Buzz Aldrin To NASA: Retire the International Space Station ASAP To Reach Mars (space.com) 349
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said. "We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost." Instead, Aldrin said, NASA should continue to hand over activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private industry partners. Indeed, the space agency has been encouraging that move by awarding contracts to companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Boeing to ferry cargo and crew to and from the ISS. Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space or other companies should build and operate LEO space stations that are independent of the ISS, he added. Ideally, the first of these commercial outposts would share key orbital parameters with the station that China plans to have up and running by the early 2020s, to encourage cooperation with the Chinese, Aldrin said. Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" -- spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth.
OR - (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OR - (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OR - (Score:4, Funny)
If you're trying to send a message, you don't need to land something as heavy as ISS at congress's doorstep. Just use a small launch vehicle (Pegasus, for example), with a small reentry vehicle (deploys parachute, jettisons fairing, needs a rather low CEP), whose payload consists of, in order from bottom to top:
* Crush zone
* Paper bag filled with frozen dog poop (reinforced as necessary), a small amount of accelerant, and an ampule of a hypergolic ignition fluid designed to rupture on impact (or equivalent electrical igniter).
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No member of Congress will notice unless you tape a few $100,000 bills to it.
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Can I do the math for this?
Re:OR - (Score:5, Funny)
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Who do you think, the 1%ers are ruining this country, don't you fucking white trailer trash rednecks know anything?
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It's also a lot heavier than an equivalent craft built today would be, which means a heavier transfer stage. Solar power systems for example are approaching an order of magnitude better power density than the ISS's solar arrays.
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But it's already in orbit.... That means a lot.
Of course, it won't work - the arrays aren't specced for Martian distances. I doubt you can put much acceleration on the frame - it wasn't designed for that. But there has got to be a better way of utilizing the thing besides burning it up in in the atmosphere.
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But it's already in orbit.... That means a lot.
No, it means very little. It's so heavy that just launching the fuel for TMI would involve so much mass that you could launch a more capable modern assembly AND its TMI fuel in a smaller mass budget than just the TMI fuel for the ISS.
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I doubt you can put much acceleration on the frame
Once a craft is in orbit, you don't need much acceleration to go places. You can attach some ion thrusters, and power them with the solar arrays. Even an acceleration of 0.001g applied continuously will get you to Mars far quicker than any chemical rocket could.
Re: OR - (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, you mean there's more to going to mars than just building big rockets and putting people in them? Going to mars is more complicated than anyone knew.
No, that's healthcare. Going to Mars is easy compared to rejiggering the American Medical Industrial Complex.
think about orbital staging (Score:3)
The ISS is certainly a financial burden but it seems well-suited to assist with transit to mars. To get to mars will require a meat can that's too big to go up in one launch, so it's going to require multiple launches and some staging in orbit. The ISS is one of the few existing stations that could be used for staging right now. (chandra I suppose, but the ISS would be better?) Even if you tried minimal support with staging, it would be less failsafe in the event of a problem. The ISS has a return capsu
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The ISS has no real advantages for staging, and some disadvantages compared to using an empty spot in orbit. First, it's in an orbit designed for its own purposes at a low altitude -- not designed for transfer to Mars -- and this could increase fuel costs significantly. Second, it has no manufacturing or assembly capabilities and retrofitting it with such will likely be more expensive than launching those facilities directly. Third, the "advantage" of being an emergency fail safe can as easily be seen as a
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"- attach boosters to ISIS and SEND THEM TO MARS."
FTFY. Two birds, one stone.
Ack no. Didn't you see Prometheus?
Re:OR - (Score:5, Informative)
None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.
It's important to protect this planet, it will be home to the vast majority of humans for the foreseeable future. We should not destroy our home. But there are things we cannot protect against. The planet wil be fine. Life will bounce back. It probably won't include us.
The only defense around that is to live in more places than earth.
That said - I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well - and it's a lot easier to get to. More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.
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The Universe doesn't throw giant rocks at Earth all that often. There hasn't been an event wiping out all life on Earth in something like a billion years now, and humans are remarkably difficult to eradicate. I don't think one of the fifty-million-year ones would do it.
