Bush Administration to Fund Nuclear Mars Rocket

Great Debates
61

I think the budgetary objections to this are a shibboleth, as well as the guilt tripping about starving children or decrepit schools. Not that those aren’t serious problems, but I contend that the money is there for those things as well as a ramped up space program.

$25B, the figure usually given as the cost for the manned space program throughout the 1960’s is an amount so huge it’s beyond comprehension. Until, that is, you remember that the S&L bailout cost roughly $500B. Until you consider the billions spent on the War On Drugs each year. I think going to Mars is a great idea; in the future it could well become second home for us, if some ideas that have been suggested about terraforming are feasible. And we could sure use a spare planet.

62

Didn’t the elder Bush propose a Mars mission before an election?

63

Yup.

Mars Mission Still a Hope For NASA (article date April 1998)

64

Yep. And a nuclear rocket. The Bushes seem to be big space proponents. So was Reagan. The Clinton Administration, on the other hand, basically sat on its hands for eight years.

BTW, here’s what Former House Science committee chair Bob Walker, speaking for the George W. Bush campaign before the election, predicted we’d see from Bush if he became president:

That looks like about the direction we’re heading in, and shows that this isn’t just a publicity stunt or an attempt to divert attention away from Iraq and North Korea.

65

I believe the worry is that there might be a failure between launch and orbit that would spread nuclear material over the surface of the Earth. Hence the idea to send the fuel separately with heavy shielding.
Should their be a failure in orbit and re-entry, would nuclear material burn safely? I remember the Russians had a ractor re-enter some time ago.

66

The spilling of radioactive material has always been a fear that had little basis in reality.

It is not hard to design a containment vessel that can withstand forces from a crash or rocket explosion. I mean, black boxes in airliners not only survive intact in even the most horrendous crashes, but they even protect the contents so that they are still readable.

There are no mysteries here. It’s just engineering. If there’s a requirement to prevent nuclear materials from being scattered in a crash, you just design for it. Work out the stresses in all possible accident scenarios, build a container, and test it. Typically, it’ll be built to handle way more than the predicted stresses. Then they’ll take a sample container, blow it up, fire it at concrete walls, put it in a hot fire for a few hours, etc.

These vague fears of nuclear accidents are just ludditism. People who don’t understand engineering but are feeling vaguely afraid of things they don’t understand.

67

Wow, If Bush pushes through with this, I’ll support him.

It’s about time someone did something about our stagnating Space program, and this is the time to do it. A Nuclear rocket is exactly what we need to spur space travel, and the immediate technological benefits will become apparent within 20 years. Maybe in 50 years, we’ll be taking round trip Moon trips via nuclear rockets. That’d be really, really cool.

Anyways, the nuclear “fallout” thing with material being spread over the Earth is utter BS. Anyone stupid enough to send a nuclear reactor up there without any protective casing deserves to incur the wrath of nuclear materials upon them. There is NO risk of this happening. Besides, as previously mentioned, the Mars Lander will not be built on Earth, but it will be shipped via the shuttle up to the ISS, and then built up there.

There are a few obvious reasons for this.

  1. Everything is exponential harder to do in space, but it makes it incredibly easy to fit together huge pieces of material that are required for building such a monumental spaceship. Overall, construction will be cheaper in Space then on Earth.

  2. The boost to the ISS, will make it a huge success, by stationing a permanent repair/reuse crew for consecutive Mars Trips. It will also serve it’s purpose to be a jump point.

  3. It’s a lot easier to ship the thing in pieces, rather than try to attach tons and tons of rocket fuel to the thing and try to blast it into Earth orbit.

  4. It gives the Shuttle a purpose.

  5. It will give us a better understanding of Space Construction, and the risks involved.

The ISS will be a huge component of this.

