they quite simply can not see it because it is never reflected in the mirrors they stare at every day of their lives.
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So a change that should be celebrated in every home, a shift from end of the species war to extinction to becoming a galactic species.
Great - now all we have to do is spend 2% of GDP on it.
Re: Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:2)
It's a lot easier to build a better computer than to send people into space with a far better ROI. The risks inherent in space travel put off most investors.
Re:Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:4, Informative)
Except that not only are costs trends in the space industry not comparable to computers and smartphones... they don't even track with the general economy. NASA budgets based on the NNSI, the Nasa New Start Index. It's a higher inflation rate than common metrics like the CPI.
The reason for this is that common metrics are based on a grab-bag of consumer goods. Over time consumer goods have shifted from being hand-produced by domestic labour to mass produced in factories with cheap overseas labour. Meanwhile, however, rockets continue to involve large amounts of manual labour by highly trained individuals.
Nor does rocketry have some sort of amazing tech advance that's been driving it down. Fuels have changed little in recent decades. Engine efficiencies have drifted up and stage masses down, but there have been no spectacular leaps. Dreams of major leaps forward, such as the Shuttle, VentureStar, etc have played out poorly. That doesn't mean that they always will - it's just that the situation as it stands isn't rosy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think there's hope. One, companies like SpaceX that start from scratch and thus can apply "lessons learned" from scratch are at a big advantage, as well as not having to make hard decisions about what sort of legacy "baggage" is worth keeping around. Secondly, smart design approaches can help keep costs down. SpaceX, for example, manages to get some degree of mass production on its engines by using so many that are identical (or virtually identical, in the case of the vacuum versions with the extended nozzle) on every launch. And with the Heavy they'll step that up even more. The upper and lower stage cores are also very similar, and the boosters on the Heavy will also be very similar to the cores. So they get some degree of economies of scale, and a lot more unit testing on at least the engines (not as much with the cores, unfortunately, and that's come back to bite them - the downside to starting over is that it's a total reset on system reliability). From a technological standpoint, using new (by space industry standards) manufacturing techniques like friction stir welding, and balancing ground handling costs with rocket performance (aka, the "semi-balloon tank" design, where the rocket is strong enough to support itself unfilled but not strong enough to withstand launch forces without pressurant) also improve their cost performance. If someone - SpaceX or others - can mange to get cost effective stage reuse to work, then that would be another big boost. So there is hope.
But as far as the past decades have gone, comparing rocketry to computers and cell phones has been anything but an apt comparison.
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Besides which, the percent of the GDP spent on the military is above 5%, IIRC.
Across the world as a whole it's 2% (as it is where I'm from).
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Rockets don't have a Moore's Law, and that's responsible for like 99% of tech progress in the last 50 years.
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Maybe he wasn't being sarcastic?
You are correct! Until we put the same sort of value on exploration as we currently do to killing each other there is little chance of the humanity saving shift mentioned above.
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Re:Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of fixing local problems, people get wrapped up in tech porn.
And they have forever. And that's actually a good thing. Those ships that brought most people's ancestors to where they live now are technology. Wagons are technology. You have to deal with it that not all people are stuck in the mud.
It's almost like they escape problems here by thinking of grandiose plans in space and imagine that they will solve anything.
Wanderlust is an integral part of the human experience. Not everyone has it, but aside from people who might be fleeing overcrowding or lack of opportunity, it is something rooted in their psyche. We are not trying to solve anything, we are just doing what we do. It's the difference between someone who wants to go to the Grand Canyon for the experience, and someone who wonders why anyone is interested in a big ditch
This isn't even an indictment of you. There is a very big place for people who resist change, and don't like risk. The world also badly needs adventurists, people who strike out towards something new.
In the end, all practical matters aside, a lot of people are interested in going to Mars, even as a one-way trip. Others are happy to not ever venture out of the city the live in. Its just how people act.
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And they were built for economic profit. If the same were true of manned space travel we'd have a colony on the moon by now. "Wanderlust" already takes us to the extreme points of our planet and boundaries of the solar system.
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Except that going to space isn't "Wanderlust", it is an escapist fantasy.
All wanderlust is an escapist fantasy.
Re: Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:2)
What are you doing to contribute to the solving of our terrestrial problems?
