Posted on 07/06/2009 5:24:26 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Nasa astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, has urged the world to forget about returning to our nearest satellite and head to Mars instead.
'Why do we want to go to go back to the Moon?' he asked.
'Some nations want to go for prestige to say they are 'first' in space exploration in the 21st century and they want Nasa to compete with them.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Well I would imagine it would be with current rockets, but what if something goes wrong and the fissile material just goes?
We’ve been launching fissile material into space for decades. It powers long range craft like Voyagers 1 and 2.
And with the exception of the satellite that crashed after orbiting Venus (with radiation leaking that caused the zombie outbreaks of the ‘60s and ‘70s), no accidents have yet to occur.
Oh, you mean hippies?
I guess you've never eaten undercooked poultry.
I bet you run faster than the speed of light to the bathroom in that case.
As Einstein postulated; the faster you move, the slower time passes. As you run to the bathroom, the trick is to approach the speed of light as closely as possible. If you’re lucky, you’ll arrive before you go...
We should colonize the moon with Robots and remote controlled mining equipment.
Use machines to strip mine the moon and turn the whole thing into a giant factory.
Maybe when we are done cover it in giant square mirrors and then we will have a giant disco ball like moon!
So I was running faster than the speed of light after Spanish class in high school...
I’m good with Mars. Whatever the first objective is gonna be, let’s get on with it. Low Earth orbit is so yesterday. We’ve figured this out already.
I disagree. The logistics of space travel have not changed in my 53 years. In time order, we need:
1) A permanently settled, useful space station, that can be used for manufacturing of spacecraft. This SS can also provide solar power, beamed to the earth to pay for everything else.
2) Permanent lunar station. This would be used for mining and getting raw materials for manufacturing space craft.
3) Interplanetary craft to be built—either from the SS or the lunar station. I’ll let the engineers figure that one out.
4) Good scouting and planning trips to Mars to test our IP technology. These would all be robotic.
5) Manned trip to Mars, with the plan to build a permanent station their.
This is like island hopping in WW II—only years between each step. We haven’t accomplished step one yet.
Back in 1983 Dr. Robert Forward was performing a study of advanced propulsion for the USAF.
I offered my idea: Mini-Orion craft using Californium bombs. IIRC, critical mass for a Californium bomb is about 1 ounce.
Tether technology offers some astounding capabilities. Using cables of carbon nanotubes (600 times as strong as steel for the same weight) you can run an elevator up to geosynchronous orbit. Then you can run a tether outward from geosync. Simply releasing a payload from the end of the outer tether provides enough velocity to get to Jupiter, let alone Mars. Where does the energy come from? From the rotation of the Earth.
That sounds correct. Buzz also has a cool “Doctor Rendezvous” idea for a series of space stations that do nothing but provide habitat and workspace for humans who use the stations’ orbits to hitchhike to Mars. At that point they hop in their landers and blast off for the Martian surface, while the stations continue their long orbits.
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