Vice President Pence Vows US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon (engadget.com) 226
Before astronauts go to Mars, they will return to the Moon, Vice President Mike Pence said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday and in a speech at the National Air and Space Museum today. He touts "humans exploration and discovery" as the new focus of America's space program. This "means establishing a renewed American presence on the moon, a vital strategic goal. And from the foundation of the moon, America will be the first nation to bring mankind to Mars." Engadget reports: There have been two prevailing (and opposing) views when it comes to U.S. endeavors in human spaceflight. One camp maintains that returning to the moon is a mistake. NASA has already been there; it should work hard and set our sights on Mars and beyond. The other feels that Mars is too much of a reach, and that the moon will be easier to achieve in a short time frame. Mars may be a medium-to-long-term goal, but NASA should use the moon as a jumping-off point. It's not surprising that the Trump administration is valuing short-term gains over a longer, more ambitious project. The U.S. will get to Mars eventually, according to Pence, but the moon is where the current focus lies.
But won't be dining with any green alien ladies. (Score:4, Funny)
But, why? (Score:3)
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Because we are back in the cold war. Time for arms races, nuclear deterrence, and government funded pissing matches. Why did we go to the moon the first time? I've been told we don't know how to get back because we threw the rocket plans out. Some science.
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Why go to Mars?
Total pandering... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unnecessary politicization. (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't connected to anything else in the article, just a bit of personal politics slipped in where it didn't belong. The editor should have stripped it out and explained the difference between journalistic and OpEd authorship.
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That isn't really a partisan statement. (Whether it was *intended* to be or not is a different discussion.) It's been quite a while since we've had an administration, from either party, that has shown serious interest in goals that extend beyond what can advantage them personally within their own term(s). And that's at least doubly true for space exploration goals. They will pander a lot about supposed grand visions, but the money never goes where their mouths are.
Easily solved the Trump way... (Score:2)
They'll buy them tickets on a Russian or Chinese moon-shuttle service...
Why? (Score:3)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Reinvigorate our Space capabilities. Every-shifting politics and evaporating budgets have left pretty far from what we were in our ability to actually field a viable space program. We have no shuttles, we rely on Russian equipment and/or to launch bother personnel and satellites.
2) Test runs for Mars. All the same challenges of landing a mars mission are present on the Moon, but being so much closer it makes a much better place to test out the systems. If we cant do the moon, a mars trip is suicide. We havent actually tried since the days where the most advanced piece of tech around was a hand-held calculator. It's probably worth trying again with today's tech.
3) Foundations of Industry. A trip to mars has a bunch of challenges that are specific to inter-planetary missions, while the R&D to get a working lunar base would have much broader and more local applications. I agree that the future of lunar travel is going to be in the private sector, but current private technologies (and current International Law) inhibit that for now. However, private companies working under government contract accomplishes much the same thing, without running afoul of legal implications of ownership and profit generation and whatnot.
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The same question is justifiably asked of why go to Mars? What is the "scientific justification"? Cuts some rocks to find that microscopic organisms might have existed there eons ago? Who cares? How will that affect anyone's life? What are you going to do differently now that you know? You may have an insatiable thirst for useless knowledge, but it is the ideas of humans traveling the stars that excites me.
The way to build a transcontinental railroad is not to build a steam engine, demonstrate that it
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2) Test runs for Mars. All the same challenges of landing a mars mission are present on the Moon, but being so much closer it makes a much better place to test out the systems. If we cant do the moon, a mars trip is suicide. We havent actually tried since the days where the most advanced piece of tech around was a hand-held calculator. It's probably worth trying again with today's tech.
Landing on the Moon and Mars really aren't all that similar. Due to its lack of atmosphere, and lower gravity, landing on the Moon is a fairly simple propulsive affair. Kill your orbital velocity, which isn't that high to begin with, and use your engine to land gently on the surface.
Mars, on the other hand, has twice the gravity, and just enough atmosphere to be a problem. There's enough gas there that you need to have a heat shield, and can't build like you would for the moon, but you can't rely on it for
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If nothing else, it makes a better launch point for larger scale missions because it requires less fuel to take off from the moon than it does from Earth.
Of course, this does presume that it is possible to process the raw resources already available on the moon to create more rocket fuel, and I'm not sure if that's workable.
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And we won't know if it is workable if we don't build a moon base. And if it doesn't work on the moon, why would we think that it would work on Mars?