Re: Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:2)
Re: Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:2)
So nothing at all then
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Nope, this represent a major seismic shift in corporate ideology, a humanity saving shift. That shift is the change from a war industrial complex to a space industrial complex. Instead of turning in on ourselves in a egoistic orgy of self destruction through war for profit, that energy is finally starting to shift out into space. Instead of glorifying mass murder and the most brutal engines of destruction, that energy will be focused on better space craft, a full fledged Lunar City, colonies in space and even terra forming mars and that is just the start with hints already coming out about how to get past the FTL barrier. So a change that should be celebrated in every home, a shift from end of the species war to extinction to becoming a galactic species.
Likely many are just way to shallow, self centred and narcissistic to appreciate things which benefit humanity as a whole, they quite simply can not see it because it is never reflected in the mirrors they stare at every day of their lives.
That's a nice story, but I'll believe this when you figure out a way to remove the warmongering gene from the human race.
Look back at one of the most amazing space achievements in human history. We put a man on the moon. And yet even that didn't do jack shit to stop the conflict in Vietnam, which raged on for many years after. I fail to see how another space race would ever change the war-for-profit mentality. Man would have to sacrifice Greed and Control, and that will never happen. Thousands of years
Re:Sometimes being first isn't the best plan. (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of glorifying mass murder and the most brutal engines of destruction.
This part of our history will serve us well when we encounter other species.
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Nope, this represent a major seismic shift in corporate ideology, a humanity saving shift. That shift is the change from a war industrial complex to a space industrial complex.
Yep. I'm sure that ISIS will give up the whole "kill everybody who isn't our kind of Muslim" thing any day now so that they can join the space industrial complex.
all is going according to plan... (Score:3)
and Elons plan is working perfectly. he cant build all the necessary tech and infrastructure himself. trigger a space race and the tech WILL get developed by a multitude of startups for those specific needs. It's a a sensible method!
Klik
Musk is way ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
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Musk announced SpaceX will try to get something to Mars every other year for the next 20 years.I'm not saying Boeing doesn't have the engineering talent but I seriously doubt it has the will to beat Musk to Mars. Musk said, this is what we're doing, this is when, and this is how. Boeing said, over the next few decades we're going to put tourists in earth orbit. There isn't even a competition at this point.
And you base these facts off the grandstanding arrogance of a billionaire vs. a company with a proven track record of space exploration?
If you think having the "will" is all it takes to be successful, then neither Boeing or SpaceX will be first. North Korea will beat us all.
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He doesn't just have the will, he has the talent, the production facilities, the engine, the launch pad, the plans for the vehicle, the materials, they've already made the first development fuel tank.
Boeing have nothing. They're barely even supporting development of the Vulcan. They'll have nothing and do nothing until NASA decide they want to go to Mars and contract stuff out to Boeing, and that will only happen with Congressional support. It might never happen.
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China plans to reach Mars by 2020 and build a moon base.
Russia will put men on moon by 2030.
ALL of it (the US claims included) is bullshittery until we at least see the first heavy-lift rocket put a load into high orbit.
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We have had the technology to send people to Mars for decades.
Sending living people to Mars and have them go on living is more of a challenge, but we're closer.
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We have had the technology to send people to Mars for decades.
No, we're not quite there yet. We had a huge issues with even landing on Mars till recently. There was too much atmosphere to use a rocket like on the moon, and too little to use a parachute like landing on earth for something large enough to land humans. Even with smaller missions like Curiosity, they had to come up with strange things like "sky cranes" and inflatable landing shells. Neither of which would work for a manned mission. Only with SpaceX's landing rocket technology do we actually have a solutio
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Whooosh!
I think you need to reread the post you replied to.
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We landed things on Mars in the 70's. We've had the technology to get there for decades. We could just have easily sent a human.
As my initial post said "sending living people there is more of a challenge".
One of these days, Elon... (Score:2)
Boeing CEO Vows To Beat Elon Musk
Bang! Zoom! Right to the... Mars.
Now if only... (Score:3)
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Then they'd interbreed and create a race of Darth's who come pestering us with bigass weapons.
I was picturing thunderdome with neckties and shredded suits.
Calling BS on some points (Score:4, Interesting)
1. The Boeing that, indeed, did build the Saturn V first stage was not nowadays Boeing. The former was much smaller, more agile ("agile" not in the software engineering sense, but in the common dictionary sense).
2. Boeing is indeed heavily involved in the SLS program. That program's pace, however, is set by NASA, whereas Musk's SpaceX, being a virtual start-up, sets its own and dramatically different pace.
