You know, I was skeptical at first. But they might actually pull it off this time. If they're already building the prototype here two years later, that shows drive and determination on the level of the old Apollo programs. They might actually pull of a return to the moon! The question is, will that return precipitate a stay this time. Will they, and do people believe they should, establish a permanent base? And will they then go on to part two and head to Mars?
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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I am completely uninterested in a return to the moon unless we build a permanent base there. After everyone got done racing to the South Pole, the race was over; it's not like, two decades later, they did it all over again to prove that they still could.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I think that returning to the moon is an important part of preparing for a trip to mars, whether or not we establish a permanent base there. (Though a base would be nice.) Part of the point of a return to the moon is to test new technology that will be used during manned expeditions to Mars. After all, it is important to make sure all of that stuff works so that astronauts don't get to Mars and go, "Well, the life support system in the lander isn't working right, we'll have to turn around and come back."
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It is essential that we establish a permanent base on the moon this time, including a mining and fabrication facility for carbon, water, metals, glass and semiconductors. It is, in the long run, so much cheaper to build it at the bottom of the lunar gravity well that not staying is among the worst decisions we ever made. I take that back, not going with the intention to stay was among the worst plans. It is true that we did not go with the tools we needed to stay, we needed a space station first and we needed to take different equipment.
I cannot imagine that we will be so foolish this time. Space holds out the promise of survival for the human race, not just the promise of high profits and resources such as energy and metals, but living space and room to grow. Also the first to take charge of space and Lunar resources will have an unassailable and absolutely dominant military advantage. Crowbars of lunar metals from orbital space could take the place of expensive guided missles... (Hammer of Thor) to go without planning to stay is a 'Cut and Run' philosophy I hope we can avoid.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I am completely uninterested in a return to the moon unless we build a permanent base there. After everyone got done racing to the South Pole, the race was over; it's not like, two decades later, they did it all over again to prove that they still could.
The main reason for going is the development of new technologies that always acompanies new endevours in space exploration. The profits returned to the economy by the apollo program, and by any major nasa project in the last 50 years have been, as I recall, many times greater than the initial costs of the projects. I think the value of the space program in dollars alone is incalculable, and the scientific benefit is similarly priceless.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I agree completely with General Sax. It is time that we started moving towards some sort of permanent expansion into space. The only way that we can hope to do that is by putting in place the means to gather resources and actually construct things off of earth. Moving things off of Earth is really prohibitive, but with a significant one time expenditure, we will have the means to build the larger projects that are necessary for any sort of space expansion.
A return for the sake of just going there seems kind of pointless, but if we can use it as a staging point for future efforts it will be worth it.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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We need to split NASA up into two portions, one military and one a 'for profit' organization. It is horrifying that we left the space race in the hands of an organization that could not sell space exploration on its merits or inspire wonder, awe and excitement with the entire universe to offer. That is not mentioning that they managed to fail to make the best men and women in history into heroic icons. Talk about a failure of management.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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quote:Originally posted by General Sax: We need to split NASA up into two portions, one military and one a 'for profit' organization. It is horrifying that we left the space race in the hands of an organization that could not sell space exploration on its merits or inspire wonder, awe and excitement with the entire universe to offer. That is not mentioning that they managed to fail to make the best men and women in history into heroic icons. Talk about a failure of management.
Right now, yeah. Their management is horrible. But NASA USED to be a great example of amazing company culture and on top of that, it really did used to inspire wonder.
I have many ideas on how to bring that back, but that would likely turn into a nonsensical rant at this point. Anyways. All I'm saying is, they used to be really awesome.
posted
I would love to hear them, if we had 'stayed the course' in space exploration we could be kicking rovers out the front porch of the our settlement on Mars by now...
What was the name of the program to build a habitat after Apollo? It was supposed to be the function of the Shuttle to build a modular habitat, not wear itself out putting up a GPS system.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
Sax, without getting into how I would improve the space program if someone were to make me ruler of the world, let me give you this example of how it USED to be:
Back before we'd landed on the moon, someone went around and interviewed all these different employees of the program. They got to a janitor who was mopping the floor, and they asked her, "So what are you doing here?" To which she replied, "I'm helping put a man on the moon."
Makes me sad that it's not like that anymore. I do think that having a big, major, cool-sounding goal (i.e. moon colony) would be a step in the right direction, if they'd just say that was what they wanted to do and try to focus more on that. Right now, it seems like they're vaguley moving in that direction sorta kinda maybe we think.
posted
I applaud this. I think the next goal we need to have is to build facilities on the Moon for the production of fuel, and really turn the Moon into a waystation for a trip to Mars. Ships can be launched faster and easier on the moon, fuel can be produced up there, the research that could take place up there would be amazing.
