An interesting topic that has come up often in the news recently, with a number of both state and now private endeavours aiming to place man on Mars.
So what are people's thoughts on who will be first, because surely now it is more of a case of 'when' rather than 'if'?
Will it be the 'Mars One' project - I believe the first to leave (if their efforts go to plan), less than 10 years from now in 2022. Apparently recouping the money from sold television rights (estimating costs of $4 billion) - apparently 80,000 have signed up for the chance to make the journey, but will they make it?
Will it be Elon Musk's, founder of SpaceX, who has the critical number of engineering visionaries within the company to make the trip more likely to be a success (and safe) for the astronauts? Or rival company Blue Origins (with both companies apparently close to revealing re-usable first-stage rockets, estimated to make trips to orbit ten times cheaper)?
Will the first boot to step on the red planet belong to Commander Yu Xing of the People's Republic of China airforce? China has made massive steps forward in space flight - the 3rd country to make the trip into upper orbits with their own technology, their own space suits and now space station - they too have expressed a desire to reach Mars as the hyper-expanding Chinese Economy looks to throw money at anything it can.
Will it be the old man on the block that shows these new pretenders the way in the form of NASA - who perhaps will be justified in their comments of waiting for the technology to develop (for radiation shielding, and superior engine technology) to make the trip a success, perhaps even after earlier attempts have failed?
In any case - wondered what people's thoughts are on this, and especially what is likely to happen -And if not, why not, who, what and when!
My vote goes to whichever company isn't delusional enough to think that they can fund, design, build, test, and launch a Mars mission in less than a decade.
Pacific wrote: Will the first boot to step on the red planet belong to Commander Yu Xing of the People's Republic of China airforce? China has made massive steps forward in space flight - the 3rd country to make the trip into upper orbits with their own technology, their own space suits and now space station - they too have expressed a desire to reach Mars as the hyper-expanding Chinese Economy looks to throw money at anything it can.
I wonder how much of their designs were "borrowed" from other countries?
Hey we have got to start somewhere! It's not like we can go straight to mining asteroids on the other side of the Solar System. Baby steps...
I am not really fussed about who gets to Mars first, only that someone does!
Also, I am baffled that 80,000 people want to go on the Mars One voyage, that's a no-return trip am I right? Pretty sure I would be bored after the first week, barring any giant alien worms of course..
If China comes out and explicitly states "we're going to put a man on mars and plant the red flag on the red planet within X years" The US would necessarily 'one up' that, the President would put the boot to NASA, and we'd git are dun. If there's anything to go by our past history, its that we win space races.
Columbus was a a buffoon who got staggeringly lucky. And he wasn't the first to reach the New World either. His trip changed things in a way that other efforts to reach the New World didn't, though, because behind Columbus there was a new European economy with the ability and economic capacity to start making regular commercial journeys to the New World. Those trips made money, increasing the capacity to make more and more trips and so on. Before you know mercantilism is born and the world will never be the same again.
Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.
I challenge anyone to tell me why a trip to Mars would be more like Columbus and less like Armstrong.
Pacific wrote: Will the first boot to step on the red planet belong to Commander Yu Xing of the People's Republic of China airforce? China has made massive steps forward in space flight - the 3rd country to make the trip into upper orbits with their own technology, their own space suits and now space station - they too have expressed a desire to reach Mars as the hyper-expanding Chinese Economy looks to throw money at anything it can.
If the Chinese economy is still expanding in 10 years I'll be relieved, and also very, very surprised. Throwing money at a Mars mission is something that makes sense now, but I'd be shocked if there was still money in the coffers and political will to continue funding it in 10 years.
Commander Cain wrote: Also, I am baffled that 80,000 people want to go on the Mars One voyage, that's a no-return trip am I right? Pretty sure I would be bored after the first week, barring any giant alien worms of course..
There's 80,000 people who want to go because there's way more than 80,000 people with lives that aren't all that interesting anyway, and continuing to be a bit bored is a small price to pay for an eternal place in human history as the first person to set foot on Mars. People remember Columbus hundreds of years later, and people will remember Armstrong and the first person to reach Mars hundreds of years later. Nobody will remember Bob the cashier at the local Walmart.
It's starting to get overpopulated here and we have the resources to funnel into this and colonize other planets in about a century.
Guys seriously out of 330 known exoplanets 30 are instantly habitable by humans if they wound up on the planet nude. 10% of planets are instantly habitable by humans. Yeah amazes me too.
I say try the moon first. Like I mention before. We stand a better chance not building above ground structure and going the "Tunneling" route. Cheaper and better chance for a Mars mission without mass......bodies. I'm calling it. Its a one way trip to Saint Peter....Chuck Norris instead if he dies before the Mars Mission peeps
Spoiler:
why Chuck Norris? Because Chuck Norris will straight out tell Saint Peter "Your in my seat." with a dead calm.
sebster wrote: Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The Apollo program revolutionized computer development through its advancement and widespread use of integrated circuits. Without the R&D that came with the Apollo program in the 60s, our technology wouldn't be at the level it is today. They also invented fire-resistant materials for the the astronaut's suits that then used as the basis for the protective gear firefighters wear and emergency thermal blankets, common in first aid kits. They developed plenty of other stuff too (water purification systems, freeze-dried food, cardio-muscular conditioning equipment, etc.) that might never have happened unless the government threw money at it.
Only if you read the words 'materially different in our day to day lives' and think of emergency thermal blankets. I don't.
And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible, and your attempt to justify what they've accomplished by talking about spin-off tech undersells their achievements.
But the real point is to compare and contrast what happened when Columbus reached the New World, and why the same thing didn't happen when we landed on the moon. Given that, thinking a trip to Mars would be anything like Columbus' trip would be, simply, total madness.
The likely follow up to a successful trip to Mars would likely be nothing. Been there, done that, left a flag. The only way you'd see more and more trips and an expasion will be when someone figures out a self-sustaining economic reason for it. And at this point in time there isn't one.
Only if you read the words 'materially different in our day to day lives' and think of emergency thermal blankets. I don't.
And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible, and your attempt to justify what they've accomplished by talking about spin-off tech undersells their achievements.
But the real point is to compare and contrast what happened when Columbus reached the New World, and why the same thing didn't happen when we landed on the moon. Given that, thinking a trip to Mars would be anything like Columbus' trip would be, simply, total madness.
The likely follow up to a successful trip to Mars would likely be nothing. Been there, done that, left a flag. The only way you'd see more and more trips and an expasion will be when someone figures out a self-sustaining economic reason for it. And at this point in time there isn't one.
I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."
I suspect you haven't really read what I've typed here. I am not, in any way, belittling what NASA accomplished, which is something you would have learned if you'd bothered to read what I had said "And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible".
And there is nothing, nothing magical about research when it involves space. All manner of research provides spin off technology. Take NASA funding and roll it some other technical endeavour and you'll end up with all kinds of spin off technology. Oh, and your assertion that miniaturisation of electronics would only have happened because of NASA is bizarre. A bit like claiming the New World would never have been found if Columbus hadn't sailed there.
And, once again, just to make it completely clear - I'm not criticising what NASA have accomplished. I think NASA are awesome, because pretty much every research institute is awesome. But that doesn't mean we should just pretend that putting a man on the moon changed the world. Because it didn't.
An idiot stumbling in to the New World changed the world, not because of anything remarkable about that idiot, but because of the economics surrounding that discovery - it was economically profitable for ships to travel to the New World, which in turn led to more and more ships, and it was economicaly viable to create new colonies, which in turn led to more and more colonies. The same circumstances are not even slightly when it came to the moon, and so trips stopped as soon as the government stopped paying for them. And that same situation is the case for Mars.
Pretending any of that isn't true by talking about spin off technology is nonsense.
But I'm pretty sure you stopped reading somewhere in the second sentence of this post to start typing up a list of things NASA invented, so I really don't know why I'm still trying to explain this.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."
I suspect you haven't really read what I've typed here. I am not, in any way, belittling what NASA accomplished, which is something you would have learned if you'd bothered to read what I had said "And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible".
And there is nothing, nothing magical about research when it involves space. All manner of research provides spin off technology. Take NASA funding and roll it some other technical endeavour and you'll end up with all kinds of spin off technology. Oh, and your assertion that miniaturisation of electronics would only have happened because of NASA is bizarre. A bit like claiming the New World would never have been found if Columbus hadn't sailed there.
And, once again, just to make it completely clear - I'm not criticising what NASA have accomplished. I think NASA are awesome, because pretty much every research institute is awesome. But that doesn't mean we should just pretend that putting a man on the moon changed the world. Because it didn't.
An idiot stumbling in to the New World changed the world, not because of anything remarkable about that idiot, but because of the economics surrounding that discovery - it was economically profitable for ships to travel to the New World, which in turn led to more and more ships, and it was economicaly viable to create new colonies, which in turn led to more and more colonies. The same circumstances are not even slightly when it came to the moon, and so trips stopped as soon as the government stopped paying for them. And that same situation is the case for Mars.
Pretending any of that isn't true by talking about spin off technology is nonsense.
But I'm pretty sure you stopped reading somewhere in the second sentence of this post to start typing up a list of things NASA invented, so I really don't know why I'm still trying to explain this.
Your original quote was stating that Apollo gave humanity nothing other than Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, which is wrong.
You claim to not be "knocking on NASA" but you follow it up by saying research in to space exploration offers no benefit, and you are simply wrong. There is no other way to put it, other than you have no clue what you are talking about. Our government funding those project because it had a problem to solve, and in solving it, we created a massive amount of economically beneficial products from it. Because the government pumped money into figuring out how to send men to the moon, entire companies were founded and fortunes were made. The exact same thing would happen by figuring out how to send a man to Mars, but people like you are too short-sighted to understand what that could mean for the technological advancement of the human race. It isn't bizarre to think that Apollo jump-started the quantum leap in the miniaturization of circuits, because it did and it has been fairly well documented. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the one of first computer ever built to use integrated circuits and became the basis of the fly-by-wire system (as well as proving what could be done with integrated circuits). Despite your claim that all we did was put a man on the moon, it is widely accepted that the Apollo program was one of the greatest technological accomplishments in human history.
We stopped sending men to the moon because the public stopped caring about it, again because like you, they were too short-sighted to see what we gained from the program. Other than pure human achievement of going to another planet, there is massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance human spaceflight. There are abundant minerals on other worlds that are extraordinarily rare or difficult to acquire on Earth that, if we found safe and economically sustainable methods of spaceflight, could be harvested and returned to earth. Not to mention the fact that it would put people to work in order to support an ongoing mission on the massive scale that would sending people to Mars would be.
The point is that if the US government had dumped the Apollo money directly into developing integrated circuit technology we'd have the same breakthroughs. And even without that funding we'd probably have them anyway, since the market clearly existed and research would go in that direction. The fact that the new technology was developed in the context of the moon was just a coincidence, and the actual presence of a man on the moon gave us next to nothing. Once we planted that flag there was little reason to continue going back.
Compare that with Columbus, where reaching the destination changed the world.
Other than pure human achievement of going to another planet, there is massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance human spaceflight.
There's massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance spaceflight. The argument that we need long-distance human spaceflight is a lot more questionable. As robotics technology continues to advance it seems less and less likely that sending humans on those long-distance trips would accomplish anything more than planting a flag for national pride. Meanwhile sending a human crew vastly increases the cost and difficulty of the mission. You have to keep the humans alive, burn obscene amounts of extra fuel to carry them and all their life support equipment, etc.
There are abundant minerals on other worlds that are extraordinarily rare or difficult to acquire on Earth that, if we found safe and economically sustainable methods of spaceflight, could be harvested and returned to earth.
Then why would you want to go to Mars? If you want resources you go to the asteroids, where you don't have to haul your minerals up out of a planetary gravity well before you can use them.
Not to mention the fact that it would put people to work in order to support an ongoing mission on the massive scale that would sending people to Mars would be.
If you want to create jobs in a useful way dump that money into repairing our crumbling infrastructure here on Earth. Space flight is difficult enough as it is without turning it into a giant welfare program.
Even if you wanted to develop the technology that would make a Mars mission feasible, the last thing you should do with it is actually launch a Mars mission. It's a cold, dry, poorly lit desert whose sole selling point is how hard it is to get there. If someone with more dollars than sense wants to spend their own money trying, fine, whatever, but it would be criminally negligent for the government to spend taxpayer money on this instead of on doing their bloody jobs.
I think going to Mars is, in fact, one of the only undertakings worth... um, undertaking.
I could have phrased that better.
But seriously, we do have an awful lot of eggs in our one little mote of dust basket, and there's an awful lot of rocks shooting around up there in the sunbeam. While I agree that our primary goal should be fixing problems on Earth I also think we should continue working hard to explore the rest of the solar system towards eventually being able to successfully colonize somewhere else. Obviously this is on a scale much longer than a decade, but the post count of a million starts with "FIRST POST!!1!", as the expression goes.
The point is that if the US government had dumped the Apollo money directly into developing integrated circuit technology we'd have the same breakthroughs. And even without that funding we'd probably have them anyway, since the market clearly existed and research would go in that direction. The fact that the new technology was developed in the context of the moon was just a coincidence, and the actual presence of a man on the moon gave us next to nothing. Once we planted that flag there was little reason to continue going back.
Compare that with Columbus, where reaching the destination changed the world.
There was simply no reason for the government to fund research, hence why they did not until the need arose. You're essentially making the argument that we shouldn't do or work on anything, because it will all happen eventually. That is a logical fallacy of the highest caliber. Space exploration has changed the world, for the better, no less.There is plenty of reason to go back, the most important being the advancement of human knowledge. Scientist continue to study rocks brought back from the Apollo missions to this day and new discoveries are still made. It may be altruistic, but it's no less important.
There's massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance spaceflight. The argument that we need long-distance human spaceflight is a lot more questionable. As robotics technology continues to advance it seems less and less likely that sending humans on those long-distance trips would accomplish anything more than planting a flag for national pride. Meanwhile sending a human crew vastly increases the cost and difficulty of the mission. You have to keep the humans alive, burn obscene amounts of extra fuel to carry them and all their life support equipment, etc.
It's true, there are arguments to be made of the virtue of manned space-flight, the safety of the crew being the most paramount. Robotics are wonderful, true, but no machine we have created (nor will likely create) can compare to a human. There is a general consensus amongst scientist in every related field that the future of humanity is not here on Earth, so if there are problems to be solved, why not solve them? How does sicking out heads in the sand further mankind when we can solve our problems now?
Then why would you want to go to Mars? If you want resources you go to the asteroids, where you don't have to haul your minerals up out of a planetary gravity well before you can use them.
Gravity is less of a concern than you think, at least not on earth. Compared to an asteroid, Mars is a massive target and is perfect practice for making deep-space landings. Perfecting human spaceflight to neighboring planets is an important step to working out manned landings on something as small and remote as asteroids. Not to mention, the main asteroid belt is past the orbit of Mars, which makes going there even better. By establishing an advanced outpost closer to the source, you are making it easier to harvest; it's the same reason they build mining and lumber camps.
If you want to create jobs in a useful way dump that money into repairing our crumbling infrastructure here on Earth. Space flight is difficult enough as it is without turning it into a giant welfare program.
It's not a welfare program, not even close. A sustained spaceflight industry creates the demand for high tech, high paying jobs; something our country sorely lacks. It inspires younger generations to become interested in science, mathematics, and technology and encourages them to pursue education and employment in those fields. Over 60% of graduates can't find work in their field of study. Why study that stuff now when chances are, you'll leave college and get a job that has absolutely nothing to do with what you studied? That won't be a problem with in demand jobs in those fields. That isn't a "welfare program" by a long shot, that is actual job growth.
Ouze wrote: I think going to Mars is, in fact, one of the only undertakings worth... um, undertaking.
I could have phrased that better.
But seriously, we do have an awful lot of eggs in our one little mote of dust basket, and there's an awful lot of rocks shooting around up there in the sunbeam. While I agree that our primary goal should be fixing problems on Earth I also think we should continue working hard to explore the rest of the solar system towards eventually being able to successfully colonize somewhere else. Obviously this is on a scale much longer than a decade, but the post count of a million starts with "FIRST POST!!1!", as the expression goes.
The flaw with your reasoning is that working hard to explore the rest of the solar system doesn't help progress towards meaningful colonisation. Meaningful colonisation, especially if you want the population to be mobile enough that you're not just doubling the chance of a catastrophe that kills half as many people, requires a technology base that itself makes the exploration phase trivially easy. It's like thinking you can get a head start on your trip to Disneyland by walking and getting picked up on the way, instead of just waiting half an hour until the car is ready.
But right now we have no car getting ready - are the technologies needed to undertake such a.. crap, I did it again - undertaking going to be developed short of actually trying to go? I.e. did the technology we need to get to the moon come about because we were trying to get to the moon, or did we go to the moon when our technology was ready? I think it has to be the former rather than the later.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Your original quote was stating that Apollo gave humanity nothing other than Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, which is wrong.
Holy gak. You misread what I said the first time, so I quoted it for you again, and you still got it wrong. Here it is, for a third time "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives."
It's not like its long, the whole quote comes in at 18 words. My whole first post came in at 160 words, and that might sound like a lot, but The Very Hungry Caterpillar is 222. So there really just is no excuse for you to still have no idea what I typed. Just fething read it please, because I'm getting really bored of explaining to you over and over again that I haven't said any of the nonsense you keep pretending I've said.
You claim to not be "knocking on NASA" but you follow it up by saying research in to space exploration offers no benefit, and you are simply wrong.
It's in the clipboard now so it's just a simple ctrl-v to point it out again, so here we go; "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives".
And then compare that to what you're pretending I said "space exploration offers no benefit". For a guy who seems to really love science, you don't seem particularly inclined to read.
Our government funding those project because it had a problem to solve, and in solving it, we created a massive amount of economically beneficial products from it. Because the government pumped money into figuring out how to send men to the moon, entire companies were founded and fortunes were made.
The same could be said for any sufficiently difficult, research oriented project. Tech developments from attempting to build a hundred metre high Space Marine would have similar tech offshoots.
Despite your claim that all we did was put a man on the moon, it is widely accepted that the Apollo program was one of the greatest technological accomplishments in human history.
ctrl-v is really taking the work out of this; "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives."
We stopped sending men to the moon because the public stopped caring about it, again because like you, they were too short-sighted to see what we gained from the program.
Actually we stopped sending men to the moon because NASA refocused on useful human achievements like advancing satellite technology, improving weather forecasting and all that kind of stuff. With their finite budget, they chose between developing space technologies that did something, and continuing to send people to the moon. NASA chose correctly.
Not to mention the fact that it would put people to work in order to support an ongoing mission on the massive scale that would sending people to Mars would be.
Employment as a reason to spend money.... uurgh. Just, fething think about what you just typed. Because it basically works as a justification to just spend money, and it doesn't matter what you spend it on because 'jobs'. Dig a hole, then fill it in again. You've got a job, therefore the program is worthwhile.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: There was simply no reason for the government to fund research, hence why they did not until the need arose. You're essentially making the argument that we shouldn't do or work on anything, because it will all happen eventually.
No, but advances in computing have happened very rapidly, without needing to be part of a plan to fly humans through space. It's a complete nonsense to conclude that some advances that happened as part of a space based research project could never have happened otherwise.
Robotics are wonderful, true, but no machine we have created (nor will likely create) can compare to a human.
Sbuh? How in the hell can you just declare that? Have you seen the future of robotics?
There is a general consensus amongst scientist in every related field that the future of humanity is not here on Earth,
Really? So there was like a study done, was there? They went around and asked a sample group of scientists in every field of scientific endeavour, and a majority in each group said 'the future of humanity is not here on Earth'. Uh huh.
It's not a welfare program, not even close. A sustained spaceflight industry creates the demand for high tech, high paying jobs; something our country sorely lacks.
The US is the largest hi-tech manufacturer in the world, by an order of magnitude.
Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place. In the meantime we should be looking at setting up on the moon and 80,000 people will made a substantial organic contribution to any off-world garden.
I don't see the USA leading the way though, they currently have no spacecraft and the skill base required to operate a mission like that will be declining as a result.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: There was simply no reason for the government to fund research, hence why they did not until the need arose.
You're missing the point. If your goal is to develop new technology then fund development of new technology directly. NASA didn't decide to go to the moon so they could advance computer technology, they decided to go to the moon so they could go to the moon. If the US had wanted to advance computer technology as quickly and efficiently as possible they would have done so directly, not as a hoped-for side effect of some other project.
You're essentially making the argument that we shouldn't do or work on anything, because it will all happen eventually.
No, I'm making the argument that if you want to do X you do X. You don't do Y and hope that as a side effect you get X.
Robotics are wonderful, true, but no machine we have created (nor will likely create) can compare to a human.