This is not to say that Boeing could not or should not be involved in what might became a "race toward Mars". I am, however, calling bullshit on the Saturn V and SLS arguments.
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Correction: That program's pace is set by Congress. Congress set the milestones in the appropriations. Congress at the same time appropriated only a fraction of the money needed to make those milestones. If people are whinging about how SLS will take longer to get off the ground than Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo combined, one can start by examining the amount of money devoted to each of those programs.
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I stand corrected. Of course you're right. Thanks!
Boeing is pathetic (Score:5, Interesting)
A telltale symptom is the mind boggling stagnation in rocket technology. Look at main lift engine development: ULA is using Russian engines designed in the cold war. The rocket cartel hasn't invested a dime in big lift vehicles since the early 90's.
It took two outsiders, Musk and Bezos, to inject life into the US space sector. They were both technologists with no ties to aerospace. They independently realized that new booster technology was the key to 21st century space flight, manned or unmanned. They both spent their own money to build new rockets from scratch. Yes, they got federal funding, but they spent a lot more then that. (ULA has been developing new upper stage rockets, but that is a much smaller effort then building a new launch system from scratch.)
When ULA woke up and realized they were at least six years behind SpaceX in engine design, they went to Blue Origin. Their next generation main lift stage will based on the Blue Origin design. [washingtonpost.com] That's called being asleep at the switch.
Don't start whining about NASA, feel sorry for them. They are constrained by politics and budgets. If Congress only gave them rubber band and paper clip money they would still be making a valiant effort to get into space somehow.
Speaking of Congress, ten House Republicans are trying to squash SpaceX. [washingtonpost.com] They claim to be "greatly concerned" about the recent pad explosion and want the USAF and NASA to cut SpaceX off. What they are actually doing is shilling for ULA. Who gives a rat's ass about US technological leadership or actual capitalism when there are campaign contributions and jobs to protect in their districts? Congress are the real jokers behind the rocket cartel.
House Republicans *should* squash SpaceX (Score:2, Funny)
House Republicans have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors!
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Meanwhile, 24 members of congress [latimes.com] wrote a counter-letter :)
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Meanwhile, 24 members of congress [latimes.com] wrote a counter-letter :)
Led by a Republican, by the way.
The fact is that we are again seeing the free market beating government cronies.
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To be clear:
* The letter against SpaceX was signed by 10 people, all of them Republicans
* The letter supporting SpaceX was signed by 24 people: 11 Republicans and 13 Democrats
So I'm not sure how you're turning this into some commentary about Republican support for free markets, because honestly it looks like the opposite.
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When ULA woke up and realized they were at least six years behind SpaceX in engine design, they went to Blue Origin. Their next generation main lift stage will based on the Blue Origin design. [washingtonpost.com] That's called being asleep at the switch.
Is that any different from Google buying Keyhole and Quest Visual, which became Google Earth and the Google Translate camera feature? Why expect one company to have all the new and great ideas?
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Why would you expect a rocket company to design its own rockets, instead of getting them from a shopkeeper?
"And if we can't beat 'em fair and square..." (Score:2)
"...we'll take pot shots at their rockets from our rooftop while they're refueling them. (Oops! Did I say that out loud?)"
Mars Vacation Peddlers; just stop already. (Score:2)
While I can understand the attraction in jetting people across continents at very fast speeds (even though we've seem to forgotten we abandoned that 40-year old technology when we retired the Concorde), I fail to see this whole commercial "race" to Mars.
Attention Martian vacation peddlers; How about you start with proving you can safely navigate through our man-made asteroid belt of space junk before you start bullshitting investors about Martian getaways.
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We've been setting modest goals for far too long. It's time we stopped pissing about with probes, and launched some spaceships with people inside. As a society, we have become so risk-averse that we won't contemplate the tiniest possibility of a space-related death.
30,000 people die every single year just within the US from using the automobile. Hundreds of millions of humans accept this risk and use an automobile multiple times a day. We're hardly a species that is "so risk-averse".
That said, we seem to be a species that is afraid to actually justify our actions anymore. Sorry, but "Fuck it, why not" should not be the main reason we're looking to spend billions of dollars and pretty much guarantee death to explore the red planet.
