Moon is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative To Mars, NASA Chief Says (scientificamerican.com) 64
The moon has not superseded Mars as a human-spaceflight target, despite NASA's current focus on getting astronauts to Earth's nearest neighbor, agency officials stressed. From a report: The Red Planet remains the ultimate destination, and the moon will serve as a stepping stone along the way, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, and Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said during congressional hearings Wednesday. "The moon is the proving ground, and Mars is the goal," Bridenstine said during testimony before the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, part of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. "The glory of the moon is that it's only a three-day journey home," Bridenstine added. "So, we can prove all of the technologies, we can reduce all of the risks, we can try all of the different maturations that are necessary to live and work on another world. And we can do it all at the moon, where, if there is a problem, if there is an emergency, we know that we can get people home." He cited NASA's Apollo 13 mission in 1970, which famously managed to make it safely back to Earth despite experiencing a serious problem on the way to the moon.
A worrying lack of imagination (Score:2)
So, we can prove all of the technologies, we can reduce all of the risks, we can try all of the different maturations that are necessary to live and work on another world.
If this guy thinks that Mars has no "surprises" up its sleeve he is going to be proved sorely mistaken. Possibly fatally so.
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If this guy thinks that Mars has no "surprises" up its sleeve he is going to be proved sorely mistaken. Possibly fatally so.
While your statement is true, it is unrelated to anything he's said. He's still correct; while dealing with lunar dust is not the same as dealing with martian fines, it's still a good analogue in many ways and it certainly is nearby. It's close enough to where if there are problems, we can send more supplies in a timely fashion. Or where it might even be possible to recover crew members from the lunar surface, although they'd have to have a vehicle on hot standby for that.
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Obviously the Moon is not Mars and it is a wholly accurate description to call it a stepping stone. So the long term role of the Moon in terms of human exploration of the galaxy, is being that stepping stone. It is kind of better to have high speed objects, space craft, aiming at a largely empty moon, rather than the earth, even though the atmosphere would diminish the impact, it is still not desirable.
So the Moon, is the logical space station by which we explore the rest of the galaxy, where space rescue
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Yes, yes, no one expects the subterranean Martian psychic vegetables.
The idea of lunar testing is to see the feasibility of different options in an (even) lower gravity and negligable (really near 0) atmosphere but enough proximity that corrections and emergency resupplies are a possibility.
Sure there will be surprises, but they don't have to be the sort of stupid mistake that we could've spotted with relatively easy testing.
(Also, this gives us a chance to put up a color-safe flag by Tranquility Base. No
Re:A worrying lack of imagination (Score:4, Insightful)
It is kinda like saying, if we are trained to boat across the great lakes, we can take on crossing the Atlantic.
However if no one crossed the Atlantic by boat before, I would much rather have someone who was able to cross large bodies of water before, with enough skills to deal with such an undertaking.
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On the other hand, if you've never succeeded in boating across the great lakes, you'd better not try the Atlantic!
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Why did you read "reduce all of the risks" means "eliminate all of the risks"?
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Between the Lunar Gateway and the Space Launch System, NASA won't have any money left over to go to the Moon's surface itself.
Which is why you propose going there, try to get some popular support, then go ask Congress for money.
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For the foreseeable future, NASA isn't even planning to go to the moon. They're planning to be a space station in cislunar orbit. It will be mad expensive, will not help in any way with actually getting to the Moon or Mars, isn't even really all that close to the Moon at all, and is generally going to be a huge waste of money. Between the Lunar Gateway and the Space Launch System, NASA won't have any money left over to go to the Moon's surface itself.
Thank you, I came here to say just about the same thing.
This is a jobs program for NASA employees and contractors, that's all. It's simply meant to maintain the status quo. NASA has no real intentions of going anywhere with manned missions. NASA, like all large organizations, especially large bureaucratic government agencies, has become far, far too risk-averse to ever do anything bold or novel. As someone who was alive to watch the first Mercury missions, it's very sad.
