Maybe relevant ping.
Maybe relevant ping.
Somebody ought to sit down and figure out all the benefits in medicine,technology etc that came out of the space program.
That list would be one of those lists that keeps getting longer the more you look.
Think about how often a new product is touted as having come from NASA or the space program. That "evergreen" lubricant for cars is the latest I've heard of.
If one wants to talk about waste, look no further than Boston's "Big dig" it cost $14.6 billion for 7.8 miles of underground roadway. That's over $50 for each man, woman and child in the United States.
All so Bostonians don't have to wait in traffic.
Perhaps this gentleman would prefer the government spend it's $$ on the flavored and colored condoms mentioned in a previous article this evening. Personally I prefer the vaccum of space for our $$ even if we never find anything or benefit in any manner. Or maybe we could find little green men---I know, it's a bad joke.
That's a crock.
1 - "Very short sighted ...."
Sorry, I must disagree. Going to the moon or mars with rockets does not make sense. The money wasted should be spent on exploring new methods of propulusion which harness energy efficiently.
With a trillion dollar investment, we could invent a workable fusion reactor. We could invent new propulsion systems which would revolutionize economics of transportation, including space transportation.
Men Going to Mars with rockets is a bad investment. How about (to use an old catch phrase) invest in new methods for making buggy whips more efficiently?
This number has been debunked 500 billion times.
Sooner or later, space industry will catch on. Someone this century is going to be the Bill Gates of space and start the Microsoft of space transportation.
They will come up with a successful system for getting humans and cargo into low earth orbit and they will make billions.
Plus a bonus of energy independence here on earth.
BUMP
I totally agree with this article.
Man requires gravity to survive and not just any old gravity, it has to be exactly the same force as on the Earth.
A manned space voyage to Mars is a planned suicide mission for the crew not to mention a huge money sink.
I love Star Trek but its a modern fairy tale. Face it, man was made for Earth and there is no other planet close by like it.
Money not spent for scientific endeavors gets flushed down the black hole of social welfare.
Scientific projects at this scale always bring with them scientific advances that help us all.
Sad to say, the only way to reign in spending on the black hole of social welfare is to spend it on projects other than those directed towards the black hole of social welfare.
Redesign with upgrades /jk
“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]
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.