Why do I get a bad felling about this?.... (Score:2)
What worries me is how sure he is they will be the first. I read another article about the person heading up the same program at NASA (can't recall her name right off, sorry) and she said pretty much the same thing -- absolutely positive they would be there first. Now, their time line puts that is the 2030s. That's behind SpaceX's schedule, so unless they know something....
Good luck (Score:2)
Boeing Rocket? What Boeing Rocket? (Score:3)
They don't have any rockets.
Even if he's considering ULA's rockets being nominally Boeing's, they're shutting down production of the Delta IV family, the Atlas V is on shaky ground with its Russian engines, and is supposed to be discontinued when the Vulcan starts flying, the development of which they are underfunding and as it stands, even when it's done, would probably not even be competitive with SpaceX's current Falcon 9.
Or are they planning to buy out LockMart's half of ULA, or compete with their own subsidiary with an undisclosed rocket design?
Boeing Developed the TR3B - They're already there! (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.drboylan.com/xplane... [drboylan.com]
The TR3-B 'Astra' is a large triangular anti-gravity craft within the secret U.S. fleet. Black-projects defense industry insider Edgar Rothschild Fouche wrote about the existence of the TR3-B in his book Alien Rapture(10).
The TR3-B does not depend solely or principally on its hydrogen-oxygen rockets. It is a highly-reduced-gravity aerospace craft manufactured in secret "black programs" by Boeing. The reduced-gravity field it produces reduces the vehicle's weight by about 90% so that very little thrust is required to either keep it aloft or to propel it at speeds of Mach 9 or higher.
The TR-3B vehicle's outer coating is electrochemical-reactive and changes with electrical radio-frequency radar stimulation, and can change reflectiveness, radar absorptiveness, and color. This is also the first US vehicle to use quasi-crystals in the vehicle's skin. This polymer skin, when used in conjunction with the TR-3B's Electronic Counter Measures and Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM), can make the vehicle look like a small aircraft, or a flying cylinder - or even trick radar receivers into falsely detecting a variety of aircraft, no aircraft, or several aircraft at various locations!
A circular plasma-filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter surrounds the rotable crew compartment and is far ahead of any imaginable technology. Sandia and Livermore National laboratories developed the reverse-engineered MFD technology. The plasma, mercury-based, is pressurized at 250,000 atmospheres at a temperature of 150 degrees Kelvin, and accelerated to 50,000 rpm to create a super-conductive plasma with resulting gravity-disruption [reduction of almost all of the pull of gravity and effects of inertia].
The MFD generates a magnetic-vortex field which disrupts or neutralizes the effects of gravity by 89 percent on a mass within proximity. The MFD creates a disruption of the Earth's gravitational field upon the mass within the circular accelerator. The mass of the circular accelerator and all mass within the accelerator, such as the crew capsule, avionics, MFD systems, fuels, crew environmental systems, and the nuclear reactor, are reduced by 89%. The current MFD in the TR-3B craft causes the effect of making the vehicle extremely light, and able to outperform and outmaneuver any craft yet constructed - except of course those back-engineered total-antigravity craft, which the government does not admit exist.
The TR-3B is a high-altitude, stealth reconnaissance platform with an indefinite loiter time. Once you get it up there at speed, it doesn't take much propulsion to maintain altitude.
With the vehicle mass reduced by 89%, the craft can travel at Mach 9 vertically or horizontally. My sources say the performance is limited only the stresses that the human pilots can endure. Which is a lot of reduction, considering that along with the 89% reduction in mass, the inertial G forces are also reduced by 89%. The crew of the TR-3B can comfortably take up to 40Gs.
The TR-3Bs propulsion is provided by three multimode thrusters mounted at each bottom corner of the triangular platform. The TR-3 is a sub-Mach 9 vehicle until it reaches altitudes above l20,000 feet - then who knows how fast it can go!
The reactor heats the liquid hydrogen and injects liquid oxygen into the supersonic nozzle, so that the hydrogen burns concurrently in the liquid- oxygen afterburner. The multimode propulsion system can operate in the atmosphere, with thrust from the Magnetic Field Disrupter powered by the nuclear reactor; in the upper atmosphere, with hydrogen propulsion; and in orbit, with the combined hydrogen/oxygen propulsion. The engines are reportedly built by Rockwell.
Doesn't sound good (Score:4, Funny)
"I'm convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,"
Informing people that you are deluded isn't the best idea. ;)
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There is a finite amount of energy currently available to our species, both in an absolute sense and a per unit of time sense.
Currently? This has always been the case and will always be the case.