If we're wiped out on Earth, then to continue the species we'd need completely self-sustaining colonies, able to replace anything they've got with available resources and able to expand. We won't be able to build that for centuries.
So
Re:OR - (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.
2) Only a factor if you think it's critical the colony trade with earth from natural resources. Not really a factor if the major point of the colony is to exist - colonists can always trade with each other, and they'll certainly develop other things to trade with us later.
3) You're wrong about how space works. There's a reason we say "low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere" - once you're in orbit the cost of changing orbit is relatively low compared to the massive cost of getting into orbit. Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.
4) Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ? There is basically nothing that the moon lacks which Mars does not also lack. You cannot answer me questioning an assumption by restating that same assumption without providing any new information.
5) And if you understand why that is true, you understand why you're wrong in number 3. But it DOES take a lot less energy to LAND on the moon than on Mars - you have a much smaller gravitational force to overcome with your slow-down actions. And it takes a GREAT deal less to get back up again (whether to mine an asteroid, ship trading goods to earth or whatever). A colony means landing a great deal of extremely heavy things - the kind of things parachutes aren't much help with (and the thin Atmosphere on Mars makes them only a little useful anyway) - it's going to be mostly rocket-braking to land anything safely. The moon is a MUCH easier target for that.
Reach Mars or colonize Mars? (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe it would be better to start sending material and structures, and only then sending actual people. It's sad in my mind, but maybe we should give up seeing men on Mars in our lifetime, if we want it to be something more than a passing experiment.
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Seeing as the world can't even make a simple semi-permanent habitation on the moon, something that's only four days away with current rocket tech, there's zero chance at putting people on Mars. Space propulsion engineering has barely moved on from the 1960s, and that was based on German 1940s long distant bombs.
The whole "Mars" wankfest is a job creation scheme to empty the tax payers' pockets into a select few mega-corp pockets with a few crappy factories popping up to justify it.
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The whole "Mars" wankfest
Mars wankfest? Is that a thing in your head or something?
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Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, landing is actually harder on Mars - the gravity is too high to use propulsive braking, and the atmosphere too thin for aerodynamic braking. Which means mixed mode braking, and freakin' enormous parachutes. Not long ago it was estimated that a LEM sized lander would need total parachute area larger than a baseball infield - and they'd have to go from packed to fully inflated in under .1 seconds. (Meaning that at one point in deployment, the edges of the chute and the shroudlines would be moving faster than the local speed of sound.) It's much harder to land on Mars - which is why the various rovers have had to use such Rube Goldberg methods.
In theory. In practice... well, we don't know. None of the hardware required has moved off the prototype bench and none has been tested with anything resembling the toxic materials that make up Martian soil.
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"Maybe it would be better to start sending material and structures, and only then sending actual people."
The most powerful proof-of-concept would be landing and operating a device to make fuel from Martian atmosphere, as Zubrin proposes.
Private only? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...
Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.
Re:Private only? Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...
Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.
Okay, I'll call you a communist. Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it. Of course with public infrastructure, the government is there to consult, kibitz, cajole, zone, and regulate it, and inevitably foots most of the bill, but of course owns the artifact at the end of the day.
Often as an incentive to reduce public outlays, concessions are offered to the public companies to reduce the actual net present cost to the public for the infrastructure. E.g., build a dock or railroad and you get this adjacent land for development, design a spacecraft for us and you can take the technology to build rockets for private launches, etc, etc...
Eventually, these *concessions* to private companies can form the seed for whole new private enterprise that accelerate the economy of a country. Call me an evil capitalist, but that's the way it works... the even the socialist (pseudo-communist USSR and China) world...
How does this work in your theoretical communist world?
Re:Private only? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:
1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and
2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.
It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).
Re:Private only? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).
If someone wants to rely purely on free market capitalism to fund a manned trip to Mars, good luck to them. Presumably the fact that they have costed it and realise it would just lose them money is the main stumbling block?
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A public space program gets funded because people think it's a good idea.
A private space program gets funded because it actually is a good idea (return exceeds investment).
The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea. And I don't say that from a public vs private space exploration standpoi
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The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea.
