If I have time later I’ll see if I can dig up the quote, but to paraphrase, it went something like: "Everything in sciences has already been discovered. There are not new discoveries out there, only refinements of what we already know’. This was, IIRC, around the turn of the century…thats 1900 btw. Yeah, they nailed that one, ehe?
Seriously, you are deluded if you think all the great discoveries have been made and there is nothing new for us to figure out. Myself, I think we are on the cusp of advancements across the board as far as science, physics and biology goes. Advancements that will radically alter what we ‘know’ about the universe. Its ridiculous to say that the limitations we have today are due to the fact that we have already figured out what can and can’t be done, and that we have maxed out our potential…which is exactly what you are implying with the above.
BTW, I’m no NASA cheerleader. I think the organization is totally fucked up. Typical of a government approach to discovery and science IMHO. Its not MY big idea to have such an organization, tied to the whims of politicians who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground wrt to either meaningful science or exploration, but who only know what the poll numbers say…and so give funding, then jerk it away, or attempt to force through their own stupid vision of what can and can’t be done. None of this makes manned (and even unmanned) space exploration a dead end, or impossible…it only means that we have been stupid about how we went about it.
Like what, antigravity? Wormholes? Radiation-resistant biomechanical cyborg warriors? Are you guys unaware of the successes of 20th century physics and chemistry, the fantastic precision and the exotic energy realms that have been thoroughly tested already? I mean, seriously, “new physics” as it’s sensibly understood, simply isn’t relevant to this problem. Biology? Like what? We figure out someday that radiation is good for us? “Oh, all a big mistake!” This rationalization is dreaming, nothing more.
Well…yeah. Perhaps. Did I miss something where an anti-gravity device is completely impossible and beyond the realm of physics?
Wouldn’t be too useful for the discussion at hand, namely getting stuff to orbit in an economical way and exploring/exploiting the solar system…but again, is this something that is completely impossible in the future? Even if it is, so what?
Well, leaving aside the stupid ‘biomechanical cyborg warriors’ bit…again, yeah. I know for a fact that NASA is doing research on biological radiation resistance. How is this beyond the realm of possibility? Is there something inherently impossibly about the concept that I’m missing? Feel free to show me what physical laws (or biological laws) are being broken by any of the above.
Besides, we don’t NEED all that exotic bullshit that you are strawmanning in order to figure out ways to get into orbit cheaper and explore/exploit resources in the solar system (well, the bio-engineered radiation resistance might be key). As I said earlier, there are concepts like ground based lasers to be used to get stuff into orbit, there is the old space elevator concept, there is the possibility of fusion rockets…and there is always the possiblity of other, cheaper means that don’t require over the top Sci-Fi straw men to make work. Just linear progressions from the technology we already use, with perhaps a pinch of not impossible technologies to enable a radical shift in method. Sailing ships continued to be refined for centuries, until they reached their peak with the windjammers in the 19th century…thats because people were trying to find ways to make them more efficient, safer, etc…until there was a technology advance in steam and later internal combustion for propulsion. You figure we are all out of advances? Cupbord is bare?
Are you aware of the term ‘Strawman’? I never said we’d need exotic new technologies to figure out how to do something we can ALREADY do…but better. You were the one bringing up Star Trek bullshit…not me. Lasers we have and I’ve seen demo’s of ground based laser propulsion with my own eyes. Maybe it can scale up, maybe not. Fusion is not a reality…yet. But there is nothing impossibly about it. Chemistry and physics don’t stand still…they are advancing at astonishing rates these days.
Or that we become resistant to it. Why is this impossible? I believe that NASA and others are already looking into ways to do this (and other ways to modify basic genetics) with rodents. Could you point out why you think this is so far fetched? What laws of biology are broken? Whats impossible about this in your own mind??
Sure Loopy. De Nile ain’t just a river in Egypt, ken?
It may be impossible, but we’re working on it anyhow. Really, man, it’s all about working towards a goal. You never know what you’ll figure out along the way. Look what we got from the first space program. Medicines, food, technology… metallurgy…
The claims of the contributions of the space program to just about every field of technological advancement have generally been completely overblown. Manned space exploration has mostly taught us a great deal about manned space exploration. We’ve learned it’s horrendously expensive, and provides little or no return on investment beyond a feeling of national pride.
I’m pretty supportive of these prizes to spur on research, esp. by the private sector, as I think a space elevator would be of most value to the private sector, being the owner of most of the useful hardware in orbit. We’ll have to see if we can manufacture materials light and strong enough to do the job. At any rate they’re relatively cheap, and the folks competing for them are doing it largely for prestige, as the prizes probably don’t cover the expense of winning it.