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Entropy's a bitch.
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That's a bullshit argument. It's bullshit because it can be applied to every single human activity, not just space.
Is energy a big problem? No, actually - we have plenty of it, and we know ways to generate far, far more. What we will run out of is fossil fuel, and that is a problem, but 'space' is not a big contributor to that loss (rockets don't run on oil). And even if energy were such a big problem, there is no need to give up on other research and development until we solved it - in fact quite the oppos
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(rockets don't run on oil)
Actually modern rockets do. That is the whole point of the money thrown at them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
lousy sock puppet (Score:2)
He linked to an article that shows the energy from the resources you'd get from space resources vs the energy needed to overcome the gravity well.
What's the mass of microwaves again? He proposes going to Titan, constructing a chemical rocket using local materials and returning a little bit of hydrocarbons as chemical energy. We could try things here that aren't that dumb like fissionable materials like uranium and thorium which both have a far better energy per mass, and which can power a far better rocket engine.
Or as I note in my question, we could send the energy as microwaves, that doesn't require any mass for transportation and isn't subject
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It doesn't matter. Our society is a mix of cultural left wing with economic right wing. Culturally we are sinking further and further away to extreme left, while economically we are sinking further and further away in extreme right. Cultural extreme left don't listen to reason, they only listen to their ideology. It doesn't matter how flawed that ideology, they are not open to criticism. Economic extreme right doesn't care when people end up in deep poverty. Everything is good news show, even when they fire
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Cultural extreme left don't listen to reason, they only listen to their ideology. It doesn't matter how flawed that ideology, they are not open to criticism.
How is the cultural left flawed? There's a few issues with certain wings opposing free speech ("safe spaces") in very, very recent years, but for the most part they're socially libertarian. The only way you can oppose that ideology is if you're an authoritarian asshole who wants to push your own values or religion on other people by force.
Of course,
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It's essential for long term survival of any species. If confined to living on just one planet, the fate of the entire race is dependent on that planet remaining habitable. One large rock falling from space or some kind of accident/war and humanity could be over.
Being able to live on other planets is a great insurance policy.
Space is really there... (Score:2)
What's the difference between you and any other religious person talking about my salvation in the sky?
Well, unlike the heaven promised in other religions, space is objectively there. We can actually see Mars and even send probes there.
Send some probes to heaven and get a chemical composition of the surface rocks, and then we can say that spaceflight and religion are on a comparable basis.
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WTF? You have case history to cite of the long term survival of 'species' depending on migrating to more than one planet?
Clearly that is what has happened to many, if not all of the other species that share this universe with us or we would have heard from them by now. We need to learn from their mistakes rather than repeat them.
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What human activity is NOT a 'loser' from the energy standpoint, other than the very active search for new energy sources itself?
Go to this site, and do what it recommends: http://vhemt.org/ [vhemt.org]
This leaves the gene pool a little cleaner for the rest of us.
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Yes, you're right, because the sun sends all it's solar energy towards earth. There are no potential nuclear fuels in space.
Oh wait... that's wrong.
Earth isn't the only place in the galaxy that has energy. Energy is everywhere. It may be concentrated in earth due to the presence of life sequestering it but it exists all over the place.
finite but huge [Do the Energy Math-] (Score:2)
There is a finite amount of energy currently available to our species, both in an absolute sense and a per unit of time sense.
Well, I suppose the amount of energy is technically "finite", but the amount is huge by human standards. You do the math. The solar power striking Earth is 173,000 terawatts. All the energy used by humanity is a trivial fraction of a percent of that.
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Except for source.
I agree you need space based refueling and infrastructure in several key orbital areas to make it useful.
The problem is all of it has to come from earth. Even the nearest mining asteroids are too far away to be useful at present speeds. our best hope is finding water, or ice on the moon that we can use.
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If it's that simple, why did we need to wait until we started burning coal, then oil, to get where we are?
We didn't need to. Don't confuse choosing a path as indicating that one needed to choose that path.
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You really think we could have gone from the 17th century to solar cells... simply by *willing* it to be so?
The obvious rebuttal is that the laws of physics didn't suddenly change in the 17th century to allow us to burn coal. Coal has been around for hundreds of millions of years. But creatures with the knowledge and tools to use coal to power machines have only been around since the 17th century.
Wood, hydro, and yes, solar power would still be available to us with that knowledge.