You're right. Humans are squishy, use up lots of expensive food/water/etc (and yes, in space those are extremely expensive), and add tons of mass compared to a robot. There's a very good reason NASA is happily sending robotic probes all over the solar system while nobody is seriously considering sending people to those same places.
Gravity is less of a concern than you think, at least not on earth.
Congratulations, you just failed Rocket Engineering 101. Gravity is the single dominant concern here, if your desired minerals are at the bottom of a planetary gravity well you have to spend obscene amounts of fuel to get them out of that gravity well. Strip mining Mars instead of the asteroids is just so unbelievably stupid that nobody with any understanding of the problem thinks it's a viable idea.
(A space elevator changes things, but right now a space elevator is purely wishful thinking.)
Compared to an asteroid, Mars is a massive target and is perfect practice for making deep-space landings.
Congratulations, you just failed Rocket Engineering 102. Getting to a specific point in space is easy, and Mars is not a huge target unless you consider "watching your spacecraft burn up in reentry because you didn't hit your small approach/reentry window" to be a successful mission.
And in reality, getting to an asteroid is much easier than getting to the surface of Mars. With the asteroid you can come in nice and slow by matching orbits and arrive at the asteroid with near-zero relative velocity. With Mars you have to deal with the massive problem of reentry through atmosphere, which imposes severe design constraints on your spacecraft. Oh yeah, and severe mass constraints. Heat shielding isn't light, and you're going to burn a lot of fuel carrying it to Mars.
Perfecting human spaceflight to neighboring planets is an important step to working out manned landings on something as small and remote as asteroids.
No, perfecting human spaceflight to the moon is an important step. Starting with Mars is just as difficult as getting to the asteroids.
Not to mention, the main asteroid belt is past the orbit of Mars, which makes going there even better.
Congratulations, you just failed Rocket Engineering 103. Distance in space is meaningless (other than longer travel times, but a prerequisite for either is the ability to make long trips with a manned spacecraft), what matters is delta-V (and stop posting if you don't know what that is). And the simple fact is that Mars is at the bottom of a planetary gravity well a long way from Earth, which makes it a poor choice for a "base" to go to the asteroids. Launching a mission to the asteroids from Mars would be almost as difficult as doing it from Earth.
Also, you failed Astronomy 101 because there are asteroids that are closer and easier to get to than Mars.
cadbren wrote: Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place.
Terraforming Mars is a bigger pipe dream than the whole colony thing. You'd need a LOT of snow from the outer Solar System to make the atmosphere as well as an abundance of Nitrogen for plants. Where you gonna get enough to make a liveable atmosphere? How you gonna get it to Mars? How you going to get it all down onto Mars without making massive impact craters? How are you going to get the soil to provide enough nutrients for crops to grow? Even if 3/4 of Mars' surface becomes covered with water, that's still a lot of chemicals you need to find and import. And none of it can be taken from Earth because we're still using the stuff we have here.
cadbren wrote: Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place. In the meantime we should be looking at setting up on the moon and 80,000 people will made a substantial organic contribution to any off-world garden.
I don't see the USA leading the way though, they currently have no spacecraft and the skill base required to operate a mission like that will be declining as a result.
Why would you want to set up on the moon? Why not spend that same effort working out how to build an arcology here on Earth?
Set up on the moon simply to have an off world base that could one day be used for going out further.
I agree in the meantime we'd be better off investing in exploring the sea floor including the trenches and developing urban centres underground to save our planet's surface for crops, wildlife etc.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Mars though is a silly waste of time.
AlexHolker wrote: Why would you want to set up on the moon? Why not spend that same effort working out how to build an arcology here on Earth?
Two reasons:
1) The moon has raw materials and a much smaller gravity well than Earth, which makes it a great starting point for missions elsewhere in the solar system.
2) Building on Earth is different from building in space. Yes, you can learn a lot by building self-contained living spaces on Earth, but the real test is doing it in space. The moon is a much closer equivalent to Mars or an asteroid, while being close enough to Earth that there's actually a reason to do it instead of going straight to the final goal.
As an amateur astronomer, I'm well aware of the fact that there are plenty of asteroids near earth, I make it a point to look for them whenever conditions allow. Near-Earth asteroids are of course prime targets for early asteroid mining, because of their low delta-v, from earth. Trojan asteroids are prime examples too, even though Earth has only one known. Key word in all of this is, early. There is no reason not to start that these two project could start congruently, one can supply (mining) materials to the other (Mars exploration), and I've never said that we shouldn't. I'm all in for robotic missions to NEOs, they are an important vanguard for human exploration. Plus, there is what, less than 10000 measuring over a meter with less than a 1000 over a kilometer and only handful out of those worth considering? While there is at least 100000 in the main belt? How many asteroids have a comparably low delta-v from Mars? I honestly don't know, perhaps you can enlighten me. But I can tell you, establishing Mars as a permanent mining colony for mining the main belt is one of the focal points for colonization and a topic of serious consideration.
Yes, getting to an asteroid is "easy," but coming back from one isn't always so easy. Not to mention mining one without human presence and minutes-long delays in communications presents it's own complications.
If you read what I wrote, I never said anything about "strip mining Mars" (though mining Mars is feasible) nor did I say we shouldn't go to the moon first; I don't think we should have ever stopped. I'm in favor of Moon-asteroid/Mars-beyond progression or space exploration. The main argument is that it is worth it in the long run with no reason to not start on it now.
I'm also totally cool with setting up the moon as a way-station, though from why I understand from cartoons, Deceptions will try to overtake it. It might be best to try and work on Dinobots first.
Ouze wrote: I'm also totally cool with setting up the moon as a way-station, though from why I understand from cartoons, Deceptions will try to overtake it. It might be best to try and work on Dinobots first.
GRIMLOC WANT CUP TO TELL STORY!
And my goodness, the amount of e-peen going on in this thread is staggering
But seriously it's starting to get overpopulated here and we have the resources to funnel into this and colonize other planets in about a century.
Guys seriously out of 330 known exoplanets 30 are instantly habitable by humans if they wound up on the planet nude. 10% of planets are instantly habitable by humans. Yeah amazes me too.
Who cares? It benefits no one but the space industrial complex. We still have the military industrial, and criminal justice industrial complexes to protect. Those complexes aren't going to protect themselves!
Nuts who cares. In ten years AI will combine with google and the NSA and Skynet will be born.
Only if you read the words 'materially different in our day to day lives' and think of emergency thermal blankets. I don't.
And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible, and your attempt to justify what they've accomplished by talking about spin-off tech undersells their achievements.
But the real point is to compare and contrast what happened when Columbus reached the New World, and why the same thing didn't happen when we landed on the moon. Given that, thinking a trip to Mars would be anything like Columbus' trip would be, simply, total madness.
The likely follow up to a successful trip to Mars would likely be nothing. Been there, done that, left a flag. The only way you'd see more and more trips and an expasion will be when someone figures out a self-sustaining economic reason for it. And at this point in time there isn't one.
I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."
Thermal balankets and TANG don't add up to the billions and billions spent on the program. Lets get real here. The only reason we went to the moon was the Cold War.
Ouze wrote: I'm also totally cool with setting up the moon as a way-station, though from why I understand from cartoons, Deceptions will try to overtake it. It might be best to try and work on Dinobots first.
GRIMLOC WANT CUP TO TELL STORY!
And my goodness, the amount of e-peen going on in this thread is staggering
GRIMLOC SMASH GRAVITY WELL IN FACE!
It would be interesting to tell the many many many people in the world without running water, you'd rather spend trillions sending a VW bus to Mars then help them have running water and indoor plumbing.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Yes, getting to an asteroid is "easy," but coming back from one isn't always so easy.
Yes, returning from an asteroid is always so easy, because an asteroid has a much smaller gravity well than Mars. Using Mars means immediately throwing away a quarter to half of any gains from developing an extraterrestrial supply point.
Not to mention mining one without human presence and minutes-long delays in communications presents it's own complications.
It presents less complications than trying to keep a group of humans physically and emotionally healthy for months in almost complete isolation. Especially when the most efficient flight paths are not the fastest.
Well, we never really were able to exploit the Moon economically because of the Cold War. Trying to build anything up their by anyone would have been dangerously provocative. I think there was even a Treaty mitigating the Super Powers use of the Moon.
There is a lot we can benefit from pushing tech to new levels of invention so we can get to Mars.
I am in the "just as long as someone does" camp. I also agree that we need to consider not only getting people there but maintaining them while they are there. Mars is not very hospital and has an orbit that causes it to be yanked around a lot and this means drastic weather patterns. I think we would be better served by taking a step and setting up a small base on the moon, then a permanent structure on the moon, and then we consider what we can do to get to Mars and setting up something there.
I would much rather see asteroid mining be developed. Colonies, drones, whatever it takes to open up those wonderful minerals to our exploitation. It will also herald in the first age of commercial space exploration. Private doesn't have enough funds. Governments don't have enough focus. But corporations are ruthless and have deep enough pockets to advance space travel- even over heaps of dead 'monkeys'.
cadbren wrote: Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place. In the meantime we should be looking at setting up on the moon and 80,000 people will made a substantial organic contribution to any off-world garden.
I don't see the USA leading the way though, they currently have no spacecraft and the skill base required to operate a mission like that will be declining as a result.
How do you expect to terraform a planet without a rotating iron core.
cadbren wrote: Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place. In the meantime we should be looking at setting up on the moon and 80,000 people will made a substantial organic contribution to any off-world garden.
I don't see the USA leading the way though, they currently have no spacecraft and the skill base required to operate a mission like that will be declining as a result.
How do you expect to terraform a planet without a rotating iron core.
Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.
The consumer tech spawned from the Space Race greatly affect our day to day lives... Satellites, the microprocessor, the various materials used in the creation of the craft itself.
Yes, many technological devices used today would have happened anyway, but the Armstrong trip/NASAs breakthroughs in technology greatly increased the speed with which we have them.
I should say that I think improving the situation for us here on earth (now) should be a priority - understanding of climate science, of predicting trends and sustainability of farming are vital if we are to ensure that the billions of us here continue to get fed and, to go to one extreme, if we are to prevent our civilization ultimately from nose-diving.
That being said I see no reason why we should not continue to look outwards. The journey to another world I think kindles something in the human spirit - without sounding like a soppy idiot (possibly too late there!) a landing on Mars would be a great focal point to help pull humanity together*
*at least temporarily, before we go back to fighting with our neighbours (both those in the next house and those in the next country).
Grey Templar wrote: Asteroid mining would be a more useful goal. And would give an economic incentive to develop space technologies.
Although other space-based technologies and reach would almost certainly increase as a consequence of any attempted trip to Mars.
Ensis Ferrae wrote: The consumer tech spawned from the Space Race greatly affect our day to day lives... Satellites, the microprocessor, the various materials used in the creation of the craft itself.
The space race was spawned by the invention of communications satellites, not the other way around. Their development was justified by their own merits, without any need to resort to chest beating nonsense or appeals to undefined spin-off technologies.
cadbren wrote: Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place. In the meantime we should be looking at setting up on the moon and 80,000 people will made a substantial organic contribution to any off-world garden.
I don't see the USA leading the way though, they currently have no spacecraft and the skill base required to operate a mission like that will be declining as a result.
How do you expect to terraform a planet without a rotating iron core.
I wouldn't even know where to buy a rotating iron core let alone how to use one.
It seems that the only thing that would come from a Mars mission is providing organic mass to start a vege garden there and 80,000 bodies would make for a large plot.
Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.
The consumer tech spawned from the Space Race greatly affect our day to day lives... Satellites, the microprocessor, the various materials used in the creation of the craft itself.
Yes, many technological devices used today would have happened anyway, but the Armstrong trip/NASAs breakthroughs in technology greatly increased the speed with which we have them.
Don't bother, he doesn't think any of those things count. Apparently the United States putting a man on the moon was just a remarkable human achievement that achieved nothing.
The space race was spawned by the invention of communications satellites, not the other way around. Their development was justified by their own merits, without any need to resort to chest beating nonsense or appeals to undefined spin-off technologies.
Their development was purely a by-product of the Cold War Space Race. There was on-going research before the Space Race (no one is debating that) began in earnest, but because there was suddenly a need for innovation (even it was just a game of international one-upsmanship) it ended by accelerating innovation in a way that was unparallelled at any other point in human history.
That is the argument that is being made here, people. Competition can and will spur innovation; we have proof of it. NASA spent $25 billion between 1958 and 1969 and had returned $71 billion by 1971 and by the late 80's ended up returning over $180 billion, a return rate of 33%. A Space Race 2.0 (albeit, without the threat of nuclear annihilation) could be a boon not to just the United States, but any other country that wants to invest it achieving such a remarkable goal.
I know, I know, god forbid we are altruistic in thinking. I find it odd that a website filled with, what I would guess as, self-described nerds, is so vehemently opposed to what would be the most nerdgasm-inducing thing ever: going to F'ing Mars!
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: There is no reason not to start that these two project could start congruently, one can supply (mining) materials to the other (Mars exploration), and I've never said that we shouldn't.
There's a huge reason not to start the projects at the same time: you want to learn from your mistakes. You build a moon base because it's an easier first step that can teach you a lot about how to get to Mars successfully. If you go for both simultaneously you just end up throwing away a lot of money on a Mars project that you're going to scrap when you realize it would be cheaper to start over from the beginning than to try to modify your existing work to include all the things you learned the hard way with the moon mission.
Plus, there is what, less than 10000 measuring over a meter with less than a 1000 over a kilometer and only handful out of those worth considering? While there is at least 100000 in the main belt?
Think for a second about the numbers you just quoted. That's more than enough to cover all exploration for the foreseeable future. By the time you get done with that who knows how technology will have advanced and what new developments you might want to incorporate into your mission to the main belt.
How many asteroids have a comparably low delta-v from Mars?
None, because "comparably low delta-v" and "planetary gravity well" are mutually contradictory concepts. The absolute most you'd want to do for that purpose would be a base on one of the moons of Mars, not Mars itself.
Yes, getting to an asteroid is "easy," but coming back from one isn't always so easy.
Of course it is. If you can get there you can come back, especially since an asteroid mission doesn't require getting out of a planetary gravity well before you can start the trip home. Getting home from an asteroid is much, much easier than getting home from Mars.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Don't bother, he doesn't think any of those things count. Apparently the United States putting a man on the moon was just a remarkable human achievement that achieved nothing.
Why do you keep posting this straw man? Do you really have trouble reading the part where he has explained that's not what he's saying, or are you just being dishonest?
I find it odd that a website filled with, what I would guess as, self-described nerds, is so vehemently opposed to what would be the most nerdgasm-inducing thing ever: going to F'ing Mars!
We're opposed to it because there is no viable plan for going to Mars as anything other than a flag-planting mission, and even that is pretty questionable. Space exploration needs sustainable, realistic goals, not a repeat of Apollo where we plant the flag and cancel the whole thing to save money.
Hey we have got to start somewhere! It's not like we can go straight to mining asteroids on the other side of the Solar System. Baby steps.....
Can you imagine mining one of the pure diamond/gold asteroids floating around! One trip there and back and you will mine more gold than the combined total of all human history!
The possibilities that open up when the costs for materials decrease and the desire for gold as a source of currency lessens....
sebster wrote:Columbus was a a buffoon who got staggeringly lucky. And he wasn't the first to reach the New World either. His trip changed things in a way that other efforts to reach the New World didn't, though, because behind Columbus there was a new European economy with the ability and economic capacity to start making regular commercial journeys to the New World. Those trips made money, increasing the capacity to make more and more trips and so on. Before you know mercantilism is born and the world will never be the same again.
Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.
I challenge anyone to tell me why a trip to Mars would be more like Columbus and less like Armstrong.
sebster wrote:
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Your original quote was stating that Apollo gave humanity nothing other than Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, which is wrong.
Holy gak. You misread what I said the first time, so I quoted it for you again, and you still got it wrong. Here it is, for a third time "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives." It's not like its long, the whole quote comes in at 18 words. My whole first post came in at 160 words, and that might sound like a lot, but The Very Hungry Caterpillar is 222. So there really just is no excuse for you to still have no idea what I typed. Just fething read it please, because I'm getting really bored of explaining to you over and over again that I haven't said any of the nonsense you keep pretending I've said.
Umm... were did he miss read, you even ask to be showed as wrong. He just do what you asked.
bodazoka wrote: Can you imagine mining one of the pure diamond/gold asteroids floating around! One trip there and back and you will mine more gold than the combined total of all human history!
There are no such asteroids, we wouldn't be able to bring back more than we've mined today (close to two hundred thousand tons, or the launch weight of sixty Saturn Vs), and it would cost more to bring it back than the gold is worth. That's zero out of three.
Let's talk about Mars when we have an actual sustainable presence in orbit or on the moon where we have the capacity to build actual space faring ships. Barring some future technological marvel, serious space exploration won't happen from the surface of Earth.
And don't bother thinking it's a good idea to turn the moon into a mining penal colony. They'll eventually break free, declare themselves an independent nation, and hurl rocks at us from orbit.
Frazzled wrote: Thermal balankets and TANG don't add up to the billions and billions spent on the program. Lets get real here. The only reason we went to the moon was the Cold War.
I agree that the Cold War was a major factor, but Spanish Imperial expansion was also a major motivation for sponsoring Columbus' trip. Despite that, it changed the world forever in ways the Spanish couldn't have possibly conceived.
Similarly, reaching the moon could have changed the world. It could have turned out that space travel was much cheaper than it actually is. It was, I think, a worthwhile endeavour based on what it might have led to. But it's done now, we know how hard and how expensive space travel actually is, so there's no point in picking some place that's even further away and trying to go there, in the hope that somehow this trip will be different.
Out of the 9000 NEOs, there are currently a dozen that are prime targets for mining with our existing technology... except, to mine them safely and efficiently, we have to move them to the L1 or L2 Lagrangian points. While feasible, doing that opens up a whole new slew of complications. So it isn't as "easy" as you claim, this isn't going to a McDonald's drive-thru. Massive amounts of work is still needed to achieve that somewhat "basic" goal, and guess what: that same technology can be used to go to Mars.
I read what he explained, and I still disagree. Anyone can argue that progress would have been made with or without the Space Race. However, since the acceleration of human technological advancement has been directly correlated with the Space Race, that argument is moot. We know what the outcome of an undertaking of that magnitude are so we can have reasonable expectations that it will happen again.
Again, if you actually do research on the topic, NASA made money with the Apollo program. The reason Apollo was canceled wasn't just to "save money," that is a gross oversimplification of what happened. They canceled missions Apollo 17-20 because public interest had waned (when you have things like Vietnam, campus protests, and general civil unrest, that will happen) and Congress, not NASA, told them not to spend money on it (even though their budget at that time was less than 2% of the national budget). So they did what they were told to appease the public and built Skylab, which ushered in the end of the Space Race. They had intended on stopping at Apollo 20 anyway, moving on to AAP (Apollo Applications Programs) and pushing manned spaceflight further out in to the solar system.
Easy E wrote: Well, we never really were able to exploit the Moon economically because of the Cold War. Trying to build anything up their by anyone would have been dangerously provocative. I think there was even a Treaty mitigating the Super Powers use of the Moon.
Frazzled wrote: Thermal balankets and TANG don't add up to the billions and billions spent on the program. Lets get real here. The only reason we went to the moon was the Cold War.
NASA didn't invent Tang (or Velcro, or Teflon...). Plus, they contributed much more to the public than thermal blankets. I just used that as an easily identifiable example. Again, NASA returned more money than they spent on Apollo.
Ensis Ferrae wrote: The consumer tech spawned from the Space Race greatly affect our day to day lives... Satellites, the microprocessor, the various materials used in the creation of the craft itself.
Yes, many technological devices used today would have happened anyway, but the Armstrong trip/NASAs breakthroughs in technology greatly increased the speed with which we have them.
I've just been through this with that other poster.
The point is, you don't do invest billions into some pointless endeavour then figure that's okay because you'll end up with some spin off tech. Research something useful and count the spin off tech as a bonus to doing something actually useful.
And to repeat myself, again, I'm not knocking the race to the moon. For all they knew it could have changed the world. It didn't and that's okay, because you never know how these things will turn out will you start them. No-one had any clue what Columbus trip was about to set in motion. But once you've done it, and discovered that with the current tech and economic factors, repeat space travel just isn't going to happen... then picking some other place even further away is just stupid... and doing it just because in spending billions of dollars you hope you'll discover some other new tech is even crazier.
It's like if Columbus had made his journey, and then... nothing. They figured out how to make a faster boat and some other nice things, but no-one was willing to repeat his journey because the cost was too great for what you could bring home... so they decide that they need to invest in another journey to a place that's even further away.