That depends entirely on what your actual goals of space exploration are. I support both manned and unmanned space exploration, but for two entirely different reasons. Robotic missions are best for long range exploration and scientific discovery. Naturally, you can cut many, many expenses when you don't have to support a human life, or have to worry about a return voyage.
I want humans going into space for perhaps less logical reasons: an innate desire to explore and settle the universe. One could also a
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The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:
1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and 2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.
It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).
Even though they are all building rockets doesn't mean they are trying to achieve the same thing. NK builds their rockets on a shoestring budget and sometimes they even manage to complete a flight path, quite a successful program for their purposes. NASA, the Air Force, and the various Spy agencies asked Being and Lockheed to build rockets that are reliable as possible and that's what they got, at eye watering costs of course. SpaceX and the new breed see a whole new type of a business plan, one where they
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Re:Private only? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it.
That is completely wrong.
Historically nearly all infrastructure in Europe was state owned (Railways, Telephon, Roads, Water distribution, Gas distribution, Electric Grids, Post/Mail, Power Plants etc.)
Since the mid 1990s most European countries started to privatize parts of the infrastructure. Some countries with success, some failed misserable in certain areas, e.g. the British railway system.
E.g. the French Power Company is still 85% state owned.
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Sigh... I think people need to study history more.
Let's just take German railway history as an example. Please google the Deil Valley Railway Company (one of the first joint stock companies in Germany). It wasn't until later that railway operation like these were taken over by the Bergisch-Markisch Railway Company and only later these private enterprises were nationalized by the the Prussian State Railway.
Nearly all the other public works in Europe have a similar history, sure they belong to the governmen
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And lest we leave out the "post office", please read this wiki entry on the Thurn-und-Taxis Post [wikipedia.org]. This was a private company. Nearly all german states still continued to contract with this company to handle postal service after they were finally given the right to create their own postal service. Eventually this was nationalized by Prussia as well.
In contrast, in the USA, the postal service has been a government monopoly from the get-go.
I think people's general observation about the government owning ever
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Obviously we are talking about times when "socialism" was a word to recon with.
Why you bring up "private companies" especially companies run by nobility before even a democratic and socialist regime exists is beyond me.
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That's kind of the core issue on whether a project goes ahead or not mister market forces.
An invisible hand is not getting us to Mars just as it didn't get Columbus to America.
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Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
You are absolutely right. Right now, spece exploration is exclusively in private hands. That is because public sector funds are not being spent on manned space exploration. Look at all that (zero) progress.
On the other hand, the private sector is obviously more efficient in developing ways of making a profit than government. So, why not let the government offload non-useful enterprises like the ISS to the private sector? Let the private sector develop commercial infrastructure to sustain the ISS (for
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3.5 billion is even more less than the non-discretionary spending that keeps Grandma from coming to live with you. Frankly, I think you should let her move in.
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"Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far"
Because Mars will not have "masses" to be exploited by any business monopoly until colonization is already underway, by which time the inhabitants will be developing their own legal system per the UN Space Treaty. NASA performs best when it deploys scientific missions, not when it runs high-risk manned missions. Let the private sector take the manned missions and the whole 'priorities' argument
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Give the money to Elon (Score:5, Insightful)
His Interplanetary (Mars) Colonial Transport is so much more economical than the other proposed alternatives ($500,000 for a first ticket dropping to 140K later) that even if he's off by an order of magnitude it'll still be (much) cheaper.
Will he be able to pull it off? Frankly I have no idea but if you had asked me 10 years ago if he could get a 10 story booster to fly back to its launch pad and land, or build an electric car company worth more than GM or become one of the biggest solar providers in the U.S. I wouldn't have stopped laughing.
Give him a chance, it's almost assuredly better than you or I or certainly those idiots in Washington (maybe not the scientists but certainly their politician masters) could do
Re:Give the money to Elon (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time you try something radical it's a toss of the dice. Musk's successes don't mean that everything he does will be successful. I generally am in agreement with the logic processes that lead him to each approach he wants to try to revolutionize new industries (it's generally just looking at them as a ruthless optimization problem, requiring as few new technologies as possible - for example, with the Boring Company: tunnel costs are roughly linearly proportional to boring cross section, while diameter is constrained by number of lanes, space per lane (which is much higher than the width of a car), shoulder/pulloff space, etc. So have cars ride on automated sleds to reduce space per lane, move them very fast to increase throughput and thus reduce the number of lanes (while simultaneously cutting travel times), cut the tunnel width in half, and you're cutting the boring cost by 75%, at the cost of having to engineer and build sleds; combine that with simultaneous casing rather than bore/stop/case, borehead improvements, etc, and push it down further if you can). But there's always a gamble with everything he does, and there can always be failure. Past success is no guarantee of future success.
ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. Now, to be fair to them, there has been a lot of low level research in the past several decades, and attempts to improve the technology seem to have been going well. And it's also understandable that they'd want to move away from aluminum to composites - the strength to weight ratios are far higher, and strength to weight is everything when it comes to high payload fraction rockets. But it's a risky endeavour.
To get costs down as far as they want requires revolutionizing everything, from the pad to range services to telemetry to thermal protection to the state of the art on reentry design and so on down the line. They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance (although their initial signs on that front are promising - your biggest concerns are erosion, and they're reporting that with the new alloys they're using erosion appears to be minimal). The scale of the challenge they're taking on with this one is much bigger than that they took on when founding SpaceX, or Solar City, or Tesla - and I'd argue bigger than Hyperloop and the Boring Company as well (although not as extreme as what they're taking on with Neuralink). Expect long timescales. Expect glorious, pad-destroying failures. Expect initial prices much higher than their ultimate goal, and long periods of time to get them down. And to fund it, their satellite venture is going to have to play out. Which it probably will (improving communications and satellite technology has thrown this opportunity in their laps - Blue Origin is trying for a piece of the potentially massive market as well), but it's another case of breaking-new-ground which throws another risk into the process.
But kudos to them for trying. With everything, really.
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And NASA's best contribution to such an effort would be to keep plugging away at the science, answering questions like 'What is the exact composition of the soil in a variety of locations?' If Elon is going to make bricks or plant anything, he needs to know this.
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ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. ...
They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance...
Ordinarily I'd agree with you. If we were talking about the usual suspects (NASA/Boeing/LockMart), they'd have a pile of paper at this stage and not much else.
But SpaceX has (had) a giant carbon fiber tank [twitter.com] which they successfully burst tested [businessinsider.com] to 2/3rds the design pressure back in November, then blew up [reddit.com] testing with liquid nitrogen on February 17th 2017. (Judging by the pictures, it failed at the equatorial seam.)
They've built and tested [youtube.com] a 1/3rd scale Raptor engine (which I presume you already knew, but ot
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Sure, one of these days he's going to use the notoriety gained from SpaceX, Tesla, etc to go found an online payments company where he'll make his real money.
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Shooting rockets into space is "cheap advertising"? Damn. Someone should let McDonalds know about this so they can get to work building some McRockets. Surely cheaper than just buying advertising space, right?
defense budget (Score:2)
Getting along? What are you talking about. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but a world where 7 billion people magically get along with each other is a fantasy.
It would be laudable, however, if humanity would just spend a little less money and effort on not getting along.
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I'm pretty sure that the capability to depopulate the entire planet a few times over is far beyond what's necessary to stop you.
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Easy enough: Gimme all your money, land, water, women, children & other ressources & then go die in the corner. Because I'm sure (as are so many others) that we deserve it more/would employ it better.
What? you don't want to? I'll just take it all anyway because you have no way to stop me -- unless you too start paying for that military you'd like to see diminished
They've been gutting the shit out the the UK armed forces for years and years and years now, it's now a shadow of its former self and we still haven't been invaded or anything, in fact we're still doing the invading. Not that I'm saying any particular army is too big or too small or whatever but there's no big boogie man waiting to jump on you and take all your stuff if you let your guard down even for a second and stop stockpiling and spending more and more and more on defence. Defence from who, Russia? Wh
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That's just because Germany gutted its armed forces even harder.
*SCNR*
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Curious how women and children are seen as a resource to you, equivalent to money, land, water, and other resources.
Rather than, you know, human beings.
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Two societies, one with your view, one with his. Who wins?
History shows that Rei's view wins. The GGP's view was dominant for millenia, and has lost.