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You yourself just named two energy sources (hardly the only ones we use). Let's add some more.
1) Wood fire. Which not just increased safety, health, and comfort, but ultimately led to primitive metallurgy, allowing first for the bronze age, then with later improvements the iron age.
2) Animal power. Domestication of animals and the use of their muscle power for human needs led to a vast increase in the ability to transport goods and people, farm the land, and operate early "industry" (such as oxen yoked t
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And I think "crash" really is the operative word. Look at the Hoba meteorite [wikipedia.org]. This was a natural object, not something shaped by man to be some sort of optimal entry shape or set on some optimal entry trajectory. Yet it lost only a fraction of its mass during entry and landed intact on the surface. We absolutely can do that and better. Forget trying to "land" mined asteroid material with a spacecraft - it only needs to be shaped, sintered, and ejected onto a proper intercept trajectory. Nature has alr
Rare earths aren't concentrated in asteroids (Score:2)
many asteroids are full of rare earths.
No. they're not. Where in the world did that idea come from? Asteroids aren't particularly rich in rare earth metals. (Which, despite the name, aren't actually rare).
if they capture and crash even ONE, they'll be the richest men on earth. (the refining and processing is minimal, these are PURE at the core, nature sorted the elements already)
What?? No.
Nature has sorted out iron and nickel. Platinum group metals are sideorphiles, and segregate with the iron and nickel, albeit still at parts per million concentration, so you need a lot of refining. Rare earths, however, are not segregated in asteroids. On Earth they tend to be concentrated by aqueous processes, so you wouldn't
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Whereas, I agree, we should expand ourselves and spread life beyond Earth, No matter how bad we fuck up the earth, it will always be more hospitable to us than any other planet or body in our solar system currently is. It may be the most hospitable place in the galaxy.
We cause oceans to rise and swamp the surface? It's still more hospitable than Mars. We poison the air and have to wear respirators? It's still more hospitable than Europa.
We kill all non farmed life on earth. It's still more hospitable
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I'll take the surface with its sunlight, wide open skies, forests, beaches, cities, mountains, people, and all the other stuff we have here over orbit any time, thank you. But the rich are welcome to live in a stinking, unhealthy tin can that can fail disastrously at any moment with all their money...
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"Meanwhile the permanently unemployed poor stay on the surface and rot."
In a socially mobile country anyone can be made poor by temporary circumstances. But those permanently unemployed poor of yours are the people who lack the vision it takes to improve themselves. Perhaps it's being dedicated to an obsolete industry, perhaps it's BLM-style racial hatred, or perhaps it's falling into the black hole of addiction.
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In a socially mobile country anyone can be made poor by temporary circumstances.
Unfortunately the US is no longer a socially mobile country. Once you get rid of inheritance taxes you are more likely to succeed because the wealth you inherited (Koch brothers, Trump, Mitt Romney, etc.) than by wealth you created on your own (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Cuban).
Re:The Cloud Minders (Score:5, Insightful)
"Meanwhile the permanently unemployed poor stay on the surface and rot."
In a socially mobile country anyone can be made poor by temporary circumstances. But those permanently unemployed poor of yours are the people who lack the vision it takes to improve themselves. Perhaps it's being dedicated to an obsolete industry, perhaps it's BLM-style racial hatred, or perhaps it's falling into the black hole of addiction.
Exactly. If everyone had the will to be rich, everyone would be incredibly wealthy. 100 percent of us would be in the top 1 percent.
Re:The Cloud Minders (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of people confuse the possibility of social mobility with the probability of social mobility.
Think of it like the difficulty setting on a game. Difficulty settings can range from the ridiculously easy to the virtually impossible. Likewise, different players have different skill levels in how good they are at the game. If the game had the same difficulty setting for everyone, comparing in-game scores/accomplishments/times would be an easy way to compare how good players are at the game.
But it's not that way, because you have difficulty settings. A person can be quite good at a game, but still loose because they choose to play it on a tough difficulty setting. Likewise, a person can really suck at a game but still win because they chose to play it on an easy setting. Now, there always will be some people who are so good that they'll win at the toughest settings and some people who are so bad that they'll still lose on the easiest settings. But lots of quite good players will still fail when the settings are hard enough, and lots of quite bad players will still succeed when it's easy.
