I still like Buzz Aldrin’s approving words on kicking the center tank of the STS into space and using it as a quick-n-dirty orbital hab part. Read Encounter with Tiber. Among other things, the White Knight/Spaceship One shows up… and it was written 15 years ago. It’s pretty darn good.
You’re almost correct. Nixon killed Apollo because it was Kennedy’s baby and Nixon hated Kennedy. NASA knew that the shuttle wasn’t going to work right and was going to be insanely expensive from the get-go, but Nixon told them to fudge the numbers or else. Had Apollo continued, we’d have had month long manned moon missions before 1975. Instead, we wound up with some very expensive Edsels and 14 dead astronauts. I have a feeling that the future of manned spaceflight lies with private folks like Rutan and the Chinese.
I don’t disagree that Kennedy’s close association with Apollo helped make it easier for Nixon to kill it.(**1) **
(1) There were many other reasons as well:
Great article overall peer reviewed article if you can get it.
I would add to what you said: that that what “everyone” believed and told Nixon was that the Shuttle was going to dramatically bring down launch costs and was the way to open Rutan-like folks in the late 80’s and 90’s
That folks - beyond Nixon - beloved the cost of Apollo was atrocious – and (the heart and best part of your post) the early penny pinching doomed making the Shuttle ever making the economic sense that it looked like it might on the drawing board.
All very true. The sad part about it? If in a fit of uprightness NASA ever goes before the committee and says: *“Look, we’ve been getting bogged down because we’ve had to please political decision-makers instead of doing good science, can we please stop doing that?”, * the committee will say “Oh, my certainly” when the mic’s on, and as soon as the mic’s off, follow up with “and while doing your good science, you surely will not show your faces around here to ask us political decision-makers, elected by The People[sup]TM[/sup] for one red cent, will you, pocket-protector boy?”.
I’m against all manned spaceflight programs if they come at the expense of science, which returning to the moon does. This thing’s only raison d’être is to service the ISS and deposit fragile meatware on other worlds becase we can. The former should be allowed to de-orbit and burn up so no more money is wasted on it, and the latter, we already did. I don’t see why a nation that squanders so much on optional foreign wars can’t adequately pay for science, and instead blow some of our hard-earned taxpayers’ dollars on useless feats of patriotism that kill only a few astronauts occasionally (as opposed to tens of thousands of random people). But if stunts must be funded out of what would be science dollars, which our leaders, in their infinite wisdom, feel is true, then I completely oppose Orion or anything else like it.
The object of space science, Loopy, is to go beyond the currently possible. The Shuttle has decayed to nigh-uselessness as a vehicle for that, it was never able to explore the unknown.
Orion will bring us to Mars. Beyond the possible. Beyond what man has ever experienced in space, in duration and distance. That’s good exploration. That’s to boldly go, man.
If we can get a base on Mars, we can do things we could never do safely on Earth. Staging points for interstellar travel, space elevators, mining… if we did them on Earth, we’d have terrorist problems.
Basically, it’s a step. It’s a big step, and one that’s twenty years overdue. So we’re using old technology to do it… but we’ll be using new science to build it, and it will create even more.
But would they be profitable on Mars?
See this thread.
Certainly it would be…eventually. There are a whole solar system’s worth of raw materials out there, materials that completely dwarf the resources we have on Earth. In addition, moving industries to space of off planet would do much to alleviate our impact on the environment…again, eventually.
One thing is certain though…if we sit back and junk manned space flight we will never know what was possible. I think manned flight is extremely important in and of itself to push the envelope of what our potential is as a species. I never have gotten those folks who seem obsessed with turning inward, solving all our problems before we do anything, etc etc. Reminds me of the Chinese before European exploration. Most advanced civilization, yet because of their inward focus they never did get much beyond their own borders…and had to play second fiddle to the Euro’s ever since, attempting to catch up to them at every turn. Because the Euro’s looked beyond their own small world and their own immediate problems and decided to take a chance and push their own envelope…and the end result was that they managed to step firmly to the head of the pack on our little mudball.
I suppose we COULD let the Chinese have their turn now. Wonder how that will work out for us…
-XT
As I pointed out in the other thread, there are untapped mineral resources in Antarctica. They remain untapped because the cost of mining operations on a continent under a mile-thick ice shield would be too high to allow a profit. Would mining on the Moon or Mars be any cheaper? Considering that you have to not only get all the miners and equipment there, but provide the miners with a sealed living habitat, and then ship the product back to Earth?