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ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Don't bother, he doesn't think any of those things count. Apparently the United States putting a man on the moon was just a remarkable human achievement that achieved nothing.
I've explained to you multiple times now that there is nothing magical about space research, compared to other research, when it comes to producing spin off technology. Spend a billion dollars on a research project, and you'll get spin off tech, whether you're trying to fly in to space or not. You haven't replied to that, just kept re-asserting your original claim that spin off technology justifies it. Whether this is because you haven't bothered to read my post, can't understand, or are just too lazy to actually try debating the point I'm not sure.
And once again, I'll copy paste my original statement, in the hopes that this time you'll understand what I actually said "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives". Any chance you'll spend some time thinking about the difference between 'achieved nothing' and 'nothing materially different in our day to day lives'? Any chance at all?
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Noir wrote: Umm... were did he miss read, you even ask to be showed as wrong. He just do what you asked.
He misread in thinking I claimed that landing on the moon achieved nothing, rather than what I actually claimed, that it changed nothing material in our day to day lives, a standard that 'faster computing in the midst of a still on-going revolution in computing speed' really, really doesn't make the standard.
And more than that, he totally missed the point in the comparison of Columbus and the moon landing. The first changed the whole way the world's economy worked, produced a massive expansion in trade and made mercantile powers immensely powerful, eventually leading to capitalism and the modern world. That's the standard that justifies massive undertakings like another attempt at landing people on another planet.
And it's fair enough that we tried, but once we've done and seen that it didn't change the world, it'd be fething stupid to go somewhere even further away and harder to get to, and hope this time will be different.
Except it did make our every day lives different, I offered proof. You claim it didn't, offered nothing but purely hypothetical musings.
Using your logical reasoning, I believe that if the Europeans had left the Americas well enough alone, the indigenous people would have eventually expanded and made contact with Europe. International trade routes would have been established and the world as we know it today would still have arisen.
We invest in massive projects like the Space Race because it gives a purpose to drive innovation, a reason to make things happen. People just don't throw money in to research for no reason, governments are not that altruistic. Look at the sad state of NASA now; my government hasn't really given them anything to do and now they a stymied by an ignorant public who sees them as a waste of money, yet the receive 0.5% of the total federal budget. If they were to be given a task to accomplish, and that task can be sold to the American public (like it was during the Space Race), there is no reason to believe that we couldn't enter a new era of scientific and technological achievement (...again).
Go read about the picture "The Blue Marble" and resulting environmentalism movement. If you honestly believe that man landing on the moon didn't change the world and the way we look at it (and the universe), I feel sorry for you. I would hate to live with a world outlook like that.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Out of the 9000 NEOs, there are currently a dozen that are prime targets for mining with our existing technology...
Which is plenty. Unless you're an incompetent engineer you don't start with a dozen simultaneous missions. The first mission to mine an asteroid will teach us important lessons, the second will apply those lessons and learn new ones, etc. By the time you've exploited those dozen prime targets it's a long time in the future and you've had plenty of time to prepare your next mission.
While feasible, doing that opens up a whole new slew of complications.
And it's still easier than mining on Mars. If you can't mine an asteroid without moving it closer to Earth then how exactly do you plan to mine anything on Mars, which is just as far away and at the bottom of a planetary gravity well?
and guess what: that same technology can be used to go to Mars.
No it can't, because one of the hardest parts about going to Mars is landing on Mars.
However, since the acceleration of human technological advancement has been directly correlated with the Space Race, that argument is moot.
Correlation is not the same as causation.
We know what the outcome of an undertaking of that magnitude are so we can have reasonable expectations that it will happen again.
No we can't. Apollo required the development of entirely new computer technology, building rocket technology up from its most primitive origins, etc. A mission to Mars would be done with relatively "mature" technology and it's incredibly idealistic to assume that it would provide significant benefits outside of the narrow field of "technology for manned space travel".
Landing on Mars isn't really the problem. its taking off again.
You don't need as many landing thrusters and you can also basically eliminate the need for large take off thrusters with an Asteroid.
Plus you can simply attach some thrusters to it and bring it back to Earth for the actual mining.
Asteroid mining would also have relatively immediate payoffs compared to going to Mars. Asteroids are already in space. Anything valuable on Mars needs to be extracted, lifted into orbit, and then taken back to Earth. Asteroid mining basically skips the first 2 steps.
Martian mining will be most useful once we've actually established a permanent colony and it needs material for its own use. It wouldn't be practical to ship stuff back to Earth.
Which is plenty. Unless you're an incompetent engineer you don't start with a dozen simultaneous missions. The first mission to mine an asteroid will teach us important lessons, the second will apply those lessons and learn new ones, etc. By the time you've exploited those dozen prime targets it's a long time in the future and you've had plenty of time to prepare your next mission.
I don't disagree with that at all.
And it's still easier than mining on Mars. If you can't mine an asteroid without moving it closer to Earth then how exactly do you plan to mine anything on Mars, which is just as far away and at the bottom of a planetary gravity well?
I've never said mining Mars is the reason to go there, I have only suggested it is a future possibility (and perhaps a necessity for establishing a long-term or permanent settlement) worth consideration. Still, the current plan to tow asteroids into an easier-to-reach orbit has significant drawbacks. Many prominent, past and present, scientist (including the great Carl Sagan) have voiced concern over a project such as that.
No it can't, because one of the hardest parts about going to Mars is landing on Mars.
Agreed. Landing on anything is hard, including Mars (especially considering the surface conditions). I was referring to propulsion technology.
Correlation is not the same as causation.
The Space Race caused the acceleration of human technological advancement. Happy?
No we can't. Apollo required the development of entirely new computer technology, building rocket technology up from its most primitive origins, etc. A mission to Mars would be done with relatively "mature" technology and it's incredibly idealistic to assume that it would provide significant benefits outside of the narrow field of "technology for manned space travel".
Not every technology needed to push humanity into the solar system is mature. Chemical rocket technology is not efficient enough or economically practical for deep space exploration. There are other propulsion methods being developed that are still in their infancy; some that are flight-proven, some that lab-verified, and some that are still in a conceptual form. I think it's incredibly cynical to assume the only reason for going to another planet is to plant a flag.
Are they worried they might accidentally toss one into Earth
With the current most feasible plan, yes, but it is not the most major of concerns. None of the proposed Near-Earth objects are large enough to cause any real threat to the planet. The problem is that objects orbiting at Lagrangian points tend to be unstable and would have to constantly make adjustments to keep them in place.
Frazzled wrote: Thermal balankets and TANG don't add up to the billions and billions spent on the program. Lets get real here. The only reason we went to the moon was the Cold War.
NASA didn't invent Tang
Rei did.*
The only way I could see any of this advancing technology is if someone walked into NASA and said, "damn it, we're going to bring an asteroid back here whether you like it or not but your budget depends on it being worth doing."
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Except it did make our every day lives different, I offered proof. You claim it didn't, offered nothing but purely hypothetical musings.
Are you kidding me? How many times do you want me to point out the difference between Columbus reaching the New World revolutionising international economics, and the moon landing having a spin off technology in slightly faster computing? How many times do you want me to repeat the word 'material'?
Using your logical reasoning, I believe that if the Europeans had left the Americas well enough alone, the indigenous people would have eventually expanded and made contact with Europe. International trade routes would have been established and the world as we know it today would still have arisen.
Umm, no. None of that would have happened. 'expanding' is not just an automatic, linear thing, where each step is an inevitable next point in a game of Civilisation. What Columbus did mattered because of when he did it, because of the state of the European economy at that time.
And you still haven't understood the point I keep repeating to you - major projects should be tried, and tried all the time. The moon landing was a good idea because for all we knew it could have triggered economic and social changes as great as as Columbus reaching the New World. But it didn't, and now we know a hell of a lot more about the limitations of space travel. So instead we need to put that research money in to other blue sky projects that could just change the world, instead of doubling down on one that we know won't with current technology.
We invest in massive projects like the Space Race because it gives a purpose to drive innovation, a reason to make things happen.
No, else we'd be just as keen to invest billions in to building a 100 metre tall Space Marine. Achieving that would drive innovation, and make things happen. But we aren't building a 100 metre tall Space Marine because we actually expect the project, and not the spin off technology, to achieve something in and of itself with the billions invested into it.
That was what was hoped for with the race to the moon. In achieving that we would be opening up a vast host of possibilities in space. But it didn't.
And that's okay, because not every blue sky project can be certain of changing the world. But when we try it, and it doesn't change the world... we fething stop doing it. We don't natter about useful minor stuff we discovered along the way, and try to do something even harder and more expensive, somehow expecting that if travel to the moon was too expensive for people to commercialise, then an even more expensive trip to Mars must be ripe with opportunity.
Look at the sad state of NASA now; my government hasn't really given them anything to do and now they a stymied by an ignorant public who sees them as a waste of money, yet the receive 0.5% of the total federal budget. If they were to be given a task to accomplish, and that task can be sold to the American public (like it was during the Space Race), there is no reason to believe that we couldn't enter a new era of scientific and technological achievement (...again).
NASA are an invaluable part of the modern research landscape. The field of climate change would be close to non-existant without NASA's contribution.
If you honestly believe that man landing on the moon didn't change the world and the way we look at it (and the universe), I feel sorry for you. I would hate to live with a world outlook like that.
I would hate to live in a world where I never read anything anyone else wrote, and instead trapped myself in strange arguments with pretend people and the things I thought they were saying.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I've never said mining Mars is the reason to go there, I have only suggested it is a future possibility (and perhaps a necessity for establishing a long-term or permanent settlement) worth consideration.
It's a FAR future possibility. There is no current realistic plan to get there, and no compelling reason to start working on a plan other than flag planting.
Agreed. Landing on anything is hard, including Mars (especially considering the surface conditions). I was referring to propulsion technology.
Propulsion technology is irrelevant to the bigger problem here: getting from Mars orbit to the surface of Mars is much harder than getting from asteroid orbit to the surface of an asteroid. The ability to get to Mars pretty much guarantees the ability to get to an asteroid, the ability to get to an asteroid does NOT guarantee the ability to get to Mars.
Also, it has nothing to do with surface conditions and everything to do with required delta-V. Getting into and out of the planetary gravity well is by far the most difficult part of a Mars mission, a problem that does not exist at all with an asteroid.
The Space Race caused the acceleration of human technological advancement. Happy?
No, because that's a much stronger claim that you can't defend. The space race correlated with advancement, but you can't just declare that none of it would have happened without the space race.
Not every technology needed to push humanity into the solar system is mature. Chemical rocket technology is not efficient enough or economically practical for deep space exploration.
Of course it is. Why do you think that we're sending probes all over the solar system already? The technological problems with getting to Mars have very little to do with rocket design and a lot to do with keeping the delicate and heavy human passengers alive over a period of months/years.
And besides that, incremental improvements in well-understood rocket designs are not likely to lead the kind of fundamental revolution in technology that the Apollo computer research contributed to.
I think it's incredibly cynical to assume the only reason for going to another planet is to plant a flag.
Sorry, but that's what it is. The only real reason to go to Mars instead of building on the moon as the first step is to plant the flag. Which is probably why nobody has a serious proposal to go to Mars.
It's a FAR future possibility. There is no current realistic plan to get there, and no compelling reason to start working on a plan other than flag planting.
I see it as a massive accomplishment for humanity, not a propaganda move.
Propulsion technology is irrelevant to the bigger problem here: getting from Mars orbit to the surface of Mars is much harder than getting from asteroid orbit to the surface of an asteroid. The ability to get to Mars pretty much guarantees the ability to get to an asteroid, the ability to get to an asteroid does NOT guarantee the ability to get to Mars.
Also, it has nothing to do with surface conditions and everything to do with required delta-V. Getting into and out of the planetary gravity well is by far the most difficult part of a Mars mission, a problem that does not exist at all with an asteroid.
Surface conditions can definitely complicate a landing on Mars, ask any of the mission planners of the various robotic missions to the planet. Martian dust storms and wind are extremely dangerous to any craft in the atmosphere. So yes, getting to Mars has challenges, those challenges then increase once try to land. Your fixation of gravity wells is bothersome. No one yet has said that going to Mars is just like taking a Sunday stroll in the park. It is hard, we have all agreed on it. At the same time, you are oversimplifying the underlying difficulty of going to an asteroid and coming back. Yes it is "easier" in the grand scheme of things, which is why it is an important step in preparing for the more difficult task of Mars. I've mentioned this already.
No, because that's a much stronger claim that you can't defend. The space race correlated with advancement, but you can't just declare that none of it would have happened without the space race.
I can and have defended it, you just refuse to accept it. But what do I know, right?
Of course it is. Why do you think that we're sending probes all over the solar system already? The technological problems with getting to Mars have very little to do with rocket design and a lot to do with keeping the delicate and heavy human passengers alive over a period of months/years.
No, it isn't. Take for instance the Voyager program. They are extraordinarily far away right now, but it still debated whether or not it has even passed the boundary of the Solar System... something that has taken over 36 years. It's good enough to get relatively small payloads around the solar system, but still prohibitively inefficient for deep-space, heavy payloads, or sustained long distance spaceflight. It has more to do with rocket design than you think. Lifting heavy and delicate life support systems would be too costly with current technology, hence the need to use cheaper, more efficient propulsion methods.
And besides that, incremental improvements in well-understood rocket designs are not likely to lead the kind of fundamental revolution in technology that the Apollo computer research contributed to.
See above.
Sorry, but that's what it is. The only real reason to go to Mars instead of building on the moon as the first step is to plant the flag. Which is probably why nobody has a serious proposal to go to Mars.
Again, I never advocated missions Mars in lieu of the Moon. I would absolutely love humans to go back to the Moon. I wish we never stopped. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most logical step in our expansion in the Solar System, no one is debating that. I'm just not willing to cast aside Mars because "it's too hard." I think you need to understand that I agree with almost all of what you are saying, except that going to Mars is a useless endeavor.
The bottom line is this:
We can go back and forth quoting each other with points and counterpoints, but make no mistake about it; there are serious pros and cons about the entire subject. Your cynicism allows you see the cons outweigh the pros and my idealism allows me to let the pros outweigh the cons.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I see it as a massive accomplishment for humanity, not a propaganda move.
Whether you call it "flag planting" or "a massive accomplishment for humanity" you're still talking about an entirely symbolic victory where little, if anything, of practical consequence happens.
Your fixation of gravity wells is bothersome.
Sorry, but that's how things work in space. Here's a nice chart for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fileelta-Vs_for_inner_Solar_System.svg . Notice how the cost of getting from Earth to Mars surface is much higher than the cost of getting from Earth to Deimos, or even low Mars orbit. That means vastly higher fuel costs (in terms of mass, not money), extra mass and complexity for reentry protection, extra fuel to haul all that protection, etc.
At the same time, you are oversimplifying the underlying difficulty of going to an asteroid and coming back.
No, I'm not. I'm saying it's simple relative to going to Mars. And it is, because you have much lower delta-V required and don't need to go through a planet's atmosphere to get there.
I can and have defended it, you just refuse to accept it. But what do I know, right?
There's a big difference between "investing in NASA produced X" and "investing in NASA was necessary to produce X". Nobody is disputing that various advances came as a result of the Apollo program. The point we're trying to make is that you can NOT just assume that those advances wouldn't have been made in the absence of Apollo, especially when you could dump all of the Apollo funding directly into computer research.
It's good enough to get relatively small payloads around the solar system, but still prohibitively inefficient for deep-space, heavy payloads, or sustained long distance spaceflight.
Oh hey, you just discovered one of the reasons why robots are awesome. Not only do they not need all that expensive (in mass terms) life support stuff they don't complain about boredom if you use a slow maximum-efficiency route to get them to their destination.
But I guess if you want to plant the flag have a major human accomplishment you might need to speed things up a bit, or the taxpayers might get bored and cut your funding.
Lifting heavy and delicate life support systems would be too costly with current technology, hence the need to use cheaper, more efficient propulsion methods.
Nope. NASA was giving serious thought to manned missions to Mars and Venus (a flyby, at least) using existing Apollo hardware with limited modifications, at least until their budget was cut. Yes, you would need to build a heavy-lift rocket that doesn't currently exist (because nobody needs one), but building more Saturn Vs with modern computers is hardly going to drive a revolution in technology.
I'm just not willing to cast aside Mars because "it's too hard."
You don't cast it aside indefinitely, you cast it aside for now. Mars is irrelevant as a goal right now, other than flag-planting, because by the time you've accomplished the easier steps you're dealing with a new generation of hardware and lots of experience. Any Mars plans made now would be thrown out anyway if/when we succeed at getting back to the moon/asteroid mining/etc.
I'm well aware of how delta-v works and it's limitations on spaceflight. Like I have already explained, we can lessen those burdens with cheaper, more efficient propulsion.
The point we're trying to make is that you can NOT just assume that those advances wouldn't have been made in the absence of Apollo
In that case, you can't assume that they would have come about without the Apollo program, especially since the people that created them have said there was no reason to except for the spacecraft.
Oh hey, you just discovered one of the reasons why robots are awesome.
I know why robots are awesome, when did I ever say to abandon robotic probes? Oh that's right, I didn't. I called them "important vanguards to human exploration of space."
NASA was giving serious thought to manned missions to Mars and Venus.
Yeah, it was called AAP and I went over it already. That doesn't prove your point.
taxpayers might get bored and cut your funding.
That is one of the fundamental problem with our society. The public views science, mathematics, and technology as "boring" unless they can get a new iPhone out of it. By expanding the industry and creating more high-paying jobs in the astronautics we can rekindle the passion for SEM in the public eye.
All of this brings me back to my original point of contention: the fact remains that the Apollo changed the world in similar degree that Columbus did.
Columbus wasn't the first European to get on a boat nor was the first to visit the New World. What he did was prove that it could be done reliably (of course he also wrought destruction on the people already living here, but that's besides the point) with existing technology for the benefit of his people. He didn't personally change the world instantly, but it gradually changed as more people started to come the New World, thus establishing a trans-Atlantic trade route. That is a direct parallel to the Apollo program. Besides have the awesome effect of the greatest achievement in the history of man, they proved you could adapt new technology to meet goals never before thought of. The simple fact remains that what they did with integrated circuits in computers in Apollo led to the development of microchips which led to the foundation of our society in the 21st century.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I'm well aware of how delta-v works and it's limitations on spaceflight. Like I have already explained, we can lessen those burdens with cheaper, more efficient propulsion.
And that still doesn't change anything. Any improvement that makes a Mars mission easier also makes an asteroid mission easier, keeping the relative difficulty the same.
In that case, you can't assume that they would have come about without the Apollo program, especially since the people that created them have said there was no reason to except for the spacecraft.
Remember, your fundamental premise here is that we should fund space exploration to get the side benefits of improving technology. If the government had simply dumped the Apollo money into computer research there would have been a reason, and it would have been a much more efficient way of doing things if your primary goal is to improve computers. You go to the moon because you want to get to the moon, not because you hope that going to the moon will coincidentally help some other thing you want to accomplish.
I know why robots are awesome, when did I ever say to abandon robotic probes?
You didn't, but you are arguing for manned space travel. Which is already of questionable value now, and will only continue to lose value as robots get better and better. The primary argument in favor of having humans on the mission seems to be the ability to plant the flag.
Yeah, it was called AAP and I went over it already. That doesn't prove your point.
Yes it does. 1970s rocket technology was already good enough to reach the destination, even without a dedicated from-scratch design. The primary difficulty in a manned Mars/asteroid mission isn't the engines, it's the life support. Therefore the most likely outcome of that mission technology-wise is incremental improvements in engine design, not a major revolution. A new Saturn V with modern computers and engines would be pretty cool, but it isn't going to change society in any meaningful way.
Remember, your fundamental premise here is that we should fund space exploration to get the side benefits of improving technology. If the government had simply dumped the Apollo money into computer research there would have been a reason, and it would have been a much more efficient way of doing things if your primary goal is to improve computers. You go to the moon because you want to get to the moon, not because you hope that going to the moon will coincidentally help some other thing you want to accomplish.
No, my fundamental premise for funding space exploration is my love for outer space and my belief that humanity is destined to expand from Earth. Everything else we get from it is a bonus. That being said, unfortunately not everyone feels that way so I think that the side benefits are what should be sold to the public, so they know their $9 a year accomplishes something.
You didn't, but you are arguing for manned space travel. Which is already of questionable value now, and will only continue to lose value as robots get better and better. The primary argument in favor of having humans on the mission seems to be the ability to plant the flag.
I don't feel that even highly advanced robots are a substitute for the human experience. I believe humans are intrinsically linked to the universe on a fundamental level and no robot could truly replace us.
And that still doesn't change anything. Any improvement that makes a Mars mission easier also makes an asteroid mission easier, keeping the relative difficulty the same.
