How do you feel about the death of NASA / US Space Program?

[Locut0s]

Perhaps you need to read that article again. It's talking about low earth orbit. Low earth orbit is cheap. It doesn't take much to get things there. It's not talking about the moon.

Again, the difference between low earth orbit & going to the moon is like crossing a river & crossing the Pacific Ocean.

I want to see more robotic missions to the planets. For the price of a lunar base they could almost litter all the planets with Spirit and Opportunity rovers and more.

 

[So]

Perhaps you need to read that article again. It's talking about low earth orbit. Low earth orbit is cheap. It doesn't take much to get things there. It's not talking about the moon.

Again, the difference between low earth orbit & going to the moon is like crossing a river & crossing the Pacific Ocean.

Heinlein said it best: "Low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system"

Even if LTO is ten times more expensive than LEO, it takes more fuel, which is not the most significant cost in a low duty launch system. In a system with hundreds of launches a year, it would be, but in that case we have such a low marginal cost that it really doesn't matter. Launch two and refuel on orbit (yes, I know, it's not a "proven" technology, but if we can do it in the atmosphere, we can do it on orbit.

 

[dmcowen674]

The last scheduled night launch of a space shuttle took place last night.

Only four shuttle missions remain.

Now, mind you, I am not "wed" to the shuttle. It is inefficient. It is old. Their time is over. Fine, I can live with that.

What I have a hard time with is the idea of killing a program (NASA) that not only has pioneered some amazing technologies (R&D investment) but has also been a symbol of American progress. We put man on the moon for God's sake and now we want to kill the organization that did it? For what? To support more welfare babies?

Is America just giving up here and giving space to the Chinese?

I am frankly saddened by all this and don't want to see NASA go.

Get over it. Just like Health Care is only for the rich, space is only for the rich. The U.S. is dirt poor, no space for you.

 

[SunSamurai]

Yeah, but the ocean sustains life and provides us with resources. The moon is a big fucking rock.

What the fuck are we gonna do, make the moon the most expensive strip mining venture?

ur dum.

obviously we would go there to shut down the malfunctioning training facility so we can open up our specialized skillset and maybe gain a level to put that last point in assault rifles.

 

[Jeff7]

And I think you're greatly underestimating the ingenuity of the engineers involved in space operations. First of all, I'm confident that you could get the a bootstrap base going in twenty or so saturn five scale launches, or, (as implied by the article I posed way back on page 1), several hundred smaller launches using the economy of scale provided by a "model T" atlas sized rocket made on a REAL production line.

It's not really about ingenuity though - it's about raw mass. Yes you can reduce weight here and there, but the fact remains that a lot of "stuff" needs to be heaved up and all the way to the Moon, and that takes a lot of fuel, presently. (When/if we build a huge fusion-powered railgun mass driver, that may change slightly.)

If you want to build a base, that takes a lot of mass in components to send there, completely ignoring the costs and mass of getting robots or humans there to perform assembly and installation. If you want to send equipment to mine, refine, and fabricate, you'll save on long-term costs of constantly sending new materials, but the up-front costs would be utterly immense, not only for designing the equipment, but also the weight. Fabrication machinery is rarely lightweight, unless you're fabricating Styrofoam.

An alternative might be to have small long-lived mining robots head there and very slowly begin at least extracting raw materials. But even that only removes one small hurdle.

 

[techs]

It's not really about ingenuity though - it's about raw mass. Yes you can reduce weight here and there, but the fact remains that a lot of "stuff" needs to be heaved up and all the way to the Moon, and that takes a lot of fuel, presently. (When/if we build a huge fusion-powered railgun mass driver, that may change slightly.)

If you want to build a base, that takes a lot of mass in components to send there, completely ignoring the costs and mass of getting robots or humans there to perform assembly and installation. If you want to send equipment to mine, refine, and fabricate, you'll save on long-term costs of constantly sending new materials, but the up-front costs would be utterly immense, not only for designing the equipment, but also the weight. Fabrication machinery is rarely lightweight, unless you're fabricating Styrofoam.

