Posted on 01/20/2004 1:41:32 PM PST by JoeFromSidney
DAYTON, Ohio — Twenty years ago, Neil Armstrong made “one giant leap for mankind.” Since then, manned space exploration has been one giant leap forward, two giant leaps backward.
When the movie 2001 appeared in 1968, the idea of 10,000 people on the moon by 2001 was believable. All it would take was to continue the moon program already begun.
Now we know there won’t be even 10 people on the moon by 2001. NASA doesn’t plan to go back to the moon until the 21st century. That’s disappointed many of us. As a child, I avidly read Flash Gordon and listened to Buck Rogers. I dreamed of space exploration. Watching TV “live from the moon” in 1969, I felt my dreams were coming true..
What went wrong? In a word, NASA. NASA’s mission is to develop technology. NASA really looks at each space project as an excuse to develop new technology. NASA scraps its successful old technology and starts over. Moreover, NASA is completely bureaucratized. Each of NASA’s centers must get “its fair share” of the budget. New space systems are designed not so much to carry out a task as to give each center a piece of the action.
Congress is also part of the problem. Congressional cuts in the NASA budget delayed the moon landing by a year. Today, the chairman of the committee which funds both NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has said there won’t be any housing in space (the space station) unless more money is spent for housing on Earth.
But Congress only reflects the will of the voters. They didn’t care that Richard Nixon canceled Apollo just as it was starting to pay off. The manned program simply outlasted the public’s attention span.
But those of us who dreamed of space must ask ourselves, why should the taxpayers pay for .the space program we want? After all, it was our dream, not theirs.
The fundamental lesson of our “one step forward, two steps back” manned space program is that space exploration must be done privately, not by government. Only then will we escape congressional politics and NASA bureaucracy. History shows that private enterprise gets the job done quicker and cheaper than government. We’ve lost 20 years waiting for NASA. It’s time to follow our dream again. But this time let’s do it ourselves.
Four things:
In short, this venture is not something to be undertaken lightly. Yes, it must be undertaken, but not in a half-assed way.
The Apollo missions were a 9-day round trip on average. The Mars mission is a 3 year venture MINIMUM: six months getting there, two years staying there while waiting for Earth to complete an orbit and rendezvous with Mars again, and a six month journey back.
See http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mars/mars_orbit.html to appreciate the launch, rendezvous, arrival, departure, and return logistics. And that's just one small part of the whole equation here. You also have to consider living quarters, the human reaction to such confinement, and a host of things that can (and most likely will) go wrong without proper planning and execution.
One more thing: it has to be fail-safe. You can forget about a rescue mission when the Earth and Mars are at opposite ends of the Sun.
In short, there's a damned good reason why they call it "rocket science."
In the Soviet Union, that is true. In the United States of America, the government is supposed to serve the will of the people; not vice-versa.
In the Soviet Union, that is true. In the United States of America, the government is supposed to serve the will of the people; not vice-versa.
So I take it that you believe it was wrong to go to war with Iraq? At first, the polls showed the public to be against it, but the President eventually pushed public opinion in support of it.
You must have seen different polls than I did prior to the liberation of Iraq. The polls I saw indicated that the vast majority of Americans supported the war.
No, the government should not function as a windsock. For that matter, it shouldn't be the seat of all decisions. If anything, it should function as the rudder on a ship: responsive to those at the helm.
A government that ignores the will of the prevailing majority is no republic; it is a dictatorship.
438 days. That's one year, two months and two days shy of two weeks. You have a funny way of rounding up that figure.
But while we're on the subject, perhaps you'd care to also do some fact checking on the supplies that were sent up to Mir and the crew rotation. Those alone appreciably altered the experience of the cosmonaut in question. Such alterations will not be possible in the Mars mission.
On a mission to Mars, the astronauts would only be ship bound for a period of six months.
And bound to the confines of their lander and enviro-suits upon landing. The atmosphere on Mars is carbon dioxide.
I would also presume that scientists are/will be working on a fast mode of travel so that the 3 year round-trip is sped up considerably.
The most they'll be able to shave off is perhaps four months...unless they figure out how to alter the orbit of Mars to make it synchronous with Earth.
In any event, I'd favor skipping the return trip and moving towards immediate colonization.
And once again I ask: do you have any idea how many metric tons of water, food and oxygen must be shipped in order to fulfill even the most basic needs? And what of emergencies? How do you intend to address a number of situations that can come up while that far isolated from Earth? Judging from your abundant avoidance of those stubborn facts, it's pretty apparent you either don't care to know or just don't care at all.
Based on this ignorant question, it's obvious you didn't read my reply. Go back and read it again. Read it as often as you require in order to comprehend it. And after you comprehend it, read it again. You're wasting my time with these asinine questions.
Do you?
No objections. In fact, I think it was a national crime that we stopped in the early '70s. If it'd been up to me, we'd have hot dog stands on the moon by now.
The point I'm trying to make (and, from the looks of things, failing miserably) is that a manned mission to Mars is not something to be taken lightly.
Manned space flight leapt from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo and then regressed back to an expanded Gemini program with the STS and stayed there for 30 years. Much of what was known in the late '60s and early '70s about manned interplanetary travel has been lost. (This is even true of our robotic missions to Mars. When Pathfinder was being machined, JPL engineers discovered to their horror that the documentation on heat shield construction for Mars-bound craft was incomplete. Fortunately, most of the people who fabricated the heat shields were still alive and were brought back as consultants to document the entire procedure.)
Should we colonize the moon? Yes, but only if we mean to use it as training for shaking out the bugs in our ultimate mission to Mars and its moons (and perhaps beyond).
What I fear most is that unrealistic expectations that the American public has about space flight will only serve to leave them disappointed when they are faced with the reality that our current technological capacities will not -- in any near future -- afford us the ability to match the "Star Wars" style of space travel on which they've been reared.
Space travel does capture the imagination...but when one considers the imminently hostile environ in which it is conducted (vacuum of space, radiation hazards, brutal temperature extremes), the need for safety and dispassionate planning is paramount, just the same as if one were to seek to colonize the ocean floor.
So, in the final analysis, I'm not trying to be a buzzkill. I'm trying to impart reasonable expectations on a public that has yet to fully appreciate the sheer magnitude of the journey we're only just beginning.
I'm grateful, given enough power supply, we can mine water on the moon. It's a huge bonus.
NASA: The discretionary budget punching bag.
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