I've already said going to an asteroid should be done before a mission to Mars, it is a logical step. You and I pretty much agree on this.
it isn't going to change society in any meaningful way.
That is just where I plain disagree. Every advancement is meaningful.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: All of this brings me back to my original point of contention: the fact remains that the Apollo changed the world in similar degree that Columbus did. Columbus wasn't the first European to get on a boat nor was the first to visit the New World. What he did was prove that it could be done reliably (of course he also wrought destruction on the people already living here, but that's besides the point) with existing technology for the benefit of his people. He didn't personally change the world instantly, but it gradually changed as more people started to come the New World, thus establishing a trans-Atlantic trade route. That is a direct parallel to the Apollo program. Besides have the awesome effect of the greatest achievement in the history of man, they proved you could adapt new technology to meet goals never before thought of.
And now you're aping my first post, but still missing the point. Yes, what Columbus did was pave a way for others to follow. But the point that I've been explaining to you since you first tried to argue with me is that others actually did follow Columbus, because travelling to the new world to trade and set up colonies was clearly and immediately a good way to make money, and that money was then re-invested in more ships, and that's how you get capital expansion, and that changes the world.
Whereas since Armstrong, there were a few more government funded trips to the moon, and nothing else. No mining expeditions, no colony. Not even space tourism. Because the tech and economy just isn't there to support that kind of stuff. As a result, there just hasn't been a change in the world, even though you just assert that there has, with some vague notion of 'proving you can adapt technology'... which was an idea that no-one had understood before that, at all.
When someone lands on Mars, or lands on the moon again, and people see it and think 'holy gak, the clever way they did that is something we can offer to lots of people in a self-sustaining industry', then that's changed the world.
The simple fact remains that what they did with integrated circuits in computers in Apollo led to the development of microchips which led to the foundation of our society in the 21st century.
You can continue to claim that the only way anyone could possibly have developed integrated circuits was if they were being put on a rocket, but the rest of us will continue to consider that ridiculous, especially because IC had been theorised in various forms for more than a decade before NASA even formed, and were of great interest to the US airforce for a lot of purposes other than flying to the moon.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: All of this brings me back to my original point of contention: the fact remains that the Apollo changed the world in similar degree that Columbus did.
Columbus wasn't the first European to get on a boat nor was the first to visit the New World. What he did was prove that it could be done reliably (of course he also wrought destruction on the people already living here, but that's besides the point) with existing technology for the benefit of his people. He didn't personally change the world instantly, but it gradually changed as more people started to come the New World, thus establishing a trans-Atlantic trade route. That is a direct parallel to the Apollo program. Besides have the awesome effect of the greatest achievement in the history of man, they proved you could adapt new technology to meet goals never before thought of.
And now you're aping my first post, but still missing the point. Yes, what Columbus did was pave a way for others to follow. But the point that I've been explaining to you since you first tried to argue with me is that others actually did follow Columbus, because travelling to the new world to trade and set up colonies was clearly and immediately a good way to make money, and that money was then re-invested in more ships, and that's how you get capital expansion, and that changes the world.
Whereas since Armstrong, there were a few more government funded trips to the moon, and nothing else. No mining expeditions, no colony. Not even space tourism. Because the tech and economy just isn't there to support that kind of stuff. As a result, there just hasn't been a change in the world, even though you just assert that there has, with some vague notion of 'proving you can adapt technology'... which was an idea that no-one had understood before that, at all.
When someone lands on Mars, or lands on the moon again, and people see it and think 'holy gak, the clever way they did that is something we can offer to lots of people in a self-sustaining industry', then that's changed the world.
The simple fact remains that what they did with integrated circuits in computers in Apollo led to the development of microchips which led to the foundation of our society in the 21st century.
You can continue to claim that the only way anyone could possibly have developed integrated circuits was if they were being put on a rocket, but the rest of us will continue to consider that ridiculous, especially because IC had been theorised in various forms for more than a decade before NASA even formed, and were of great interest to the US airforce for a lot of purposes other than flying to the moon.
Ouze wrote: I'm also totally cool with setting up the moon as a way-station, though from why I understand from cartoons, Deceptions will try to overtake it. It might be best to try and work on Dinobots first.
GRIMLOC WANT CUP TO TELL STORY!
And my goodness, the amount of e-peen going on in this thread is staggering
GRIMLOC SMASH GRAVITY WELL IN FACE!
It would be interesting to tell the many many many people in the world without running water, you'd rather spend trillions sending a VW bus to Mars then help them have running water and indoor plumbing.
Call me crazy, but if people want to complain about gaking in a bucket,maybe they should move. I also get a bit annoyed at how the rest of the worlds problems have to fall on America to fix. We need to advance the sciences just add much as fix indoor plumbing.
Fair point. Then I'll rephrase. it would be interesting to tell the many people barely making payments, crying in frustration that they can't send their kids to college an take care of their parents, theat we're going to spend trillions to send a monkey to Mars.
Frazzled wrote: Fair point. Then I'll rephrase. it would be interesting to tell the many people barely making payments, crying in frustration that they can't send their kids to college an take care of their parents, theat we're going to spend trillions to send a monkey to Mars.
Or we could let then know that NASA budget is less then 4% of the US budget at it peak time and normal less then 2%. We are taking less then 2% the yearly Military budget. Why are you worryed about the maybe 20 million they might get on NASA's best year, hell just give them a billion form the Military budget. Then NASA good for 50 years. I don't know maybe people barely making payments should ask why we need to spend so much on the military, first.
Frazzled wrote: Fair point. Then I'll rephrase. it would be interesting to tell the many people barely making payments, crying in frustration that they can't send their kids to college an take care of their parents, theat we're going to spend trillions to send a monkey to Mars.
They should take up their fight with the mega-rich funneling all the assets upwards to themselves more than they should the government for not giving them handouts, right?
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The average taxpayer gives NASA about $9 a year.
Again, NASA cannot reach Mars on their current budget. You'd be looking at a substantially higher budget, for twenty years. And all this so that you can send a dozen people to a cold, lifeless desert.
For comparison, the most recent Antarctic base cost $10 million a year for four years to build. And there's actually stuff in Antarctica.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The average taxpayer gives NASA about $9 a year.
Thats sweet pooplkins but brilliantly irrelevant. The topic is going to Mars. To go to Mars you have to factor in the cost, including secondary and primary stations.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The average taxpayer gives NASA about $9 a year.
Again, NASA cannot reach Mars on their current budget. You'd be looking at a substantially higher budget, for twenty years. And all this so that you can send a dozen people to a cold, lifeless desert.
For comparison, the most recent Antarctic base cost $10 million a year for four years to build. And there's actually stuff in Antarctica.
Penguins that can do the Charleston! And of course, the hidden Nazi base.
Thats sweet pooplkins but brilliantly irrelevant. The topic is going to Mars. To go to Mars you have to factor in the cost, including secondary and primary stations.
Clearly and I fully understand what the topic is. Snarky comments notwithstanding, the poster above you said that NASA's budget is "normally less than 2% of the federal budget." I was merely confirming that statement and giving insight on how little Americans actually spend on NASA. Obviously we have to factor cost (it probably the most important aspect of anything we do), and seeing as how NASA receives so little money, things would need to change. But thanks for clearing that up for us.
Frazzled wrote: Fair point. Then I'll rephrase. it would be interesting to tell the many people barely making payments, crying in frustration that they can't send their kids to college an take care of their parents, theat we're going to spend trillions to send a monkey to Mars.
Id then come back with "Well do something about the political corruption that plagues our government, rather then complaining about going to Mars, which we will actually get SOMETHING out of the experience"
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The average taxpayer gives NASA about $9 a year.
Thats sweet pooplkins but brilliantly irrelevant. The topic is going to Mars. To go to Mars you have to factor in the cost, including secondary and primary stations.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The average taxpayer gives NASA about $9 a year.
Again, NASA cannot reach Mars on their current budget. You'd be looking at a substantially higher budget, for twenty years. And all this so that you can send a dozen people to a cold, lifeless desert.
For comparison, the most recent Antarctic base cost $10 million a year for four years to build. And there's actually stuff in Antarctica.
Penguins that can do the Charleston! And of course, the hidden Nazi base.
Nazi Base?!? I thought you were talking about the crater that leads to the center of our hollow Earth. Im confused now
And so now you're giving up. Shame, we were so close. All you had to do was realise that unlike Columbus, no other organisations tried to follow in NASA's footsteps and reach the moon, and you'd have finally understood the point I made in my first post.
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Noir wrote: Or we could let then know that NASA budget is less then 4% of the US budget at it peak time and normal less then 2%. We are taking less then 2% the yearly Military budget. Why are you worryed about the maybe 20 million they might get on NASA's best year, hell just give them a billion form the Military budget. Then NASA good for 50 years. I don't know maybe people barely making payments should ask why we need to spend so much on the military, first.
A billion dollars lasting NASA 50 years? What are you talking about. NASA's budget now is about 18 billion.
I mean, NASA is pretty cheap, and pretty awesome, but if you want to talk numbers you shouldn't be off by a factor of a 1,000 times.
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AlexHolker wrote: Again, NASA cannot reach Mars on their current budget. You'd be looking at a substantially higher budget, for twenty years. And all this so that you can send a dozen people to a cold, lifeless desert.
Yeah, and the other point people are probably missing is that NASA does great work now, and they do work that no other agency in the world could do.
Decide that you want to put a man on Mars, and that means redirecting funds away from that useful work and towards pointless nonsense. Anyone who gives a gak about science should be outraged if such an idea ever got taken seriously.
Although, you could argue that it is the purpose of governments to funnel money into pointless nonsense..
At least this would be one kind of pointless nonsense that might have future benefit for mankind, rather than stuff that's just built for killing people for instance.
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
I think those ''Luddites'', if you refer to Sebster and AlexHolker, realise very well the potential benefits of having the means of colonizing another planet. I mean, this has been part of our imaginary background since before we were all (except maybe Frazzled) born.
The problem being that we aren't in a position to exploit those benefits, or they simply aren't a need at this moment. Whatever materials we might want to exploit on Mars would require us to develop hauling technologies we do not have, and I doubt there are actually exploitable materials on Mars that would turn in a benefit after factoring the processing and shipping expenses.
For those talking about overpopulation... *sigh* overpopulation isn't a problem. It won't even be a problem in 50 years. The problem is proper population dispersion. And space colonization wouldn't, in any shape or form, be a short term solution to an overpopulation problem (and by short term I mean in the next centuries). Right now, establishing a base on Mars would be as useful as acquiring a multi-billion dollars aquarium.
I would much rather see an influx of funds and research time into long-term terraformation, done by boring scientists in boring white coats, behind their boring chemistry set, comfortably located in a boring, earthly research center. Actually, I'd much rather see all those funds go into a research field that could, in the foreseable future, actually change our civilization, such as cognitive science.
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
What benefit would that be? Apart from nationalistic bs, what does a Mars colony get you that an Antarctic colony doesn't?
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
I think those ''Luddites'', if you refer to Sebster and AlexHolker, realise very well the potential benefits of having the means of colonizing another planet. I mean, this has been part of our imaginary background since before we were all (except maybe Frazzled) born.
The problem being that we aren't in a position to exploit those benefits, or they simply aren't a need at this moment. Whatever materials we might want to exploit on Mars would require us to develop hauling technologies we do not have, and I doubt there are actually exploitable materials on Mars that would turn in a benefit after factoring the processing and shipping expenses.
For those talking about overpopulation... *sigh* overpopulation isn't a problem. It won't even be a problem in 50 years. The problem is proper population dispersion. And space colonization wouldn't, in any shape or form, be a short term solution to an overpopulation problem (and by short term I mean in the next centuries). Right now, establishing a base on Mars would be as useful as acquiring a multi-billion dollars aquarium.
I would much rather see an influx of funds and research time into long-term terraformation, done by boring scientists in boring white coats, behind their boring chemistry set, comfortably located in a boring, earthly research center. Actually, I'd much rather see all those funds go into a research field that could, in the foreseable future, actually change our civilization, such as cognitive science.
As has been pointed out already in this very thread, the Apollo program gave us technology that we use every day. It could be argued that we are using it right now.
It's not simply a matter of being on Mars. I'm referring more to the innovations that would get us there.
Pacific wrote: Although, you could argue that it is the purpose of governments to funnel money into pointless nonsense..
At least this would be one kind of pointless nonsense that might have future benefit for mankind, rather than stuff that's just built for killing people for instance.
The current budget at NASA for killing people is pretty close to zero. Whereas the current NASA contribution to climate science. astrophysics and all sorts of other stuff is basically world leading.
Shift that funding towards putting a person on Mars and NASA becomes a materially less useful organisation.
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Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
Getting called a technolocrat and a luddite on the same weekend... huh.
I hope and dream that one day we'll colonise another planet. But I'm not going to confuse a dream with our immediate technological and economic capacities. Put a man on Mars... a colony will not follow. It's that fething simple.
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Monster Rain wrote: As has been pointed out already in this very thread, the Apollo program gave us technology that we use every day. It could be argued that we are using it right now.
It's not simply a matter of being on Mars. I'm referring more to the innovations that would get us there.
As was also pointed out, multi-billion dollar research and development will always produce technology off-shoots. But other R&D projects will also produce a useful main goal. Going to Mars will not.
Consider these two stories; "We spent 50 billion on getting to Mars. Along the way we advanced a number of related scientific fields, and put a man on Mars, who got back safely. And that was that, nobody else attempted the same. After a while people started talking about going to some other planet." "We spent 50 billion on terraforming technologies. Along the way we advanced a number of related scientific fields, and changed desert landscape in to high yield farming land. And once we did this, it became economically viable for all a number of private companies to deploy similar technology all around the globe, and it changed the world forever."
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
I think those ''Luddites'', if you refer to Sebster and AlexHolker, realise very well the potential benefits of having the means of colonizing another planet. I mean, this has been part of our imaginary background since before we were all (except maybe Frazzled) born.
The problem being that we aren't in a position to exploit those benefits, or they simply aren't a need at this moment. Whatever materials we might want to exploit on Mars would require us to develop hauling technologies we do not have, and I doubt there are actually exploitable materials on Mars that would turn in a benefit after factoring the processing and shipping expenses.
For those talking about overpopulation... *sigh* overpopulation isn't a problem. It won't even be a problem in 50 years. The problem is proper population dispersion. And space colonization wouldn't, in any shape or form, be a short term solution to an overpopulation problem (and by short term I mean in the next centuries). Right now, establishing a base on Mars would be as useful as acquiring a multi-billion dollars aquarium.
I would much rather see an influx of funds and research time into long-term terraformation, done by boring scientists in boring white coats, behind their boring chemistry set, comfortably located in a boring, earthly research center. Actually, I'd much rather see all those funds go into a research field that could, in the foreseable future, actually change our civilization, such as cognitive science.
As has been pointed out already in this very thread, the Apollo program gave us technology that we use every day. It could be argued that we are using it right now.
It's not simply a matter of being on Mars. I'm referring more to the innovations that would get us there.
No it gave us Tang, a cool bar code system, and velcro. Everything else would have been developed just fine on its own.
No the space race did not develop computer technology. Sorry, if we relied on NASA for computer technology, we would be back with IBMs using 486s.
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
What benefit would that be? Apart from nationalistic bs, what does a Mars colony get you that an Antarctic colony doesn't?
Because it's...in...SPAAAAAAACE!
I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. As in *really* wanted to be one, at least until I realized that job requires a technical and scientific background that's really beyond me. (Ultimately, I'm a creative person...math sucks!) So I get the romantic factor involved with space travel, I really do.
But I've come to realize that it just doesn't make sense to invest heavily into manned space flight. There aren't any compelling arguments for it beyond the romantic one, as plenty of others here have illustrated. I think that romance is still worth something, but not the untold billions it would take to get people to Mars and back. Undertaking that right now would be the equivalent of the Moon landing, which was an utterly amazing achievement but ultimately an Evel Knievel stunt..."look what we can do!"
When we're ready to actually DO something on/with Mars with a clear long-term objective and real payoff -- and landing people there is part of that -- then I'll be on board with it. I don't think I'm going to live that long, however.
How about making this a general space flight/exploration thread? I guess this latest news story is kind of related in that sending a rover to the moon is no small technical accomplishment.
Good to hear that the ESA have been involved in this also, helping with the transmissions and telemetry of the rocket in transit and during the approach and landing.
Automatically Appended Next Post: ++EDIT++ Have changed the title of the thread as the previous one wasn't really encompassing enough (or apt for that matter).
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
What benefit would that be? Apart from nationalistic bs, what does a Mars colony get you that an Antarctic colony doesn't?
Pretty much everything in this video.
The Ability to construct a self sustaining colony on mars and to one day terraform the planet. Will help to ensure the survival of our species.
Frazzled wrote: No it gave us Tang, a cool bar code system, and velcro. Everything else would have been developed just fine on its own.
No the space race did not develop computer technology. Sorry, if we relied on NASA for computer technology, we would be back with IBMs using 486s.
NASA did not invent Tang, it was invented in General Foods in 1957; Velcro was invented by Swiss engineer George de Mestra in 1948; and the "cool barcode system" was developed for the Space Shuttle program, not Apollo. While we are at it, NASA didn't pay millions (or billions, depending on the story) to develop a "space pen" while the Soviets used pencils. They also didn't invent Teflon, cordless power tools, smoke detectors, or quartz clocks. Hope that clears the air.
There are plenty of books out there detailing what technology advances occurred as a direct result of the Space Race and computers (specifically the integrated circuit) are generally on top of the lists.
How about making this a general space flight/exploration thread? I guess this latest news story is kind of related in that sending a rover to the moon is no small technical accomplishment.
Ninjacommando wrote: The Ability to construct a self sustaining colony on mars and to one day terraform the planet. Will help to ensure the survival of our species.
If Mars is ever going to be a lifeboat for the human race, it will be after we have developed the technology necessary for mass interplanetary transport. But that same technology will make it far easier to build the colony in the first place. Going to Mars half cocked will not achieve the goals you suggest. It's like you're building a house, but you're too impatient to put down the foundation first.
Monster Rain wrote: I'm not surprised that there are unimaginative Luddites out there that don't see the benefit of attempting to reach or colonize another planet.
What benefit would that be? Apart from nationalistic bs, what does a Mars colony get you that an Antarctic colony doesn't?
Ninjacommando wrote: The Ability to construct a self sustaining colony on mars and to one day terraform the planet. Will help to ensure the survival of our species.
If Mars is ever going to be a lifeboat for the human race, it will be after we have developed the technology necessary for mass interplanetary transport. But that same technology will make it far easier to build the colony in the first place. Going to Mars half cocked will not achieve the goals you suggest. It's like you're building a house, but you're too impatient to put down the foundation first.
Well people are working on, and have a working prototype IIRC, of an Ion drive which would make going back and forth fairly easy.
The real limitation is getting a viable surface to orbit/orbit to surface transport. Something that is reusable and doesn't need massive rocket boosters to achieve escape velocity.
Ninjacommando wrote: The Ability to construct a self sustaining colony on mars and to one day terraform the planet. Will help to ensure the survival of our species.
If Mars is ever going to be a lifeboat for the human race, it will be after we have developed the technology necessary for mass interplanetary transport. But that same technology will make it far easier to build the colony in the first place. Going to Mars half cocked will not achieve the goals you suggest. It's like you're building a house, but you're too impatient to put down the foundation first.
Getting to Mars 'half cocked', as you say, is part of the process. We didn't put man on the moon on our first journey beyond our planet's atmosphere.
iproxtaco wrote: Getting to Mars 'half cocked', as you say, is part of the process. We didn't put man on the moon on our first journey beyond our planet's atmosphere.
As I explained multiple times when this thread started months ago, when we did put a man on the moon, nothing followed other than a handful more government funded missions to the moon. Compare that to Columbus, where his voyage was followed by large numbers of other countries and private interests making trips, setting up colonies and changing the world in a very short period of time.
The difference, you see, is that when Columbus made his trip there was economic capacity and motivation for lots more people to do the same, and so his trip was a trigger for a world changing event. But while the moon landing was perhaps the greatest scientific achievement in history, there simply wasn't the economic capacity and motivation for repeated efforts - the moon is really far away and really expensive to get to, and there's nothing there to justify that kind of cost.
And Mars is the same. That's what would be 'half-cocked' about going to Mars - we are simply miles away from the economic capacity and motivations needed to turn a trip to Mars in to a sustainable industry.
iproxtaco wrote: Getting to Mars 'half cocked', as you say, is part of the process. We didn't put man on the moon on our first journey beyond our planet's atmosphere.
As I explained multiple times when this thread started months ago, when we did put a man on the moon, nothing followed other than a handful more government funded missions to the moon. Compare that to Columbus, where his voyage was followed by large numbers of other countries and private interests making trips, setting up colonies and changing the world in a very short period of time.
