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I thought this would make for an interesting discussion, especially on a scifi writer's forum. I like to imagine that in the future, we'll get to the point as a race where we find ways of traveling through the galaxy and colonizing new worlds. I'm an optimist, to quote Steven Hawking, but maybe that's not being realistic.
What do you guys think? What's the next step for us and do you think we'll ever leave this planet? Technology is evolving rapidly, but is it heading in the right direction? China started up their own space program a few years back and they're trying to make their own space station, which could put us in another space race, and that could kickstart us back into the direction we need to head.
Personally, I hope we make the leap, and I hope it doesn't take another fifty years. It was so long ago that we went to the moon. When we got there, we just kind of stopped and gave up, as if that was the end of the line. Can you imagine where we would be if we had kept going with that same momentum?
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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There's lots to explore still in our solar system. I'm eager to see humans set foot on Mars and Pluto.
Posts: 399 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I've read too much near-future sci-fi to not want us to eventually colonize the Moon and Mars and keep pushing further. I'm still like a little kid when it comes to the prospect of solar system exploration. The grown-up part of me knows that we have plenty of problems to be solved on our own planet, but I do still hope that somehow we'll be selfish and disregard that and go back to space anyway.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Can you imagine where we would be if we had kept going with that same momentum?
The poorhouse?
As opposed to right now? Three wars have bled our economy dry. If you ask me, scientific endevours might hurt our pockets in the short run, but long term you can't argue that the results would probably do much more for us than what we're doing right now.
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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Actually seeing as how NASA gets barely any money and a much larger amount of our taxes go into the military and foreign affairs, I seriously doubt the validity of what you're saying.
Facts:
-NASA receives less than half of a percent of the annual US budget. In dollars, that's 15 billion dollars a year on average.
-The military's budget has gone up considerably over the past decade, so much so that annually, we are spending roughly 1-1.5 Trillion dollars. The more we continue to spread out our forces, the more we end up spending.
It seems to me that the difference is fairly obvious. If we had invested our funds in science and space, we probably would have something to show for our cashflow. As it stands, right now, all we have are three wars and a broken economy.
I know several people who work at NASA and they are doing much more than simply trying to land on other planets. There's a project entirely concerned with the weather where hundreds of satelites are being used to predict massive storms and tsunamis that could save millions of lives. They're looking at trying to get to Mars, of course, but also asteroids and the moon. They hope to harvest valuable resources from them that would be otherwise difficult to obtain on the Earth. Their only complaint is that they don't have the resources they need to get the job done faster. Why? Because people can't look more than ten years into the future.
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I think the only way that space travel will become feasible is through a completely unexpected breakthrough technology, in which case the technology could be stumbled upon ten years from now or 500 years from now.
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In all honesty the "dont spend money on space exploration when we have so much more to spend it on earth" are fairly ridiculous; there's decreasing suck and increasing awesome. Space exploration increases awesome.
We could with entirely off the shelf technologies, half of them 40 years old get to Mars and begin terraforming it RIGHT NOW and get it all started with 60 billion$, thats a drop in the bucket for the US, Russia or China.
quote:Actually seeing as how NASA gets barely any money and a much larger amount of our taxes go into the military and foreign affairs, I seriously doubt the validity of what you're saying.
I don't see what that has to do with what I said, which is that that there's no way we could have afforded to keep spending money on the space program for the last fifty years like we did during the Apollo program.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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I'm not trying to dismiss your idea completely, because we certainly spent money on it, but it wasn't nearly as much as what we've spent on the military or how much we're even spending on the program right now.
quote:After the last lunar landing, total funding for the Apollo program was about $19,408,134,000. The budget allocation was 34 percent of the NASA budget.
That's 13 years of missions and research which accumulated to just over 19 billion. After altering those numbers for inflation, it comes out to the same average we're using right now, which is about 15 billion dollars a year. So again, I am going to have to diagree with you.
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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posted
Interesting. It's not the first time I've been wrong today. Maybe it will be the last.
On a related note, I had an engineering professor say that it would be impossible for us to send a man to the moon today. (Well, actually, this was 15 years ago. But still.)