I think first things first, we need a goal, like pH says. We need that JFK, man on the moon, pie in the sky goal that gives us just a little bit of excitement. Going back to the moon isn't that exciting. Going back with the goal of staying and going further, that IS exciting.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Yeah, I agree with what most people are saying here. Going to the moon again just for the sake of going is sort of ridiculous and pointless. Going to the moon with a different goal, one that will perpetuate space exploration and research, is a lot better and makes more sense.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I hear all the time, "Space exploration is a waste of money" Less often I hear conspiratorial that "The moon landing was faked" I do not even begin to understand where you start educating someone that backward but here I am sure I am preaching to the choir, how do we reach the common man with this spirit?
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
At least with the "Space exploration is a waste of money" people, you can point to past results. Enough things have come from the space program that it can make a clear case for itself.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
yes but who has those figures on hand? I feel like I need a college PHD paper to pass out every time I get in the discussion "One Hundred Economic Benefits of the Space Program" a cost benefit analysis of the money invested in our quest for the moon...
As for the ones who call it a conspiracy theory I wonder how a hundred thousand people who disagree about everything all agreed to cover that up at the height of anti government paranoia...
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
If we're talking about the common everyday person, you probably don't really need to do any sort of exhaustive analysis of the program. It should be sufficient to point out some major examples of ways that the space program has benefited their everyday life. People may not get the whole economic picture, or the scientific merits of the program, but they will get satellite TV, GPS, etc. For the majority of these people, they probably think of space exploration primarily in terms of random probes taking pictures of places they'll never set foot on. Just shaking that perception, I think, would go a long way to dealing with those people.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
But we have those things, the question is where else is the gold, if only solar power had wider acceptence, people would understand that enourmous power is avalable, that we can make almost anything, carry nothing more then carbon in fine powder into space and make it into habitats, we can make glass walls and golden halls on Luna, and a single Near Earth Asteroid could supply us with all the material we need to build a elevator to the stars...
Mylar sacks full of air, balls of ice wraped in solar cell sheets to boil, crack water, filter carbon sort it into fuel tanks and manuevering moduals and drop them on the moon. Turn comets into ice mines, asteroids into metal mines, build habitats... I see it all, so have a hundred visionaries and thousands of readers of science fiction. But I guess I feel almost offended that the vision is inacessable to so many.
Maybe we need a space series on TV that spans a ficitional space program into the solar system to show people the possibilities in a medium they can access.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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quote:Originally posted by General Sax: Maybe we need a space series on TV that spans a ficitional space program into the solar system to show people the possibilities in a medium they can access.
That's a big thing, actually. Plus more positive media coverage. Interestingly enough, if they actually did that new Star Trek series, it'd about coincide with the retirement of the shuttle methinks...
posted
The unmanned space program returns far greater amounts of knowledge per dollar spent than the manned.
It's not going to be cheaper to do silicon fab on the moon. It's not going to be worth it to mine metals on the moon unless we plan to use them on the moon or in space.
If we're going to look for general technological advancement as ROI from government research programs, we'd do far better to spend all the manned space program money on energy research - production, storage, transmission, and conservation of.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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True, but ultimately, space is somewhere that we need to go. Learning how humans deal with space travel, and how to move them safely, is extremely important knowledge for this goal.
quote: It's not going to be cheaper to do silicon fab on the moon. It's not going to be worth it to mine metals on the moon unless we plan to use them on the moon or in space.
That's exactly why we would want to mine and manufacture them there. One of the greatest constraints in space travel is simply getting the mass of of earth. If we already started off of earth, we would be free to make much larger constructions.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:True, but ultimately, space is somewhere that we need to go.
I'm not convinced of this at all. Why do we need to go there?
quote:That's exactly why we would want to mine and manufacture them there. One of the greatest constraints in space travel is simply getting the mass of of earth. If we already started off of earth, we would be free to make much larger constructions.
Which, again, assumes we need to be in space at all.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
You mistakenly assume that metals will be sparse on the moon as they are in the crust from which the moon was formed, (in large part) of the Earth, but you are forgetting that we have thousands of bulls eye's to work with with nickle iron impactors at the center of a significant fraction. You do not need a large percentage of metal when you can dig up a highly concentrated source. There is plenty to get started with.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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quote:You mistakenly assume that metals will be sparse on the moon as they are in the crust from which the moon was formed
You mistakenly assume that I've assumed any such thing. Extraction costs are irrelevant unless we plan to use them on the moon or in space.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Ok, before I dive in to this discussion, let me first just say this: Sax, I agree with you completely in principle. However, there are a couple of things in your posts that I rather feel need addressing.