Bullshit (Score:2)
These political announcements are so sad because every time there is talk about manned space exploration it doesn't go any further than the ISS, 450Kms up. I mean, isn't there more useful science 2000Kms up? and if we're not willing to face the challenges of a space station that high up, what real chance have we got of going back to the moon?
Consider this. Manned space programs have zero political capital past an issue of national prestige. However that sort of political capital has a limited life span s
The usual poly-ticks: (Score:2)
The subject immediately became a flame war about the current administration. A similar thing happened here when the Obama administration announced their program of visiting an asteroid (or whatever, it morphed a few times).
Personally, I favor return to the moon for a number of reasons. Others prefer Mars or other programs.
That said my main preference is: Choose a mission. Stay with it for long enough to get it done. Fund the damn thing on a consistent basis.
If you do these, you will have a successful progra
How? (Score:2)
How are we going to be able to afford it after the administration is done ruining the economy and making everyone poorer?
Heard it befoe (Score:4)
I have been hearing this for years. Call me when they take off.
Time travel is real ... (Score:2)
Vice President Pence Vows US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon
It's all about jobs and energy independence. (Score:2)
Trump thinks there's coal on the Moon.
Good idea (Score:2)
I'd like to send our politicians into space. They already have their heads in Uranus.
Believe it when I see it (Score:2)
Bush said we would replace the space shuttles, Obama said we would go to Mars, and now the current crop say we will return to the moon. Maybe they should fund NASA before making empty promises.
Re:Good Luck (Score:5, Interesting)
It'll probably take a bit more time than you kids have in office.
That is the whole point. Every president likes to make promises that don't come due till long after they have left office.
Unless the Trump administration is seeking increased NASA funding for this fiscal year, you can just ignore anything they say about space.
Re:Good Luck (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless the Trump administration is seeking increased NASA funding for this fiscal year, you can just ignore anything they say about space.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case I'm cautiously optimistic, if only because VP Pence seems to be a genuine NASA fanboi... he was nine years old for Apollo 11, and asked for a seat on the space sub-committee when he was elected to Congress. Pence was apparently the driving force behind Trump's decision to reconstitute the National Space Council which met yesterday for the first time. [youtube.com]
Given the amount of disruptive innovation in the space industry lately (led by but not limited to SpaceX), now is a particularly opportune time to "innovate" on the policy side as well. Will the new NSC ever amount to anything more than a few high-profile meetings? Hard to say... As you rightly point out: No bucks, no Buck Rogers. But when a handful of billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Bigelow are investing their own cash to bring new capabilities to the market, you really couldn't ask for a better time for government to get on the bandwagon too.
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It'll probably take a bit more time than you kids have in office.
That is the whole point. Every president likes to make promises that don't come due till long after they have left office.
Unless the Trump administration is seeking increased NASA funding for this fiscal year, you can just ignore anything they say about space.
Not everything. the threat to dismantle climate science programs is all too real.
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"Before astronauts go to Mars, they will return to the Moon"
Yeah, perhaps, but they will be Chinese people.
Or perhaps no, they will perhaps not do all this pointless stuff.
Re:I agree - moon first (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars [venuslabs.org]. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
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Mostly because it's way, way harder to do than Mars. Personally, I'd guess it's pretty much impossible with current technology to do a manned mission to Venus.
And I'm not even talking about the atmosphere yet. The dV budget required to get to a stable low orbit around Venus is already higher than for Mars, and as soon as you wish to land you are really in trouble. Ok, you can aerobreak on Venus, that's nice for going down, but the question is how you get up again. You need about 10k dV to get from the surfa
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The above link argues otherwise, in excruciating detail.
Not with aerocapture; it's actually slightly less. Venus also allows for much faster transfers, especially on return.
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Incorrect again. Is it really that hard for you to read even the introduction in the above link? Venus habitation is about settlement in the middle cloud layer, not orbit.
Or for that matter, to even read the very post you're replying to? "Venus sample return mission designs use balloons to get out of the dense lower layers." Not to orbit - only o
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How do you get to that middle cloud layer? You're coming from an orbit. Then have to slow down to "hover" there. In between you not only have to get rid of quite a few km/s of speed while inflating something that lets you hover. Now, normal air (N/O, as found here at home) would of course be floating on the mostly CO2 atmosphere of Venus, but we're a far cry from simply filling a multi-ton heavy space craft with air to make it float. If anything, you'd need something akin to a helium balloon as used here, f
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You could just read the document. There's many ways to enter from orbit, including the traditional (aeroshells), but also some more advanced concepts in advanced states of research such as ballutes and inflatable lifting bodies. These offer gentler deceleration at a lower mass penalty. The VAMP mission proposal for Venus, for example, is a lifting body example - the same inflated wing that functions as an entry lifting body / radiator also keeps it aloft in the at
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When ever I see "space nutter" in response to a well reasoned and scientifically backed comment, I can't help but read it in the Cletus voice.