US manned space exploration has becom
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The most efficient method is going direct from Earth orbit to Mars.
Define "efficient".
In terms of energy, most certainly not.
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It takes barely any more delta v to go to Mars than it does to go to Moon orbit.
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The point was about starting from Earth or starting from the Moon,
not about going to the Moon or going to Mars.
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The SLS and the cis-Lunar station proposed will be useless for going to Mars. The most efficient method is going direct from Earth orbit to Mars.
I disagree. I won't argue for the SLS except to say that NASA does what they are told with the money they are given that is already earmarked for those goals. However, a Lunar station is an important part of the mission to Mars. There is a lot about deep space habitats we don't know. There is a lot of engineering that needs to be applied and have the bugs worked out. There is a lot of research that needs to be done about humans in deep space for long periods with regards to radiation, gravity, sustainabilit
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For the foreseeable future, NASA isn't even planning to go to the moon. They're planning to be a space station in cislunar orbit. It will be mad expensive, will not help in any way with actually getting to the Moon or Mars, isn't even really all that close to the Moon at all, and is generally going to be a huge waste of money. Between the Lunar Gateway and the Space Launch System, NASA won't have any money left over to go to the Moon's surface itself.
Man you should of posted that with a log in. Just from an orbital mechanics standpoint having the way station in earth orbit always was just as good as in lunar orbit and considerably cheaper as well. This goes back to Von Braun's original plans for lunar exploration. Anyway I would be willing to bet the team in Huntsville manages to suck enough money from the NASA budget that even the Lunar Gateway never happens.
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WTF is cislunar orbit and how does it differ from any other lunar orbit?
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We have been lacking in the space exploration for a while now. A lot of people think we can just go to Mars now, while in reality we are in a Space Age Dark Age so we are actually kinda stupid on Space Travel, and we are back to thinking of it in Science fiction terms vs practical.
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We have been lacking in the space exploration for a while now. A lot of people think we can just go to Mars now, while in reality we are in a Space Age Dark Age so we are actually kinda stupid on Space Travel, and we are back to thinking of it in Science fiction terms vs practical.
Meh, technology-wise I think we're in good shape. Even though the people on the ISS haven't been going anywhere we have long term experience with living in space. Basically it's not about where you are, it's about keeping the conditions on the inside habitable. We also have decades more experience sending satellites and probes. What's missing is money, lots and lots of money. Look at Falcon Heavy, there's still just the demo flight and no more heavy launches scheduled this year. There's two next year, but t
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A fee days ago Ariane 5 had its 100ds launch.
So much to "dark space age" ...
"so we are actually kinda stupid on Space Travel" ... landing is hard. And it takes some time to get to the destination. Oh, and if you want to live there, you probably need a habitate ....
Actually we are not. Space travel is super simple
Nevertheless: most of this is centuries old tech.
stepping stone (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's about time! (Score:1)
It's about time somebody stated this. We supposedly went to the moon in the 60's/70's. Haven't been back in nearly 50 years? WTF?
Now they talk about going to Mars! I've always thought that it would make more sense to build a moon base to launch spacecraft further into space. Finally someone else says it.
Because it's easy (Score:1)
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, because they are easy, not because they are hard, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept. Going to Mars we are willing to postpone, which we intend to lose, and let others, do.
Mars Schmars (Score:2)
Mars is interesting, no doubt, but it's not where we should be going.
Venus is Earth's twin.
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Honestly, anybody going anywhere is pretty alright.
Things have been a bit stale on the exploration front since that whole New World thing a couple centuries back.
Re:Mars Schmars (Score:4, Informative)
"Lead would melt on the surface of the planet [Venus], where the temperature is around 872 F (467 C)." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html [space.com]
"At the surface, the atmosphere presses down as hard as water 3,000 feet beneath Earth's ocean." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html [space.com]
Not a twin in those regards.
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Not a twin in those regards.
Venus is still the most similar planet to Earth in our solar system. Mercury, Mars and Pluto (if you want to include it) are barren rocks, and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are all balls of gas.