His argument was that as a nation, we are far less tolerant of risk and death than we were then, and now require that manned space flight be much safer than it was during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions. (the Challenger explosion notwithstanding). Given the exponential costs of lifting heavier and heavier payloads, among other engineering factors, he was of the opinion that the United States, even if it bent its whole economy to the task, would not be able to afford what it would take to safely send astronauts back to the moon.
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Your professor was half right, at least as far as NASA's reasoning goes. Granted, he told you that 15 years ago, so maybe things have changed, but here is what I've been told by my associates at NASA regarding the moon.
The reason we haven't been back yet is simply because the technology we used 50 years ago no longer exists. The computers and equipment we had back then aren't being manufactured anymore. As a result, we're now left with rebuilding everything from scratch, and that's the major hold up. If we had continued on the momentum we originally had when we went to the Moon, we would have kept going back and we'd probably be doing other interesting things by this point. However, interest died down and the technology got phased out while NASA focused its resources on other endevours, not bothering to keep up with their research. You can thank the leaps in computer technology for that.
Project Constellation was supposed to get us back to the moon (this was abandoned recently), but because it was taking so long and because commercial companies like Virgin were working on it, too, NASA decided to sidestep that mission and focus on going to Mars and asteroids, so now we have an entirely different goal.
Time will tell if we reach that goal, however, but who knows when that will be.
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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quote:Originally posted by Jeff C.: If we had continued on the momentum we originally had when we went to the Moon, we would have kept going back and we'd probably be doing other interesting things by this point.
I think the technology that will allow us to colonize the planets within our solar system will be different than the technology that takes us to other solar systems, in the same way that the technology that I use to travel through town is different than the technology that I use to travel to different countries. Continuing the momentum we originally had would have taken us to other nearby planets, but I don't think it would have taken us to other solar systems, let alone galaxies. For that to happen, some revolutionary concept will need to be discovered (or maybe it has and we just haven't realized the magnitude of it yet). This is why I think we need to continue the funding of these types of things; we never know when we will stumble upon The Next Big Thing. But I don't think that investing heavily into one specific area will be what causes us to discover the key to interstellar travel.
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Project Constellation was cancelled by the Obama administration and Congress, not NASA. And we're not going to make it to Mars or any asteroids any time soon with the funding problems NASA is experiencing right now.
Posts: 1658 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Can we get more people to agree to tax the rich more if we include budgetary salvation for NASA in the plan? What's that even called, Appeal To Spacenerdery? Whatever, can we do that?
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All though, if you wanted to give some voluntary taxes of your own to NASA, I'll bet something could be arranged...
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quote:Originally posted by Rappin' Ronnie Reagan: Project Constellation was cancelled by the Obama administration and Congress, not NASA. And we're not going to make it to Mars or any asteroids any time soon with the funding problems NASA is experiencing right now.
That's true, actually. I didn't want to get into the details about it, but yes, that is what happened. Obama's admin actually wanted to do more than just cancel the project, however. Luckily they were able to agree on a new direction for NASA.
Does anyone know the projected time they're hoping to get to Mars by? I know there's a plan but I can't remember what it is.
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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You know, it's funny you should say that. The Chinese actually wanted to join our joint mission and be a part of what we're doing in space, but we turned them down. They were all like "Fine, be that way. We'll do it all by ourselves!" And now they are! Just goes to show you don't turn down free help. Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by Jeff C.:
quote:Originally posted by Rappin' Ronnie Reagan: Project Constellation was cancelled by the Obama administration and Congress, not NASA. And we're not going to make it to Mars or any asteroids any time soon with the funding problems NASA is experiencing right now.
That's true, actually. I didn't want to get into the details about it, but yes, that is what happened. Obama's admin actually wanted to do more than just cancel the project, however. Luckily they were able to agree on a new direction for NASA.
Does anyone know the projected time they're hoping to get to Mars by? I know there's a plan but I can't remember what it is.
posted
I'm hoping an entrepreneur would make a prison and a retirement home on the moon.
The prison because how could you escape?