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About using balloons: If that was a feasible way to get payloads into an orbit (because that's what you have to do if you want to return whatever went down to the surface), don't you think that we might be already doing something like this here on earth? One of the key problems of spaceflight is that rocket engines behave vastly differently at sea level than they do in near vacuum and that we waste nearly all the fuel just to get out of the denser parts of our atmosphere, so if this could work in any way we'd probably already be doing it.
Sorry, I'm not sold. I've read it and they make some interesting claims, but so far it fails to convince.
The atmosphere on Venus is significantly more dense than on Earth.
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Venus has the slight problem that anything you want to send there would melt. Mars is a lot easier.
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Nobody is talking about the surface of Venus. If you're not going to read the linked document, you could at least read the above comments.
Venus's middle cloud layer is the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth. Earthlike pressures, temperatures, gravity, sunlight, sufficient radiation shielding, etc.
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Accessing its resources, adding redundancy to the human species, making use of its orbital dynamics, etc, etc. Numerous subcategories on each.
Wrong on both accounts: transparent, not windowless, and extremely massive open space.
With resources literally pouring right through your propulsion system.
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Don't get me wrong, Mars is not resource-free. For example, it seems to be a good place for large bolide mineral deposits (Sudbury / Norilsk style). But it's not exactly a mineral treasure trove in general, and most of the potential is covered in deep overburden. Plus, each habitat is constrained to the specific location it's in - but not all essential resources will be located in the same place.
I won't repeat what's been written elsewhere in this thread (or is covered extensively in the link), but Venus
Re:I agree - moon first (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
Long term Venus has an even bigger "But why?" problem than Mars. Neither Mars nor Venus is very human-friendly but Mars is far more robot-friendly. Opportunity is two days away from operating for 5000 days on Mars. Since you're on the surface you have the potential to start making fields of solar arrays, greenhouses, excavate underground structures, mining and refining, build roads and create a much more earth-like outpost or colony. Venus will essentially be an orbiting spaceship, you have what we send and it's very hard to see us ever expanding on that or utilizing the local resources on Venus.
At least not in any way that we couldn't do with remote control from earth, since it'd be remote control to the surface anyway. On Mars there's at least the potential for human/robot co-projects or mobile robot supervisors, you also don't need absurd equipment to get out and fix things or tow broken robots back to base for repairs. All of this is much further into the future than "just" sending a manned mission though. Not that we have a feasible plan to terraform either planet, so in that respect neither can become a new earth. But if the end goal is something the size of the base in Antarctica I'd go with Mars.
I'm hoping we'll start with something that's at least a semi-permanent presence like a new crew going every 2.5 years when the launch window is optimal, like if we've built the habitat and everything around it supporting it and all the technology to get people to and from Mars I hope we can use it more than once and it becomes more of a resupply/expansion. If we're doing it just to do it once it's a bloody expensive trip. With the Moon you could have people land, lollygag around a few days and leave, on Mars you're committed to make it work for years. And if you're doing years, then I think doing decades with resupply/rotation can't be that far off.
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Some people think that Venus is more terraformable than Mars because there's more stuff there. You can theoretically deal with insolation problems in either direction with a soletta.
Re:I agree - moon first (Score:4, Insightful)
Venus has over 2 orders of magnitude higher deuterium than Earth. Venus has much higher energy resources than Earth. Venus is located in a place with a strong Oberth effect (easier to launch probes to the outer solar system). Venus has fast transits to Earth. Venus is easier to live on than Mars (much more Earthlike) environment in the middle cloud layer). Venus's atmosphere acts like a "refinery" to some extent, baking / eroding chemicals out of rock and precipitating them at various layers of the atmosphere. Venus's surface has been exposed to very different (and generally favorable) enrichment processes relative to other places in the solar system. Venus has little to no overburden. Etc, etc, etc.
On Venus, your habitat is a solar array. Is a greenhouse. A truly massive one in both regards, with - unlike Mars - tons of sunlight and Earthlike pressures. There's no need to excavate anything. The planet "mines" itself of many numerous resources and passes them right through your propulsion.
**Facepalm**
Once again: We're not talking about the surface, and we're not talking about orbit. We're talking about the middle cloud layer.
