King of Creation
Vault Fossil
Mars or Bust
- Thread starter welsh
- Start date
Vault Fossil
welsh
Junkmaster
Sorry if this is cynical but it seems that the monkey in the white house is pointing to the moon and mars as a means to win another election, and increase the debt.
If it wasn't for that, I'd think this was pretty cool.
Moon-hopping to Mars
Jan 12th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda
President George Bush is expected to announce this week that America will build a base on the moon, from which it will send astronauts to Mars. But his plans are likely to be long on rhetoric and short of hard cash
Reuters
THE loss of seven astronauts when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, almost a year ago, dealt a serious blow to Americans’ faith in NASA, the agency that designed, built and operates the shuttle. Since then, there have been two important reviews: the first, completed in August last year, looked at some of the agency’s inherent flaws. The second, a root-and-branch examination of America’s space policy, the results of which are due to be announced this week. President George Bush’s officials say that on Wednesday January 14th he will reveal a bold new strategy for NASA: reportedly, this will include sending humans to Mars via the intermediate stage of a permanent lunar base.
Mr Bush no doubt hopes that launching an exciting, visionary project that invokes America’s pioneer spirit will boost his campaign to be re-elected in November’s presidential poll. Sceptics may also be forgiven for sensing a little déjà vu: in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, Mr Bush’s father, then president, announced something rather similar. Cost estimates for the plan turned out to be so spectacularly expensive, in the region of $400 billion, that Congress quickly buried the idea.
According to Space.com, a news website, government insiders say the plan will call for Congress to approve an initial $800m of seed money as part of NASA’s 2005 budget request, followed by a 5% increase in its budget in subsequent years. Since this alone will not buy a lunar base—let alone put astronauts on Mars—it appears that the rest of the money will be found by severely pruning NASA’s current space activities. The shuttle programme is likely to be retired by the end of the decade, and America’s involvement in the International Space Station (ISS) is rumoured to be reduced a few years later. Many politicians see the space station as a costly failure. Together with the shuttle it consumes the lion’s share of NASA’s annual $15 billion budget.
Some scientists are already concerned that plans to focus on human exploration may put at risk valuable work that does not involve human spaceflight, such as the incredibly successful Hubble telescope and the search for life on other planets. In the last 30 years, NASA’s most notable and popular achievements have been in astronomy and in unmanned missions to other planets in the solar system. Any trimming of this work could actually reduce the public’s interest in, and approval of, NASA during the decade or more it will take to return to the moon.
The first thing Mr Bush’s proposals would require is the design of a new craft to take astronauts to the moon and then beyond—most likely, one based on the Apollo-era idea of a crew capsule riding on top of an expendable launch rocket. While it takes a mere three days to fly to the moon and the materials to build the lunar base could be sent ahead using cheap unmanned rockets, the onwards trip to Mars would take at least 6 months and thus the astronauts might have to survive away from Earth for several years. Besides being arduous, such a mission would be incredibly expensive. Enthusiasts currently put a Mars mission at as little as $20 billion; others suggest figures of $40 to $80 billion. Whatever figure NASA actually produces, however, Congress will be bitterly aware that the ISS project, despite being scaled back from its initial plans, ended up costing more than three times its original price tag. Sceptics on Capitol Hill may also recall that the ISS itself was also suggested as a stepping stone to Mars.
The plain fact is that, at this stage, nobody really knows how much a mission to Mars would cost, nor how long it would take to achieve. More than ten years, certainly, and as long as 30 years, say some. A one-off, “flag and footprint” style mission to the red planet might seem pointless to politicians—unless another country, such as China (which recently launched a man into space) threatened to get there first. Since Mr Bush’s grand vision may not be shared by the current Congress or future ones—or indeed future presidents—his grand announcement this week may not in the end amount to anything more than starry-eyed campaign rhetoric. Of course, only an incorrigible sceptic could possibly conclude that Mr Bush knows this perfectly well—and intends simply to let the whole thing fade away after it has helped him get re-elected.