Just get along? (Score:2)
You don't understand our priorities. $3.5bn is a lot of money until it's time to declare war on something. Then, money is no object. We've got to declare war on Mars. Convince Trump that ISIS has a secret base hidden on Mars and we'll have boots on the ground there in no time. Cost be damned.
It's useless to send humans on Mars (Score:2, Interesting)
It's way more costly, risky and frankly, rovers can do an equivalent job.
NASA to Buzz Aldrin (Score:2)
NASA to Buzz Aldrin: Whatever. You won't be going on it, Mr Did-it-second.
Re:NASA to Buzz Aldrin (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA to Buzz Aldrin: Whatever. You won't be going on it, Mr Did-it-second.
Out of a population of over seven billion humans, a total of twelve of them have walked on the moon.
First, second, or last, it's one of the most exclusive clubs in the history of mankind.
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NASA to Buzz Aldrin: Whatever. You won't be going on it, Mr Did-it-second.
Out of a population of over seven billion humans, a total of twelve of them have walked on the moon.
First, second, or last, it's one of the most exclusive clubs in the history of mankind.
Clearly OP should have put a "hashtag joke" or smiley face on the end to give you a clue.
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Those cues aren't necessary if the joke is funny.
We are still lacking the technology ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the short list:
Power. Except for the moon, Venus and Mercury, where solar power may be feasible, I don't see any option other than nuclear fusion for sustainably fulfilling a colony's power needs.
Flexible, small scale chemical engineering. We need a way to synthesize almost arbitrary chemical compounds out of simple precursors. Basically, a machine that will produce a spoonful of sugar out of CO2, H2O and power. Or one does of acetaminophen out of H2O, CO2 and NH3.
Flexible, small scale manufacturing. We need to reduce the size of the smallest manufacturing unit that is capable of producing a copy of itself as well as producing other useful outputs.
Medical technology. We need better ways of easily diagnosing and treating a number of diseases, especially cancer (which will be a problem on any extraterrestrial colony).
Launch-to-orbit technologies. Especially ones that don't involve the vehicle having to contain all of the fuel and reaction mass necessary to reach orbit.
Life-support and maintenance. The colony needs to remain habitable for decades or centuries, unlike our current and past space stations that were simply de-orbited when they became too dirty.
Easy and flexible genetic engineering of microorganisms, plants and possibly animals, to adapt them to the colonys needs.
Re:We are still lacking the technology ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wilfully blind to nuclear fission, I see.
Re:We are still lacking the technology ... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, not willfully blind. I have excluded fission after careful technical consideration. Nuclear fission requires very specific resources that may cost more energy to acquire and process on an extraterrestrial settlement that the amount that can be gained from them as fuel.
And a colony that depends on regular shipments of fuel from Earth fails one of the very basic criteria of self-sufficiency. It is an option during the ramp-up phase to self-sufficiency.
To be more precise: The technology needed is at least D-D fusion. Deuterium should be common enough on most celestial bodies (especially those farther away from the Sun than Earth) that self-sufficient energy supply is possible.
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a colony that depends on regular shipments of fuel from Earth fails one of the very basic criteria of self-sufficiency
Duh, all we need to do is find a small asteroid made mostly of uranium, nudge it into orbit around Mars, then Bob's (*) your uncle.
(*) Robert Heinlein described this very scenario in one of his early science fiction works. Probably.
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Not all Uranium is equal. Getting enough of the right isotopes for fuel out is not trivial.
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It's not a false dilemma. A colony that does not eventually reach the point of self-sufficiency is a dead-end outpost. A colony that has to wait six months for critical equipment to arrive from Earth is a death trap. So is a colony without either sufficient evacuation capacity or tons of redundancy if anything goes wrong. And I doubt it is feasibl
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Wilfully blind to nuclear fission, I see.
Technically he's right, because nuclear processes are not 'sustainable', in that they use up fuel. The sun itself is not sustainable, because eventually the hydrogen will be depleted.
But since we don't know what a fusion plant will look like yet, the most likely power source for extraterrestrial use will be variations of the one we already use when space power needs exceed what sustainables can provide in a given part of the solar system.