An alternative might be to have small long-lived mining robots head there and very slowly begin at least extracting raw materials. But even that only removes one small hurdle.

qft

The major fail in this thread is that what people are calling currently "feasible" extends to such things that are so astronomically (pun inteneded) costly as to really not be feasible.
For example the idea that we could "mine" Mars to get fuel for the return trip is ridiculous. We can't mine here on Earth and get a greater energy return than we put in to mine. And carrying something like a bulldozer and dumptruck to Mars would take a ridiculousy large launch vehicle, far larger than anything ever attempted.

In fact, if you just consider the amount of material the Saturn 5 lifted for the moon trip, you are looking at over a hundred similiar launches for a Mars mission.

Technologically feasible must include cost feasibility.

 

[K1052]

qft

The major fail in this thread is that what people are calling currently "feasible" extends to such things that are so astronomically (pun inteneded) costly as to really not be feasible.
For example the idea that we could "mine" Mars to get fuel for the return trip is ridiculous. We can't mine here on Earth and get a greater energy return than we put in to mine. And carrying something like a bulldozer and dumptruck to Mars would take a ridiculousy large launch vehicle, far larger than anything ever attempted.

In fact, if you just consider the amount of material the Saturn 5 lifted for the moon trip, you are looking at over a hundred similiar launches for a Mars mission.

Technologically feasible must include cost feasibility.

Provided a power source (nuclear or solar) and a supply of ice it is definitely possible to produce hydrogen, oxygen, and methane in place on Mars using just the atmosphere. None of this technology is particularly exotic.

I don't know how you arrive at 100+ Saturn V launches for a Mars shot. Also, the heaviest Ares V variant proposed will loft a 40% more payload to LEO than the Saturn V.

 

[techs]

Provided a power source (nuclear or solar) and a supply of ice it is definitely possible to produce hydrogen, oxygen, and methane in place on Mars using just the atmosphere. None of this technology is particularly exotic.

I don't know how you arrive at 100+ Saturn V launches for a Mars shot. Also, the heaviest Ares 5 variant proposed will loft a 40% more payload to LEO than the Saturn V.

Lets see. You want to send a nuclear power plant to Mars? How much shielding does that require and how much does that weigh? And your dump truck, no way to solar power a dump truck. So you are going to need rechargeable batteries. How much does that weigh?
Not to mention some kind of processing station to perform the electrolysis of water and then store the hydrogen and oxygen? And don't forget you have to cool them way down, so you need some really big refrigeration units.
And the Ares 5 needs to achieve much more velocity than LEO, it has to break away from earths gravity.

The Saturn V could only carry 100,000 pounds to the moon.

 

[Gibsons]

I want to see more robotic missions to the planets. For the price of a lunar base they could almost litter all the planets with Spirit and Opportunity rovers and more.

This. Some more Cassini-Huygens projects, a freakin constellation of telescopes for everything from deep IR to gamma, another Pioneer program...

 

[K1052]

Lets see. You want to send a nuclear power plant to Mars? How much shielding does that require and how much does that weigh? And your dump truck, no way to solar power a dump truck. So you are going to need rechargeable batteries. How much does that weigh?
Not to mention some kind of processing station to perform the electrolysis of water and then store the hydrogen and oxygen? And don't forget you have to cool them way down, so you need some really big refrigeration units.
And the Ares 5 needs to achieve much more velocity than LEO, it has to break away from earths gravity.

The Saturn V could only carry 100,000 pounds to the moon.

The Ares V lift advantage extends to a lunar mission (I just used LEO figure as an example).....being that's the whole point of building it in the first place.

Various types of lightweight radiation shielding (lithium, tungsten, beryllium, etc) have been studied and there are no technical showstoppers.

You don't need a refrigeration plant, you need compressors and insulated tanks.

 

[Modelworks]

I hate to see NASA funding cut like it has been.
People focus on what is out in space but not enough on what is right here, the ocean.
I think we should be doing much more ocean exploration, it is right here , no rockets needed and we still do not know everything that it contains.

