Posted on 01/21/2008 8:41:38 AM PST by Truth29
Neither are farm subsidies, the Department of Education or bailouts for idiots who bought more house than they ever could afford.
I'd rather spend it on space.
A thousand robotic missions will not deploy a system capable of noticing something unusual or out of place - perhaps something the size of a dime on the sidewalk - picking it up, looking it over, and finding something unexpected all within ten seconds of mission time.
A thousand robotic missions might learn more than one manned mission, but they probably wouldn't learn more than two manned missions.
The farmers, on the other hand, would rather spend it on farm subsidies, and the teachers unions would rather spend it on the Department of Education, and the idiots would rather spend it on bailouts.
That's the problem with funding using plunder. It leads to fights among the pirates.
Well said.
The Moon not only makes sense as a colony, for science but militarily...IT IS the High Ground.
Yeah, maybe.... but it also makes a great deal of sense, if you're serious about more than just a rock-picking tour of Mars. It's a lot easier to use the moon to try out and perfect the techniques and technologies needed for a long-term Mars habitation. And once you've got that infrastructure on the moon, Mars becomes a lot easier. And not only that, but you open up a lot of other places in the Solar System as well.
The real problem -- which folks in the space biz hate to acknowledge -- is that there's no pressing reason to send people to Mars. It'd be cool ... and really expensive ... and there's no particular scientific goal aside from being able to maintain breathable air for a couple of years.
Having read the entire thing ... these guys are pie-in-the-sky types who are doing their best to ensure that nothing gets done at all.
.
If something castastrophic were to happen to the Planet Earth...
...a surviving Human Race MUST be living on two different worlds.
Or else.
In year 2029 a large Asteroid is due to speed through the space between our orbiting communication space satellites and the Earth’s surface.
Seven years later that same Asteroid is due to possibly intercept us precisely on its return leg.
Long dormant Mega Volcanoes in Yellowstone National Park and Indonesia, that would severely affect all life on the Planet Earth, are due to do just that.
So...
...our having fellow members of our Human Race living on the Planet Mars at the time would be another thing altogether..?
.
or some plague that would that can spread pretty fast.. I hate to see the human race wiped out due any circumstances..
By 2039 we MAY have 4 people on Mars. It’s too late for us I’m afraid.
"A large portion of the scientific community in the U.S. also prefers Mars over the Moon," he acknowledged. But "interest in the Moon is driven by goals in addition to and beyond the requirements of the science community. It is driven by the imperatives that ensue from a commitment to become a spacefaring society, not primarily by scientific objectives, though such objectives do indeed constitute a part of the overall rationale. We continue to experience intense international interest concerning our plans for lunar exploration," Griffin told Aviation Week.Missions to Mars won't be launched from the Moon. The specialized, one of a kind or rare equipment needed will have to be manufactured here on Earth. Missions to Mars will have to be assembled in LEO using multiple launches from the Earth. There are reasons for a permanent human presence on the Moon, but in the context of humans to Mars, the importance of moonshots is to practice for the much more demanding Mars missions. I'm following the thinking of Von Braun here, and going to the Moon was ultimately the product of his mind (along with the funding, naturally). Thanks kevin.
As you could probably tell from my post #20, I agree with your first paragraph. Moon is the perfect place to perfect the technologies that will make life on Mars feasible. It is an important step on the way to Mars and the more distant world. I disagree with the folks who want to skip that step.
As for your second paragraph, I mildly disagree. The country, or people, who master space technologies will be the country or people who own the next century, in my view. That country should be ours, and those people should be our grandchildren. When we landed on the moon, I thought those people would be us. Now I just hope they will be our grandkids. But while the “pure” science is important in itself, development of the technology of space travel is also important for its own sake. The two aren’t completely separate, the one makes the other possible. But both sides of the coin are important for their own sake. The science is cool, but the people who master space travel will own the future.
That is what I am afraid of and when the shuttle is retired, the US gets caught up in its shoe laces and the planned gap before we regain a human space launch capability becomes permanent. A Democrat Administration may well decide to divert funding to its dependent voter base and simply allow the US high frontier to slide away.
The shuttle has many faults and detractors as does the ISS, but if we are not committed and very careful, the future will belong to some other culture.