The cost of liquid fuel and oxidizer for a Shuttle launch is a few million dollars, compared to between $600M-$1500M per launch, so figure that fuel is on the order of 1% of actual refurb, maintainence, and launch costs. This doesn’t include the cost of the SRBs owing to the fact that they are simultaneously “fuel” and “motor”, but the cost of the actual material–essentially aluminum flakes, ammonium perchlorate and rubber–is negligable compared to the cost of manufacture of the entire booster (~$25M per).
The scaling problem you refer to isn’t a fiscal one, but rather a physical one; with chemical propulsion systems you asymptotically approach the limit to which additing additional propellent mass doesn’t increase net payload capability; in essense, your extra fuel only serves to lift itself. In fact, there is no operational booster system that can launch a significant payload directly to orbit (referred to as Single Stage To Orbit or SSTO), hence all orbital boosters utilize multiple stages and/or external boosters. (The original Atlas rocket was technically a single stage but dumped two of the three engines after achiving a given altitude, and is often informally referred to as being a “1.5 stage rocket”.) However, credible fully reusable single stage orbital boosters have been proposed and even developed to a limited degree (the McDonnell Douglas DC-X and the Chrysler Aerospace SERV proposal for the STS among them) using more efficient propulsion technology, and the use of an air-breathing flyback booster with a spaceplane ascent stage (similar to the Soviet Spiral system or the Scaled Composites White Knight/Space Ship One) could reduce launch costs and fuel requirements dramatically. (Indeed, this was the original plan for many early STS concepts, but the development costs and timeframe were considered to be too extensive for the allotted budget.) In any case, we’re nowhere maximum efficiency for chemical propulsion.
The real cost, again, is labor. The STS requires a team of ~2500 people (technicians, engineers, managers, et cetera) working a minimum of 2 months (more typically 4-6) to return a Shuttle to flight status and integrate it with the SRBs. A more mature and less complex system (along with a more streamlined bureaucracy) could reduce that expense to a modest fraction. While it seems unlikely that orbital travel using chemical propulsion will ever be as inexpensive as an intercontinental aircraft flight, it certainly shouldn’t be seen as infeasible to reduce launch costs to on the order of $100/lb payload, or a few tens of millions a flight, with an incidence of catastrophic failure as a fraction of a percent.
That’s about the difference between a press release and a Prime Item Development Specification. There is absolutely nothing in the Stage I spec that addresses in any but the most superficial detail the requirements for an interplanetary mission. There was brief reference to Mars in the Spiral 4 and 5 developments (back when NASA was still talking about spiral develoment), but they were treated as merely extensions to the system rather than addressing some of the fundamental developments of radiation shielding, long duration interplanetary hazards, propulsion, risk abatement in a non-rescue scenerio, landing and extended habitation on Mars, et cetera. If such a mission were going to occur on a, say, twenty five year timeframe, NASA should be developing the specifications and allocating future funding for research and development right now. All the talk about going to Mars using Orion (that is, the CEV Orion, not the Project Orion rocket concept) is so much hot air without a single definitive step.
And even this was being established as a serious goal for NASA, by the time the technology is there, the CEV should be obsoleted out and replaced with the next generation of system. One of the nearly fatal flaws about the STS was that NASA was so wedded to the Shuttle (by budget restrictions, political impetus, bureaucratic complacency, and the failure of aerospace contractors to be held accountable for failures to demonstrate progress for the billions of dollars spent on potential successors and development programs) and until the failure of Columbia, did not seriously push forward with a replacement for the Shuttle which used lessons learned to reduce complexity and launch costs while extending propulsion and spaceflight technology. The STS is a pastiche of Sixties- and Seventies-era technology, cobbled together on the (relative) cheap to keep NASA in the manned spaceflight business and meet unrealistic combined expectations of the manned program, the military, and commercial spaceflight interests. There was never a good reason for building Endeavor (the last of the Shuttles to be built) rather than pushing forward with the development of a new–or at least, dramatically improved–system, other than the unwillingness by many parties to admit to and learn from the problems of STS.
CEV is a quick and cheap solution to replace critical aspects of the STS with Shuttle-derived hardware (hence the name for ATK’s campaign of Safe, Simple, Soon), but it shouldn’t be considered anything but a stopgap while advancing spaceflight technology. The Lunar objective seems to be little more than nationalistic flag-waving, proving that we can get (back) to the Moon before the Chinese do, and any proposals for using this system as a Mars vehicle fail to account for many required developments. Even Zubrin’s childishly optimistic Mars Direct proposal presumes more development and offers greater detail than the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (which mostly focuses on extracting methane from Mars for fuel).