First off:
quote:It is essential that we establish a permanent base on the moon this time, including a mining and fabrication facility for carbon, water, metals, glass and semiconductors.[quote]
What water? There isn't any. Least ways not really a useable amount. A while back they announced that they'd found small ice deposits in polar craters that were permanently dark. A recent experiment using similar equipment discovered a similar positive result in areas that were sunny, which isn't possible. They now think that that positive was a false one, caused by the nature of the terrain in those craters. If there's any water there its mixed into the regiloth in particulate ice crystals and in no way easy to retrieve. Here's the article on it: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4378
[quote]t is, in the long run, so much cheaper to build it at the bottom of the lunar gravity well that not staying is among the worst decisions we ever made.
It's cheaper to launch things from the bottom of the lunar gravity well, we have no idea whether or not it's cheaper to manufacture and launch from the moon. Most of the raw materials you mentioned are indeed on the moon. But they're mixed into the regiloth and would need to be baked out and processed by an extensive chemical plant before they'd even be in usable raw form. And all that equipment would have to be shipped from Earth. That ain't easy to do.
quote:we needed a space station first
Pet peeve. We don't need any space stations. None, zip, zilch, nada. They're nice for some things, they'd be handy for on orbit construction, but we don't need them. What we need is cheap access to LEO. A craft that's reliable, cheap and has a quick turn around time. We may soon get this, at least for the light lift class, in SpaceShipTwo and SpaceShipThree. But for heavy lifters we'll probably have to make do with the new Ares Nasa's building.
quote:Space holds out the promise of survival for the human race, not just the promise of high profits and resources such as energy and metals, but living space and room to grow.
Cheers. I agree with you completely here.
quote:Also the first to take charge of space and Lunar resources will have an unassailable and absolutely dominant military advantage. Crowbars of lunar metals from orbital space could take the place of expensive guided missles...
Depends on how 'take charge' we're talking about. If they just get a Moon base, that'd be about useless in terms of military value. The reason we never built a base on the moon from which to launch nuclear missiles is because people realized that the best time from launch back to Earth was about 3 days. By that point... there wouldn't be a point. Either everybody would already be dead in an all out nuclear war, the target would have moved if we're talking about tactical nukes, or the enemy would have spotted them and would be ready and waiting to shoot them down.
There's not that much metal on the moon. And most of it would burn up in the atmosphere. Talk about waste! It'd be highly expensive to process and then you're just gonna let it burn up? Crazy! No we'll stick to guided missiles. No to mention the fact that it's cheaper to launch stuff from the moon. Not free.
But now we have to back up to that analysis of cheaper. Most of the mass of a rocket comes from the fuel. In most rockets, the metals that form the body, fuel tanks, crew quarters and such accounts from less than 10% of the mass. The other 90% is fuel, usually liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Sometimes liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Well hold up now. If there's no water on the Moon there's no oxygen... there's no easily accessible hydrogen... there's no rocket fuel. That would still have to be shipped from Earth. Well that means we can manufacture 10% of the rocket's mass on the moon... the cost of which we can hardly predict now but I'd wager it wouldn't be cheap... and the other 90% would still have to be shipped from Earth. Now that's hardly an improvement.
Personally I'm not a fan of a Moon base. I think a Moon base is for later in the course of colonizing space. When we're able to laso a commet and move it to lunar orbit to supply the base with water, then we can set up a Moon base and have it be worth something. As a testing ground for an eventual trip to Mars I suppose it works well enough, assuming we do actually go on to Mars.
ricree101:
quote:The only way that we can hope to do that is by putting in place the means to gather resources and actually construct things off of earth.
Yes, construction in orbit is nice. But the problem is, you'd still have to move all that stuff up from Earth. Or the moon, but if it's the Moon you're still supply the darn base with water from Earth, as I pointed out above. It's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. The real thing we need to do is to find cheaper transport to Earth orbit. The best way to do that would be to make rockets reusable instead of this one shot deal. The shuttle isn't really reusable. The vast majority of its important systems (the rockets that lift it up there, and the tank that holds all the fuel for it) are a one shot deal. And the stuff we do reuse gets so beat to heck and back that it takes months to examine it, repair it and reassemble it with the new parts. The end result is that each launch costs half a billion. Heck, a fully expendable Delta IV rocket can lift about as much as the shuttle can and costs 1/4th the price! We should just be using that!