Quite true, but, again, how could that be done profitably?
Are they actually doing/planning anything we aren’t?
Not that I’m aware of. They have plans for more manned flights (in a space craft very similar to the one NASA is proposing ironically enough), including vague plans for a space station, moon orbit, perhaps a moon landing, and eventually a landing on Mars. Pretty much similar to our own vague plans.
The key though is…will we do it? Will they? THATS the crux.
-XT
Their government has the resources of the world’s most populous (and rapidly industrializing) country to draw on and does not have to answer to the voters/taxpayers. If they (the government) want to do it, they’ll do it.
Of course, if you want to do it on the cheap, there’s always MASA.
Just getting a ship capable of carrying a handful of astronauts out of Earth’s gravity well is so absurdly expensive I have absolutely no concerns whatsoever about the Chinese beating us out of lucrative space mining prospects. There are none. We just don’t need raw materials from space so badly we’d spend tens of billions of dollars just to get a couple miners to the mine. It might make more sense for space colonists to mine raw materials in situ, rather than drag them up from Earth, but then the justifications for the whole endeavor become rather ridiculously circular: Space mining is cheaper than transporting supplies to a space colony. Of course, producing the space colony will cost tens, maybe hundreds of billions, and those raw materials will benefit the investors not a bit.
Science can and is being done by robots just fine, and as I’ve said before, robots are getting better at an exponential rate. Humans are not. We simply don’t need people in space, and we never did. Like I said, if the pie had enough slices, and given the gargantuan sums of money we’ve flushed down the shitter on other useless endeavors, I suppose there are worse things you could squander billions on than a moon base. But since we no longer have those billions to squander, and science, everyone’s favorite “elective” to jettison, is the activity that takes the hit when manned spaceflight is prioritized, I’m all in favor of dropping the manned spaceflight entirely instead. It’s an extravagance, and should be treated as such.
imho if we dont leave the earth pretty soon the human race will stagnate and die on an overpopulated,overpolluted and over heating home world . the indians and the chinese have said they`re going to the moon by 2020(and who knows if the japanese will join in? ) who ever gets established there first as opposing to just relanding there first will get all the goodies !
Yeah, its expensive. And its absolutely impossible that costs will eventually come down, ehe?
Well, that answers that. Lets all shut down now. Loopy says there is no potential for mining outside of this rock we live on, so it must be so.
Quite correct. Of course, stone age man didn’t need to go digging about for all that copper stuff either…I mean, stone was good enough for their daddies, and THEIR daddies before them, and so on for hundreds of thousands of years!
Europeans just didn’t need materials from the new world or the far east either…they should damn well have been content with what they had and stayed home. Gods, think of the initial capital expense for startup colonies and such! The dangers, the diseases, the transport and logistics! Idiots!
Right, 'cause we all know what big failures European colonies were across the board. Not one of THEM, despite staggering initial costs ever paid anything back to their investors…not a bit as you say. Hell, that East India company alone showed consistant and staggering losses for centuries! And it was a circular arguement. Goods and services COULD have been taken in situ, but most of the processed stuff had to be lugged all the way from Europe…on wooden ships if you can believe it! With storms and sea monsters, pirates and gods know what else! How’d they do it? What were they thinking?!?
And we are using those robots. No one is saying to do away with the things…in fact, they are vital and important in their own right. But so is manned exploration, though you obviously don’t agree. There are simply things that people can do that machines can’t…and won’t…be able to do for the foreseeable future.
It comes down to how you look at things. I tend to think that the robots only folks are inward lookers. The Chinese of our time so to speak. Oh, we can have science, and we can strive…as long as we do so safely from our little rock here. Its cheap, its safe…and in the end it will only get us so far and no farther. To me its a lack of vision…and inward focus that says ‘well, I can’t invision how space travel could ever be more than an ‘extravagance’, so its a waste.’ The Chinese didn’t see what could possibly be worth while beyond their own borders…and so, though they were great sailors in their day they never did develop the abilities needed to go out and meet the Euro’s on their own terms at sea. Bummer for them, as this totally fucked them in the long run and they have been playing catch up ever since…
Public interest will wane eventually, if we completely scrap manned exploration (it HAS waned since we have stopped doing any actual exploration, and only use people as glorified bus drivers or to do meaningless experiments in LEO), and the next cycle will be the loopy’s of the world saying, well, we don’t really need robotic exploration either. What does it bring us after all? Does it put food on the table for the poor? Does it give them housing? The public doesn’t want it, so I say, ‘Its an extravagance, and should be treated as such’. Loopy is probably furious for me seemingly putting words in his mouth, but to me its a logical progression (not that HE would think or say this, which I don’t know but doubt, but just how events would flow IMHO).