Thanks to Stranger on a Train for excellent contributions to the discussion. I think it should be clear that all the talk about “Mars” or whatever (as well as Return-to-Moon)* in the Orion context * is just PR flackery to make people think Orion is some sort of the Next Great Thing, because by now NASA feels it can only justify its existence by promising nothing less than the Next Great Thing. In reality it’s just something to keep NASA in the MSF business after the STS becomes unflyable, until they figure out what really should come next (or the private sector comes up itself with the Next Great Thing).
Any connection to space research in anything but the most ancillary fashion is bull. People have been studying this stuff for illnesses like muscular dystrophy for many years. I was dumping myostatin on myoblasts a just month ago, and it’s certainly isn’t rocket science figuring out blocking it might help. It’s not like the Belgian Blue is some new dyscovery. It sure as hell isn’t a new idea when you can buy it by the vial from R&D Systems. Every other week there’s a new gene popping up that supposedly augmenting or blocking will provide a cure for muscle wasting diseases, if you believe the press releases. Certainly something good will come of it, but I’d be happier to leave the hype to, well, politicians. Bone and the immune system also break down in microgravity, so it’s not like even if we figure out how to preserve muscle on long flights all the other problems will be just as “easy” to solve.
Well, a Lunar landing mission is certainly plausible, and while not fully detailed, the Project Constellation proposal cribs heavily from the Apollo Lunar missions albeit with somewhat more difficult objectives that were capable with Apollo (polar landings, 4 person lander). Since this is basically a rehash of what has already been done, it’s pretty easy to accept that it can be done again; heck, it was done in the Sixties with avionics and guidence systems that are less capable than a modern handheld scientific calculator. Whether there is sufficient will–politically and fiscally–remains to be seen.
A manned Mars mission, on the other hand, is an enormous technical challenge, a huge financial investment (in the George H. W. Bush era, planners came up with a figure of $400B in 1989 dollars), and is a giant risk for an agency that is risk-adverse (or at least risk-oblivious). It is one thing to talk of grandiose schemes, another to have the resolution to follow through on them for a couple decades or more.
So yes, I agree that both a Lunar mission and especially a Lunar base or Mars landing are unfunded, hand-waving flackery to give the appearance of vision and depth to what is a very workman-like system. Ironically, a non-bleeding edge, low cost, easily maintained workhorse system is just what we have needed for the past couple of decades when the vision was nothing more than an increasingly marginalized space station in low Earth orbit (though I think the projected cost for CEV is way out of line); instead, we spent the kind of money to operate the STS that could have better funded research into the kind of technologies that would permit a capable, moderate risk mission beyond Earth orbit. Now, NASA is enjoined in an essentially unfunded mandate that limits their capabilities to what can be done with existing, largely 1980s technology while spinning tales of grand exploration. If you could but fuel a spacecraft on unrealistic ambition oxidized by political posturing, we’d be vacationing in Saturn’s rings by now.
But they sure do make some purty PowerPoint slides, don’t they?
I heard an interview with Dr. Goldberg and he specifically mentioned the space program as benefitting from this. No doubt treating diseases are going to be where the money’s made, but I don’t doubt that there’s been a few NASA dollars kicked Dr. Goldberg’s way. As for the bone loss, well, there’s NASA funded research (as well as oodles from the pharma industry) for combatting bone loss, since older folks as well as astronauts suffer from it. And the immunological side of things overlaps with HIV research (as well as all other disease research). So it won’t be easy, but the work is being done. Before manned spaceflight, no one was sure humans could even survive being weightless long enough to go to the Moon. Just because we don’t have all the answers now, doesn’t mean we won’t have them in the future. Thanks to the human genome project, we’re learning all kinds of things about how the body works, and this will enable us to take care of the physical complications spaceflight causes.
There’s really no such thing as “anti-gravity” per se, and nothing can be shielded from gravity, as it’s simply the manifestation of the curvature of spacetime by the energy that’s in it. Aside from the natural phenomenon of positive vacuum energy having a negative pressure that repels (and which is quite useless for the purposes of travel), matter with negative energy would repel matter with positive energy, and could maybe serve as the basis for a propulsion system. Problem is, there’s absolutely no evidence such exotic matter exists in a usable form, if at all, and producing it artificially might violate the law of conservation of energy. Even if it doesn’t, no one has any even remotely practical idea of how to go about it. Warp drives and traversible wormholes are nice toy models for relativists to play with, but they’re purely hypothetical and depend on material that can’t be had.