While a personal favorite idea of mine is the construction of cruiser craft in orbit that would never have to land on the surface of a planet and would be by and large self sufficient, basically space stations with engines, even I have to admit that that wouldn't really be feasible until we have a cheaper way to get to orbit. So what we really need to concentrate on right now is developing cheaper access to orbit.
quote:We need to split NASA up into two portions, one military and one a 'for profit' organization. It is horrifying that we left the space race in the hands of an organization that could not sell space exploration on its merits or inspire wonder, awe and excitement with the entire universe to offer. That is not mentioning that they managed to fail to make the best men and women in history into heroic icons. Talk about a failure of management.
Talk about an over simplification. In it's heyday NASA was BRILLITANT at doing all of the things you mentioned above. It's only after we landed on the Moon that people stopped caring and NASA kinda stopped being good at what it did. I could go into a very long rant and explanation on exactly what happened and what NASA's been up to for the last couple of decades. Instead I'll just point you to a book that does it much better than I would: read Lost In Space by Greg Klerkx.
quote:It was supposed to be the function of the Shuttle to build a modular habitat
Actually the modular habitat came about as a way to give the shuttle something to do. Cause it really didn't have anything to do before that aside from shuttle satellites up. NASA didn't really have a specific function in mind when they built the thing. They just thought it would give them publicity and keep them in existence after the Moon landing. Again, read Lost in Space.
quote:I think the next goal we need to have is to build facilities on the Moon for the production of fuel and really turn the Moon into a waystation for a trip to Mars. Ships can be launched faster and easier on the moon, fuel can be produced up there, the research that could take place up there would be amazing.
New flash: There's not as much water up there as we thought (see above article). Ooops. Looks like a fuel production plant on the Moon isn't so hot... Of course the only way to be sure would be land someone in one of the craters that registered positive for water with a flash light and a number of sensors and experiments to test the regiloth up there for the stuff. So yeah, lets land a few men up there again. But lets not get our hearts set on a colony just yet.
quote: But we have those things, the question is where else is the gold, if only solar power had wider acceptance, people would understand that enormous power is available, that we can make almost anything, carry nothing more then carbon in fine powder into space and make it into habitats, we can make glass walls and golden halls on Luna, and a single Near Earth Asteroid could supply us with all the material we need to build a elevator to the stars...
Sax, your drooling. Stop daydreaming the distant future. That convinces no one. Believe me, I've tried it. If you want to convince people show them whats possible NOW with the CURRENT technologies. And don't go all fantastic on them. No one wants or cares about golden halls on the Moon. That just brings bad science fiction of the 50s to mind.
Ok, enough with the negative, how about some positive, eh?
I don't think going to the Moon will do us much good. I'm cautiously optimistic about going back to the moon just cause it means NASA's working on human space flight again and cause it's somewhere beyond Earth orbit (and in the process will get a handy dandy... if expensive, new heavy lifter out of the deal). But I'm fair certain that once we get there we're gonna find little of actual value.
So what should we be concentrating on? Mars. We're pretty much 95% sure that there used to be a ton of water on its surface long ago. Where'd it all go? It couldn't have all just boiled off the surface. The gravity is lower than Earth's is but the escape velocity is still higher than the velocities that water molecules can typically obtain. That means it still has to be there some where. We know there's some water fairly easily accessible in the northern polar cap. Certainly enough for an exploratory base to find where the rest of the water is or how much there is in the polar cap. The plan NASA is currently using, rather heavily modified, was developed by Robert Zubrin and David Baker. It's called the Mars Direct. For more information take a look at the wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct. It would work, with current technology and would set us up with the beginnings of a colony on Mars. It also skips the Moon step that NASA decided to add in. Personally, I think this is the way to go. And if NASA presses forward with its current plan I don't think the Moon side trip will last long.
Unfortunately that's the optimistic side of me hoping that the Moon will be only a slight side trip on the way to the Mars via Mars Direct. The pessimistic side of me is fair certain that we'll get to the Moon and discover that there is no water there to speak of. With out water the cost of a Moon base will sky rocket. Rather than simply cutting the Moon base part out of the plan, congress will cut the plan. Instead of going on to Mars and forgetting about the Moon, congress will use that as an excuse to cut the entire program and send NASA back into the rut its only just trying to climb out of.
So I guess to conclude I'll say that I'm trying my best to remain cautiously cheerful about NASA's new energy and plan. But knowing NASA's past, staying as such is rather hard. I'm not getting my hopes up too far just yet. I'll let myself get my hopes up if one of two things happen: we get the Moon and find water, or we get to the Moon and find no water, shrug, say “Oh well” and immediately start concentrating on going straight to Mars.
posted
Given that private companies are well on track to going there, it would behoove some government to be able to do so as well in order to enforce laws and the like.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote: Which, again, assumes we need to be in space at all.
You are simply a fool then, I will deal with you as such and try to remidy your affliction.
