Bumped.
President Obama has pledged a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/opinions/america-will-take-giant-leap-to-mars-barack-obama/index.html. Doing so with less than four months remaining in office is not especially opportune timing.
It’s kind of a presidential tradition to saddle your successor with a big NASA promise.
Bush did the same thing and earned Obama a lot of ill-will when his new administration took one look at Bush’s promised timetable and said “this is unaffordable”. Pet project cancellations ensued and a lot of congressional districts were less than amused.
The Bush->Obama transition wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened.
This one is a bit different because the odds are darn good the successor administration will also be D. So handing off a tainted chalice isn’t as attractive. Perhaps this is simply electioneering by a different label to red-leaning districts receiving lots of NASA spending. Make those constituents feel more comfortable that voting D isn’t voting for their or their neighbors’ layoffs come 2018 when the new administration’s first budget becomes effective.
As a separate matter, lots of administrations of both flavors issue some vision-thing proclamations, executive orders, and such towards the end. Trying to go out on a high-minded note.
All in all not too surprising.
Oh no, done for political purposes? 
Pretty vague, no? There was already a hand-wavey NASA plan for a manned Mars mission in a few decades.
Is there anything of substance in there that’s new? I see a few mentions of “cooperation between government and private innovators”, but little that is specific. Only one thing stood out to me:
This could mean that mean that NASA is considering a Mars transfer hab module developed by Bigelow, who is working on inflatable space station prototypes, or Axiom, which is developing commercial space station modules based on existing ISS modules.
Otherwise… I want to be excited, but I’m not.
Found a little more about development of deep space hab modules. A couple months ago, NASA announced that they would fund six different companies, to a total cost of $65 million, for design studies and early stage development. Most of these modules would be based on existing hardware or designs:
Bigelow, will develop a deep-space variant of the B-330 inflatable station.
Boeing, based on ISS modules and hardware they’ve built.
Lockheed Martin, based on the Shuttle Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM).
Orbital ATK, based on the Cygnus cargo vehicle.
Sierra Nevada, based on the cargo module of the Dream Chaser.
NanoRacks, who is working on a “wet workshop” concept where an empty ULA upper stage is converted to habitable space.
Overall a lot of nifty ideas. I’ll be more excited and impressed if the Mars mission continues to use the competitive, fixed-prices contracts that have been so successful with the commercial cargo service to the ISS.
There are a lot of things that need to be done before we can launch a manned Mars mission, and most of them would have many other applications as well. I’d be a little more comfortable with a set of itemized goals to work on those lesser milestones. That way, the total path is clearer, and if (or more likely when) the budget cuts come along, you can still salvage some of them instead of scrapping the whole thing.
See, that’s an example of what I’m talking about. If we get a space elevator, then a mission to Mars would suddenly become a heck of a lot more practical. But a space elevator would have all sorts of other benefits, so make that the target, not the Mars mission itself.
Or take it back another step: Making a space elevator would require some significant advances in nanomaterials. But those advances would lead to many other developments before the space elevator. So make nanomaterial research the target.
And yeah, your nano-research proposals will still say that the technology might eventually lead to space elevators and missions across the Solar System, but you’re still taking it one step at a time.
I actually agree with this statement, well said.
Last I heard the space elevator was facing some possible deal breakers. Has anything changed recently to make it seem hopeful rather than wildly hypothetical?
As with any project of that scale, there are many, many engineering problems to be solved. The primary one is to just be able to produce enough nanofibers, both in total length and in the lengths of individual fibers. Even after we get that squared away, there would still be many others, but I’m confident that they can all be solved.
I was thinking more about micrometeor strikes, lightning strikes, collisions with satellites, and if we can drag an asteroid in place to use as a counter weight.
I figure the engineering is just a matter of time and effort.
But all of that is just engineering.
It seems to me that the accidental spinoff technological benefits of a pointless showcase project is a very inefficient way of achieving such benefits. How about targeting R&D to technology that we actually know we need, and spending one-tenth as much to achieve more valuable results targeted to needs like clean energy, sustainable food supplies, and preserving life in the oceans and biodiversity on land?
I love science fiction and I have no doubt that some aspect of sci-fi like humans inhabiting other planets will happen in some distant future. In the foreseeable future, though, Mars has nothing for us. There’s almost no atmosphere, what there is of it is toxic, nothing can grow in the soil, and most of the time it’s cold enough to freeze CO2. We might be able to get there in a few decades, but then what? It’s ridiculous to believe that we can terraform a distant planet when we not only lack anything even remotely resembling the necessary technology, but we can’t even get our act together to stop trashing the planet we’re living on.
To take the example of satellite collisions, it’s theoretically possible to deorbit any derelict satellites or space debris with ground or space-based lasers. You don’t need to completely vaporize the debris, rather you just need to heat up one side to produce ablation sufficient to lower its orbit to the point where it will decay from atmospheric drag.
Future satellites can be placed in sun-synchronous orbits that will never cross the equator at the same longitude as the space elevator.
That’s a pretty tremendous engineering problem, but not that difficult compared to the rest of the challenges faced by a space elevator.
Things I want before food pills:
light sabers;
phasers with stun settings;
skin tight spacesuits;
mecha;
moar light sabers.
To me, the needs you mention above are more of a political problem than a technological one. The political will needs to be behind all those things to push them forward. There will always be other necessities competing for finances. I take your point on targeted resources, but I don’t consider the Apollo program a wasted opportunity to have invested in other sciences.
Thing is, the US really does have a ridiculous amount of money. The military alone gets half a trillion or more a year. People have long said things like “we should feed the poor first, or spend it on something useful like x or y.” The money we don’t spend on space research and development never goes to anything people wanted it to. I really don’t see them taking money from NASA and putting it into the environment, nor do I think the money needs to come from there. That’s a different battle.
It’s funny how with NASA, politicians are all up in their shit. How much does this cost? How much does that cost? My constituents really, reeeally need to know! Every dime and nickle. Pity they aren’t nearly so concerned how much their other projects cost that they never even mention to their constituents.
What is a moar light saber?
Although a space elevator might not be feasible (or at least not for a long time), there are plenty of other applications for tethers, which could make going between Earth orbit and the Moon and Mars much easier in terms of conserving delta-V/reaction mass.
In the linked blog the author also mentions that a tether at Deimos or Phobos could spare an electrically driven spacecraft days or weeks of slowly spiraling into Mars low orbit: dock at the tether, then move payloads down to where they can be flung into an aerobrake trajectory.
In the novel Web Between the Worlds by Charles Sheffield this is expanded even to tethers in solar orbit. Between those and Aldrin Cyclers, interplanetary travel at least in the Earth-Luna, Mars and Ceres areas could become vastly easier. Again, if the enormous investment in infrastructure is made.