Robots in space will never spark the public imagination (or garner the funds) that real manned exploration will. And really, robots can only do so much out there. If we want to take things to the next level and actually strive to exploite the vast natural resources Loopy waves away, or even colonize the solar system and perhaps beyond we have to push things in that direction…now. It won’t magically happen if we choose NOT to go now…not unless some other nation at some later time picks up the torch. Like the Chinese we will be inward focused and thus surprised and playing catchup to some other nation who has vision and purpose.
All this rhetoric is of course getting away from the OP which was simply about a new bus NASA is proposing. While I’m not overly thrilled by the thing, I suppose if they actually follow through this time I’ll be happy enough. I actually DO think there are things still to learn on the moon…and engineering to get there will push forward are knowledge base on manned spaceflight and extraterrestrial exploration. Especially if we manage to actually build a perminent facility there.
-XT
How, do you figure? Earth’s gravity will change? Propellants will suddently become hundreds of times more powerful? Materials will suddenly become a hundreds of times lighter and more durable? Cosmic rays will declare a moratorium on human bombardment? Humans will instantly evolve resistance to ionizing radiation?
Well, if we could figure out how to heat the hydrogen up to 30,000,000 degrees, we could do away with those big, heavy LOX tanks, and get more thrust per gram of H[sub]2[/sub]. Other than that, no, there’s only so much energy in a chemical bond, and H[sub]2[/sub]/O[sub]2[/sub] rockets aren’t going to get any more powerful, ever.
Right…'cause we are still using those damn wooden sailing ships. Not like the oceans or winds will ever change, ehe? Or that propellents will suddenly become hundreds of times more powerful than good ole wind power! Materials will not suddenly become a hundred times lighter or more durable than good old oak either! Sailing ships…those bad boys are here to stay!
One things for sure. If we sit on our ass you will be right…we never will find more efficient ways of getting off this rock.
-XT
This argument always amuses me, because in a previous job, I had a certain amount of contact with poeple at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s main center for robotic exploration of the Solar System. While they take great pride in their work, using robots for exploration is often a source of great frustration, since robots are so inflexible on-site compared to how a human might be in the same situation.
One of their Mars people gave a talk once (spreading info about the then-upcoming 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission), in which he outlined the frustration this way (I’m adding specifics to the generic hypothetical he gave):
Let’s say one of the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched in summer 2003 and having reached Mars in January 2004, had encountered a rise of too steep a grade or rough a terrain to navigate, but whose summit seemed to be scientifically interesting.
The launch window from Earth to Mars opens roughly every two years. By January 2004, assuming this rise had been encountered by the rover almost instantly (unlikely since the rovers top demonstrated speed so far is about 725 feet per day, and they were rated for only about 300), the technology for the August 2005 mission would have been frozen (two years ahead of launch, by JPL policy).
If you could manage to analyze all the relevant data, design and test the technology for topping the rise by August 2005, you could make the August 2007 launch, but it would be a stretch to accomplish that. Given the factors I’ve mentioned, you’d be more likely to make the 2009 launch at the earliest, and getr your rover to the peak some time in 2010, 6 years after you found the rise.
If, once you get to the top of the rise, you find that it’s the edge of a steep-walled crater that your hill-topping rover can’t navigate, you won’t get to whatever you might want to see until about 2017, at the earliest. A decade and a half and three expensive launches to explore one site that is probably only a few hundred yards from the 2003 landing site. You only get to improve on your successes in 6-7 year increments*.
Meanwhile, you’ve also launched different missions every two years so as not to waste the launch window, so it’s really 8 launches to get into the crater. In contrast, what could a well-equipped and well-supported series of human expeditions have accomplished with 8 launches in 14 years?
*For a real life parallel, compare the fact that the very successful “bounce landing” approach, successfully tested on the 1996 Pathfinder mission, was not used again until the 2003 MER missions (even though a lander was scheduled for the ill-fated 1999 mission, three years after Pathfinder), and the bigger, better rovers based on the successful Sojourner/Spirit/Opportunity design will not land until the 2009/10 Mars Laboratory mission.