Human survival depends on space travel. There is not a single but a multitude of catastophies that are certain to occur that can set the human race back to flint tools, if not set the evolutionary picture back to wide open. Of course there is also the certainty of solar catastrophe.
So you have judged the human race to be not worth saving and investing in.
Further there is no check on population growth in most of the world (except AIDS and car bombs) and the demographics of poverty will be harder and harder for mankind (and us) to avoid. We are in a period of historical significance with the wealth and technical potential to do the job, if we can find the will.
If we do not, then a larger and larger portion of our resources will be devoted to dog paddling with our head above the water. I believe in the future of our species, I believe we will be the saviors of our biosphere. I know these things are possible, I believe that enough of us are not fools to make it happen.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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quote:The unmanned space program returns far greater amounts of knowledge per dollar spent than the manned.
Dag, theirs a good reason for that appearance. But it doesn't have to be that way. The reason rests on one simple problem: the shuttle. All manned spaceflight right now is done through the shuttle. The shuttle is four times as expensive as the an expendable booster of similar launch capacity. The robots are launched from said expendables. Remove the shuttle, and a lot of that dollar advantage will vanish.
If we succeed in landing people on Mars for a year using the Mars direct the data they return will be 100 or 1000 times that of what the rovers have returned. What takes the rovers days or months they could do in hours or days. People are more agile, smarter, infinitely more independent, more versatile and can move faster than robots can. The Mars direct predicts the cost of a single Manned Mars mission at about $30 billion. The current Mars Rover mission has lasted two years and cost about $850 million. So that means the cost ratio is about 35/1. I'd say a manned human mission could produce 100 times the science of the rover mission easy.
quote:It's not going to be cheaper to do silicon fab on the moon. It's not going to be worth it to mine metals on the moon unless we plan to use them on the moon or in space.
Cheers, Dag. You beat me to it and said it much more concisely. The advantage of space resources doesn't come from the moon however, it comes from asteroids. Many asteroids are basically floating balls of solid metal. Including many rare Earth metals. I'm going to refer to Robert Zubrin's book Entering Space here, because he says what I want to say here much better than I would:
quote:For example, in his book Space Resources, Professor John Lewis of the University of Arizona considers a single small type S asteroid just 1 km in diameter - a run of the mill asteroid. The body would have a mass of around 2 billion tonnes, of which 200 million tonnes would be iron, 30 million tones high quality nickel, 1.5 million tonnes the strategic metal cobalt, and 7,500 tonnes a mixture of platinum group metals whose average value, at current prices [in 1999], would be in the neighborhood of $20,000 per kilogram. That adds up to $150 billion just for the platinum group stuff! There is little doubt about this -- we have lots of samples of asteroids in the form of meteorites. As a rule, meteoritic iron contains between 6 percent and 30 percent nickel, between 0.5 percent and 1 percent cobalt and platinum group metal concentrations at least ten times the best terrestrial ore.
In short asteroids are friggin gold mines. We know there are at least 5000 asteroids of that type and size in the belt. Who knows how many more there are out there that we haven't spotted and analyzed yet. I'd say it'd be worth it to mine one of those and move some of that material back down to Earth.
quote:If we're going to look for general technological advancement as ROI from government research programs, we'd do far better to spend all the manned space program money on energy research - production, storage, transmission, and conservation of.
Well here's a trick. The two are very closely linked. Fusion research and space propulsion/power research have been buddy buddy for a long time. Because they're pretty much studying the same things. Much of the money that goes toward the space program (mind you not necesarily the manned part) does indeed go into energy research. And here's the real thing: the form of fusion they're researching on Earth right now isn't really clean fusion. It does produce some radioactive waste in the form of the chamber walls of the reactor. The reaction is Tritium Deuterium: H3 + H2 -> He4 + neutron - water with weight 3, water weight 2 to regular helium plus a high energy neutron. That neutron goes into the wall of the reactor chamber and irradiates it.
There's another form of fusion that we can't work on because the fuel isn't available on Earth unless we produce it (which is expensive). The reaction is deuterium + He3 -> He4 + H+. It's completely clean. The proton that results would cycle back into the reaction as heated plasma to keep it going. It couldn't escape the magnetic field used to contain the reaction. While He3 isn't available on the Earth it's available in small quantities on the Moon and in massive amounts in the outer solar system.
But you're right Dag. We do need to work on energy stuff. I'd personally prefer we work concurrently on energy and manned space travel. That way by the time we get to the point of needing He3 for clean fusion, we'll have an established presence in space capable of supplying it.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:You are simply a fool then, I will deal with you as such and try to remidy your affliction.