We enter life with a variety of factors that influence our "difficulty settings" that we all have to play on. A white cis straight man with wealthy, college-educated parents raised in a good household is probably going to be playing on "easy". A poor black gay or trans woman with poor, high-school-educated parents raised in a bad environment, with no healthcare, loaded in debt from day one, having to work to support their family, limited transportation options, etc? Not so much. Will some of the former fail, and some of the latter succeed? Of course! But the odds of it are skewed. Many if not most people who would have been quite successful had they been on a level playing field will fail, and vice versa.
I, for one, support giving everyone access to the easier difficulty settings. I don't think it's a good thing for an economy when you have potential talent not being realized and people who really should be working a cash register in management. More to the point, the cost to the economy is almost unfathomably large. So if it takes some money to make this happen? So be it. Social mobility isn't just about the technical possibility of moving from one economic reality to another; it's about the practical reality of it, and how much merit and ability are able to overcome social inertia for the majority of players in the system.
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Exactly! I rose several levels above "my place". Place was lower middle class blue collar. But it took energy and effort and outlook that many have described as pathological. It can be done, but not everyone is cut out for that. Certainly people who aren't that way should not be punished by poverty. A lot of people just want to have a way to support themselves and their family. I'm too restless for that, but it isn't remotely bad to h
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Ugh... "still lose", not "still loose".... that's one of my personal pet peeves, and now I made it myself (due to a typo, but still, that's no excuse!)
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or out of my gene pool
<sarcasm> I typically avoid mating with Internet trolls. If you agree that you want to keep your gene pool clean, might I recommend you follow the same advice? Just food for thought. </sarcasm>
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No, I wish I had lots of money so I could send some other asses to Mars.
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If it's going to end up being the same asses going to Mars anyway, why not let them pay for it themselves?
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Because if I pay, I get to decide that they stay there.
And I get to set the safety standards, and, bluntly, whether they arrive at Mars or blow up on the launch pad...
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Let them arrive at Mars please... no one wants to clean up the remains of a few exploded asshats on a launch pad.
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Could someone find out whether it's cheaper to fly them to the sun?
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According to them, it would be cheapest to just strap a solid fuel can underneath the pod, don't limit thrust so we can easily reach 15+ g and simply let it fall into the big pond next to the launch site.
Re: The Cloud Minders (Score:2)
Or Norway, that well known failed state
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1. Liquid oxygen and hydrogen don't leave CO2 as a byproduct.
2. What the fuck are you actually on about.
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some hydrogen is created via electrolysis of water, but the electricity used for that mostly comes from burning fossil fuels. Can you point to a large scale hydrogen production fac
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Both SpaceX and Blue Origin's proposed vehicles use methane. Hydrogen is not considered viable for re-usable deep-space missions.
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Without people greedy for gold it would have taken longer for the Americas to be discovered. Without people wanking to online pictures, the internet might never have got so big.
Without rich people wanting to stay in power; the Coliseum you want fixing would never have been built. Without idiots with more money than sense, digital music might never have happened. It took the rich people wasting $1000 on a CD player to bring the money down for the rest of us.
I'm personally disgusted at the wealth divide in
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I was looking for this. Boeing, Lockheed, others exist for the soul purpose of "creating jobs".
One way of creating jobs would be to fix autocorrect by bringing in enough AI to give it an understanding of semantic context. It would be a logical extension of digital assistant tech.
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If we do that then how would people be able to mock others for using the wrong homonym?
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This is BS.
Boeing isn't just a defense contractor; they're one of the two largest companies in the world that makes passenger aircraft. When you consider that long-distance travel (on either Boeing or Airbus jets) is cheaper than any point in aviation history, they're obviously doing something right.
Lockheed, and the portion of Boeing the does defense contracting, OTOH, is another story. But that can really be blamed on the government and how it does those projects.
Before you try to blame defense contract
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"The poster 11010101011 seems to be strangely absent from this thread."
Probably just posting AC again. Why do certain people have such a fear of having an observable posting history?
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No, in 28 flights, and this would have been 29. You don't define a failure rate by "what is the narrowest bounds that I can choose that will give the worst-sounding number"?
Several percent failure is normal for rocketry (different figures are cited depending on how you measure, often 95%, although IMHO that's too pessimistic for modern rocketry). SpaceX was running 96,4% before this failure, although that's obviously biased upwards by measuring immediately before failure. They're now 93,1%, although that
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Their flagship products literally catch on *fire*.
Wait, are we talking Boeing or have we moved onto Samsung?