Posted on 10/28/2010 12:22:55 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Nasa is planning an audacious mission to send a manned spacecraft on a one-way trip to permanently settle on other planets. The ambitious idea is known as the Hundred Years Starship and would send astronauts to colonise planets like Mars, knowing they could never come home. NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASAs main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project. The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from Nasa.
You heard it here, Worden said at Long Conversation, an event in San Francisco. We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund. He added: The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired. Worden said he has discussed the potential price tag for one-way trips to Mars with Google co-founder Larry Page, telling him such a mission could be done for $10 billion.
He said: His response was, Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2billion? So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price.
Worden also suggested that new technologies such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome could also be explored ahead of the mission. And he said that he believed the mission should visit Mars moons first, where scientists can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. He claims that humans could be on Mars' moons by 2030.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I hope they are Democrats.
He said said: His response was, Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2billion? So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price.
Oh yeah! Sign me up for the budget one-way trip to Mars. lol
Where do they get Starship out of this? That right there is enough to give the lie to the whole thing, in my mind. Well, you could say the same thing about “Astronaut”, but this is the second time around.
Yeah, if it's gonna be one way, at least make it Saturn. That might be worth it.
It's a ton of money but if I'm going to spend the rest of my life on Mars I don't think I want the Motel 6 package.
So they have £1 million (= about $633,000 US) + $100,000 from Nasa ... so they have only $9,999,267,000.00 to go. George Soros to the white courtesy phone please.
My dream is of the rings. When Cassini-Huygens was on the way, I naively supposed that it would get down there and give real closeup shots of them. After arrival, though, when the itinerary was laid out in the popular press, there was no such thing in the offing, and the reason was apparent. It costs as much energy to descend into a gravitational well as it does to ascend out of it. The closest approach to the ring was a one time thing when the orbit was being shaped, and took a steep elliptical form. Once it was rounded out, it was much higher than the rings, and at this point it became impossible to go any deeper, due to fuel limitations.
They have a very good vantage point, of course, but there is no prospect of visual closeups of the actual ring particles, like we see in artists conceptions. This was and remains a real disappoint to me, even though the rewards of the Cassini-Huygens mission are otherwise ample, most particularly the landing of Huygens on Titan, 'cause if that doesn't capture your imagination, I don't know what.
A permanent base on one of Saturn or Jupiter's moons sounds a little more interesting than Mars.
Might want to check your exchange rate...
I would like to formally nominate Barry Obama and Michelle Obama the King and Queen of Mars. Long live the king.
We could use some new penal colonies.
Load it up with Congress & send them to Nirvana.
Until we can reach speeds close to the speed of light, similar to all of the sci-fi shows, cheaply & easily, we will continue to ride a 20” Huffy bicycle from NY to LA when it comes to space travel.
Muslim outreach?
That got me too. A Starship would go to, you know, another star, I would think.
You did the exchange rate in reverse. £1 million is about US$ 1,590,000.
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