Sax... please... stop talking. Now.
quote:Human survival depends on space travel. There is not a single but a multitude of catastophies that are certain to occur that can set the human race back to flint tools, if not set the evolutionary picture back to wide open. Of course there is also the certainty of solar catastrophe.
True enough. Sax's talking about asteroids and the sun going red giant. He's also talking probably distant future.
quote:So you have judged the human race to be not worth saving and investing in.
No he didn't. Dag said we'd be better off researching energy stuff. There is, if I read that correctly, an implied first in there. The sun won't go red giant for at least 4.5 billion years and most people assume an asteroid collision big enough to wipe us out is highly unlikely any time soon. Technically they're right. I'm guessing that Dag isn't opposed to going into space ever. Just doesn't think it's really worth the cost just now. Did I translate correctly Dag?
quote:Further there is no check on population growth in most of the world (except AIDS and car bombs) and the demographics of poverty will be harder and harder for mankind (and us) to avoid. We are in a period of historical significance with the wealth and technical potential to do the job, if we can find the will.
If we do not, then a larger and larger portion of our resources will be devoted to dog paddling with our head above the water. I believe in the future of our species, I believe we will be the saviors of our biosphere. I know these things are possible, I believe that enough of us are not fools to make it happen.
*holds head in hands* Oh brother. And there goes the forum. Sax... it's a little more complicated than that. We have a window right now sure. That window could last 100 years... 1000 years... with the developement of certain pipe dream technologies maybe forever, who knows? That's not an argument that wins hearts and minds to space exploration. Specially when you start by calling them 'fools'.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:I thought this had already been mentioned, but they're retiring the shuttle in a few years...
Right, but the cost ratios Dag was talking about are due to the shuttle. And they're replacing it with the Ares. An expendable, heavily lift booster. It'll be able to lift more and will be much cheaper than the shuttle for it. But it'll still be a one shot deal, and rather expensive.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
I have a simple come back for moon landing nay sayers: "The Soviets" pwned.
Claification: The Soviets were perfectely capble of tracking the lunar landings and would have milled the propagandamill to its fullest had the lunar landings been faked.
People, yes it would be nice to make a permanant base on the moon it is more of a distraction we could within 2-5 years get to mars at a cost of under 20 billion dollars a drop in the bucket for any first world economy. We can modify a Saturn V booster to carry a capsul big enough for a 4 man crew and all the supplies they'ld need to make the trip there, infact for a little bit more money and effort we could get nuclear boosters, it owuldnt make it go noticably faster but it WOULD allow us to carry more tonnage.
We send 1 SATV empty but ocmpletely automated so that when it lands it converts the atmospehre to rocket fuel to fuel the ERV or Earth Recovery Vehical, and then we send a second SATV with ppl in it, they can epxlore mars for practically 600 days with limited need for refueling, even if the first ERV didnt work right a second one could be send arrive in 180 days and they could leave, te supplies in the firt 2 SATV's is more then enough.
I also like to point out that there is nothing unethical about travelin in a capsol, you can fit laptops, LCD screen, perosnal affects the crew could send emails and recieve them and watch mvoies and play game or like unnormal people busy themselves wiht work over the trip, 600% more confortable then th 3 week journies between Franc to Quebec in cramped galleons.
COnclusion: Our last priority should be going to the moon, we need next to little infastructure to do this, off the shelf supplies could make up 90% of a Mars Direct mission, if we start trying to make the moon our first goal we'll get bogged down in bureaucratic bull*** and escalating costs until oh knows cancelled.
Get to Mars now, skip the moon for later.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Oh appears someone already cited Mars direct hehe go figure.
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quote:I also like to point out that there is nothing unethical about travelin in a capsol...
Here's a problem: your body atrophies in weightless space, and exposure to cosmic radiation over a period of multiple years (as would be necessary on a Mars round-trip) may cause permanent brain damage.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Nopers tom, the engineer who outlined the Mars direct plan neately debunked those concerns, A) 180 days with excersize and possibly a spinning capsol can negate the atrophy, and then Mars's gravity is less then Earths so it is easier with a trip to Mars to recover from the transition to near 0 G to near 1 G.
Also Mars's atmo is an atmo and will shield the astronaughts from deadly radiation, any radiaton left is to serve an analogy near enough to what humans endure on a daily basis.
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Blayne, I wouldn't call what Zubrin did "neatly debunking them". He really sorta handwaved them away.
The atrophy thing would be easy enough to handle. You spin the ship on the end of a tether the other end of which would be attached to one of the spent fuel containers.
Radiation isn't so easy to deal with. People have looked at using magnetic fields to simulate the Earth's magentic field. But there are issues with generating one strong enough. The radiation coming from the sun is very high energy. Personally I think the magnetic field solution could use a little more examination than its been given thus far.
