Nanotubes aren’t here yet, at least according to my Berkeley-graduate material science brother who raises an eyebrow when I bring up nanotubes and buckyballs. (Its become a joke – I keep asking for a pair of pants made out of nanotubes…)
Now, about the danger of a space elevator cable: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars had Red (as in pro-Mars, anti-Earth) terrorists get ahold of the end of the space elevator, which was attached to one of the moons. They blew it up, and the cable came down and wrapped around the entire planet a few times, crushing everything in its path.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/future-01f.html says 47,000km for a cable. The circumference of the earth is 40,000 km. If it came down it would go around the world once (orbital mechanics, it ain’t going to coil up around the base), and, well, thats going to kick over a few anthills…
Now, I’m ALL for space travel, and hell, if we’re going to Mars, then hotdamn I would so think about going to work on that, but not every idea is practical.
Not every astronaut is a member of the USAF, there’s been Navy, Marine (John Glenn, IIRC), and many of the current astronauts have never even served in the military. (Jack Schmidt of Apollo 17 fame was a geologist who got lucky and made the last mission.)
Do you know about Beal Aerospace? Andrew Beal spent $200 million of his own money to develop a launcher, and failed. He blames unfair competition from the government but whatever the reason, it takes a bit more than a lottery prize.
Correction granted, gross generalization on my part.
The point stands. If someone were told “We have the ability to get you to Mars in 7 years. The problem is, we won’t have time to really test our systems like we did with Apollo, so we’ll be running off what we have already sent to Mars. We expect a failure rate of 80%. Will you go?” and they answered “no,” they very probably wouldn’t be in the space program, to say the least.
A moon mission embodies everything that humanity does - and more than that, it comes at a critical time in history. We’re entering a second phase of instability (somewhat like Cold War II) where political structures are breaking down (look how effective the UN is, FFS), there is rising conflict throughout the world, and more nations are reaching a point of technological advancement that puts them right in the middle of the hottest parts of the Cold War. America has been challenged, and the future is in question. How effective are we against terrorism? is a good echo of questioning the situations in Korea and Vietnam. The nation was united for a time, but cracks are clearly showing in how far we want to go.
And the President proposes a mission that matches world peace in how much it is an unachievable dream. Perhaps an opportunity for, for at least one day, all of mankind to stare at the TV with a shiver and let the flags blur, and just see a man stepping onto the surface of Mars, and have that single day define a generation more than all the attacks and murders and terrorism. A single day where no one belongs to any group except mankind.
Or maybe Bush just wants to get re-elected on those kinds of emotions.
Either way, I’m a sucker for it, and if you want to say “why explore,” I think something is wrong with you mentally.
Hell, Zagadka, I ain’t even in the space program and if you gave me only 10% odds of surviving a trip to Mars, I’d kill someone to be able to go! (Heck, I’d do it even if I was only going to get to go into Earth orbit for a week!)
No, sorry, you won’t. Not without its permission. And you will need considerable political clout and, um, let us say lobbying resources to get it. Put this into Google: “government permission” space launch.
Ummm, yes they are. Read the space eleveator thread. Follow the links involved. Carbon Nanotubes have been around for a while. The amount able to be produced per year has gone up dramatically. As best as I can tell, however, no one has weaved them into a macro scale cable yet.
Also, I think we figured out the math to be that the potential would be for the cable to wrap around the planet 3 times! The question becomes where it breaks. Part of it may just fly off into space with the asteroid. Many suggestions were made about how to deal with a Space Elevator disaster in that thread. You really should give it a read if you’re really interested. All this and more was discussed in detail.
Now, I love the idea of going to Mars, the Moon, Europa, and anywhere we have a mind to. Nukes for power? No problem.
But let me put on my cynic/conspiracy theorist hat for a minute.
Why–apart from the advancement of science, the glorification of America, and the romance of a voyage of discovery (all laudable goals, IMO)–would Bush be behind this?
Apollo was marvelous, but it was also a not-so-veiled race that was meant to demonstrate to the world whose system of govt. was better (US or USSR) and who, symbolically by virtue of our spacegoing savvy, was top dog when it came to the nulcear big stick, ICBMs, etc. (Americans weren’t just freaked out by Sputnik’s beeps because the Russians out-did us in science and exploration; we were freaked because Sputnik was a highly visible reminder that the Russkies could drop a nuclear-packing-ICBM on our heads at any moment.)
Some of my cynical thoughts:
We’re doing it to outshine China, who’s about to become nation 3 to launch humans into space (okay, I personally don’t find this THAT cynical … I think we should be trying to top everybody else, anyway); someone already alluded to this–“China got to space? To the moon? Who cares! We’re on MARS!”
We’re doing it to make people mor comfortable with the idea of nukes in space, generally … so that we can forward the weaponization of space, SDI, etc.
Someone also already mentioned spending China into bankruptcy w/ a space race
Any other suggestions?
I’m sorry, but I seriously doubt that a space race with China will bankrupt them. It didn’t bankrupt the US or the Soviet Union back in the 1960’s. It won’t bankrupt the Chinese now.
How did the USSR pay for their space program? If the state owns everything, aren’t they paying the engineers anyway? If they own the aircraft industry, how much does it cost to build spacecraft?
Short answer: Lots. Long answer, it depends on the type of craft you’re building. Something like the space shuttle will set you back tens of billions of dollars, which could buy you a whole fleet of military aircraft. However, you’ll get lots more benefits from building a space shuttle than you will all those military planes. Space shuttles force you to push your technology to new limits, whilst one can get away with “merely” using cutting edge technology in a fighter plane. Also, engineers working on a “non-military” project like a space shuttle tend to be able to share their knowledge with other engineers, whereas military projects have “Classified” and “Top Secret” slapped all over them, and the engineers involved can’t say squat about what it is that they’re doing.
Rumsfeld’s Star wars program comes to mind as a possible reason for Bush’s support of Prometheus. To be truely immune to missile attacks from North Korea et.al. we’ll need space based weaponry. That’s pretty impractical without some sort of atom-powered space tug that can service things in medium to high orbit. This doesn’t necessarily mean nukes in space, but it does mean weapons in space, and that means we’ll be working to withdraw ourselves from the space treaty in the next few years, and that increases the likelyhood that someone else will withdraw in order to put their own nukes in space.
Uhh… The space race did a lot to bankrupt the Russian economy. They ended up dumping millions upon millions of dollars into the space race, and in the end, their economy crumbled under it. That coupled with the stupid leadership ultimately lead to their demise.
Russian communism, isn’t communism at all… More like an oligarchy.
“Will all Comrades who shared their knowledge please stand next to wall?”
Thanks, but let me rephrase the question:
Where do the costs come from? If the government owns all forms of production and can shoot the engineers, why does it cost anything?
If North American has a contract to build the Apollo capsules, sure, that will cost a gazillion bucks. If Academician Smirnov has a choice of building the spacecraft or going to Siberia, I think he’ll work for peanuts. Or maybe borscht.