Why not? Some sort of nuclear propulsion system (presumably not the original “Orion”, unless maybe we face imminent invasion by Bug Eyed Monsters from outer space, or a cometary impact in the very near term). Or the whole concept of “propellants” for getting from Earth to orbit might be rendered obsolete by something like the space elevator. (See answer to your next question.)
Almost certainly they will. I see you’ve already scoffed at the notion of carbon tube nanotechnology, but clearly that’s an area of research that’s still in its infancy. And its worth noting that superlight, superstrong materials would be so obviously useful right here that you don’t need us Space Cadets to support research into the field; anyone who could develop vastly lighter and stronger materials for a reasonable cost stands to get very rich from a whole boatload of applications in many different industries.
Hey, has anybody ever asked them nicely? I mean, don’t charged particles have feelings too?
I gather there are some biological approaches to the problem of radiation, but from what I’ve read in the popular science press, the most technically straightforward way to shield crews would be with enough matter. Like, say, a nice big jacket of water (which would have obvious uses in and of itself, both for drinking and perhaps also for breaking down into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel).
The big problem with that is that the weight would be prohibitive, and space travel to this point is extremely weight-sensitive. See above regarding nuclear propulsion; superlight, superstrong materials and space elevators; and other exotica.
Now, this isn’t near-future. This may not be possible. But this is peer reviewed science, and it’s not… impossible. It’s not likely, but it might work. Might not. Worth checking.
So your first cite about how impossible a trip to Mars is, not only does it mention a possible solution, it’s a solution for a problem that at the time the article was written, hadn’t even manifested itself. You can’t claim that the certainty of brain damage due to heavy-nucleus radiation kills the manned space program when your cite doesn’t even know if it is a likelihood.
So, even here in your devastating collection of evidence against even the remotest possibility of man leaving Earth orbit, there is admission of progress.
So your third cite in the Great Case Against Mars pretty much begins by saying Mars is probably feasible with conceivable technology. :rolleyes:
These articles are saying nothing more than “I fyou think we’re going to Mars with today’s technology, you’re dreaming”, as they go on to try to find the parameters within which the solution must exist, if there is one.
And even the stuff the scientists in the articles seem to be fretting about are not as big a concern as the journalists seem to make it out to be. Check this out:
And yet you continue to parade your ignorance as though there’s some meat there. You seem to know just the right amount about the relevant subjects to open your mouth wide enough to indicate you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.
It’s going, as it has since the early seventies, as well as it can on its budget, which, despite the fact that it’s been less than 1% of total federal outlays for years, remains a political football as though it were actually a comparatively sizable amount of money.
I still don’t see why it takes nine years to send man to the moon a first time, but 14 years to send them a second time.
The station will be in use, but the US may not be using it much. It was internationally funded, with each countries relative contribution dictating the amount of access they had. With America attempting to pull out its commitment, other countries are stepping in to get more of a presence.
We absolutely must return to the moon to further the manned space program. Any permanent colonizing will need to be heavily supported at first, and having a trial location where the time to get a rescue mission there is only a few days is a boon we can’t pass up while we work out inevitable kinks. Plus, all the water in the soil there can be used to create more rocket fuel. If colonizing the moon works, and the materials there can be used for manufacture, then the low-gravity moon could be the new World Space Center, from which almost all long-distance launches, like a Mars mission take place
There will certainly be a manned attempt for Mars within the century. Whether America will be one of the nations that demonstrates the will to make that attempt is looking shaky these days.
Perhaps you misunderheard what I was asking for. I was looking for a cite saying that theorizing about anti-gravity and an anti-gravity device violates some law of physics. It was just an idle question on my part, you understand, as nothing I mentioned requires exotic new technologies like AM…but since you brought it up I figured you might, you know, back up your assertions that there is no such thing as anti-gravity, and that from a physics perspective the concept is impossible. Just for fun, ken?
Thats nice. Even assuming I take all that at face value (and after your anti-grav statement I’d be skeptical to do so), my question would be…so what? None of this stuff is necessary to get to Mars, to explore the solar system or to make America safe from communism. It was YOUR strawman that we would need all this exotic shit. I was just pointing out that none of it is impossible, afaik…though it may be centuries, if ever before we know.
Thats very true. Of course, in the 15th and 16th centuries no one had any idea how to make an internal combustion engine either…or even a practical steam powered engine. They didn’t know much about germ theory either…or powered flight (hell, they didn’t know much about unpowered flight come to think of it). They didn’t even know what an atom WAS.