The other way to deal with it is to just say "Well the amount they'd absorb on a trip is still with in the safe zone, barely." Which it is. Then give them a safe area from a solar flare (which would knock them over the safe line if they didn't have one). Safe zone being a lead lined area inside the ship.
IMHO, a Mars mission is definately worth the risk from radiation. And I'm not the only one, I doubt they'll have trouble finding volunteers. I think radiation's probably just a risk we're gonna have to grit our teeth and let those willing take for now.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Also Mars's atmo is an atmo and will shield the astronaughts from deadly radiation...
Blayne, you're looking at a four to six year round-trip. That's roughly equivalent to getting four X-rays a day for six years.
Believe me, scientists have identified cosmic radiation as one of the most serious hazards of interplanetary travel and orbital habitation. While magnetic shielding may stop most of the stuff, there's still enough high-energy radiation floating around there that you'd still basically be writing off the astronauts you sent out.
That's not necessarily unacceptable, since we're talking about volunteers. But it's a life sentence.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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This thread is very interesting, I'm enjoying it.
And thanks to General Sax for making it so evident you're someone to ignore! Saves me some reading time.
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Dagonee,
I believe we 'need to be' in space but not necessarily in any concrete short-term political or scientific way. I just think it's important for humanity to have some 'breathing room', a frontier really. For all of human history, except the very recent past, humanity has had many frontiers and unknowns. It's an emotional, perhaps romantic notion on my part, but I think it's important and the lack of it will not be truly appreciated until we have it back again.
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Furthermore, I'm not a fan of going to the moon for the sake of doing it either. While I think it'd be a good thing, I do think it needs a purpose-such as a permanent moon base, even if for the time being it was an unmanned permanent moon base once built.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Blayne, you're looking at a four to six year round-trip. That's roughly equivalent to getting four X-rays a day for six years.
Believe me, scientists have identified cosmic radiation as one of the most serious hazards of interplanetary travel and orbital habitation. While magnetic shielding may stop most of the stuff, there's still enough high-energy radiation floating around there that you'd still basically be writing off the astronauts you sent out.
That's not necessarily unacceptable, since we're talking about volunteers. But it's a life sentence.
Tom, it's not a six year round trip. The trip they're looking at right now is more in the range of 3 to 4 years. Estimates for time in space range from one year total (6 months there, 6 months back) to 2 years total (1 year, one way). The plan most often posited suggests staying for about 18 months, 2 years at the most.
According to this article: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_dangers_040120.html that would mean the astronauts would absorb about 1.6 seiverts of radiation. NASA regulations limit people to between 1 and 3 sieverts of radiation, depending on a number of factors. So yes, that puts it near the limit, but not over. It wouldn't be a one way trip, but it would mean that the astronaut probably wouldn't be allowed outside of the Earth's magnetic field again. Which doesn't eliminate Space Station visits.
Also there are a number of ways to reduce the amount of radiation absorbed: thicker/heavier space craft walls, magnetic fields, magnetically shielded sleeping areas.
Radiation is certainly an issue and not something to be written off quite so readily as Blayne does, but its not a show stopper.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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A few thoughts as someone who works in the aerospace industry, and whos senior design project was 50 engineers working on a series of manned missions to mars.
1) Zubrin is a brilliant idea guy, and he has made any number of great suggestions and contributions to the field. However, his actual numbers are generally laughable. Zubrin's "agressive estimates" are generally 10-100 times more efficient than anything we currently have operating.
for comparison: generally a reasonable assumption when estimating something like mass of electronics in the next 5 years is 10-20% better than current. Zubrin tends to take that a factor of magnitude further to make his ideas look tastier. Some of the time this may be somewhat justified, but in many cases it's patently wrong.
That being said, I still think ideas based around the concepts of Mars Direct are our best steps forward from here.
2)Radiation research. No one really knows what interplanetary radiation exposure will do to living tissue, much less human beings. About half the literature out there claims that we could probably make a 3 month journey to mars with only some exess protection (safe room) to hide from occasional solar flares. The other half would argue that the entire crew would be dead by the time they made it there even if encased in a 3-meter thick case of aluminum to shield them. The problem is that this is a very very very complex science that has almost no practical knowledge base.
And there's no one metric to measure things by, you have to take into account energy levels of exposure, time exposed, energy levels of the particles, etc etc... much research needs to be done before we can concievably send humans out of the van allen belts for an appreciable amount of time.