There is a far better case to be made for local operators on Venus than on Mars, in that robots on the surface are much more time-limited on Venus than on Mars, so communications delays matter much more. On Mars, so what if your rover sits idle for a while? It's getting so little power from the sun that it needs time to charge (if it's solar powered) regardless. And speaking of rovers, both the habitat and its surface probes are vastly more mobile on Venus. With a Mars habitat, you're stuck using only the resources found near where you settled; the further away, the more onerous delivery of materials becomes. With a Venus habitat, the whole planet is yours from a single habitat (although it's easiest, in the beginning, to stick to the high latitudes of a single hemisphere).
Speaking of that, Venus has more frequent launch windows.
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Ed: deuterium concentration. I shuold relly strat porfraednig.
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Re:I agree - moon first (Score:4, Informative)
Actually check the link that you replying to. Nobody is talking about habitation on the surface.
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Re:I agree - moon first (Score:4, Interesting)
As discussed in the above, it's incredibly difficult to actually "sink" a Venus habitat. Beyond how slowly large airships actually leak, the vast majority of the habitat's lift is dedicated to lofting the propellant on the ascent stage and (depending on the design decisions) the ascent stage itself. Meaning in the worst case you can ditch your ascent propellant (or even the ascent stage itself) and stay aloft on a tiny fraction of your peak design lift.
The easiest expansion design is via the "airworm" layout, where you have individual envelopes joined one after the next, each acting as lift cells, but containing their own propulsion, power generation, etc, and being able to function fully on their own. Even in the event of the total loss of one cell, there's no effect on the remainder.
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I'm not sure what you mean by that. Venus gets colder as you increase in altitude (there's not even a thermosphere), not hotter. The actual constraints for manned missions are the pressure to temperature ratio (which is more optimal closer to the poles). There's several kilometers acceptable variation for the long term, with allowable deeper excursions in the short term. The optimal altitude also changes d
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ED: That should read "there's not even a large thermosphere temperature spike" like there is on Earth. You can see the temperature profiles here [astronomynotes.com] (I can dig up some graphics for higher up if you'd like)
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ED: That should read "there's not even a large thermosphere temperature spike" like there is on Earth. You can see the temperature profiles here [astronomynotes.com] (I can dig up some graphics for higher up if you'd like)
That said, the thermosphere spike is largely of academic interest. The atmospheric pressure is so low at those altitudes that the thermal loading is close to nil. Basically the atoms/molecules in the atmosphere are moving really fast at those altitudes, so they're "hot", but there are just so few of them that they won't really heat anything of normal density up. I don't have a source handy, but I recall reading that it basically means that you could easily overcome it with radiators, and radiators are an in
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I dream of floating Venetian electric sheep.
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Re:I agree - moon first (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not something that can be catalyzed. That's not to say that there's not terraforming possibilities - there are. But that's not one of them. :)
That said, the sulfuric acid is much more of a resource than a curse, at least for the foreseeable future. It's readily scrubbed and separated. Heating first separates out the water, then decomposes the H2SO4 to H2O + SO3. The SO3 can either be used as a conditioning agent to help nucleate free water vapour for further capture, or heated further over a vanadium oxide catalyst to yield SO2 + 0,5 O2.
It'd actually be easier to establish a colony on Venus if there was more of it, not less.
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As discussed in the above, it's incredibly difficult to actually "sink" a Venus habitat. Beyond how slowly large airships actually leak, the vast majority of the habitat's lift is dedicated to lofting the propellant on the ascent stage and (depending on the design decisions) the ascent stage itself. Meaning in the worst case you can ditch your ascent propellant (or even the ascent stage itself) and stay aloft on a tiny fraction of your peak design lift.
Heck, during the first world war, the Germans attacked London with Zeppelins, and those were incredibly difficult to shoot down, despite being filled with Hydrogen. The Brits would spray the Zeppelins with bullets, filling them with holes, but because the gas bags were at ambient pressure, there was very little escape.
Another example was a research balloon launched out of Canada in 1998. It's mission-ending systems failed to operate (detach the payload, burn a large hole in the envelope), and it drifted acr
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We can't even do midair habitats on Earth and he wants to build them 260 million kilometers away? Yeah, that's gonna work really well.
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We absolutely can; we've been making airships since 1852. If you're asking why nobody's made a farm in one and lived in one, where's the economic case for that?
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We absolutely can; we've been making airships since 1852. If you're asking why nobody's made a farm in one and lived in one, where's the economic case for that?