Ultimately, if NASA is to succeed in human space exploration, it will have to grow its budget substantially, abandon much of its other, valuable work, or ideally find a way of successfully exploiting space commercially. Until now, NASA has been spectacularly unsuccessful in this ambition because it is not designed for this purpose. Any presidential vision ought, then, to include a way of eventually wrestling space activities out of the agency’s clutches and into the hands of the private sector.
If it wasn't for that, I'd think this was pretty cool.
Moon-hopping to Mars
Jan 12th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda
President George Bush is expected to announce this week that America will build a base on the moon, from which it will send astronauts to Mars. But his plans are likely to be long on rhetoric and short of hard cash
Reuters
THE loss of seven astronauts when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, almost a year ago, dealt a serious blow to Americans’ faith in NASA, the agency that designed, built and operates the shuttle. Since then, there have been two important reviews: the first, completed in August last year, looked at some of the agency’s inherent flaws. The second, a root-and-branch examination of America’s space policy, the results of which are due to be announced this week. President George Bush’s officials say that on Wednesday January 14th he will reveal a bold new strategy for NASA: reportedly, this will include sending humans to Mars via the intermediate stage of a permanent lunar base.
Mr Bush no doubt hopes that launching an exciting, visionary project that invokes America’s pioneer spirit will boost his campaign to be re-elected in November’s presidential poll. Sceptics may also be forgiven for sensing a little déjà vu: in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, Mr Bush’s father, then president, announced something rather similar. Cost estimates for the plan turned out to be so spectacularly expensive, in the region of $400 billion, that Congress quickly buried the idea.
According to Space.com, a news website, government insiders say the plan will call for Congress to approve an initial $800m of seed money as part of NASA’s 2005 budget request, followed by a 5% increase in its budget in subsequent years. Since this alone will not buy a lunar base—let alone put astronauts on Mars—it appears that the rest of the money will be found by severely pruning NASA’s current space activities. The shuttle programme is likely to be retired by the end of the decade, and America’s involvement in the International Space Station (ISS) is rumoured to be reduced a few years later. Many politicians see the space station as a costly failure. Together with the shuttle it consumes the lion’s share of NASA’s annual $15 billion budget.
Some scientists are already concerned that plans to focus on human exploration may put at risk valuable work that does not involve human spaceflight, such as the incredibly successful Hubble telescope and the search for life on other planets. In the last 30 years, NASA’s most notable and popular achievements have been in astronomy and in unmanned missions to other planets in the solar system. Any trimming of this work could actually reduce the public’s interest in, and approval of, NASA during the decade or more it will take to return to the moon.
The first thing Mr Bush’s proposals would require is the design of a new craft to take astronauts to the moon and then beyond—most likely, one based on the Apollo-era idea of a crew capsule riding on top of an expendable launch rocket. While it takes a mere three days to fly to the moon and the materials to build the lunar base could be sent ahead using cheap unmanned rockets, the onwards trip to Mars would take at least 6 months and thus the astronauts might have to survive away from Earth for several years. Besides being arduous, such a mission would be incredibly expensive. Enthusiasts currently put a Mars mission at as little as $20 billion; others suggest figures of $40 to $80 billion. Whatever figure NASA actually produces, however, Congress will be bitterly aware that the ISS project, despite being scaled back from its initial plans, ended up costing more than three times its original price tag. Sceptics on Capitol Hill may also recall that the ISS itself was also suggested as a stepping stone to Mars.
The plain fact is that, at this stage, nobody really knows how much a mission to Mars would cost, nor how long it would take to achieve. More than ten years, certainly, and as long as 30 years, say some. A one-off, “flag and footprint” style mission to the red planet might seem pointless to politicians—unless another country, such as China (which recently launched a man into space) threatened to get there first. Since Mr Bush’s grand vision may not be shared by the current Congress or future ones—or indeed future presidents—his grand announcement this week may not in the end amount to anything more than starry-eyed campaign rhetoric. Of course, only an incorrigible sceptic could possibly conclude that Mr Bush knows this perfectly well—and intends simply to let the whole thing fade away after it has helped him get re-elected.