3) Nuclear propulsion. everyone talks about needing cheaper access to space, which really boils down to cheaper/more efficient propulsion. In any conceivable form this means we need to re-start programs like the SP-100 (nuclear-powered heavy-lift vehicles as well as inter-planetary engines)
ISP is the rocketry equivalent of your car's mpg, with chemical propulsion (all our current launch vehicles) the absolute best you can hope to get is something like 400 seconds, and the space shuttle main engine (SSME) get's something like 360 seconds (really close to the max). Consider that most rockets are closer to 300, and many orbital propulsion systems are more like 200 seconds.
However, if you start modifying things like the SSME-type designs to heat the propellant through a nuclear reactor, then you can get something like 1000 seconds or more of ISP (at least double or triple our current max) and lets just say, when you double the fuel efficiency of a rocket that is 90% fuel, it makes a big difference.
4) As for reusable rockets, they don't really get you much. In order to make a rocket reusable it ends up weighing quite a bit more, which means it has to be bigger to carry the extra fuel to push that extra mass, which means it has to be bigger to account for that extra fuel, which means that it has to have more fuel, which means it has to be bigger... and so the viscious cycle continues.
5) Manufacturing things in space. I develop satellites for a living. Unmanned satellites, using parts and designs that have largely been aroud for 10-20 years. It takes thousands of workers and massive facilities to create these satellites, and years to make even an "off the shelf" design.
consider things like the slowness of doing even simple tasks on the space station, and add in the complexity of manufacturing electronics for exampe, and the need for testing, etc... despite the mass savings available in the distant future, manufacturing much on-orbit or on the moon is highly infeasible. Processing propellant from Martian atmosphere is largely another story, since it is mostly automated, and doesn't require the same kind of manufacturing that Sax is referring to for the moon base.
6) Cost-benefit: I'm sure people can come up with detailed numbers of how much space exploration has made in profit etc, but it's largely not going to be compelling for the public. a) NASA doesn't actually make much money off any of their offshoot developments, so the cost of space exploration is still quite high. Sure DirectTV is making a lot of money, and some of that is going back to the government in the form of taxes, but that doesn't mean that it cost any less to launch Apollo 7. b) Many of the developments can be largely chalked up as fringe benefits to most people. if you start mentioning Tang and satellite TV and tempur-pedic beds, people won't be overly wowed... a lot of what has come from the space race has been more in the form of useful and interesting gadgetry to the masses rather than critical developments like the internal combustion engine for example.
7) I'm all for continued space exploration (to a certain extent I rely on it for a living) but it is a costly prospect that doesn't have much in the way of immediate rewards, and is a very very very complicated endeavor, with many pitfalls.
Posts: 1038 | Registered: Feb 2006
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Men could do a great deal of work on the moon that is not precise: bricks, tunnels, glass. On the crude so to speak. Space Space Space, inflate a bag, build a bunker inside and pile on dirt. Mining is the same way, it can start out crude high grading and refine to gas conversion and building up to plastics and so on. The day of self sufficiency is far away, but it does not get any closer if you wait to start. A lunar mineral survey would be one of the jobs for the permanent mission of course, you cannot know what is there until you kick over the rocks.
I picture a block house like those used to sink the piles for the great bridges, the men could sink a shaft, shore it with glass use common light metal alloys (magnesium, chromium, etc) to frame it up, and a multi story underground facility results. Cap it move the block, sink another shaft, land another team. If there is no water, you make it. Fill aquariums with algae and fish...
Yes a rail gun and a fuel depot and a place to build space ships are all on the list, but it needs to start out with a wild west mentality. Grow fiber and build comfortable wicker chairs, it comes down to having creative men and women on sight with a loose enough set of options and solid support to fall back on.
It also would be worth billions as reality TV.
We know there is ample carbon on the moon, and that will be the most important building material in the next generation. So between the abundant energy and material, the rest is just a barrier to entry into a very profitable business.
Posts: 475 | Registered: Aug 2006
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I read awhile back that scientists were working on a sling shot. No fuel or engine, just a giant fulcrum on Earth that flung crap out towards the moon, and another one on the moon to grab it, and to send containers back to earth. How we doing on that?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I would be entirely in favor of shunting the money from the border fence to space exploration. I'd rather we piss away our tax dollars doing something potentially useful in the long run. And as far as technology off-shoots go, I'm figuring billions spent in space technology is going to reap more benefits than billions spent on fencing.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Considering that I think an esitmate of the worlds total militayr budget during ay the 70's was 900,000,000,000 pounds I cant think of a better way of spending money wated on the military to something like space exploration.
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Reality tv really isn't all that lucrative in a direct sense. The benefits come from making the person/family/cause/whatever more high-profile. It's just a really, really big advertisement. You don't get paid that much to do it.
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