It was deliberately inflammatory ... the challenge being to prompt somebody to provide a compelling argument to counter the claim.
The first problem is, when the objection is stated so specifically, it's difficult to come up with a compelling argument that doesn't rely on appeals to intangible, perhaps almost spiritual, ideas -- the old "mankind must explore" being one of the more common. But what if your questioner doesn't buy into the same intangibles as you do? What they see is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on an ideal they do not share.
And then there is the "let private enterprise do it" argument -- which is very unlikely to happen, because there is no money to be made in sending people to do what robots can do more cheaply. Manned spaceflight is a government game for the next few decades, at least. Which, of course, loops us back to the first problem.
What's needed, is a real and tangible reason to send people out into space ... and right now we don't really have any of those. You can't even build public support for it without a calm, orderly, and dedicated long-term program, based on a series of modest and achievable goals, managed by people who know what they're doing, and staffed by people who know how to get the job done ... and who are guaranteed a steady source of funding by a patient but demanding Congress.
As it stands now, Congress cannot or will not provide the latter, and pretty much nobody -- NASA, private industry, or the "Rutan element" -- seems capable of carrying through a sustainable and practical program.
The techniques and technologies needed for long-term Mars habitation have almost nothing to do with what would be needed on the Moon, other than they'd both probably be manufactured by Boeing.
Mars can have atmospheric temperatures as high as 60 degrees at the equator, and soil temperatures up to about 80 degrees. The coldest equatorial temperatures there are about on par with the world record low temperature in Antarctica (where humans live full time) 128.5 degrees below zero, and typical daytime temperatures wouldn't be unusual to Prudhoe Bay oil workers or Siberians. The Moon, on the other hand, has daytime highs of 265 degrees and lows of 170 below zero.
On Mars, simple 19th century technology can be used to produce oxygen and motor fuel by cracking the atmosphere (something the Moon lacks) with hydrogen, whereas on the Moon you have to melt rocks to get oxygen, or find some water somewhere. On the Moon, it's generally so dry it'd be worthwhile to extract water from dried concrete, while on Mars there's signs that open water has flowed briefly on the surface within the last few years.
On Mars, iron can be manufactured from the iron-oxide-rich soil using carbon monoxide (the atmosphere minus one breatheable oxygen atom) or hydrogen, both of which are exothermic reactions - meaning they are self-sustaining for reaction heat.
If you want to develop techniques and technologies for Mars, Antarctica, or Devon Island in Canada, is a much closer approximation to conditions on Mars than is the Moon. The Moon is really a detour on the road to Mars.
That's only if you're going to treat the Mars mission as if it were a huge Apollo-style flags-and-footprints venture, instead of a building block for a permanent human presence on Mars. If you direct-launch your power system, fuel, and supplies to Mars, which is possible with a Saturn-style booster, you can confirm they're working properly before direct-launching your crew at the next window.
You can’t drive across a river without a bridge.
We’re going to need moon bases and orbital bases if we’re going to be sending people all over the solar system.
Unless we’re preparing to build some really big launch vehicles.
From the front lines.
I work at Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Right now we are working feverishly on getting a preliminary design engineered and ready for construction. The feeling is that the quicker we get “in-process” the harder it will be to cancel the entire project.
We MUST develop craft and return to the moon. It has been 30+ years since we heavy launched astronauts into space. Contrary to popular opinion, we can’t just “rebuild” the Apollo launchers.
The Saturn 5 rockets do not lift enough payload for the equipment needed to go to Mars.
Also, people don’t realize just how primitive the Saturn/Apollo craft were. Folks, they were all designed with slide rules and paper. Yes, they worked. BUt they are NOT sufficent for the heavier loads that we need to lift in order to go to Mars.
Changing gears: Obama has been on record as saying that he would cancel the entire Constellation (return to the moon) effort. Look for NASA administrators to play the environmental card HEAVILY as a means of agency survival.
Put a different way ... just where do people plan to find things such as the specified 1950s-era electronics necessary to operate such a rocket? Where do they expect to find the manufacturing sites capable of fabricating pieces and parts according to the 1950s-era specifications?
The Saturn Rocket was a true marvel -- and it's 50 year-old technology. It's cheaper to rebuild and redesign.
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