And what happened to almost all of those airships once they met a bit of weather?
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How can you have continually missed this?
We are not talking about the surface.
We are talking about the Earthlike middle cloud layer. Care to try your post again?
(And to top it off, you're wrong about cooling energy, too. Google "coefficient of performance" for starters. You're also wrong about radiation; Venus's atmosphere is quite effective at radiatio
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Wait a minute... are you the same AC who wrote:
"and cloud city, deals with 800 degrees and sulphuric acid atmosphere how????
I'm thinking you don't realize that both pressure and temperature decline with altitude. So, here you go [nature.com]. Does that help clear things up?
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I probably need to add: those temperature isolines are in kelvins (you seem to be working in Fahrenheit).
273,15K = 0C = 32F.
+10K = +10C = +18F.
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Wikipedia gives a reference for the latter - "Kite balloons to airships: the Navy's lighter-than-air experience", ed. Roy A. Grossnick, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1987". The former record was 1928 and the latter 1958, so both are ages ago. But all this is irrelevant; in both cases, they're not limited by the airship, but by supplies (in particular, fuel). The whole point
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Have we tried?
No because basically habitats low enough for people to breathe without masks tend to crumple and crash with the least bit of weather. The whole history of powered airships in particular, the Shenandoah, the Akron, and the Macon, as well as the Hindenburg is largely a series of crashes due to weather.
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Excellent, if you love sulphur and 800 F temps.
Cloud city mother fucker
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Whenever I read that, in my mind it's being said by Samuel L. Jackson in some sort of sci-fi blockbuster ;)
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Cloud city mother fucker
That sounds awfully boring. Why not just move to an underground bunker on Earth, and paint the walls white ?
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Really? Living in a floating garden (so big you can skydive indoors) with transparent walls in a brightly mistscape, a veritable floating over hell, sounds like a boring place?
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**facepalm again**
Let's start from the very beginning: do you understand that both temperature and pressure decline with altitude?
(Let's also take the chance to correct a common misconception: there's no sulfuric acid on the surface of Venus; it's not stable in those conditions. At the surface, it's sulfur dioxide. There is sulfuric acid in the middle cloud layer, but more like a vog than an "acid bath" - it's so sparse that visibility is several kilometers)
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Titan will be an interesting destination** once we can get the trip times down; it has a number of things going for it, including reasonable pressures, minimal radiation, easy local mobility, and a fascinating scientific mission (and the thermal insulation requirements are lower than most people would imagine). But until trip times can come down, it's just too far.
** Assuming that that sort of level of gravity doesn't prove to be hazardous to human health.
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Sorry - this discussion was about manned travel, so I assumed you were talking about manned travel as well. Further robotic probes to Titan, I'm quite the supporter of that. :) Unfortunately, Mars gets the lion's share of the unmanned exploration budget, so....
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Superior, really, in most regards. [venuslabs.org]
You've literally described a colony. And life on Earth (minus the "floating" part). Self-sustaining societies using local resources is the goal.
Digging and boring is work, something you want to avoid having to do as much as possible. On V
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Don't forget the Moon is indeed a Harsh Mistress. What this really means is that the Trump Administration wants to replace the Rod of God with cheaper rocks.
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The moon should be the new Australia. Make it a penal colony so we have a reason to send all the niiggers, towelheads, kikes, chinks, wetbacks, and all other types of darkies, to the moon. Declare the moon off limits and let society advance rapidly on Earth without the evil behavior of the darkies to hold us back.
Someone has been reading way too much Robert Heinlein mixed with David Duke.
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China shina gina shina. [youtube.com]
Re:Actually I think Trump wants to go... (Score:5, Insightful)
... anywhere Obama didn't want to (and vice versa). If Obama was for it then Trump (or perhaps more precisely his supporters) are against it. It doesn't matter if it is right or wrong, they have PRE-judged the situation. Why? Because, and I'll be frank, they're racists or to use a softer word, bigots and PREjudice is what you'll get from them.
That "and vice versa" part became an anti-Trump rant pretty quick. My impression is that the way US politics works neither side can concede that the other side was right. Either an issue is born bi-parisan or it becomes a Democrat/Republican thing that the other side must reject and treat with disdain. At best they might fumble the ball like when Trump tried to abolish Obamacare but under no circumstances could the Republicans admit that that they'd rather it stays. It still has to be some kind of terrible solution that only lives because we couldn't agree on how to throw it out. You don't see Democrats saying "that was a great Republican idea, let's keep working on that" very often either.