We have recently found that 14C makes a good, long-running "nuclear ba
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You just don't understand the situation (Score:2)
For submarines it's a very good choice - aerospace where every gram counts not so much, but the complex fuel cycle kills it dead once you go off planet.
The fuel does not stay useful forever and shipping in new fuel at intervals would be very difficult to sustain.
It's fine to be a big fan of nukes but in some situations they are not so good a fit.
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Pah! Mere implementation details.
Where's your vision?
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Design engineer here. I get paid for implementation, not for visions. I'd be really rich if it was the other way 'round.
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Well, I read your post, and I disagree with everything you said.
Power, nuclear exists, so it's not a problem. Chemical engineering, life support, genetic engineering, etc; not necessary. Build a dome. We actually know how to do that part. Then put plants in it. We already have a sampling of plants which will grow in the martian regolith, even food plants which are edible.
Launch to orbit, that makes it expensive, but still within the realm of possibility.
No, we need Izzy! (Score:2)
Hasn't he read Seveneves? We need Izzy for the survival of mankind!
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"Hasn't he read Seveneves? We need Izzy for the survival of mankind!"
But if you did read Seveneves, you would recall that Hillary Clinton, as President in that scenario, pops in on the ISS and screws everything up.
or sell it (Score:3)
Why not sell the US parts to either the international partners or to potentially interested private companies? I'm quite sure some of the partners would be interested in keeping the station running, it is certainly a question of money though.
There's been talk about putting a station around the moon, I'm not sure if it would currently be feasible to push the ISS that far - or even to a lagrange point (e.g. L5 as proposed in The High Frontier).
I'd certainly prefer to see NASA just staying on with the ISS, but getting a higher budget - it certainly needs it much more than the seemingly utterly wasteful US military complex.
Re:or sell it (Score:5, Interesting)
ISS is not designed to operate out of LEO. There are plans to build a new station around the moon (in a rather curious orbit). NASA wants it to be effectively a Mars spaceship, just parked around the moon, while the Russians want it to be a permanent fixture around the moon. So the plan appears to be to develop it so that a "Mars spaceship" portion can undock from the rest at an arbitrary future date.
Who knows how far along the design and development will actually get.
As for buyers... great if you can find them, and sure, get whatever money out of it that you can. But let's not fall for the sunk cost fallacy here. In a way, building an ambitious space project is akin to buying a computer. It may be the shiniest sleekest piece of modern technology when you make it, and it serves your purposes, but it's quickly rendered obsolete by advancing technology. ISS is increasingly obsolete, with modern technology allowing for structures that are lighter, more maintainable, and more capable for a given cost. For example, compare ATK Megaflex or Ultraflex to the ISS's solar arrays. Furthermore, part of the whole point of building such things is to advance technology. You don't advance technology by continuing to use old technology and just incrementally improving it. That may be the best option for a period of time, but eventually you need to start over with a new design that incorporates the knowledge accrued since your last design.
What's the obsession with mars? (Score:2)
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It's not so much about Mars itself (other than to say "hell yeah, we put people on another planet!"), as it is about the spinoff technologies it will create.
Going to Mars first = very stupid idea. (Score:3)
Sending people off to Mars before we can prove survivability is a really dumb way to get people killed and possibly kill future off-world exploration. First, we need to prove we can sustain a colony on our nearest neighbour, the moon, and ONLY then start thinking about sending people off to another planet. Are the people who want a Mars colony *now* the kind of people who'd send a newly upright toddler off to drive a busload of other toddlers across the country? Probably.
Pick a spot on the moon suitable for a test colony, seed the area with redundant supply drops, THEN send a risk aware space trained construction crew to build the habitats. Spend at least 5 years learning how to live off-planet, working out all the bugs and expanding, then consider Mars. And FFS, make it a multi-national effort or there'll be so much political fallout it'll kill the project as sure as explosive decompression.
Was it a paid speech? (Score:3)
Only someone paid for that would claim we cannot afford 3.5 billion.
It's hard to consider any other points made when the lack of good faith has been established.
Private industry is not ready to take over yet (Score:2)
What the ISS does is important (Score:4, Insightful)
I met Buzz Aldrin some years ago when he was on a book tour signing books. Very nice guy. I respect him but I think he is wrong on this issue.