The retirement home because low gravity adds years to your life. (eta) Makes blood flow easier, makes mobility super easy even for those who couldn't walk in earth normal grav, etc.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I'm hoping an entrepreneur would make a prison and a retirement home on the moon.
The prison because how could you escape?
The retirement home because low gravity adds years to your life. (eta) Makes blood flow easier, makes mobility super easy even for those who couldn't walk in earth normal grav, etc.
I wonder how many people would commit a crime just to get sent to the moon. I think I would.
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Hell yeah, me too. That would be the best prison sentence ever! Or the best retirement ever. Either way, really.
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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As far as deep space travel is concerned, I do not see anyone doing this until one of two things happen:
1) Some sort of suspended animation or stasis technology is created so people do not age during a trip that would take thousands upon thousands of years.
2) FTL drives are invented.
I'd say #1 is more likely to happen, but who knows. For all we know they could be testing out an FTL drive in Area 51 as we speak.
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Area 51 is where the government delivers the gold bribe to keep the aliens off our world...pfft, everyone knows that!
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Geraine, what about relativistic space travel? It might still be hard, because of the humongous energy levels involved, but it's certainly a heck of a lot easier than FTL travel. Considering FTL is in all likelihood impossible.
Btw, people, does anyone have a decent calculation for the actual energy to get a fairly large spaceship to relativistic speeds? I know it's a lot, but I can't remember just how much.
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quote:Btw, people, does anyone have a decent calculation for the actual energy to get a fairly large spaceship to relativistic speeds?
A ballpark for the energy is, about as much as the energy contained in its rest mass (mc^2). Fuel-wise, it would depend a lot on how powerful the thruster is.
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I always felt like, much as was depicted in OSC's Worthing Saga, if stasis technology was invented it would have much more use planet side than for long-distance travel. Not that this changes your point just a thought. Though it's hardly inconsistent with NASA's history to think what they develop for space travel becomes directly or indirectly a part of everyday technology.
posted
the 9th or 11th generation magnetoplasmic high velocity high impulse drives of the future could realistically attain those speeds with a few generations later fusion drives. (The key is to use early fusion for easier stuff like tritium to help fuse stuff like argon-krypton reactions and lithium)
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Some fun space-travel related ballpark numbers to think about:
Time to get pretty close to light speed accelerating at 1g: 1 year.
Distance traveled during acceleration: 0.5 light years. (This is 800 times further than the distance to Pluto.)
Energy required to get a 1000kg automobile close to light speed: 9e19 J. (From Destineer's post.)
Gallons of gasoline my car would have to burn: 2.5e13 (mileage may vary) (this is about 3 times the volume of Lake Mead, when full)
Price for said gasoline: $100,000,000,000,000
And that completely ignores the fact that you'd have to be carrying along all that fuel. Maybe if we had near constant in-flight refueling for the full 2.8 trillion mile trip . . . .
Posts: 15 | Registered: Sep 2010
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Gas is fairly inefficient and artificially expensive; while fusion motors could be fairly dense, and much cheaper and in some cases the fuel could be acquired during the trip.
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quote:Can you imagine where we would be if we had kept going with that same momentum?
The poorhouse?
You do know that money spent on the space program isn't actually spent IN space, right? It's from an economic point of view similar to military spending or public works programs.
Posts: 305 | Registered: Jan 2008
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Blayne Bradley
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Space funding I'm sure does give us some return though, I would consider it closer to more akin to science funding.
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I could have sworn that NASA made the country money with it's patents like velcro...but I couldn't find a source, so I can't say that with any authority.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I could have sworn that NASA made the country money with it's patents like velcro...but I couldn't find a source, so I can't say that with any authority.
Don't forget Tang.
NEVER forget Tang...
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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I think coming up with some sort of stasis technology would benefit those traveling as well as those that stay on Earth.
FTL or Relativistic travel technology would benefit us in other ways. High speed travel would benefit us with resources.
I will say though that if the government ever puts out a call for colonists to go to another world, I'm signing up the first chance I get. I suppose I'll see some of you on the ship
While FTL travel is probably impossible, I wouldn't rule it out. We've recently discovered the laws of physics may change in different parts of the universe, and we thought that was impossible as well.
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