The difference, you see, is that when Columbus made his trip there was economic capacity and motivation for lots more people to do the same, and so his trip was a trigger for a world changing event. But while the moon landing was perhaps the greatest scientific achievement in history, there simply wasn't the economic capacity and motivation for repeated efforts - the moon is really far away and really expensive to get to, and there's nothing there to justify that kind of cost.
And Mars is the same. That's what would be 'half-cocked' about going to Mars - we are simply miles away from the economic capacity and motivations needed to turn a trip to Mars in to a sustainable industry.
Exactly. The Apollo missions put a dozen men on the moon, and it's been forty years since and we haven't been back. As far as establishing a lunar colony goes, the Apollo missions were a complete failure. If you want a Mars colony, you need something smarter in mind than trying to repeat Apollo's failure.
iproxtaco wrote: Getting to Mars 'half cocked', as you say, is part of the process. We didn't put man on the moon on our first journey beyond our planet's atmosphere.
As I explained multiple times when this thread started months ago, when we did put a man on the moon, nothing followed other than a handful more government funded missions to the moon. Compare that to Columbus, where his voyage was followed by large numbers of other countries and private interests making trips, setting up colonies and changing the world in a very short period of time.
The difference, you see, is that when Columbus made his trip there was economic capacity and motivation for lots more people to do the same, and so his trip was a trigger for a world changing event. But while the moon landing was perhaps the greatest scientific achievement in history, there simply wasn't the economic capacity and motivation for repeated efforts - the moon is really far away and really expensive to get to, and there's nothing there to justify that kind of cost.
And Mars is the same. That's what would be 'half-cocked' about going to Mars - we are simply miles away from the economic capacity and motivations needed to turn a trip to Mars in to a sustainable industry.
Sigh...
The Age of Discovery was not this massive, overnight socioeconomic boom you describe it as, but rather a relatively slow progression starting in the early 15th century and ending in the 17th century; it was not an instant revolution in the way humanity operated. The Age of Discovery was one of the most significant global events, but let us not forget that it also brought us the rise of European nation-states, colonial empires, diseases, and other scourges upon humanity, many of which took centuries (or never) to recover from.
Look at aviation: the first sustained, powered heavier-than-air flight happened in 1903. Sixty-six years later, less than a lifetime, mankind was traveling to another celestial body and returning safely. That is a revolution.
Yeah, I believe the total right now is 8 dollars comes out of every 1 dollar that is spent by NASA. Not sure how that doesn't produce substantial economic benefits.
The Age of Discovery was not this massive, overnight socioeconomic boom you describe it as, but rather a relatively slow progression starting in the early 15th century and ending in the 17th century; it was not an instant revolution in the way humanity operated.
Yeah... but it was a constant process, with capacity constantly expanding through organic systems. Whereas the race in to space is a government program to put a man on the moon, followed by some more government trips to the moon, followed by some different government programs for other types of space exploration (ISS etc), which at no point began producing a return that brought more money in to the program than went out, and at no point paved the way for other groups to start self-sustaining programs of their own.
The Age of Discovery was one of the most significant global events, but let us not forget that it also brought us the rise of European nation-states, colonial empires, diseases, and other scourges upon humanity, many of which took centuries (or never) to recover from.
Yeah, that's what change does, lots of good and lots of bad. Whether the change is worth it or not is one up for debate but nothing to do with this debate, which is about whether or not another big space project will bring about any kind of real change.
Look at aviation: the first sustained, powered heavier-than-air flight happened in 1903. Sixty-six years later, less than a lifetime, mankind was traveling to another celestial body and returning safely. That is a revolution.
Yeah, aviation was a revolution. A series of advancements building one on the next, as a wide range of organisations in a wide range of countries built a powerful new industry and form of travel where none had existed before. Which of course changed the world and how many of us live.
How you can see that, and then not see how far removed that is from the state of space travel is beyond me.
Research is almost always good, and brings in vast amounts of additional economic benefit. Please understand that I am not saying we shouldn't study space, or study any of the other incredibly useful research projects at NASA or any other government funded scientific agency.
What I am trying to explain to you (again, after you gave up last time) is that research dollars are finite, and so they should be put towards projects that in and of themselves are likely to benefit society, beyond the side benefits. As I explained earlier in the thread, research terraforming here on Earth and you'll get all the benefits that a few billion in R&D investment will get you, and you might get the technology to expand our viable farming land, which could open up a whole new industry that greatly expands our total area of food producing land. Research a trip to Mars and you'll get all the benefits that a few billion in R&D investment will get you, and maybe a guy goes to Mars then comes back... followed by the same amount of nothing that followed the moon landing.
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djones520 wrote: Yeah, I believe the total right now is 8 dollars comes out of every 1 dollar that is spent by NASA. Not sure how that doesn't produce substantial economic benefits.
That's what research does. That's why research is great and important. But that applies to all research. Throw a few hundred milion in to making the largest flag pole in the world and you'll get side benefits, but it'll be stupid waste of our very finite research dollars because there'll be no primary benefit at all.
By the logic of 'we'll develop some random stuff along the way' you've got the justification for every pointless, random R&D project that could ever exist. What you want out of your R&D is all those nice side discoveries, and a final project that actually improves lives. Sending a guy to Mars is incredibly unlikely to achieve that second thing.
We're not talking about the space program, we're talking about a manned landing. What has the Apollo program achieved of value that could not have been achieved by doing the research so you could go to the moon, and then not actually going to the moon?
We're not talking about the space program, we're talking about a manned landing. What has the Apollo program achieved of value that could not have been achieved by doing the research so you could go to the moon, and then not actually going to the moon?
Doing all the research to go to the moon without going to the moon would be about the same as all the Cold Fusion research going on.... Sure it "works" in theory. And that's one of the things that makes the men/women of that era so badass. going up to some bloke saying, "hey, we THINK this should work, we'd love to send you up to the moon. which should work based on our calculations, however there is still a significant chance you will die" and the reply is, "'Murica! Feth Yeah!" (ok, not really.. but the fact that the first men launched into space had some serious cajones, and a broken "fear sensor" speaks volumes)
Yeah... but it was a constant process, with capacity constantly expanding through organic systems. Whereas the race in to space is a government program to put a man on the moon, followed by some more government trips to the moon, followed by some different government programs for other types of space exploration (ISS etc), which at no point began producing a return that brought more money in to the program than went out, and at no point paved the way for other groups to start self-sustaining programs of their own
NASA has always contributed more the the American economy that it has taken from it. Since our country was/is willing and able to share in our technological achievements (even during the height of the Space Race), we insured that all peaceful nations could be included. The knowledge gained from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle Orbiter programs also helped spur the advancement of private spaceflight, which will be a key ingredient to continued human presence in space.
Yeah, that's what change does, lots of good and lots of bad. Whether the change is worth it or not is one up for debate but nothing to do with this debate, which is about whether or not another big space project will bring about any kind of real change.
It will bring about real change. I apologize that the past evidence is not enough for you.
Yeah, aviation was a revolution. A series of advancements building one on the next, as a wide range of organisations in a wide range of countries built a powerful new industry and form of travel where none had existed before. Which of course changed the world and how many of us live.
How you can see that, and then not see how far removed that is from the state of space travel is beyond me.
It is not done changing the world and human spaceflight is the most important cog in that wheel.
Research is almost always good, and brings in vast amounts of additional economic benefit. Please understand that I am not saying we shouldn't study space, or study any of the other incredibly useful research projects at NASA or any other government funded scientific agency.
What I am trying to explain to you (again, after you gave up last time) is that research dollars are finite, and so they should be put towards projects that in and of themselves are likely to benefit society, beyond the side benefits. As I explained earlier in the thread, research terraforming here on Earth and you'll get all the benefits that a few billion in R&D investment will get you, and you might get the technology to expand our viable farming land, which could open up a whole new industry that greatly expands our total area of food producing land. Research a trip to Mars and you'll get all the benefits that a few billion in R&D investment will get you, and maybe a guy goes to Mars then comes back... followed by the same amount of nothing that followed the moon landing.
Human spaceflight and the technological advancement of humanity is the benefit. There really is no easier way to explain it. Sorry, claiming nothing occurred following the Apollo program is categorically incorrect. Why, despite the evidence that myself and others have shown, you still believe that is beyond me. As far as your farming argument: there is not a problem of having enough food, but getting to the people that need it. That is a problem for politicians, not scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, those same politicians are also in control of the space program. So good luck.
We're not talking about the space program, we're talking about a manned landing. What has the Apollo program achieved of value that could not have been achieved by doing the research so you could go to the moon, and then not actually going to the moon?
Read those two papers and one article, they specifically address the Apollo program.
I also feel there is a gross misunderstanding here on exactly how much the Apollo program cost America. This might clear that up a little.
Ensis Ferrae wrote: Doing all the research to go to the moon without going to the moon would be about the same as all the Cold Fusion research going on.... Sure it "works" in theory. And that's one of the things that makes the men/women of that era so badass. going up to some bloke saying, "hey, we THINK this should work, we'd love to send you up to the moon. which should work based on our calculations, however there is still a significant chance you will die" and the reply is, "'Murica! Feth Yeah!" (ok, not really.. but the fact that the first men launched into space had some serious cajones, and a broken "fear sensor" speaks volumes)
If nations were built on bad-ass individuals, Russia would be... something other than an oppressive kleptocracy. Nations are built on bad-ass individuals doing stuff that the rest of us can take advantage of afterwards.
And just to clarify, I'll say it again, the moon landing was probably the greatest scientific achievement in human history. And it was a really good idea, because it could have led to a massive new opportunities and changed society massively. But it didn't, and knowing that doubling down on sending some astronaughts even further just seems foolish.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: NASA has always contributed more the the American economy that it has taken from it.
Of course, outside of a handful of exceptions, large scale research always contributes massively to the economy and technological progress. If you were trying to make a case for expanding NASA, then I'd be on your side, and listing all the great research work NASA is doing right now. But you're trying to make a case for flying to Mars, and that's a completely fething different thing.
It will bring about real change. I apologize that the past evidence is not enough for you.
Past evidence - moon landings happened. Then nothing - no follow ups from other parties, no ability of NASA to generate value from further landings to fund expansion or even just maintenance of existing operations.
There is very little capacity and zero economic motive to put people in to space... it's really fething expensive to put people out there, and what's out there isn't valuable enough for people to try bringing it back here. When that looks likely to change, then space travel will become something more than a prestige project, and it will be worthwhile pursuing. But this is not that time.
It is not done changing the world and human spaceflight is the most important cog in that wheel.
No, there's no fething cogs in wheels or any vague nonsense like that. Talk in specifics, talk in reality. You're trying to make your point simply by alluding to a really vague kind of timeline
Human spaceflight and the technological advancement of humanity is the benefit. There really is no easier way to explain it.
And, once again, I'll explain to you that 'human spaceflight' only counts when the economic capacity and incentives are there so that others follow in the wake of the initial effort.
Sorry, claiming nothing occurred following the Apollo program is categorically incorrect. Why, despite the evidence that myself and others have shown, you still believe that is beyond me.
There was no continued spaceflight. fething read, please.
As far as your farming argument: there is not a problem of having enough food, but getting to the people that need it. That is a problem for politicians, not scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, those same politicians are also in control of the space program. So good luck.
Sure, there's a problem with distribution, but to state that's all the problem is woefully simplistic. Simply put, brute force matters and the more excessive the food supply is, the less distribution matters. And if you change the amount of farming land, you can also change what is grown without fearing about a decrease in total food production, moving away from more intensive crops (which are often unsustainable long term).
Not that any of that matters, because the point was never 'do terraforming' - it was do something where the end product of the research is useful in and of itself. If that isn't terraforming, then find something else. The point is that you can't justify research just by arguing that there'll be some kind of side benefits, you have to argue for the benefit of the main project, and there simply is no benefit to flying to Mars right now.
Of course, outside of a handful of exceptions, large scale research always contributes massively to the economy and technological progress. If you were trying to make a case for expanding NASA, then I'd be on your side, and listing all the great research work NASA is doing right now. But you're trying to make a case for flying to Mars, and that's a completely fething different thing.
One and the same.
Past evidence - moon landings happened. Then nothing - no follow ups from other parties, no ability of NASA to generate value from further landings to fund expansion or even just maintenance of existing operations.
It should never has stopped, but based on the political climate of the United States at the end of Apollo, it is easy to understand why. Again, NASA has always demonstrated value, but short-sighted politicians who fear populism and the election cycle decide how much money is give to NASA, and by extension, what gets funded.
There is very little capacity and zero economic motive to put people in to space... it's really fething expensive to put people out there, and what's out there isn't valuable enough for people to try bringing it back here. When that looks likely to change, then space travel will become something more than a prestige project, and it will be worthwhile pursuing.
Again, the amount of money to put men and equipment in to is trivial compared to what my country (and others) spend on various other projects, most of which have questionable value. Space is valuable, both in raw material to be exploited and knowledge to be gained.
But this is not that time.
Now is the perfect time. Ten years ago was the perfect time. Twenty years ago was the perfect time.
And, once again, I'll explain to you that 'human spaceflight' only counts when the economic capacity and incentives are there so that others follow in the wake of the initial effort.
They do, you just refuse to accept it (despite evidence to contrary).
Sure, there's a problem with distribution, but to state that's all the problem is woefully simplistic. Simply put, brute force matters and the more excessive the food supply is, the less distribution matters. And if you change the amount of farming land, you can also change what is grown without fearing about a decrease in total food production, moving away from more intensive crops (which are often unsustainable long term).
The problem still is distribution. We can already fix all the "problems" you list, but policy needs to change. This is still a policy argument, whether you believe it or not. Bring on the GMOs.
Not that any of that matters, because the point was never 'do terraforming' - it was do something where the end product of the research is useful in and of itself. If that isn't terraforming, then find something else. The point is that you can't justify research just by arguing that there'll be some kind of side benefits, you have to argue for the benefit of the main project, and there simply is no benefit to flying to Mars right now.
Exploration would be useful. The "side benefits" would be useful. The entire project would useful.
By the logic of 'we'll develop some random stuff along the way' you've got the justification for every pointless, random R&D project that could ever exist. What you want out of your R&D is all those nice side discoveries, and a final project that actually improves lives. Sending a guy to Mars is incredibly unlikely to achieve that second thing.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you're wrong.
Please feel free to view the videos I posted in a previous reply, Dr. Tyson explains it better than I could.
No, they're not. NASA is currently undergoing large amounts of research in geo-mapping, global climate research, supporting local climate research (I read an interesting thing on salt mapping that NASA has done that our CSIRO is desperate to apply to our farming land that affflicted with salinisation) and all sorts of other stuff.
It should never has stopped, but based on the political climate of the United States at the end of Apollo, it is easy to understand why. Again, NASA has always demonstrated value, but short-sighted politicians who fear populism and the election cycle decide how much money is give to NASA, and by extension, what gets funded.
No, how are you still not getting this. At some point for any of this to matter someone other than government has to be putting their money behind it. The New World didn't get colonised because Spain kept paying for Columbus to keep making trips. The airplane didn't change the world because governments kept funding the Wright brothers and other groups around the world. Once the initial breakthrough was made the rest happened through private groups who saw economic potential.
That economic potential doesn't exist with flying to the Moon, or to Mars.
Again, the amount of money to put men and equipment in to is trivial compared to what my country (and others) spend on various other projects, most of which have questionable value. Space is valuable, both in raw material to be exploited and knowledge to be gained.
The amount spent to get one flight to Mars is trivial, sure. But that's true of all R&D - any one project in isolation is minute compared to total GDP.
The point, again, is that doing it once means nothing in the grand scheme of the world. Not one fething thing at all beyond a lot of people watching on TV saying 'awesome'. Because there will be no flood of private groups following up with extraction or colonisation missions, because at this point that stuff is nowhere near commercially viable.
Now is the perfect time. Ten years ago was the perfect time. Twenty years ago was the perfect time.
For it to be the perfect time you need to make a case that doing it now would mean someone, anyone, would follow up with repeated trips for some kind of purpose. You haven't done that, because you can't do that, because there is no chance at all of that happening.
They do, you just refuse to accept it (despite evidence to contrary).
No, it doesn't. If the Wright brothers flew their plane, and people tried to repeat it but no-one could ever figure out how to make a plane that was more effective, then their flight would have been a novelty and nothing more. If Columbus had reached the New World but found nothing of value worth repeating the trip, then it would have been an historical footnote and nothing more.
It's when that effort opens the door for lots of other people to take advantage of that it matters.
The problem still is distribution. We can already fix all the "problems" you list, but policy needs to change. This is still a policy argument, whether you believe it or not. Bring on the GMOs.
Once again, you still aren't getting how examples work, and more to the point, we can both see the need for policy to change (though I'll have to point out thinking of it as policy is woefully simplistic, the issue is a combination of system and culture, not designed policy) but that is seperate to any potential for increases in total farmable land.
Exploration would be useful. The "side benefits" would be useful. The entire project would useful.
Exploration?!
"Hey, we found an incredible mineral deposit, worth trillions if we could get it home?"
"Can we get it home?"
"No, it's on fething Mars."
The side benefits, once again, are true of all projects. Build a 40 mile high Space Marine and in figuring out how to do that you'll discover all kinds of incredible other stuff because that's how R&D works. That doesn't mean building a 40 mile high Space Marine isn't really fething stupid, because that's R&D dollars that could have been spent on projects that are actually useful in and of themselves.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you're wrong.
That's not an answer at all. If you have any real kind of explanation for why manned space travel, unique among all R&D projects, just inherently produces side benefits despite having an end goal of its own that is entirely useless, then give it. Explain how 'flying to Mars' produces new technology in a way that '40 mile tall Space Marine' doesn't.
No, they're not. NASA is currently undergoing large amounts of research in geo-mapping, global climate research, supporting local climate research (I read an interesting thing on salt mapping that NASA has done that our CSIRO is desperate to apply to our farming land that affflicted with salinisation) and all sorts of other stuff.
I know. Those things can be done congruently with manned spaceflight, like they always have.
No, how are you still not getting this. At some point for any of this to matter someone other than government has to be putting their money behind it. The New World didn't get colonised because Spain kept paying for Columbus to keep making trips. The airplane didn't change the world because governments kept funding the Wright brothers and other groups around the world. Once the initial breakthrough was made the rest happened through private groups who saw economic potential.
You really love this New World stuff, huh? I'm sorry you don't know the reason why manned spaceflight in the United States has suffered since the end of Apollo; politicians and public opinion, both of which are short-sighted.
That economic potential doesn't exist with flying to the Moon, or to Mars.
Yes, it does.
The amount spent to get one flight to Mars is trivial, sure. But that's true of all R&D - any one project in isolation is minute compared to total GDP.
It isn't just "one project" but a part of an overlapping, broad-reaching space policy.
The point, again, is that doing it once means nothing in the grand scheme of the world. Not one fething thing at all beyond a lot of people watching on TV saying 'awesome'. Because there will be no flood of private groups following up with extraction or colonisation missions, because at this point that stuff is nowhere near commercially viable.
Sorry, wrong again. That may be the case for you, but for the next generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists, it will be a wake up call to achieve more, not just for our nation but for humanity. Strikingly similar to what happened in the 60s, if you took the time to actually study the subject.
For it to be the perfect time you need to make a case that doing it now would mean someone, anyone, would follow up with repeated trips for some kind of purpose. You haven't done that, because you can't do that, because there is no chance at all of that happening.
Humans will go back to the moon and then on to Mars and it will happen in my lifetime, that I am sure. I've already stated the purpose, which you ignore, so that's cool.
No, it doesn't. If the Wright brothers flew their plane, and people tried to repeat it but no-one could ever figure out how to make a plane that was more effective, then their flight would have been a novelty and nothing more. If Columbus had reached the New World but found nothing of value worth repeating the trip, then it would have been an historical footnote and nothing more.
There is value in space and human spaceflight. I'm sorry you fail to understand it.
Once again, you still aren't getting how examples work, and more to the point, we can both see the need for policy to change (though I'll have to point out thinking of it as policy is woefully simplistic, the issue is a combination of system and culture, not designed policy) but that is seperate to any potential for increases in total farmable land.
"If you support ongoing human spaceflight, you are no longer supporting using government agencies to solve problems on earth such as sustainable agriculture."
You are essentially using farmable land as a strawman, congratulations.
Exploration?!
"Hey, we found an incredible mineral deposit, worth trillions if we could get it home?"
"Can we get it home?"
"No, it's on fething Mars."
How is that cynicism working out for you?
