Posted on 12/01/2004 4:42:44 PM PST by KevinDavis
I understand what you are saying and that it should be cheap. If that was the case in the 60s, we would never have gone to the moon and not had personal computers, satellites beaming pictures from Saturn and archaeological discoveries galore.
JFKs goal of putting a man on the moon and getting him back plus Demmings genius made the future as we know it possible.
Technological leaps come when big dreams are in the picture. Who knows what cost technology will be. But I would rather do both, send robots as we are to the planets and reach for the stars at the same time.
Take care.
SR
If we really want to explore the moon, here's how to do it. Launch some tiny, toy-sized rovers with mini-cams on them. Set them up to be remote controlled via radio link on pay-to-use web sites. (The light-speed lag for radio waves to the moon and back is only a couple of seconds, as opposed to the 23 minutes it takes for radio to get to Mars.) Let subscribers pay a reasonable fee for the time they spend "exploring" and simply take the data dumps from the cameras and sell those for study.
It's human nature to want to know what's over the next hill. Give us the chance to explore and we'll pay to do it. Someone can get rich in the process and it will expand the knowledge of the moon for everyone. It'll be safe, cheap, and make a profit.
GW
“revealed that the Mars effort would cost nearly $500 billion over 30 years.”
Only if the government does it.
Yep, good thing the Wright Brothers and Burt Rutan didn't/don't have such people hanging around them.
He doesn't know what he's talking about, insofar as he presents some problems which are artifacts of the political processes involved, not engineering problems. We don't need to launch humans with every payload, we need a heavy lift capability for anything we plan to do in space.
Von Braun suggested twelve Saturn V launches would be required (the entire lunar program, plus) to assemble just one Mars mission in Earth orbit. The amount of mass budget needed for a Mars round trip mission would be greatly reduced by not actually landing on Mars, but parking in orbit around Mars to direct robotic remote control surface probes in nearly real time.
The best way to do that is to move the ISS (or the most durable parts of it), unmanned, out of Earth orbit, in a lowest energy trajectory to Mars, where it would become the Mars orbital station. Human missions to Mars would then have a destination, a command post, and a safer habitat off the surface when human surface expeditions began some time thereafter.
This could begin in a relatively few years from now, when the ISS is scheduled to be dumped into the Pacific anyway.
The ISS would be guyed where necessary, its photovoltaic arrays upgraded, with some sort of protective coating applied to the outside. Several new docking modules would be installed and tested. The whole thing would then be pushed into ever-higher orbit until it was out of Earth's sphere of influence and on its way to its rendezvous with Mars.
As the ISS was approaching Martian orbit, more provisions (food, fuel, whatnot) would be launched for robotic rendezvous with the station in orbit around Mars, or if the ISS happened to, uh, miss its rendezvous, the supply ship would become the first module of a new station, to be assembled in Mars orbit.
['Civ accepts the flowers thrown by the crowd]
Oh, no, that's the last thing we need. GWB proposes an ambitious resumption of the vision of Von Braun et al, and that's a torch that was borne at one time by JFK. This is yet another chip, go ahead, we dare ya, try to knock it off the prez' shoulder. The space program, if funded, will benefit the aerospace industries, and there are such companies in places like, oh, I don't know, California, Washington, Massachusetts, even Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and New York.
Astronomers plan telescope on Moon
3 January 2002
New Scientist
Duncan Graham-Rowe
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1735
Maccone also wants to give the region around the Daedalus crater some form of protection status, to create a permanent quiet zone that would be safe no matter what technology is developed in the future. "The far side is in my opinion a unique treasure that should be preserved for the sake of humankind," he says.
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