8 Years, is more than enough time to put a man on Mars. We put men on the moon in 7 years, and that was without all the previous space knowledge that we now have. We could do it easily, the biggest problem would be configuring the reactor while in orbit, but think about this. A nuclear reactor using a Grapefruit size of nuclear material, could provide all the power and propulsion necessary for the entire mission. Way, way, way, more fuel efficient then chemical rockets.

Then, using chemical means the lander would be lowered, with a built in Nuke for power on the surface. This would allow for us to be on the surface for much longer periods of time, then would be normally allowed. The lander would of course have to be separate from the interplanetary vessel…

This could be redefining as to what we think about space travel. Sadly, this won’t fix the problem of getting into orbit, though, using NPR, that could be easily fixed, using an orbital elevator. We have that technology too, but it would be an enormous expense, and would cost trillions of dollars, and would be extremely suspect to damage. But, once constructed, it would be an achievement beyond any other the world has seen…

I personally don’t think it’s a question of IF WE ARE GOING to Mars, but when. We have the necessary technology, the problem is getting politcal and public support for such a program. I would vote for reelection if he pushes this through…

68

We have the technology for an orbital elevator?

::snicker::

You’re kidding, right? It’s so far beyond our material science and engineering capability it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s rather depressing.

Also, I could be wrong about this, but I think you’re underestimating the neccesary amount of radioactive material needed. It won’t be collosal, but a grape-fruit sized lump sounds a bit small.

69

hmmm

Would you settle for “an allegedly dead planet”?

I know scientists seem to present Mars as dead, or at least they did in the past. But we haven’t been there to verify that belief.

.02

70

We do have the technology for an orbital elevator. As a matter of fact, there was a special on the discovery channel about it the other day. We may have the technology, but it’s probably not very feasible at the moment…

There are only a few really complicated problems:

  1. Moving a bigass asteroid into Earth orbit, in a controlled and safe manner.

  2. Moving all the satellites around earth in order to incorporate the new gravity well.

  3. Stretching the cable to the asteroid itself.

We already can build the cable using Carbon or Graphite (I can’t remember which) Nanotubes. Using Nuclear powered rockets, we can move the asteroid, and it doesn’t even have to be that big of an asteroid. You just knudge it a little here and there when it gets close to Earth, and boom, it kind of gets into orbit on it’s own, then you just slowly decrease it’s speed until you’re at the desired orbit, and there you go. Then it is put into geosynchronus orbit, and you attach the tether, attach the elevator and your set. Now I understand that my explanation is rather simplified, but explain to me what is beyond us right now?

We can build the tether. We can move the asteroid, we don’t even have to use rockets, we can just use orbital mechanics. We can build a station inside the asteroid.

What is so beyond us right now?

71

Space Elevator Closer to Reality

A private company says it can have a space elevator in 15 years.

From the BBC: Space Elevator Takes Off

Give us a space elevator that can get mass into orbit cheaply, a space-based nuclear rocket fleet that can burn water, and water mining on the moon and maybe Mars, and you can go anywhere and do anything in the solar system, cheaply.

There are a whole bunch of extremely exciting projects waiting in the wings for cheaper access to space. For instance, how about a gigantic interferometry telescope made out of a huge array of Hubble-like telescopes? The effective aperture would be thousands of kilometers wide, and it would have a resolution so high we could look at planets around other stars with the kind of resolution of terrestrial telescopes looking at Mars. We could see continents, analyze the atmosphere for signs of life, etc.

I’ve seen a really ambitious proposal for an interferometry array with an effective aperture the size of the Earth’s orbit. You could use it to spot artificial structures like roads and buildings on planets orbiting other stars!

I’ve been disappointed by the pace of advancement in the space program since I was a kid, but maybe this is the final confluence of technologies we need to finally kick off a major presence in space.

72

Hell, yeah! Let’s go! And let’s send Buzz Aldrin and Bart Sibrel with 'em! (They’re gonna need something to do on the flight to occupy their time and I can’t think of anything better than a BS punching bag!)

73

Why?

How can you morally justify giving that many billions of dollars to a space program to land on Mars, when we can’t even responsibly manage our own planet?