The side benefits, once again, are true of all projects. Build a 40 mile high Space Marine and in figuring out how to do that you'll discover all kinds of incredible other stuff because that's how R&D works. That doesn't mean building a 40 mile high Space Marine isn't really fething stupid, because that's R&D dollars that could have been spent on projects that are actually useful in and of themselves.
So building a giant space marine is the equivalent of a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy?
lolwut?
That's not an answer at all. If you have any real kind of explanation for why manned space travel, unique among all R&D projects, just inherently produces side benefits despite having an end goal of its own that is entirely useless, then give it. Explain how 'flying to Mars' produces new technology in a way that '40 mile tall Space Marine' doesn't.
I've already offered plenty of reasons why manned spaceflight is not useless, with my own opinions on it and also through the use of YouTube videos and relevant articles on the subject.
Look, this is not the Space Race nor should it be. The driving force of the Space Race was beating the Soviets to the Moon, and while we accomplished that, we ultimately let ourselves down by not expanding our reach into space (which could have been even greater with the combined effort of Russia and the United States). The social and political climate in the United States (and Russia) at the end of the Space Race did not allow that to happen, and I see it as one of the greatest lost opportunities of the 20th century. Please, feel free to read any number of books written on the subject, I could even recommend some to you.
The bottom line is that a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy is good for the economy, good for technology, and good for humanity. The study and exploration of space must go on. Myself and others have offered numerous reason why, and despite the evidence supporting them (i.e.- it already happened once) you have done nothing but refute them with poor logical fallacies or outright denial. I am sorry that you feel that way, I really am, but there is nothing you could ever say to convince me otherwise. I know you think you "won" the last time this was discussed, so if it makes you feel better, you can claim victory here as well.
If you would like to continue to discuss some of the current missions being carried out by NASA, ESA, CNSA, RKA, or IRSO, please feel free.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: So building a giant space marine is the equivalent of a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy?
Yes, exactly. Like it or not there is very little value in spending huge amounts of money and sacrificing payload capacity to send humans instead of robots. You can talk all you want about vague "make everyone happy and optimistic" goals all you want, but I'd rather send a robotic mission (with way more scientific equipment than an equivalent manned mission can carry) to every planet than do another useless flag-planting mission to the moon.
The bottom line is that a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy is good for the economy, good for technology, and good for humanity.
No. A spaceflight program is great for those things. Adding humans to the mission just wastes valuable payload capacity.
The study and exploration of space must go on.
I agree. We should significantly increase our investment in robotic missions to explore space. These missions provide amazing new scientific work on a very efficient budget, and it should be a national embarrassment that we're even considering cutting them.
Yes, exactly. Like it or not there is very little value in spending huge amounts of money and sacrificing payload capacity to send humans instead of robots. You can talk all you want about vague "make everyone happy and optimistic" goals all you want, but I'd rather send a robotic mission (with way more scientific equipment than an equivalent manned mission can carry) to every planet than do another useless flag-planting mission to the moon.
It isn't about making everyone happy and optimistic, that is a gross trivialization of the point I was conveying. Talk to someone or read a book by someone that was inspired to do what they did because of the our space program in the 60s (Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin or Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz are good places to start). Again, we aren't spending huge amounts of money and we never have. I feel human exploration is more than flag-planting; I refuse to take that much of nihilistic point of view about it.
No. A spaceflight program is great for those things. Adding humans to the mission just wastes valuable payload capacity.
In your opinion. We will see humanity making permanent footholds outside of Earth before we see a machine than can operate in the same capacity as us.
I agree. We should significantly increase our investment in robotic missions to explore space. These missions provide amazing new scientific work on a very efficient budget, and it should be a national embarrassment that we're even considering cutting them.
If America had spent the money it has used to send its armed forces on various holidays around the world in the last 40-50 years on NASA, we would probably have FTL by now
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Talk to someone or read a book by someone that was inspired to do what they did because of the our space program in the 60s (Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin or Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz are good places to start).
And talk to the current generation of people who were inspired by some random person at NASA posting twitter updates from a robot on mars. Space is already awesome and inspiring enough as it is, you don't need to waste valuable payload capacity on sending human passengers.
I feel human exploration is more than flag-planting; I refuse to take that much of nihilistic point of view about it.
The point is that manned exploration right now is just flag-planting. What you're talking about is repeating the mistakes of the space race. If you send human passengers without any real purpose besides your vague "inspiration" you end up with missions that are little more than checking off "sent someone to mars" and that doesn't produce sustainable development. Once the goal is complete and people get bored the funding disappears and we're left with a cool accomplishment and not much else.
In your opinion. We will see humanity making permanent footholds outside of Earth before we see a machine than can operate in the same capacity as us.
Unlikely. Robots keep getting more and more capable, while there still doesn't seem to be any real point to sending passengers along with the robot (other than "because it's cool" and "because country X is doing it too"). And remember, with all the extra payload capacity you get by not hauling passengers around you can take much nicer robots.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: Talk to someone or read a book by someone that was inspired to do what they did because of the our space program in the 60s (Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin or Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz are good places to start).
And talk to the current generation of people who were inspired by some random person at NASA posting twitter updates from a robot on mars. Space is already awesome and inspiring enough as it is, you don't need to waste valuable payload capacity on sending human passengers.
I feel human exploration is more than flag-planting; I refuse to take that much of nihilistic point of view about it.
The point is that manned exploration right now is just flag-planting. What you're talking about is repeating the mistakes of the space race. If you send human passengers without any real purpose besides your vague "inspiration" you end up with missions that are little more than checking off "sent someone to mars" and that doesn't produce sustainable development. Once the goal is complete and people get bored the funding disappears and we're left with a cool accomplishment and not much else.
In your opinion. We will see humanity making permanent footholds outside of Earth before we see a machine than can operate in the same capacity as us.
Unlikely. Robots keep getting more and more capable, while there still doesn't seem to be any real point to sending passengers along with the robot (other than "because it's cool" and "because country X is doing it too"). And remember, with all the extra payload capacity you get by not hauling passengers around you can take much nicer robots.
The inspiration for people to join the aerospace industry is not vague, it's provable with hard numbers; it is In an article I posted earlier. Sending humans into space is not a waste. We will never make a machine anywhere near as complex as a human if our lifetime, probably ever. I am not talking about repeating the Space Race. Quite the contrary, we need to be mindful of the mistakes made during the Space Race, specifically a narrow-minded goal (like just getting to the moon). Landing a person on Mars is not the penultimate achievement of a sustained manned spaceflight program, just the first of many steps. This also isn't an America-only adventure, it will require the full cooperation of all willing parties to achieve and maintain. Plus, it has the added advantage of making us realize we shouldn't blow each other up when we could be working together.
You and I will not agree; you think manned spaceflight is useless, I don't. I am sorry you don't see the importance of the human factor. There really isn't much else to discuss at this juncture, but if you feel the need to make counterpoints to anything I have offered, feel free.
Between this and China, we may well see that most important element of motivation for NASA- a threatening country seeking to do it first.
There are a plethora of problems facing long term manned space flight, primarily bone density loss and insanity. Both are rapidly being studied and worked on, but it will take serious advances in those fields before two way space travel becomes a viable possibility. Much more likely are limited corporate ventures, like asteroid mining, and publicity stunts like Mars One- the chance to be one of the first people to die on Mars.
cadbren wrote: Mars has no breathable atmosphere, it would require terraforming before true colonisation could take place.
Terraforming Mars is a bigger pipe dream than the whole colony thing. You'd need a LOT of snow from the outer Solar System to make the atmosphere as well as an abundance of Nitrogen for plants. Where you gonna get enough to make a liveable atmosphere? How you gonna get it to Mars? How you going to get it all down onto Mars without making massive impact craters? How are you going to get the soil to provide enough nutrients for crops to grow? Even if 3/4 of Mars' surface becomes covered with water, that's still a lot of chemicals you need to find and import. And none of it can be taken from Earth because we're still using the stuff we have here.
The bigger issue is that Mars lacks a magnetosphere and has a gravitational pull of 1/3 Earth. In other words, whatever atmosphere you import will be quickly stripped away by solar wind.
Re: terraforming in general (for all the talk its getting in this thread), there isn't a planet or moon in this solar system that is a viable candidate for a terraforming mission. The only planet that really fits would be Venus (which basically has the opposite problem of Mars) if you could find a way to export most of its existing atmosphere and deal with any additional gaseous byproduct caused by ongoing geological activity.
Between this and China, we may well see that most important element of motivation for NASA- a threatening country seeking to do it first.
There are a plethora of problems facing long term manned space flight, primarily bone density loss and insanity. Both are rapidly being studied and worked on, but it will take serious advances in those fields before two way space travel becomes a viable possibility. Much more likely are limited corporate ventures, like asteroid mining, and publicity stunts like Mars One- the chance to be one of the first people to die on Mars.
Iran isn't really a threatening nation to anyone in the know.
sebster wrote: Build a 40 mile high Space Marine and in figuring out how to do that you'll discover all kinds of incredible other stuff because that's how R&D works. That doesn't mean building a 40 mile high Space Marine isn't really fething stupid, because that's R&D dollars that could have been spent on projects that are actually useful in and of themselves.
I was kind of hoping this thread would become a place to discuss the tech involved in this latest endeavour, developments and things like that, despite the original premise of the thread.
Was just reading, apparently the first half dozen or so Russian attempts to make a controlled landing on the moon ended in failure. Which, makes the Chinese attempt fairly impressive despite the obvious advances in computing power and materials technology that have come in the intervening years.
Quite an interesting write-up on the NASA website:
Pacific wrote: I was kind of hoping this thread would become a place to discuss the tech involved in this latest endeavour, developments and things like that, despite the original premise of the thread.
Was just reading, apparently the first half dozen or so Russian attempts to make a controlled landing on the moon ended in failure. Which, makes the Chinese attempt fairly impressive despite the obvious advances in computing power and materials technology that have come in the intervening years.
Quite an interesting write-up on the NASA website:
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: The inspiration for people to join the aerospace industry is not vague, it's provable with hard numbers; it is In an article I posted earlier.
Really? So there's hard numbers that more people joined the aerospace industry out of inspiration from the manned missions than out of inspiration from the mars robot on twitter? And these hard numbers somehow aren't biased by economic or technological factors that determine how many aerospace industry jobs exist?
Sending humans into space is not a waste. We will never make a machine anywhere near as complex as a human if our lifetime, probably ever.
Ok, fine. Let's get specific now: what useful tasks can a human perform that a robot can't? When answering please keep in mind the huge payload capacity required to send human passengers. For example, the ability of a human to repair a broken spacecraft is much less important than you might initially think because the extra payload capacity of a robotic mission allows you to include multiple redundant backup systems to the thing that the human would be repairing.
Landing a person on Mars is not the penultimate achievement of a sustained manned spaceflight program, just the first of many steps.
But that's exactly how you're setting it up. If you want to do useful scientific exploration you send robots. The primary reason for sending a human to mars is to check off the "sent a human to mars" accomplishment, and once that's done you probably have the same outcome as the Apollo missions.
Plus, it has the added advantage of making us realize we shouldn't blow each other up when we could be working together.
You know what could also do that? Everyone uniting to fight disease/starvation/etc. Except that also has some real-world benefits beyond just realizing that we can cooperate, something you can't really say for sending useless passengers on space exploration missions.
Except that in the process of actually having them sent, we will discover. In the process of sending them, we will discover.
If you took the time to send a manned mission to the asteroids, or to mars, its not just about the quantitive aspects, like economy, research. Its about the fact that those involved will come back fecking heroes. We will have another generation that dream to become astronaughts. you CANNOT put a price on that. What it comes down to, is that people will sacrifice everything for that dream.
Yes, we have a lot of problems here on earth. That is undeniable. But to stop dreaming, to stop exploring, that should be criminal. Yes, It costs a lot to get out into space. But the same could be said for military deployments.
There's three drivers for progress in this world. Religion, Fear of death, and economic gain. Think about how much we could gain from interplanetary travel. If we got to the asteroid belt, we could mine them. There's TRILLIONS of dollars worth of resources there. that could bail out the USA, complete debt wipe. Imagine that. the USA's bank debt wiped out.
And not just that. Mars - the research on everything there. Perhaps even going to europa, see how evolution there has worked. Find new minerals and elements. To look back on earth, as a speck of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
To get the the point of Mining Asteroids is a long process, Nasa Came about in a large economic boom, where money was plentiful. We have problems, here on earth, that need money now and are not making any money on potential gain, POTENTIAL. IF I came up and said "Give me X money, IT will pay off in 200 years" You would laugh at me. And the whole "Dream" aspect wasnt made solely by space exploration, it was made by a change in the middle class brought on by a large economic boom, so say the NASA was the only driving force for dreamers is just stupid
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: The inspiration for people to join the aerospace industry is not vague, it's provable with hard numbers; it is In an article I posted earlier.
Really? So there's hard numbers that more people joined the aerospace industry out of inspiration from the manned missions than out of inspiration from the mars robot on twitter? And these hard numbers somehow aren't biased by economic or technological factors that determine how many aerospace industry jobs exist?
You may feel they are biased, but the sense of inspiration young people felt during the Space Race (fueled in part by the NDEA and the patriotism of the time) contributed to the exponential growth of the American aerospace industry and the increase of scientist, engineers, and mathematicians of all fields. Feel to read or listen to the people of that generation or, you know, discount their opinions and insert your own bias. That's cool too.
Sending humans into space is not a waste. We will never make a machine anywhere near as complex as a human if our lifetime, probably ever.
Ok, fine. Let's get specific now: what useful tasks can a human perform that a robot can't? When answering please keep in mind the huge payload capacity required to send human passengers. For example, the ability of a human to repair a broken spacecraft is much less important than you might initially think because the extra payload capacity of a robotic mission allows you to include multiple redundant backup systems to the thing that the human would be repairing.
Robots cannot experience the sensation and thrill of the exploration of a new frontier, nor can they think and feel like us. Only humanity has the capacity to feel that, that is what makes us unique and I refuse to discount it. It may be altruistic, but I make no apologies for it. It is clearly a point of view you don't share and while I feel sorry for you, I respect it. I don't know what you do for a living, but I hope someone doesn't deem your profession "useless" and replace you with a robot.
Landing a person on Mars is not the penultimate achievement of a sustained manned spaceflight program, just the first of many steps.
But that's exactly how you're setting it up. If you want to do useful scientific exploration you send robots. The primary reason for sending a human to mars is to check off the "sent a human to mars" accomplishment, and once that's done you probably have the same outcome as the Apollo missions.
Nowhere did I claim it was the penultimate achievement of manned spaceflight.
Plus, it has the added advantage of making us realize we shouldn't blow each other up when we could be working together.
You know what could also do that? Everyone uniting to fight disease/starvation/etc. Except that also has some real-world benefits beyond just realizing that we can cooperate, something you can't really say for sending useless passengers on space exploration missions.
Humans in space are not pointless and it offers "real world benefits," you just discount them. You are also making the claim that solving the problems on humanity and manned space exploration are mutually exclusive, but they aren't.
It boils down to the fact that you do not share my views on the subject, but I feel that it is the willingness to think in these ways do the things we've done that make us unique among the animals of Earth. I am truly sorry you don't feel that way, I really am, but like I said before I respect your opinion.
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
NASA came about because people were frightened in the cold war, they were terrified by sputnik. We got men on the moon because we worried about communists on the moon (ironic isn't it).
And the amount of money we at the moment are spending on space research is about 1/14th of a penny on the tax dollar. Thats right, Each dollar you spend of tax, 1/14th of a penny goes to NASA. Even in the heyday of space travel, the funding still was not even a penny on the dollar. So how dare you say we don't have the money. Our most important research program is underfunded, undermanned and about to close without the help of the Military.
In my opinion, we should increase funding, go the full penny on the dollar. We need to get out there, there are so many wonders in space. The dangers will be beyond imagining, but so too will be our responses. Its innovations like space flight that kickstart our research, that we can indirectly stimulate new technologies, and other industries.
The path to space, leads back to improvement, not just in space, but for people on earth as well.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I know. Those things can be done congruently with manned spaceflight, like they always have.
The time of smart, highly educated people is in fact finite. If you ramp up research in to manned space flight you have to draw resources away from other projects. This is not something that should have to be explained.
You really love this New World stuff, huh?
I love economic history, studying how human society has changed.
I'm sorry you don't know the reason why manned spaceflight in the United States has suffered since the end of Apollo; politicians and public opinion, both of which are short-sighted.
I am absolutely bewildered that you still cannot understand that in order for space flight to really mean something, it needs to be done by groups other than government
Sorry, wrong again. That may be the case for you, but for the next generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists, it will be a wake up call to achieve more, not just for our nation but for humanity. Strikingly similar to what happened in the 60s, if you took the time to actually study the subject.
That's just vague non-thinking. The kind of babble that causes disfunctional management to book motivational days for their staff. Being 'inspired' doesn't mean gak if there's no achievable end goal, no underlying system that encourages and reinforces behaviour., then that motivation just peters away.
Exactly like the space program did.
Humans will go back to the moon and then on to Mars and it will happen in my lifetime, that I am sure. I've already stated the purpose, which you ignore, so that's cool.
And you keep fething not getting it. At some point some group or another, for some reason or another, may return to the moon, or even go to Mars. It'll be an awesome scientific achievement, and it will also be pointless. Because it will not be followed by a colony or any other kind of operation that produces more resources than it costs, that sort of thing is way beyond the scope of our current technology.
And no matter how dutifully you try to keep ignoring that it remains true.
There is value in space and human spaceflight. I'm sorry you fail to understand it.
And so I'll ask, again, for you to name that value. Explain what is out there that is so valuable as to justify the expense of going there.
"If you support ongoing human spaceflight, you are no longer supporting using government agencies to solve problems on earth such as sustainable agriculture."
You are essentially using farmable land as a strawman, congratulations.
One of two things is possible, either you don't understand how examples work, and think the example of terraforming research was a specific... or you don't understand how opportunity cost works, and fail to understand that when you put resources in to one thing you can't put those same resources in to another thing.
Whichever it is, go away and learn how those things work.
How is that cynicism working out for you?
I'm not cynical at all. I believe there's a bright shiny future out there, if we make smart choices. But making smart choices means being realistic about what future investment and research has a chance of paying off, and which are stupid boondoggles.
Guess which one flying to another planet is.
So building a giant space marine is the equivalent of a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy?
lolwut?
In terms of useful benefits to humanity, they're the same. Both will give humanity exactly zero benefit from their primary missions.
I've already offered plenty of reasons why manned spaceflight is not useless, with my own opinions on it and also through the use of YouTube videos and relevant articles on the subject.
And now it becomes clear that for all your posts you haven't actually read one word of my argument. You still have no idea how side technologies are the product of any research project, and that to justify a project you need to make some sort of argument for the actual research project itself. Which you still can't do. You cannot give a single benefit that came from Neil Armstrong landing on the moon and coming home again.
And until you do that, the argument for putting a man on Mars simply doesn't exist.
The bottom line is that a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy is good for the economy, good for technology, and good for humanity.
Your bottom line is completely wrong, and from that all your other errors flow.
But seriously, if you have some actual benefits to the economy or to technology other than 'we figured out some other stuff while researching how to do this' then by all means list them. Just name one thing that wouldn't flow from any other research project in to anything, and then, after six pages, we'll have the start of your argument.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: You may feel they are biased, but the sense of inspiration young people felt during the Space Race (fueled in part by the NDEA and the patriotism of the time) contributed to the exponential growth of the American aerospace industry and the increase of scientist, engineers, and mathematicians of all fields. Feel to read or listen to the people of that generation or, you know, discount their opinions and insert your own bias. That's cool too.
That's not what I asked. I asked for hard numbers showing that manned missions did more to motivate people than robot missions. Yes, people were inspired by the space race, but people have also been inspired by the awesome robot missions we've done recently. So do you have hard numbers that human passengers are required to inspire people?
And I'm not accusing the people of bias, I'm saying that you can't single out one cause of the growth of the aerospace industry. The size of an industry depends on a lot of complex factors like the economic situation, military contracts, etc. It doesn't matter if people are really inspired if the industry is in financial trouble and the jobs don't exist for them. Likewise it doesn't matter if people aren't very inspired in a good market, since people will become engineers to get a nice paycheck. So while I'm sure there are anecdotes about individual people choosing that career path because of the space race it's a lot harder to apply that to the industry as a whole.
Robots cannot experience the sensation and thrill of the exploration of a new frontier, nor can they think and feel like us. Only humanity has the capacity to feel that, that is what makes us unique and I refuse to discount it. It may be altruistic, but I make no apologies for it. It is clearly a point of view you don't share and while I feel sorry for you, I respect it. I don't know what you do for a living, but I hope someone doesn't deem your profession "useless" and replace you with a robot.
So you admit that human passengers have no practical value on an exploration mission, and you want to send them for the sole purpose of happy feelings?
