NASA spent untold billions and all we got was this lousy calendar ...
Posted on 12/09/2016 5:41:59 AM PST by Kaslin
President Trump can “make America great again” by planning a surprising and easily affordable human exploration mission to the red planet Mars and its two moonlets Phobos and Deimos: PH-D, for short. JFK is remembered by many people mainly for putting Americans on the Moon, but he really just initiated the program.
The two moonlets of Mars were discovered in 1877 at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. They are in near-circular, near-equatorial orbits around Mars. Deimos, smaller than the island of Manhattan, orbits at a distance of 6.9 Martian radii; Phobos, about five times larger than Deimos, is at 2.8 radii, with its orbit shrinking because of tidal friction; it will be gone in just a few million years. In past lectures, I have joked that the dinosaurs might have seen more Martian moons, now gone, “if they had had better telescopes.”
Notice that I did not suggest colonization of Mars -- the current rage, a replay of the massive, wildly expensive and technologically infeasible Empire Project of the 1950s, envisioned by space pioneer Wernher von Braun. Unfortunately, this premature emphasis on colonization tends to color even realistic manned Mars projects as fantasy. Nor do I favor the business-as-usual continuation of unmanned missions to Mars, promising the eventual return of Mars samples for analysis in terrestrial labs.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Fred Singer is nuts. Nothing about a manned Mars mission is "easily affordable" What FS wants is the taxpayers to pick up the tab for a science fiction boondoggle. Look at the physics and the biology requirements. Not only do you have to get the humans to Mars with enough consumables to sustain them on the trip there, the trip back, and their time at Mars, but you have to get a vehicle capable of returning and enough fuel to get it to Mars, a lander for on and off the surface and then enough fuel to give enough momentum change to get the vehicle back to earth in a reasonable time (consumables remember). PLUS there is the danger of solar flares killing the explorers unless enough shielding mass is included to protect them from this possibility.
Robots have already proven that Mars consists of rocks and dirt. No consumables and no complexity of needing a return trip are needed for robots. If it's so easily affordable let Fred Singer pay for it.
Whatever class will have to wait until the eyesight problem is fixed, else by the time the crew gets to Mars they may well be blind. See stories below:
Space Is Ruining Astronauts’ Eyesight And No One Knows Why
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a21757/astronauts-eyesight-viip/
Spaceflight Bad for Astronauts’ Vision, Study Suggests
http://www.space.com/14876-astronaut-spaceflight-vision-problems.html
AMERICA. FIRST. At $20 trillion in debt, Mars can wait.
On the other hand I would be in favor of granting major tax breaks for businesses willing to invest in space development.
Exactly. If some ultra-rich dude wants to spend his own dough, more power to them. And from a strictly strategic standpoint the moon is much more important - see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for example.
What we need to fund is the space elevator. We are very close in materials development and with just a little help, could make this a reality.
Once in place, sending payloads to the moon and/or Mars becomes simple and cost effective. It would make colonizing much easier.
Realistically, how much will a trip to mars cost? Is there new technology that needs to be discovered? Are there new consumables to support storage limitations? New fuel?
Don’t get me wrong. This is expensive and we can spend cash on other things instead of a feel good mission. But then again, isn’t it time we do something to show the world we are America and when we put our minds to it we can do anything we want? It’s been a long time since we did something that made the world go wow!
To your point: it turns out that a biological may stop the whole idea of deep space manned travel with out a constant 1 gee centrifugally generated: loss of eyesight. See my comment above.
Long read with images to make the concepts easily understandable:
SpaceX’s Big F@@@ing Rocket - The Full Story
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html
Another long read with images:
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
NASA can be used for the basic research, and companies like Space X can do the actual planning & launches.
However, going back to the Moon should be the first step as the planning and concepts will be similar to those needed for a Mars mission, and is closer to help if things go wrong - and they will as in any new venture.
Robots have their place but are no substitute for human insight and ingenuity - robots can either be programmed to do certain things autonomously or run as drones - however, the time lag between the time something needs to be done and disaster can be razor thin - something a human can do in seconds takes minutes or hours each way to communicate to a robot/drone depending on distance from Earth.
BTW: Earth consists of rocks and dirt ...
Finally. A mission suited for Mitt Romney!
the 2000 lb rover mission cost about 2.5 billion dollars. Figure at least 200x the mass and the fact that entirely new launch vehicles would have to be developed figure between half a trillion and a trillion dollars for something that give nothing in return except pays a bunch of scientists' and engineers' salaries to produce something of no practical use at all
And as it turns out so does Mars. Big surprise. The difference is that it doesn't cost billions of dollars to look at rocks and dirt here on earth.
Trump has his hands full with more important stuff for the next 4 to 8 years.
I wonder if that means humans have no business being in space?
You have no sense of adventure, do you?
The technologies YET TO BE INVENTED from explorations like this are the biggest reason to do this.
If those billions of dollars could only go to feed the homeless and less fortunate ... man would be hopeless and helpless still living somewhere in Africa afraid to venture beyond the horizon lest it cost too much.
What price Hope? You must have missed the late 60s and early 70s, when the entire world was enthralled and inspired by the US manned space program.
And since when does billions of dollars spent by private corporations on a project matter to people not in the corporation?
And BTW, how do you explain the recent and publish finding of Xeon129 on Mars in quantities dwarfing anything found on Earth since the 1940s, created between 250-500 million years ago? You do understand that the only massive producer of Xeon129 is by thermonuclear detonation. No robot can check this out first hand, else we dwell on this earth only until Someone returns to finish the job.
Sorry, but the Shuttle program was a big benefit for our people. Should have been done correctly, but unfortunately, we are still using 1930’s and 1940’s concepts to develop space exploration today.
We could cut the cost by easily 95% if we would stop thinking 1930’s style planetary escape and planetary re-entry.
But, we don’t. So, we will still find it expensive, until someone wakes up and makes it feasible.
How about if those billion of dollars could only STAY in the pockets of those who actually earned them?
You must have missed the late 60s and early 70s, when the entire world was enthralled and inspired by the US manned space program.
Nope I was there, but unlike the space kadets, I wasn't enthralled or inspired. I was working and paying taxes then as now wondering how much that giant PR boondoggle was costing me. Ask me how much I want to pay out of my hard earned money to "enthrall the world" (Hint - an integer less than one)
You do understand that the only massive producer of Xeon129 is by thermonuclear detonation. No robot can check this out first hand, else we dwell on this earth only until Someone returns to finish the job.
What I understand from this is that you're in need of one of these in case the aliens come back and take over your mind
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