You could more than likely feed a very large of the world’s hungy with the Prometheus budget. You could further the technology of emmissionless cars, with that money. You could cause large amounts of human suffering and poverty, with that money.

So, again, I ask why “Man’s gotta get into space?” What’s the rush? What’s the attraction?

35 years ago we spent ungodly amounts of money to get to the moon. What good had that done us? How has that benefitted mankind?

74

Exactly. I’ll be happy if Bush pushes any space program initiative… But if we want a space program that’s going to be scientifically and, possibly, commercially relevant, and is actually going to have a long-term future then we need to announce that we intend to return to the Moon… to stay.

A few reasons off the top of my head:

Science: we can build telescopes on the Moon where there’s no atmosphere to obscure the view. Radio telescopes placed on the far side will be well shielded from radio emissions from Earth. The view will be astounding.

Safety: The Moon is a few days away from Earth. Mars is months away. Where would you rather be stranded when (not if) a problem occurs?

Engineering: The experience of building a sustainable base on the Moon will be invaluable for when we do eventually go to Mars.

Space Tourism: This could promise something more than floating around in a tin can for a few days.

IMHO, the only reason to go to Mars is because we haven’t gone there before. A nice, Roddenberry-esque sentiment, but if we want to have a serious space program, we’ll have to get over this “been there, done that” attitude about the Moon.

75

the_great_dalmuti, well for starters, you can think the space program’s need for small, light computers, which has directly led to this message board. The number of lives saved each year due to satellite weather information, fuel cell technology, improved medical techniques, and damned near anything else you can point to today has been improved by the space program.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out this site and this one, for starters. Then do a google search on “nasa spinoff” and take a gander the results.

Also, sooner or later, something’s going to come along and make Earth unsuitable for human life. It might be our own stupidity, it might be an asteroid, or a comet. If we don’t get off this rock, then we’re doomed to extinction. Oh, and if we’ve spent a 100,000 years on this planet and not gotten things right, we’re not going to do it in another 100,000 years.

76

No, the main reason to go to Mars is to discover if life exists there. Because if it does, then life is probably ubiquitous throughout the universe, and that has great implications for us.

But there’s a more philosophical point: Look back in history, and you’ll see that when societies stop looking outwards and start looking inwards, they decay. Humans were meant to explore, and exploration is a great unifier that focuses a population and give us a sense of purpose.

And the long, long term reason is because one day the Earth WILL be used up. Either by us, or simply through the ravages of time. And as we become more and more powerful, our ability to destroy the planet will grow. And therefore, it becomes more and more important to expand humanity past one planet.

“The Earth is too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in” - Robert Heinlein

And then there are the practical benefits. Moving dirty industry to space or the moon means you don’t have to pollute the Earth. Drag an asteroid into Earth orbit, and you have enough metal to supply the needs of the Earth without having to strip-mine the planet. Given enough resources in space, cheap enough transportation, and enough wealth, we can turn the Earth into a park without destroying our high-energy, high-resource lifestyle.

But mostly, we should go to space because we need to discover all we can about the universe and our place in it.

77

Russia

NASA Details on a crewed mission to Mars.

China

I wonder if China making this claim - if they did - has anything to do with all of this?

78

Sam, if you were replying to my post, don’t get me wrong - I do think it’s important to eventually go to Mars, for all the reasons you lay out. But I’d say the best way to get there is by first gaining our ‘space legs’ on the Moon. “Walk before you run”, &c.

79

The moon is a important step, by building a base there… But, if you want to inspire the public, go large. Go to Mars. Nothing to build your support in the years before an election by declaring possibly the most ambitious space program in 40 years.
China can’t even launch rockets, muchless get a man to the moon. They are in no position to talk smack about going to Mars.

80

Wrong. The Chinese invented rockets, BTW. And no one thought that a “backwards nation” like China would ever have the bomb, but they and Pakistan and India both do.