Ultimately, if NASA is to succeed in human space exploration, it will have to grow its budget substantially, abandon much of its other, valuable work, or ideally find a way of successfully exploiting space commercially. Until now, NASA has been spectacularly unsuccessful in this ambition because it is not designed for this purpose. Any presidential vision ought, then, to include a way of eventually wrestling space activities out of the agency’s clutches and into the hands of the private sector.
Wait another two weeks and he'll be claiming that Osama is hiding in a secret underground martian base.
welsh
Junkmaster
I have been thinking of doing this book of places all over the world where the Bush administration feels the enemies of the US lie. North Korean, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Brazil, France, Germany. And then have one character among the multitude that looks like Osama Bin Laden. I will call the book Where's Osama. What do you think?
welsh
Junkmaster
No, rumor is that they they are going to fund all this through future revenue from all the oil they hope to find on Mars and the Moon. That or all that cheese on the moon, that Bush heard about when he was a kid.
quietfanatic
Ancient One
The properties of moon rock are proven to be close to cheese, but a free trade agreement with the martians wood be well worth the investment.
More mars crap.
http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f2_mars.html
Pan and zoom..........
See the rocks, weeee!
What a waste of money that was huh?
http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f2_mars.html
Pan and zoom..........
See the rocks, weeee!
What a waste of money that was huh?
welsh
Junkmaster
More Mars stories.
Looks like Beagle 2 is dead, but the Europeans scored a brilliant victory-
Did anyone else in the US hear about this? Doubt it.
Anyway, looks like the current barrage of spacecraft sent to invade Mars had done 50/50.
My bet is that if there is life on Mars they are pretty pissed off that we keep sending remote controls into their backyard.
Anyone ever read Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury? As I recall, at least in that book the Martians could look forward to Earthmen that put out.
Ok, here's the story for the interested.
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2384129
Looks like Beagle 2 is dead, but the Europeans scored a brilliant victory-
Did anyone else in the US hear about this? Doubt it.
Anyway, looks like the current barrage of spacecraft sent to invade Mars had done 50/50.
My bet is that if there is life on Mars they are pretty pissed off that we keep sending remote controls into their backyard.
Anyone ever read Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury? As I recall, at least in that book the Martians could look forward to Earthmen that put out.
Ok, here's the story for the interested.
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2384129
PWND !!!
Johns Volition
Still Mildly Glowing
What I wonder is... even if they find live like... some stupid bacterias or worms or whatever... hell what are they going to do with it? It's not like we have enough of them all over this planet....
welsh
Junkmaster
What? That gives us a whole new planet to mine, exploit and polute. And more reason to do so!
The sattelites and roovers on and above the planets are there for two reasons, to find life and water. if they find water on the planet then it can be inhabited by humans in a future not so far away. They already know theres CO2 frozen in the planet, all they need is water and they can plant engineered plants to make the planet inhabitable for future generations. They releaze the frozen CO2 with nukes or whatever and raize the planets core temperatur so the water if there is any melts allowing them to plant the plants to make the planet support life, voila earth 2.
A whole new world to live on and exploit.
A whole new world to live on and exploit.
Snake said:
Unfortunately, it is not quite that easy to create a functional biotope, my friend.
Man this thread is one giant Kumbaya party! What did you all forget to take your estrogen pills?
But of course I agree.
A billion dollars to send a remote controlled car to the moon would be better spent on superfund sites, or prosecuting war criminals, or improving the infrastructure in Afghanistan, or going to the moon, oops.
I'm still getting the LEGO model of Spirit though
But of course I agree.
A billion dollars to send a remote controlled car to the moon would be better spent on superfund sites, or prosecuting war criminals, or improving the infrastructure in Afghanistan, or going to the moon, oops.
I'm still getting the LEGO model of Spirit though
welsh
Junkmaster
Murdoch- I am tempted to agree that much of this is a big waste of money. I could make an argument that NASA money and space research funding goes to supporting cutting edge R&D and thus helps get the product cycle going with government subsidization.