Nowhere did I claim it was the penultimate achievement of manned spaceflight.
No, but that's how it will be treated if you focus on manned exploration. The manned element has little or no practical value, so the only reason to include it is to check off the "sent people to mars" achievement. Any manned mission to mars will necessarily be focused around this goal rather than on more practical things, so once the big achievement is done you've got a mission with limited remaining value. Just like with the space race the excitement fades, and the whole thing is canceled.
Humans in space are not pointless and it offers "real world benefits," you just discount them.
You have yet to name any practical benefit besides some vague happy feelings about how cool it is to have people in space.
You are also making the claim that solving the problems on humanity and manned space exploration are mutually exclusive, but they aren't.
Not inherently, but in the real world they are. We clearly have limited resources that we're willing to spend on improving the world, so spending more on one thing means spending less on others. Which gives us a choice: we can work on problems on earth and send efficient robotic missions to explore space, or we can dump massive amounts of resources into manned space missions so we can have vague happy feelings about sending people into space.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I know. Those things can be done congruently with manned spaceflight, like they always have.
The time of smart, highly educated people is in fact finite. If you ramp up research in to manned space flight you have to draw resources away from other projects. This is not something that should have to be explained.
You really love this New World stuff, huh?
I love economic history, studying how human society has changed.
I'm sorry you don't know the reason why manned spaceflight in the United States has suffered since the end of Apollo; politicians and public opinion, both of which are short-sighted.
I am absolutely bewildered that you still cannot understand that in order for space flight to really mean something, it needs to be done by groups other than government
Sorry, wrong again. That may be the case for you, but for the next generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists, it will be a wake up call to achieve more, not just for our nation but for humanity. Strikingly similar to what happened in the 60s, if you took the time to actually study the subject.
That's just vague non-thinking. The kind of babble that causes disfunctional management to book motivational days for their staff. Being 'inspired' doesn't mean gak if there's no achievable end goal, no underlying system that encourages and reinforces behaviour., then that motivation just peters away.
Exactly like the space program did.
Humans will go back to the moon and then on to Mars and it will happen in my lifetime, that I am sure. I've already stated the purpose, which you ignore, so that's cool.
And you keep fething not getting it. At some point some group or another, for some reason or another, may return to the moon, or even go to Mars. It'll be an awesome scientific achievement, and it will also be pointless. Because it will not be followed by a colony or any other kind of operation that produces more resources than it costs, that sort of thing is way beyond the scope of our current technology.
And no matter how dutifully you try to keep ignoring that it remains true.
There is value in space and human spaceflight. I'm sorry you fail to understand it.
And so I'll ask, again, for you to name that value. Explain what is out there that is so valuable as to justify the expense of going there.
"If you support ongoing human spaceflight, you are no longer supporting using government agencies to solve problems on earth such as sustainable agriculture."
You are essentially using farmable land as a strawman, congratulations.
One of two things is possible, either you don't understand how examples work, and think the example of terraforming research was a specific... or you don't understand how opportunity cost works, and fail to understand that when you put resources in to one thing you can't put those same resources in to another thing.
Whichever it is, go away and learn how those things work.
How is that cynicism working out for you?
I'm not cynical at all. I believe there's a bright shiny future out there, if we make smart choices. But making smart choices means being realistic about what future investment and research has a chance of paying off, and which are stupid boondoggles.
Guess which one flying to another planet is.
So building a giant space marine is the equivalent of a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy?
lolwut?
In terms of useful benefits to humanity, they're the same. Both will give humanity exactly zero benefit from their primary missions.
I've already offered plenty of reasons why manned spaceflight is not useless, with my own opinions on it and also through the use of YouTube videos and relevant articles on the subject.
And now it becomes clear that for all your posts you haven't actually read one word of my argument. You still have no idea how side technologies are the product of any research project, and that to justify a project you need to make some sort of argument for the actual research project itself. Which you still can't do. You cannot give a single benefit that came from Neil Armstrong landing on the moon and coming home again.
And until you do that, the argument for putting a man on Mars simply doesn't exist.
The bottom line is that a comprehensive manned spaceflight policy is good for the economy, good for technology, and good for humanity.
Your bottom line is completely wrong, and from that all your other errors flow.
But seriously, if you have some actual benefits to the economy or to technology other than 'we figured out some other stuff while researching how to do this' then by all means list them. Just name one thing that wouldn't flow from any other research project in to anything, and then, after six pages, we'll have the start of your argument.
I've read everything you've said. I've listed what we benefited from the Apollo program and the paradigm shift it brought. Books have been written on the subject, I'd encourage you to read them. I am all for everything you want to say you would like to spend time and money to research, on top of what I believe we should do. You are committing to a false dilemma (on top of other fallacies) to which I am not going to argue with you over.
It recently occurred to me that your government does not have a space agency In fact it is the only country in OECD that doesn't. I find that disappointing (considering Australia was the seventh country to send a satellite into orbit), and so should you because you are losing your brightest and most talented students. They are taking their knowledge and going to work in other countries. It would be of great benefit to the Australian people to enter in the exploration of space (manned or otherwise).
Here is a pretty interesting read on the subject: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/10/ten-reasons-why-australia-urgently-needs-a-space-agency/
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I am all for everything you want to say you would like to spend time and money to research, on top of what I believe we should do. You are committing to a false dilemma (on top of other fallacies) to which I am not going to argue with you over.
Except it isn't a false dilemma because that's how it works in the real world. If you don't account for the reality of current politics then your proposals are nothing more than wishful thinking.
So you admit that human passengers have no practical value on an exploration mission, and you want to send them for the sole purpose of happy feelings?
No, but that's how it will be treated if you focus on manned exploration. The manned element has little or no practical value, so the only reason to include it is to check off the "sent people to mars" achievement. Any manned mission to mars will necessarily be focused around this goal rather than on more practical things, so once the big achievement is done you've got a mission with limited remaining value. Just like with the space race the excitement fades, and the whole thing is canceled.
You have yet to name any practical benefit besides some vague happy feelings about how cool it is to have people in space.
Those were written by someone more knowledgeable than you and myself. Enjoy.
Not inherently, but in the real world they are. We clearly have limited resources that we're willing to spend on improving the world, so spending more on one thing means spending less on others. Which gives us a choice: we can work on problems on earth and send efficient robotic missions to explore space, or we can dump massive amounts of resources into manned space missions so we can have vague happy feelings about sending people into space.
Finally you actually mention some real arguments instead of vague happy feelings. But those articles suffer from some problems:
1) They seem to be assuming a 1:1 ratio between manned and robotic missions, when in reality the vastly superior payload capacity of a robotic mission (since you don't have to waste mass on passengers, life support, or fuel for the return trip) means that for every human you land for a short mars mission you have several robots operating for years or potentially even decades.
2) They're comparing the results (paper citations) of primitive 1960s-70s robotic missions to manned missions instead of looking at the potential of modern and near-future technology. I'm not going to deny that back then the gap between humans and robots was significant, but robots have improved a lot since then. And if you take the money you'd spend on hauling passengers around and invest it into better robots you'll close that gap even more.
3) They're focusing on volume of samples returned and assuming that it's a result of having a manned mission rather than having a round-trip mission with high payload capacity. In reality a robot mission designed specifically for sample return would bring back a lot more samples because it doesn't have to waste payload capacity on humans and their life support equipment. Every pound spent on passengers is a pound of rocks that you have to leave behind.
4) They're assuming that the manned component is a sunk cost and all you have to pay for is adding science to the flag-planting mission. This is a bad assumption to make when the question is whether to send a manned mission at all. And they even admit it:
The lesson seems clear: if at some future date a series of Apollo-like human missions return to the Moon and/or are sent on to Mars, and if these are funded (as they will be) for a complex range of socio-political reasons, scientists will get more for our money piggy-backing science on them than we will get by relying on dedicated autonomous robotic vehicles which will, in any case, become increasingly unaffordable.
Finally you actually mention some real arguments instead of vague happy feelings. But those articles suffer from some problems:
1) They seem to be assuming a 1:1 ratio between manned and robotic missions, when in reality the vastly superior payload capacity of a robotic mission (since you don't have to waste mass on passengers, life support, or fuel for the return trip) means that for every human you land for a short mars mission you have several robots operating for years or potentially even decades.
2) They're comparing the results (paper citations) of primitive 1960s-70s robotic missions to manned missions instead of looking at the potential of modern and near-future technology. I'm not going to deny that back then the gap between humans and robots was significant, but robots have improved a lot since then. And if you take the money you'd spend on hauling passengers around and invest it into better robots you'll close that gap even more.
3) They're focusing on volume of samples returned and assuming that it's a result of having a manned mission rather than having a round-trip mission with high payload capacity. In reality a robot mission designed specifically for sample return would bring back a lot more samples because it doesn't have to waste payload capacity on humans and their life support equipment. Every pound spent on passengers is a pound of rocks that you have to leave behind.
4) They're assuming that the manned component is a sunk cost and all you have to pay for is adding science to the flag-planting mission. This is a bad assumption to make when the question is whether to send a manned mission at all. And they even admit it:
The lesson seems clear: if at some future date a series of Apollo-like human missions return to the Moon and/or are sent on to Mars, and if these are funded (as they will be) for a complex range of socio-political reasons, scientists will get more for our money piggy-backing science on them than we will get by relying on dedicated autonomous robotic vehicles which will, in any case, become increasingly unaffordable.
I've offered the same opinion of these articles before. Numerous times, actually. But nonetheless, the basis of the argument still stands: human spaceflight and robotic missions are both needed. It is not an either-or scenario like you are making it sound. Despite the advances, the gap between humans and robotic probes is sill massive. However, no one, especially not me, is denying they can do things that humans can't (case in point: Voyager and Pioneer) nor that they shouldn't continue or even expand in scope.
We clearly aren't going to convert each other (unfortunately), so you can have your opinion and I'll have mine, I'll at least take comfort that it is shared by people like Stephen Hawking, Neil de Grasse Tyson, the Royal Astronomical Society, and large portions of the planetary science community.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: But nonetheless, the basis of the argument still stands: human spaceflight and robotic missions are both needed.
What basic point? If you accept the criticism I just presented then the basic point is pretty badly damaged. The surviving argument in favor of manned missions is a pretty weak one, and pretty much depends on the assumption that we're going to do a flag-planting mission no matter what so we might as well do some science as well.
It is not an either-or scenario like you are making it sound.
Of course it is. Outside of fantasy worlds where NASA gets more funding than the military the simple fact is that there's a limited budget for space exploration and spending huge amounts of money on a manned mission means sacrificing the robot missions that could have been done instead.
Despite the advances, the gap between humans and robotic probes is sill massive.
And the extra payload capacity required to launch a manned mission is also massive. Obviously a manned mission is better if you're comparing them at a 1:1 ratio, but you can't just ignore the fact that you can launch lots of robots for the same cost and effort as sending a single manned mission.
There's actually quite a lot more that manned missions can be good for over long distances, such as redundancies in emergencies (ALA apollo 13). However, we also need to keep researching the human body in space as well.
The thing is, robotized missions and manned missions are two differing payloads, and would be used in different types of mission.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: But nonetheless, the basis of the argument still stands: human spaceflight and robotic missions are both needed.
What basic point? If you accept the criticism I just presented then the basic point is pretty badly damaged. The surviving argument in favor of manned missions is a pretty weak one, and pretty much depends on the assumption that we're going to do a flag-planting mission no matter what so we might as well do some science as well.
It is not an either-or scenario like you are making it sound.
Of course it is. Outside of fantasy worlds where NASA gets more funding than the military the simple fact is that there's a limited budget for space exploration and spending huge amounts of money on a manned mission means sacrificing the robot missions that could have been done instead.
Despite the advances, the gap between humans and robotic probes is sill massive.
And the extra payload capacity required to launch a manned mission is also massive. Obviously a manned mission is better if you're comparing them at a 1:1 ratio, but you can't just ignore the fact that you can launch lots of robots for the same cost and effort as sending a single manned mission.
You have tried to (incorrectly) characterize my argument as manned > robotic when it has been manned =/= robotic. The argument for manned missions is strong and backed by people with extensive knowledge in the related fields, as evidenced by the links I have provided. All you have done is offer your dissenting opinion in bullet point-style to everything I've said with nothing backing it up.
I'm not ignoring the fact that you can launch lots of robots for the same cost as one manned mission. The evidence suggests that more can be gained from that one manned mission than the multiple robotic missions, hence the benefits of manned spaceflight. According to the experts, miniaturization of the robotics will decrease the scientific payload to the point that it isn't worth it. We can have a person do it, do it better, do it more efficiently, and have the added benefit of being a human and all the pros that come with it. At that point, I feel a manned mission is even more valuable even if there is a higher ratio of robotic missions.
You're still making it a black-and-white argument, and even without a "fantasy world" of a massive NASA budget, it just isn't.
Doctadeth wrote: There's actually quite a lot more that manned missions can be good for over long distances, such as redundancies in emergencies (ALA apollo 13).
If Apollo 13 had been an unmanned mission, it would not have been an emergency. The "success" of Apollo 13 was only that the crew did not all die - the mission itself was a failure. If not for the crew, they could have smashed the thing into the moon and been no worse off than their "success".
AlexHolker wrote: If Apollo 13 had been an unmanned mission, it would not have been an emergency. The "success" of Apollo 13 was only that the crew did not all die - the mission itself was a failure. If not for the crew, they could have smashed the thing into the moon and been no worse off than their "success".
Exactly. A robot mission can use some of its extra payload capacity to carry redundant backup systems, and since it doesn't have life support at all there are fewer absolutely vital systems that could fail and end the entire mission. And when a robot suffers a fatal failure it's an annoying loss of some time and effort, not a tragic death.
The weather reports are calling for cloudiness (at least in Northern Virginia, where I live) but I hope to be able to catch a break in the clouds to watch it. I watched a Minotaur rocket launch from Wallops Island on the roof at my work back in November, it was pretty cool.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: The argument for manned missions is strong and backed by people with extensive knowledge in the related fields, as evidenced by the links I have provided.
And, as I've explained, those links present a bad argument. One is from almost 20 years ago and therefore doesn't reflect modern technology, one is based almost entirely on the volume of rock samples returned by the Apollo mission and ignores the fact that a dedicated robot sample return mission could bring even more rocks back, and the third one openly admits that it's an argument about including science on a flag-planting mission and not about replacing robots with manned missions.
I'm not ignoring the fact that you can launch lots of robots for the same cost as one manned mission.
But that's exactly what you're dong. Your articles (which is all we have, since you haven't presented any argument of your own besides vague happy feelings about humans in space) compare single robot missions to single manned missions.
According to the experts, miniaturization of the robotics will decrease the scientific payload to the point that it isn't worth it.
No, you just misunderstood that argument. The "problem" with miniaturization the article mentions is that there's a lower limit on the practical size of a vehicle because you need it to be able to travel a reasonable distance across rough terrain, and therefore arguments about "robots will keep getting smaller and smaller" have a limit. This argument ignores the potential to use those advances in miniaturization to pack more scientific equipment into a single large vehicle, which will still require vastly less payload capacity than a manned mission.
We can have a person do it, do it better, do it more efficiently, and have the added benefit of being a human and all the pros that come with it.
Except that "efficiency" is the whole problem. Yes, a human on mars is probably more efficient than a robot with the same scientific equipment, but you're ignoring the massive efficiency problems in getting the human there in the first place. You have to have a round-trip mission (and for a whole spacecraft, not just a box of mars rocks), you have to bring food/water/etc to support the human, you have to bring other humans to keep them from going insane, you have to design everything with much better safety margins, and then you have to bring all the extra fuel to haul all of that stuff around. And then you throw away all of your efficiency gains because the human can't stay on mars very long, while the robot will happily spend years there working at its slower pace.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: The argument for manned missions is strong and backed by people with extensive knowledge in the related fields, as evidenced by the links I have provided.
And, as I've explained, those links present a bad argument. One is from almost 20 years ago and therefore doesn't reflect modern technology, one is based almost entirely on the volume of rock samples returned by the Apollo mission and ignores the fact that a dedicated robot sample return mission could bring even more rocks back, and the third one openly admits that it's an argument about including science on a flag-planting mission and not about replacing robots with manned missions.
I'm not ignoring the fact that you can launch lots of robots for the same cost as one manned mission.
But that's exactly what you're dong. Your articles (which is all we have, since you haven't presented any argument of your own besides vague happy feelings about humans in space) compare single robot missions to single manned missions.
According to the experts, miniaturization of the robotics will decrease the scientific payload to the point that it isn't worth it.
No, you just misunderstood that argument. The "problem" with miniaturization the article mentions is that there's a lower limit on the practical size of a vehicle because you need it to be able to travel a reasonable distance across rough terrain, and therefore arguments about "robots will keep getting smaller and smaller" have a limit. This argument ignores the potential to use those advances in miniaturization to pack more scientific equipment into a single large vehicle, which will still require vastly less payload capacity than a manned mission.
We can have a person do it, do it better, do it more efficiently, and have the added benefit of being a human and all the pros that come with it.
Except that "efficiency" is the whole problem. Yes, a human on mars is probably more efficient than a robot with the same scientific equipment, but you're ignoring the massive efficiency problems in getting the human there in the first place. You have to have a round-trip mission (and for a whole spacecraft, not just a box of mars rocks), you have to bring food/water/etc to support the human, you have to bring other humans to keep them from going insane, you have to design everything with much better safety margins, and then you have to bring all the extra fuel to haul all of that stuff around. And then you throw away all of your efficiency gains because the human can't stay on mars very long, while the robot will happily spend years there working at its slower pace.
The "vague happy feelings" are as important as the science, I'm sorry you discount them. You have made it a point to demand that I give you proof of my opinions (instead of using the newfangled Google on the internet machine for yourself) and you have failed to return the favor. You think my argument is weak and that's fine; I think yours is weaker. You are simply arguing from a short-sighted viewpoint, which is fine because it does have its merits, but you instantly attempt to discredit everything I have brought to the conversation. You think your opinion is correct, I respect that.
Again, you can continue with your bullet-point retorts all you like, they seem to make you happy. My opinion, shared by numerous experts in the field, will stand.
Doctadeth wrote: Except that due to humans being on apollo 13, they managed to fix the craft, and get home, salvaging the mission.
The mission was to land on the moon and return to Earth. The mission failed. The only success in the mission was avoiding a failure state which can not happen to an unmanned craft.
A robotic mission will never have the adaptability of a manned mission.
However, robotic missions are cheaper and easier and as has been mentioned, robotic missions can deliver a lot more robotic equipment for the same mass and volume required for a manned mission. There is a real place for both in space exploration and at the moment I would say that robotic exploration and manipulation of extra-terrestrial bodies is the most important.
I think manned missions will pick up once we learn and have been able to nudge mineral rich asteriods into a relatively close orbit, can strip mine them and turn the minerals/rock/etc into components and ships. When the majority of the construction and work is done in space, you cut out vast amounts of cost sending everything into space in the first place...
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I've read everything you've said. I've listed what we benefited from the Apollo program and the paradigm shift it brought. Books have been written on the subject, I'd encourage you to read them.
Then, from all those books, name one benefit that came directly from traveling to the Moon. Not a side benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon, but an actual benefit that putting men on the Moon gives us. And not a vague notion of being inspired, because that puts the space program right up there with that guy who kept trying to play college football despite being really small. An actual, real benefit to people, in the way that satellites give us superior weather predictions and constant telecommunications.
I am all for everything you want to say you would like to spend time and money to research, on top of what I believe we should do. You are committing to a false dilemma (on top of other fallacies) to which I am not going to argue with you over.
There's no fallacy in pointing out that human time and resources are in fact finite, that you do have to choose one thing over another.
It recently occurred to me that your government does not have a space agency In fact it is the only country in OECD that doesn't. I find that disappointing (considering Australia was the seventh country to send a satellite into orbit), and so should you because you are losing your brightest and most talented students. They are taking their knowledge and going to work in other countries. It would be of great benefit to the Australian people to enter in the exploration of space (manned or otherwise).
Here is a pretty interesting read on the subject: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/10/ten-reasons-why-australia-urgently-needs-a-space-agency/
I agree that we need a space agency. Our current attitude of being too small makes little sense in the modern world of joint national projects. Certainly when you consider how many countries use Australia for rocket testing and similar, it's bizarre to think we'd can't leverage that to form joint projects with other space programs.
But that is nothing to do with whether or not manned missions to Mars will change anything.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: I've read everything you've said. I've listed what we benefited from the Apollo program and the paradigm shift it brought. Books have been written on the subject, I'd encourage you to read them.