 

[Paratus]

Ares V was 156,000 to lunar & 410,000 lbs to LEO

For the Mars stuff you would send an unmanned precusor mission to drop a tank a power source and the catalyst based processing equipment to make O2 and methane from the atmosphere to refuel the your lander. The lander and crew show up 2 years later when it's confirmed there is enough fuel in the tank.

 

[yh125d]

There's Prothean ruins on the Moon! We need to find them so we can join the Council!




(I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect)

 

[Siddhartha]

If we cut Nasa's funding, they'll never be able to build the moon base that will allow us to reach Mars. The Chinese will beat us to Mars, terraform it and claim it as their own. Then when we run out of real estate in the US we'll have to learn Chinese when we move to Mars.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to learn Chinese.

I doubt waving the Red Scare flag is going to buy you much in this discussion.

The cost of the Viet Nam war and the fact that we found little worthwhile on the moon killed the Manned space missions.

If we were serious about "running out of real estate" we could "terraform" the middle of the US, the Sahara, etc. Making Sahara livable would be a lot easier than converting Mars.

When I was a kid, I read Science Fiction, watched the NASA stuff on TV, and my dad worked on the development of the Saturn V rocket. Back then I would probably have said* alot of what has been written in this thread.

But as an adult I think there are more profitable areas, short term and long term, of research we could put our limited resources.

*I would never have said that we should choose rockets over feeding people.

 

[DrPizza]

Ares V was 156,000 to lunar & 410,000 lbs to LEO

For the Mars stuff you would send an unmanned precusor mission to drop a tank a power source and the catalyst based processing equipment to make O2 and methane from the atmosphere to refuel the your lander. The lander and crew show up 2 years later when it's confirmed there is enough fuel in the tank.

What? You think the tank would be the size of, say a propane tank for a gas grill or something? Perhaps you need to look at the size of launch vehicles.

Your "power source" has to produce 100% of the energy required to launch a rocket. That's a shitload of energy. You're fortunate at least though that gravity on Mars is only about 38% of that on Earth (compared to about 17% on the moon.)

 

[DrPizza]

If we were serious about "running out of real estate"

I agree that some day, we should start colonizing other areas of the solar system. However, "running out of real estate" has nothing to do with it & probably never will. The only solution to the "running out of real estate" problem is population control. The current rate of population increase is quite a few orders of magnitude greater than we'd ever be able to ship people off this rock.

 

[Paratus]

What? You think the tank would be the size of, say a propane tank for a gas grill or something? Perhaps you need to look at the size of launch vehicles.

Your "power source" has to produce 100% of the energy required to launch a rocket. That's a shitload of energy. You're fortunate at least though that gravity on Mars is only about 38% of that on Earth (compared to about 17% on the moon.)

I'm well aware of the size of launch vehicles as well as the energy requirements needed for them.

Escape Velocity at Mars is around 5km/s. So if you wanted to launch a lunar lander sized craft back (~15000kg) to orbit you would need roughly a 4KW power source running continuously for 2 years to make the propellant for you. 4KW is easily within current solar array technology - as is a two year run time. Spirit and Opportunity have been running longer than that on solar power.


Plus the technology to make methane/O2 fuel has already been demonstrated :
http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/EXLibrary/docs/BeyondLEO/leo394/misr.htm

Strangely enough if you landed that propellant processor on Mars it may already require tanks large enough to store the return propellant.

Granted Zubrin is a Mars evangelist but the science done there was sound.

All the technology has been demonstrated in one form or another for a successful manned mission to Mars. It's merely political will at this point.

So why are you so negative about this? I'm guessing you don't tell your students to wait to learn math until we get better at teaching it just because it may take them a decade or two to go from basic concepts to advanced calculus. Right?

 

[LittleNemoNES]

R&D is a waste, anyway...

 

[Gibsons]

Steven Weinberg weighs in
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2010/02/05/steven_weinberg_opinion/