Curiously, near the poles the Venusian atmosphere is colder than anywhere on Earth, and with a surprisingly low atmospheric pressure. There's probably a thermal sweet spot somewhere on Venus.
https://www.iflscience.com/spa... [iflscience.com]
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Not a twin in those regards.
Well, let's say evil twin.
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On Mars we can more or less readily live, on the surface. ... what would be the purpose of that?
On Venus we can't, we can only live in floating balloons in the skies
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It's an open question if human beings can thrive on a planet like Mars with 38% of the gravity of Earth.
Venus has a bit over 90% of Earth's gravity.
Floating habitats in the Venus atmosphere can be situated at 1 Earth atmosphere of pressure. It's doubtful Mars will be able to have a 1atm atmosphere ever due to its low gravity.
And unless Venus is isothermal, it's theoretically possible to create a heat engine to cool some portion of it to any desired temperature.
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You hardly can visit the Venus surface ... especially if you mean with visit: a human in a suit. Obviously you can drop a probe, or let a robot out of its cave.
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but I don't think a Venus surface suit is against the laws of physics as such. ...
Cough cough
Active cooling is of course needed.
You see, you are smart enough to figure it.
Now if you find a way to have active cooling "in a suit" that can sustain the pressure on Venus with the temperatures there: you likely get a Nobel Prize.
But you can backpedal and we can agree on a kind of "submarine" ...
Radiation protection (Score:1)
Radiation protection is something humans need to figure out. I don't know that we need a moon orbiting space to learn that, but we definitely need to be outside LEO.
We also need some artificial gravity - spin the damn thing most of the time to have .8G to 1.0G - there are lots and lots of reasons for that too.
But spending too much money on the lunar crap to "be there for 50+ yrs" isn't needed. NASA needs to learn to build what you need and nothing more. Their budgets get fucked with every year because the
Earth is a stepping stone to the Moon (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot of places on Earth that are a lot more hospitable than the Moon -- the middle of the Sahara, Antactica, the seafloor -- that are still pretty inaccessible to us. Yeah, we can get there, and with a continuous supply chain we can stay there a while, but we're not going to have a continuous supply chain to Mars. Whoever goes to Mars has to be able to make it there on their own. So we need to be able to at least have permanent self-sustaining settlements in the most inhospitable places on Earth, if we're ever going to have permanent self-sustaining settlements off-Earth.
And by the time we're able to do that, we've eliminated one of the biggest reasons to have people off-Earth in the first place, because if we have "colonies" on Earth that are capable of surviving Martian conditions, they'll also survive everything that could ever happen to Earth short of the death of the sun. Climate change? Nuclear holocaust? Giant meteor? Living in the aftermath of those is a cake walk compared to living on Mars.
Re:Its just Fuel (Score:1)
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Something that hasn't been accomplished at contemporary tech levels in at least a millenia. The task is so difficult, even at pre-industrial revolution tech levels, very few even tried.
And that's here on Earth where air and water are freely available and the most complex parts of a basic life support system was a heavy coat and an iron pot.
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Mars may not be as bad as you imagine compared to the three places on Earth you suggest. Martian soil looks like it could grow various food sources, which could be difficult in the Sahara or Antarctic. You can grow some stuff under the sea, but lack of sunlight is an issue that Mars doesn't have. And the sea is an extremely harsh environment in terms of corrosion and pressure.
Water is also a big issue. Obviously the Antarctic has loads, but the other two do not. At least, not relatively clean, pure water th
We need to have people off planet (Score:1)
You are making some wrong assumptions here. The goal is not to save the human race but the civilisation and Earth itself. Even in the worst case scenarios of asteroid strikes or supervulcano eruption the human race will survive, the human civilization or the earth ecosystem not.
Technologically we can do any time a self-sustainable earth “colony” anywhere on Earth but there is no need for it. Nobody will invest in a self-sustained outpost in Artic or desert when is much cheaper just to haul suppl