Then, from all those books, name one benefit that came directly from traveling to the Moon. Not a side benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon, but an actual benefit that putting men on the Moon gives us. And not a vague notion of being inspired, because that puts the space program right up there with that guy who kept trying to play college football despite being really small. An actual, real benefit to people, in the way that satellites give us superior weather predictions and constant telecommunications.
I am all for everything you want to say you would like to spend time and money to research, on top of what I believe we should do. You are committing to a false dilemma (on top of other fallacies) to which I am not going to argue with you over.
There's no fallacy in pointing out that human time and resources are in fact finite, that you do have to choose one thing over another.
It recently occurred to me that your government does not have a space agency In fact it is the only country in OECD that doesn't. I find that disappointing (considering Australia was the seventh country to send a satellite into orbit), and so should you because you are losing your brightest and most talented students. They are taking their knowledge and going to work in other countries. It would be of great benefit to the Australian people to enter in the exploration of space (manned or otherwise).
Here is a pretty interesting read on the subject: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/10/ten-reasons-why-australia-urgently-needs-a-space-agency/
I agree that we need a space agency. Our current attitude of being too small makes little sense in the modern world of joint national projects. Certainly when you consider how many countries use Australia for rocket testing and similar, it's bizarre to think we'd can't leverage that to form joint projects with other space programs.
But that is nothing to do with whether or not manned missions to Mars will change anything.
The benefits must of course be measured in terms of national economics. The problem is that when looking at things on a nation-wide scale, you can no longer calculate the effect down to dollars and cents. Still, the studies that I have read on the subject arrive at the conclusion that the return that far outstrips the investment, for simple reasons:
Rocket technology, space technology, large-scale manufacturing and core elements of modern information technology such as computers, networks and data transmission experienced a massive boost in those years, not least thanks to the large sums invested into research in these fields. Take rocket science: it is remarkable just how rapid progress was and how quickly launchers evolved from a kind of oversized firecracker to powerful, reliable backbones of spaceflight. All the points listed above are enabling technologies; they render other technologies possible, such as satellite communications, space-based meteorology, earth observation and satellite navigation - each of these items are key technologies offering almost endless potential.
The public perception of science and technology changed dramatically, re-kindling a renewed interest especially among the young generation who started studying science again ... this is indispensable for any technologically leading nation. Only scientifically advanced societies will maintain their wealth and keep up with the pace of progress. President Eisenhower specifically took note of this when he accepted the challenge posed by the Soviet space activities in the wake of the Sputnik shock.
Sure - nobody can prove that all of this would not have happened also without Apollo. But that is beside the point. The issue is that thanks to Apollo there were these benefits on a societal scale, so the Apollo program was of benefit to society. Period.
sebster wrote: Then, from all those books, name one benefit that came directly from traveling to the Moon. Not a side benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon, but an actual benefit that putting men on the Moon gives us. And not a vague notion of being inspired, because that puts the space program right up there with that guy who kept trying to play college football despite being really small. An actual, real benefit to people, in the way that satellites give us superior weather predictions and constant telecommunications.
ScootyPuffJunior, this is the point you keep dodging. Nobody is disputing that the development of space technologies have useful effects. But that does not mean using those space technologies to put someone on the moon was useful. You will have nothing worthwhile to say as long as you keep dancing around this point.
sebster wrote: Then, from all those books, name one benefit that came directly from traveling to the Moon. Not a side benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon, but an actual benefit that putting men on the Moon gives us. And not a vague notion of being inspired, because that puts the space program right up there with that guy who kept trying to play college football despite being really small. An actual, real benefit to people, in the way that satellites give us superior weather predictions and constant telecommunications.
ScootyPuffJunior, this is the point you keep dodging. Nobody is disputing that the development of space technologies have useful effects. But that does not mean using those space technologies to put someone on the moon was useful. You will have nothing worthwhile to say as long as you keep dancing around this point.
Yeah, I'm still of the opinion that it's profoundly ignorant of anyone not to realize the benefits of space exploration, and the inherent technological advances that have directly resulted in the past.
As a side note, I realize that to the highly evolved internet warrior the idea that people need to be inspired seems foreign and silly, but to the slack jawed simians that clearly make up the rest of the unwashed masses sometimes having a transcendent goal really does make a difference in productivity and dedication.
Direct benefits of landing men on the moon - we learnt wr could do it, we learnt more about manned space flight, we learnt more about what it would take to live on another body in space and in space itself, we learnt about some of the potential dangers and faults in equipment design... the list goes on. A lot of the 'direct' benefits are limited to the moon and space flight, as you would expect, but as mentioned the drive to put men on the moon spawned a lot of technology and so on that have benefitted us all.
Again, feel free to do some reading on the subject, you find yourself a little more enlightened.
This is what I asked for;
"Then, from all those books, name one benefit that came directly from traveling to the Moon. Not a side benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon, but an actual benefit that putting men on the Moon gives us. And not a vague notion of being inspired, because that puts the space program right up there with that guy who kept trying to play college football despite being really small. An actual, real benefit to people, in the way that satellites give us superior weather predictions and constant telecommunications."
You replied with;
Rocket technolgy (a benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon), large-scale manufacturing (a benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon) and modern information technology such as computers (a benefit developed while figuring out how to get to the Moon).
So to conclude this yet again - research is good, in fact it's completely awesome. The actual physical process of going to the moon, or now talking about going to Mars... doesn't actually do anything useful.
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Monster Rain wrote: Yeah, I'm still of the opinion that it's profoundly ignorant of anyone not to realize the benefits of space exploration, and the inherent technological advances that have directly resulted in the past.
And before this thread I wasn't of the opinion that a reasonable number of people were completely incapable of sensibly assessing nation building projects, and now I am and it's made me a bit sad.
As a side note, I realize that to the highly evolved internet warrior the idea that people need to be inspired seems foreign and silly, but to the slack jawed simians that clearly make up the rest of the unwashed masses sometimes having a transcendent goal really does make a difference in productivity and dedication.
And if the people working at agencies like NASA were slack jawed simians... then you'd have a good point. But they're actually highly educated professionals with a demonstrated ability to perform extremely well whether we're putting people in the rockets or just robots, and as such you have no point.
And, again, the point you keep ignoring is that those side benefits could happen with other projects. In fact, those benefits your quote mentions aren't even unique to manned missions, sending robot probes to the moon could have produced the same advances in rocket technology, satellite technology had nothing to do with manned missions (or even the moon missions really), etc. So we're left with the absurdity of pursuing a goal of extremely limited inherent value (putting humans on mars instead of robots) in the desperate hope that by doing so we'll produce vague unknown side benefits. Which is a stupid plan compared to just working on those side benefits directly.
Plus there's a problem with this approach now in 2013. Apollo produced a lot of results because it happened in a rapidly developing field. When the space race started rocket technology hardly existed, computers took up entire rooms, etc. But you don't have that situation anymore. Rockets are fairly well understood, computers are a mature technology, etc. It will take a lot of engineering work to apply that technology to do things like building a modern equivalent of the Saturn V*, but you're talking about subtle refinements of existing technology, not revolutionary breakthroughs.
*Which we don't do because there's no current need for one, not because we aren't able to do it.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: The "vague happy feelings" are as important as the science, I'm sorry you discount them.
And you have yet to explain why those happy feelings can't come from robot missions, an assumption that contradicts the excitement we've seen about robot mars missions recently.
You have made it a point to demand that I give you proof of my opinions (instead of using the newfangled Google on the internet machine for yourself) and you have failed to return the favor.
No, I've asked you to offer opinions at all. You just kept referring to vague "benefits" and ignored my request to explain what exactly the manned mission can do that the robots can't. You can't have a constructive discussion when one side refuses to even explain what their position is.
You are simply arguing from a short-sighted viewpoint, which is fine because it does have its merits, but you instantly attempt to discredit everything I have brought to the conversation.
Of course I attempt to discredit it, because it's wrong. What am I supposed to do, bow down before you and beg you to accept my apology for not immediately recognizing your superior wisdom?
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Monster Rain wrote: As a side note, I realize that to the highly evolved internet warrior the idea that people need to be inspired seems foreign and silly, but to the slack jawed simians that clearly make up the rest of the unwashed masses sometimes having a transcendent goal really does make a difference in productivity and dedication.
You know what also motivates people? Paychecks. If the aerospace industry is profitable then its needs for engineers will be met. If the aerospace industry is not profitable then those jobs will disappear no matter how inspired people are.
SilverMK2 wrote: Direct benefits of landing men on the moon - we learnt wr could do it, we learnt more about manned space flight, we learnt more about what it would take to live on another body in space and in space itself, we learnt about some of the potential dangers and faults in equipment design... the list goes on. A lot of the 'direct' benefits are limited to the moon and space flight, as you would expect, but as mentioned the drive to put men on the moon spawned a lot of technology and so on that have benefitted us all.
Direct benefits of building a 40 mile high space marine - we learnt we could do it, we learnt more about building other 40 mile high statues, we learnt what it would take to build statues that are even bigger, and we learnt about some of the potential dangers and faults in the equipment we used to build the statue.
Seriously, that kind of stuff just comes out of doing anything that hasn't been done before. What you want out of a project is an actual specific benefit in and of itself. It's like when people justify building a road because of all the jobs it will create... well sure, but just getting people to dig a big hole and fill it in again will create jobs... what you want is to end up with a road that significantly improves travel times for a lot of people.
It's the same with research - any project will help you learn how to do something similar in future, or how to undertake even more ambitious projects of a similar kind later on. What makes a project actually worthwhile in and of itself is if it provides a direct material benefit, or that it paves the way for a whole new field of human endeavour.
The Panama Canal is an example of a project with a direct material benefit - it greatly reduced the travel time by ship from the West Coast of the US to Europe, and from the East Coast to Asia.
The Wright brothers plane is an example of a project that paved the way for others - showing it was possible and how it was possible was a vital step in developing commercial air travel.
Manned flights to the Moon or to Mars don't do either of those things. There is no direct benefit to us from having a few people on Mars for a short time before flying back. And having a few people do it once won't trigger a massive flood of other people colonising the Red Planet.
SilverMK2 wrote: Direct benefits of landing men on the moon - we learnt wr could do it, we learnt more about manned space flight, we learnt more about what it would take to live on another body in space and in space itself, we learnt about some of the potential dangers and faults in equipment design... the list goes on. A lot of the 'direct' benefits are limited to the moon and space flight, as you would expect, but as mentioned the drive to put men on the moon spawned a lot of technology and so on that have benefitted us all.
Direct benefits of building a 40 mile high space marine - we learnt we could do it, we learnt more about building other 40 mile high statues, we learnt what it would take to build statues that are even bigger, and we learnt about some of the potential dangers and faults in the equipment we used to build the statue.
Seriously, that kind of stuff just comes out of doing anything that hasn't been done before. What you want out of a project is an actual specific benefit in and of itself. It's like when people justify building a road because of all the jobs it will create... well sure, but just getting people to dig a big hole and fill it in again will create jobs... what you want is to end up with a road that significantly improves travel times for a lot of people.
It's the same with research - any project will help you learn how to do something similar in future, or how to undertake even more ambitious projects of a similar kind later on. What makes a project actually worthwhile in and of itself is if it provides a direct material benefit, or that it paves the way for a whole new field of human endeavour.
The Panama Canal is an example of a project with a direct material benefit - it greatly reduced the travel time by ship from the West Coast of the US to Europe, and from the East Coast to Asia.
The Wright brothers plane is an example of a project that paved the way for others - showing it was possible and how it was possible was a vital step in developing commercial air travel.
Manned flights to the Moon or to Mars don't do either of those things. There is no direct benefit to us from having a few people on Mars for a short time before flying back. And having a few people do it once won't trigger a massive flood of other people colonising the Red Planet.
And, again, the point you keep ignoring is that those side benefits could happen with other projects. In fact, those benefits your quote mentions aren't even unique to manned missions, sending robot probes to the moon could have produced the same advances in rocket technology, satellite technology had nothing to do with manned missions (or even the moon missions really), etc. So we're left with the absurdity of pursuing a goal of extremely limited inherent value (putting humans on mars instead of robots) in the desperate hope that by doing so we'll produce vague unknown side benefits. Which is a stupid plan compared to just working on those side benefits directly.
Plus there's a problem with this approach now in 2013. Apollo produced a lot of results because it happened in a rapidly developing field. When the space race started rocket technology hardly existed, computers took up entire rooms, etc. But you don't have that situation anymore. Rockets are fairly well understood, computers are a mature technology, etc. It will take a lot of engineering work to apply that technology to do things like building a modern equivalent of the Saturn V*, but you're talking about subtle refinements of existing technology, not revolutionary breakthroughs.
*Which we don't do because there's no current need for one, not because we aren't able to do it.
ScootyPuffJunior wrote: The "vague happy feelings" are as important as the science, I'm sorry you discount them.
And you have yet to explain why those happy feelings can't come from robot missions, an assumption that contradicts the excitement we've seen about robot mars missions recently.
You have made it a point to demand that I give you proof of my opinions (instead of using the newfangled Google on the internet machine for yourself) and you have failed to return the favor.
No, I've asked you to offer opinions at all. You just kept referring to vague "benefits" and ignored my request to explain what exactly the manned mission can do that the robots can't. You can't have a constructive discussion when one side refuses to even explain what their position is.
You are simply arguing from a short-sighted viewpoint, which is fine because it does have its merits, but you instantly attempt to discredit everything I have brought to the conversation.
Of course I attempt to discredit it, because it's wrong. What am I supposed to do, bow down before you and beg you to accept my apology for not immediately recognizing your superior wisdom?
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Monster Rain wrote: As a side note, I realize that to the highly evolved internet warrior the idea that people need to be inspired seems foreign and silly, but to the slack jawed simians that clearly make up the rest of the unwashed masses sometimes having a transcendent goal really does make a difference in productivity and dedication.
You know what also motivates people? Paychecks. If the aerospace industry is profitable then its needs for engineers will be met. If the aerospace industry is not profitable then those jobs will disappear no matter how inspired people are.
Again, my "wisdom" (or opinion, as I like to call it) is based on people who know more than you and I combined on this subject. I don't want you to "bow down" to me, I've already stated that you have your opinion, which I fully respect, and I have mine, which you just ignore because your opinion is "right" (lolwhut?) and apparently can't handle the fact that someone might think differently.
The crux of your entire argument has been, "it could have happened without Apollo." That is pretty convenient for you because it could never be proven true, therefore you are arguing from ignorance; I cannot prove you wrong, so you must be correct. You win the internet. Enjoy it, I hope you like pictures of cats.
Peregrine wrote: So we're left with the absurdity of pursuing a goal of extremely limited inherent value (putting humans on mars instead of robots) in the desperate hope that by doing so we'll produce vague unknown side benefits.
This reminds me a bit of the, "Why use manned aircraft when you can just send drones?" 'logic.'
Peregrine wrote: So we're left with the absurdity of pursuing a goal of extremely limited inherent value (putting humans on mars instead of robots) in the desperate hope that by doing so we'll produce vague unknown side benefits.
This reminds me a bit of the, "Why use manned aircraft when you can just send drones?" 'logic.'
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
Seaward wrote: This reminds me a bit of the, "Why use manned aircraft when you can just send drones?" 'logic.'
At least in that case you're not paying all that much to haul a human pilot around, if you're willing to accept the possibility of getting those pilots killed. It's a very different situation with space travel, where adding a human crew results in a massive increase in spacecraft size/complexity/cost.
Peregrine wrote: At least in that case you're not paying all that much to haul a human pilot around, if you're willing to accept the possibility of getting those pilots killed. It's a very different situation with space travel, where adding a human crew results in a massive increase in spacecraft size/complexity/cost.
But a better chance of success in the face of unanticipated difficulty. Also, planes do not haul pilots.
Anyway, as far as long-haul manned spaceflight goes, I can imagine a variety of fields it would jump-start development in that robotic flight wouldn't that would benefit us back here on earth.
Seaward wrote: But a better chance of success in the face of unanticipated difficulty.
But a much greater chance of having unanticipated difficulty in the first place (since the manned spacecraft is much more complex, has a whole range of life support systems that kill everyone when they fail, and has less payload capacity to spend on redundant backups), and much harsher consequences of failure. If your manned spacecraft suffers an unanticipated difficulty you're desperately trying to fix it and avoid killing the crew. If your robot suffers an unanticipated difficulty and crashes into mars you just send the next robot, and all you've lost is the inconvenience of having to wait to make another attempt. Or since you've saved so much money and payload capacity compared to the manned mission you already have a dozen more backup robots on the way to different landing sites, so you still accomplish most of your mission.
To repeat the Apollo 13 example all having a manned crew accomplished in that situation was making the stakes a lot higher. The mission was still a complete failure, the only difference with a robot mission would have been that NASA could have just saved themselves a lot of stress and crashed the whole mess into the moon to record some new impact data for the sensors previous missions had placed.
Seaward wrote: But a better chance of success in the face of unanticipated difficulty.
But a much greater chance of having unanticipated difficulty in the first place (since the manned spacecraft is much more complex, has a whole range of life support systems that kill everyone when they fail, and has less payload capacity to spend on redundant backups), and much harsher consequences of failure. If your manned spacecraft suffers an unanticipated difficulty you're desperately trying to fix it and avoid killing the crew. If your robot suffers an unanticipated difficulty and crashes into mars you just send the next robot, and all you've lost is the inconvenience of having to wait to make another attempt. Or since you've saved so much money and payload capacity compared to the manned mission you already have a dozen more backup robots on the way to different landing sites, so you still accomplish most of your mission.
To repeat the Apollo 13 example all having a manned crew accomplished in that situation was making the stakes a lot higher. The mission was still a complete failure, the only difference with a robot mission would have been that NASA could have just saved themselves a lot of stress and crashed the whole mess into the moon to record some new impact data for the sensors previous missions had placed.
And so it begins again...
Unfortunately, it will lead to this and is the reason why we cannot have a conversation about it:
Peregrine wrote: Of course I attempt to discredit it, because it's wrong.
Peregrine wrote: But a much greater chance of having unanticipated difficulty in the first place (since the manned spacecraft is much more complex, has a whole range of life support systems that kill everyone when they fail, and has less payload capacity to spend on redundant backups),
But a much more complex mission profile counters that. You can do a lot more with humans than you can with robots.
Well, There is a company who are actually planning to put a man in space, with plumbing parts, ethelene rocket fuel, and home-grown engineering.
Landing a man on the moon, apollo. Created hundreds of new jobs, inspired THOUSANDS of people to study rocketry, science and so forth instead of blue-collaring it.
Yeah, We can put satellites in LEO, and geosync orbit. Space culture, space research is ignored, or at best, put out of our minds.
To get to another planet, we could find out science from evolution on mars and Europa. New elements and new minerals.
The benefits of space exploration are too important to just ignore.
No mention of this yet, possibly the most important launch ever for the ESA and has cosmologists doing back-flips in terms of what it represents. Loved reading about the background for it; they knew what they wanted to do, but had absolutely no idea how it could be achieved technically. Put a bunch of extremely bright people in a room and 20 years later it has been made a reality. Really sad this hasn't been featured more prominently in the mainstream media..
The Rosetta space probe chasing the comet 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko has probably woken up from its deep 2.5 year long slumber that took it nearly as far out as the Jupiter orbit and we will hear from it in a few hours:
Rosetta’s computer is programmed to carry out a sequence of events to re-establish contact with Earth on 20 January, starting with an ‘alarm clock’ at 10:00 GMT.
Immediately after, the spacecraft’s startrackers will begin to warm up, taking around six hours.
Then its thrusters will fire to stop the slow rotation. A slight adjustment will be made to Rosetta’s orientation to ensure that the solar arrays are still facing directly towards the Sun, before the startrackers are switched on to determine the spacecraft’s attitude.
Once that has been established, Rosetta will turn directly towards Earth, switch on its transmitter and point its high-gain antenna to send its signal to announce that it is awake.
Because of Rosetta’s vast distance – just over 807 million kilometres from Earth – it will take 45 minutes for the signal to reach the ground stations. The first opportunity for receiving a signal on Earth is expected between 17:30 GMT and 18:30 GMT.
Deep space tracking dishes will be listening out for the signal, starting with NASA’s ‘big ears’ – the 70 m-diameter station at Goldstone, California, followed by, as the Earth rotates, the Canberra station in eastern Australia. ESA's New Norcia 35 m antenna, in Western Australia, would be next in line to await the signal's arrival.
Here's a video of its flight trajectory through our solar system:
ESA Rosetta Twitter wrote:“Hello, world!"
7:18 PM - 20 Jan 2014
Apparently the device has warmed up, determined its position and orientation, and turned the main antenna towards earth to send us greetings from outer space.
Much earlier during its mission the probe send us a "selfie" during a Mars flyby:
Spoiler:
Let's hope we'll get to see some equally stunning images of the comet in the coming month.
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