Re:Actually I think Trump wants to go... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny you say Democrats don't often say Republicans have good ideas. Obamacare was originally a Republican proposal. The Republicans are falling over themselves to kill a healthare bill they created only because the Democrats were the ones to pass it.
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Obamacare was originally a Republican proposal.
Correct. Also, when Mitt Romney was about to leave the Governorship in Massachusetts, one of his final acts was to enact mandated universal healthcare that is shockingly similar to the (un)Affordable Health Care Act. It was applauded by Republicans, and panned by Democrats. Unfortunately, it was just as bad an idea then as the (un)Affordable Health Care Act is now.
This seesawing by Democrats and Republicans, based solely on who promotes any given idea, had gotten tiresome to me 30 years ago. Now, it's j
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This seesawing by Democrats and Republicans, based solely on who promotes any given idea, had gotten tiresome to me 30 years ago.
100% this.
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It was NOT a Republican proposal, it contained a fragment of an idea put forth by a Conservati
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whitewash history much?
it's not a myth. and iit was far more than "just a fragment". the tax penalty "punishment" came from them too.
really, the only things dems did was tack on minimum coverage, and a public optopn (that later got dropped).
you folks can try to whitewash the history all you want.
but no one is falling for it.
http://americablog.com/2013/10... [americablog.com]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/h... [wsj.com]
https://healthcarereform.proco... [procon.org]
and of course, the original document, in full, for your reading pleasure: http://thf_me [amazonaws.com]
Obamacare is a terrible idea (Score:2)
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Sometimes I think it's because the rhetoric became so hyperbolic and demonizing a few decades back that after a while people fo
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You don't see Democrats saying "that was a great Republican idea, let's keep working on that" very often either.
Generally they reserve that language for ideas that weren't really Republicans', where they're trying to cast a Democratic-centric proposal as bipartisan so they can try to shame/intimidate Republicans into getting on board. One of the most extreme examples is the truly laughable proposition that Obamacare was a "Republican idea," a meme someone quite predictably has already thrown into this thread.
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Your non-partisan post had me going until you said the following.
"However the Chinese :( or Elon Musk :) will probably get there first"
Well for starters there's the very obvious fact that the US made it to the moon decades ago but I can write that off as poor writing on your part. The part I can't forgive is that there's any sort of reason for Americans to go back to the moon. Sure, it's a great feel good landmark for those who have never made it but for America the question needs to be asked as to how it i
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If it was the EU talking about a moon base, we'd probably collaborate while keeping NASA's focus on Mars, but our relations there are Liberal-Institutionalist so we play cooperative, non-zero-sum games like building formal (and democratic) institutions. Realist relations with China means we mostly play competitive zero-sum games, despite all the trade and interdependence.
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Well what are our goals for another moon visit? All I've been hearing is that we should go back to the moon "Cuz China doin it!". That is not at all a good reason to blow a few billion dollars.
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Well what are our goals for another moon visit? All I've been hearing is that we should go back to the moon "Cuz China doin it!". That is not at all a good reason to blow a few billion dollars.
It should be pretty obvious: if Mycroft is going to hurl moon rocks at Earth, we want it to be a USA Mycroft, not a Chinese one. ( Yes I know Mike was aiding Lunar Separatists. Relax)
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Its not racism. Its simply politics has become a team a team sport. There are plenty of people who are against every position Trump takes simply because he is Trump.
The next problem with much of the issues you cite is Trump and the traditional GOP differ on them. Trump isn't as reckless and stupid as people make him out to be. He should torpedo NAFTA, blow up the Iran "deal" and tariff the crap out China, but those are steps that achieving any positive outcome from require subsequent action by congress
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B. But you prejudged the situation in a spectacular display of dramatic irony, so I guess you never gave yourself a chance to consider any other possibilities. There's an old adage that encapsulates it rathe
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Where's that story about the CIA having wanted a base on the Moon. Why? Because they thought it'd be cool to say, I dunno, I guess to the KGB or something, "But we have a base on the Moon."
But if even the CIA couldn't make it happen, then what do you suppose the odds are that little ol' NASA would be able to?
Then again, let's just start telingl everyone there's coal on the Moon. We'll be there in no time.
Re:I trust him. (Score:4, Funny)
I hope he delivers himself to the moon.
Re: I trust him. (Score:2)
VPs get to make stuff up like this (Score:2)
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/352601
There was even a "Blue Ribbon Panel" (cue Dave Barry).
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