Firstly, right now, they are testing how fire works in micro-gravity on the ISS. Knowing how to deal with fire aboard a craft on the way toward Mars is essential research. Some people on earth don't know how to deal with a kitchen fire and training astronauts in necessary knowledge can prevent unnecessary deaths. Apollo 1 happened in my lifetime (as well as Buzz Aldrin's) and that was caused by fire in 1G. Apollo 13 had an explosion (fire) that could have killed three astronauts on the way to the Moon.
We continue to learn more about long-term weightlessness on the ISS. We continue to learn more about EVA (spacewalks) and repairs to the exterior of a spacecraft. We continue to learn about how the surface tension of various liquids works and we are learning about how to grow plants (that can process Carbon Dioxide into oxygen safely) in micro-gravity.
In short, the ISS is serving an excellent function.
What Buzz Aldrin needs to to is to start encouraging a priority change for NASA. When we mounted the Apollo program, NASA's budgets were very high. After all, we were in a space race. We did not achieve all of the planned Moon landings because NASA's budget was cut. Surely Aldrin recalls this. So, were I to meet up with the distinguished gentleman again, I would ask why we're spending so much on war that could be spent on NASA and engage many of the same companies who are lobbying for war contracts. We need to change the US priority from war to the peaceful use of much the same technology for exploration.
Oh, and Martian regolith may well be poisonous, [nasa.gov] so were we to begin colonizing Mars, we would need to address that.
How about we solve the radiation problem. (Score:3)
Let's go to the moon first and figure out how to deal with the radiation problem first... then we'll go to Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
No child needs to starve, though, but that is just a matter of food distribution that doesn't take billions of dollars.
Re: (Score:2)
"He literally, like Trump, wants children to starve."
This is the 'priorities' argument. It does not exist in the private sector.
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Trump wants to take money from children to pay for science.
If it were not for science, every American would be worse off than the poorest of those children.
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The ISS is not controlled by NASA, and NASA is only a small part of an international community... But yeah American exceptionalism at it's finest again, always believe you control the things others actually do and never admit you're a giant failure... (THE AMERICAN WAY)
Maybe they think its the Incredible Space Station?
Re: (Score:2)
No. First we need a way to get stuff into orbit (and possibly beyond) that does not require the vehicle to transport all of the reaction mass and fuel necesary for this step.
Once that is accomplished, we can think about setting up infrastructure away from Earth, including infrastructure for further launches.
The only way to skip this first step is developing infrastructure capable of sustained growth (th
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no sane person will go on a one way trip to die there
There seem to be plenty of slashdotters who would, so either you're wrong or there are a lot of loonies on slashdot (pun intended). And you're not wrong.
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This trip is not for sane people. It's for the folks who went West not knowing whether they would be the Sutters or the Donners.
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Man is not a rational animal.
He is a rationalizing animal.
- RAH
Re:Should we allow ourselves off-world? (Score:4, Informative)
>We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?
Whatever your definition of 'right'... because we'd have more opportunities to get it.
Because an unused system may as well not exist, so I prefer a universe with intelligence in it. Life has an inherent value greater than that of non-living material. Intelligent life has an inherent value greater than that of mindless life.
Re: (Score:2)
No matter what we do, this rock will be baked dry in about 700 million year and then consumed by the Sun after floating, lifeless, for another 3 billion years.
There is no living 'harmoniously with our environment' on long enough scales. We ride the entropy gradient until the universe's spring finishes winding down.
However, yes, it would be nice if we managed to use our available resources in a manner that didn't exhaust them before Nature destroys them anyway, and in a way that didn't make our existence le
Re: (Score:2)
Serious question. We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?
There has NEVER been a time and place where we got it right before branching out to somewhere else. That's very basic human nature.
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Yeah, because the Russians, the Chinese and Daesh will have our backs.
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Even better, keep better track of weapon sales so Daesh are not buying our stuff and have to settle for poor quality knockoffs.
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That's why every other country in the world (all of which have drastically less spending on such things) has been conquered by the Russians, the Chinese or Daesh. If even tiny impoverished North Korea can remain stubbornly independent with most of the world against it, what are you so worried about in the world's largest economy protected by oceans and friendly neighbors?