But I also agree with you that it's probably a big waste of cash.
But it's still fucking cool. And that's really why I support it.
Is that logical? No, but then look at the gun threads for others who have made difficult arguments only because 'guns are kewl'.
But I also agree with you that it's probably a big waste of cash.
But it's still fucking cool. And that's really why I support it.
Is that logical? No, but then look at the gun threads for others who have made difficult arguments only because 'guns are kewl'.
Saint_Proverbius
Vault Senior Citizen
Dove said:
Oddly enough, it was James Watt who came up with the measurement of Horsepower. If you can't guess on your own, he's the guy for which the metric unit of measure is named.
I don't. The metric system is dull and boring. Hell, it's based on water rather than the human body. How interesting could it be? Oh, and the official name for it is in French, so it's got to suck. Besides, which sounds better? Foot-pounds or Newton-meters? The Newton-meter just sounds like a jumbo sized snack cake to me. Oh, and then there's BTUs versus Joules. Sure, lots of fun can be had with jokes about the family joules, but come on.. BTU is where it's at.
welsh said:
You'd be right on the first argument. After all, everything from contact lenses to velcro to microwave ovens to semiconductor technology comes from the space program or has been improved by it.
Jebus said:Snake said:
Unfortunately, it is not quite that easy to create a functional biotope, my friend.
I've decided to get deeper into this subject.
If you want to make to make a planet habitable, you need to create an athmosphere. This can indeed be accomplished by defreezing the CO2 that is trapped in the ice. however - that is not an easy task. Nuking Mars would be no solution too, since there's no oxygen in the air... So your nuke would'nt even explode...
One solution to raising the temperature on Mars would be to pump so-called 'greenhouse'-gasses into the athmosphere, such as for example PFC's. But that would be a very, very costly affair. By rough calculations, 100 PFC factories -- each with the energy of a nuclear reactor -- working for 100 years could warm the planet Mars by six to eight degrees. At that rate, raising Mars' average temperature up to the melting point of water (from -55 degrees Celsius now) would take about 800 years!
And then, you would have an athmosphere consisting of nothing but CO2. And when that happens, Mars would actually turn into another Venus, with temperatures around 150° celsius. To counter that, you could perhaps scatter seaweed into the athmosphere, or something. But, this method will take you approximately 300 000 years to make the surface inhabitable.
Then, you would still have to create a biotope. Just putting down some plants would be futile, since you would then probably create one huge monoculture to cover the entire globe... Also, since there are probably no fertilizers whatsoever in the soil of Mars, and the soil of Mars is nothing but desert, it wouldn't be easy to actually let plants grow there...
And if you would succeed in doing that, you would still have to create an entire food-chain. Each species you would put down on Mars would need to have its population monitored at all times, otherwise they would run rampant. And, apart from that, you would also have to create biotopes that are actually inhabitable for that certain kind of species...
If you would put all these things together, it would probably take about a half a million years and countless billions to make Mars a second earth. And be honest people, the human race will be loooooooong extinct before that...
Saint_Proverbius
Vault Senior Citizen
Jebus said:
Sure it would. There's more ways than just a combustion reaction to trigger a fission reaction. However, the problem you're going to have isn't with the bomb itself, it's with the convection of heat over the surface since there's very little atmosphere to carry it very far. The surface of Mars isn't really that good at conducting heat either, so that wouldn't work either.
So basically, bomb could go boom, but Mars wouldn't give a fuck.
Not to mention the gravity on Mars is about a third of Earth's, so most of those greenhouse gases would just drift away in to space. Which, BTW, would be a huge problem with terraforming Mars to begin with, very little gravity. After all, we're talking about a planet that's half the size of Earth and about 1/10th of the mass here.
Not too many plants like living in rust, that's true.
Mars will never, ever be a second Earth, period. Like I said, the mass and size are way off to get that critical gravity range that would hold enough atmosphere to make it anything close to Earth.
Saint_Proverbius said:
Yeah, and that too