A suggestion: Use the same launcher that got Spirit & Opportunity to Mars, to send much bigger & more capable rovers to the Moon. The light-speed delay is short enough that they could be tele-operated from here. They would cover more territory, much more cheaply than a manned mission, and would find out what we need to know to put people there more cheaply than we can do now. The biggest cost to a moon colony right now is preparing for the potential of the unknown. Send rovers there, and learn alot more before sending people there permanently. In the meantime work on improved (read: cheaper) access to orbit. By the time the rovers tell you the best way to live on the moon, the heavy launch capability will be there, hopefully. Doing a manned Mars mission now would just be a useless stunt. Putting a manned moon station there now, would also just be a useless stunt. Just like the moon landings of the 70s. Start now to do it right, rather than just doing expensive political stunts.
Myeah…which is my point? I suspect you didn’t read my first post. I said that we need to develop a new infrastructure for getting into space since rockets don’t appear to fit the bill. I’m not advocating that individual corporations do this initial build, I’m advocating only that NASA dump rockets.
A selenologist, surely?
I don’t get the reasoning behind it. Surely it isn’t saving money. That would be like a cocaine addict with a $500/day habit cutting out sugar with his morning coffee to save money. It’s a drop in the bucket.
And I think that it saps the kick-ass, can do American spirit. I was at Kennedy Space Station a few years back and you should have seen the looks in those kids eyes when the tour guide told them that we would be going to Mars and back to the moon and that one of them could be one of the astronauts! Exciting as hell.
No more. Our ambition is gone.
Pogo oscillation is a self-induced vibration from combustion instability or variance caused by harmonics in the liquid propellant flow systems that build up exponentially. The Ares I CLV Stage 1 is a solid propellant rocket motor based upon a five segment version of the STS Solid Rocket Motor. It is true that solid propellant rockets may experience amplification of both lateral and longitudinal vibrations at certain points in burn due to acoustic resonance between pressure waves in the combustion chamber as the chamber diameter increases, especially with very long and slender propellant grain (the same way a woodwind instrument produces a steady note), but this is called sin(usoidal) vibration or “motor buzz” and is distinct in both root cause and remediation from the pogo phenomenon. Sine vibe it doesn’t happen at liftoff but usually at some point in mid burn, as the complex topology of the initial grain surface (large motors usually have machined toroids or finocyl geometry to increase initial combustion surface in order to achieve and maintain chamber pressure at optimum throughout burn time) tends to inhibit large scale oscillation until the core burns into something like a regular cylinder.
Yes, and if past experience with the Falcon 1 is an example, they might actually successfully achieve orbit after three or four attempts. So far, no purely commercial (independent of government development funding) launch system provider has yet demonstrated reliable heavy lift launch capability, and as the collapse of the commercial launch service industry for the telecommunications industry in the late 'Nineties demonstrated, the development costs for designing a reliable heavy lift space launch vehicle that isn’t derived from a robust ballistic missile system is a large fiscal hurdle for which there is currently insufficient demand. In cutting corners to reduce development and test costs, SpaceX and other attempts at commercial space launch systems have so far failed to demonstrate the kind of reliability necessary to replace systems developed by the existing process and pedigree/reliability standards.
Stranger
I’m all for robots. I really am. But they are amazingly dumb, and the failure rate of unmanned space probes is ridiculously high compared to our current success rate with manned space missions.
I was very happy about the relative success of Spirit and Opportunity. But they are dumb. Really, really dumb. A pebble or a little dust shuts them down for weeks, months or permanently. A three year old human wouldn’t be confounded for a second by the things that prove to be insurmountable difficulties to our unmanned probes.
If unmanned thises or thats are so great, why aren’t they already doing the hard stuff here on Earth? Do we have unmanned robots taking care of Iraq and Afganistan for us? Of course not. We’ve got what, a few unmanned flying drones? There is always a team of humans nearby to control them and repair and maintain them.
Manned vs unmanned is of course sometimes apples vs. oranges, but the things a trained human astronaut can do in an instant or a few minutes make our best unmanned probes dumber than snails, and I don’t see them getting much better anytime soon.
Well, she does take issue with the term “planetary geologist”, since “geology” specifically concerns Earth. She’s mentioned a few alternatives…at least one of them incorporated the “selen-” prefix.
But, “planetary geologist” is the generally accepted description for her field, and she’s gotten tired of fighting it. 
Indeed, it always bugs me when people throw out the Columbus analogy for manned spaceflight.
Let’s see, Columbus had a ship that:
- Was privately funded.
- Ran on an infinite power source.
- Could be completely launched and crewed by only a handful of skilled people.
- Was capable of major course corrections and deviations from the initial planned route.
- Could be repaired (both en route and at destination) with minimal skilled labor and minimal special materials.
- Was traveling to a destination with infinite food, water, and oxygen.
Heck, if we had space technology that met two of those categories, we’d have colonies on Mars today. But we’re still at the canoe level. Big, expensive, complicated canoes. We could spend lots of money doing studies on how the human body copes with spending months of time in a canoe at sea. Or we could try to develop sailboats.
I’m very conflicted over this. First, from what I can tell the Constellation program was in serious engineering trouble. A lot of people I respect were calling for it to be scrapped or changed. So from that standpoint, I can’t really argue about the decision to kill it.
The big problem I have, however, was not that it was killed, but that it was killed without a plan for what to do post-Constellation. Obama has cut NASA adrift with no vision, no big goals, and without any plan for what to do with the decades of resources and facilities painstakingly built up to support manned spaceflight. If he simply lets all those engineers, technicians, and scientists leave the agency, NASA will never recover from the loss of all that specialized information and experience. This was the action of someone who doesn’t understand space exploration and who doesn’t really care.
The other problem I have is that I could understand the budget cuts to NASA if everything else was being cut. But Obama is pissing money away willy-nilly on all kinds of things. For example, he just pledged 8.4 billion for high-speed rail in Florida - which will turn into a boondoggle if you ask me. That money almost exactly represents the funding gap that needed to be made up to fix Constellation. So it wasn’t a matter of needing to cut the deficit or get spending in check - it was simply that Obama would rather spend money on trains than on space.
For those of you who think manned spaceflight is unnecessary, you have to consider the intangibles. NASA has been one of the U.S.'s grandest achievements. At a time when American popularity around the world is waning, NASA has always been the one thing that has caused people to look up to the USA. As a result it has caused some of the best, smartest people around the world to move to the U.S., and it has paid benefits in general with relations between the U.S. and others.
I just finished reading Craig Ferguson’s biography, “American on Purpose”. He was born in Scotland, but decided at an early age that he wanted to become an American. Do you know why? Because of NASA. He loved NASA. He tells the story of sending them a letter asking how to become an astronaut, and they sent him back a large manila folder containing a poster and other space materials. He put that stuff on the walls of his room, and he said it inspired him every day. How many kids around the world were inspired by NASA? How many chose lives in science or emigrated to the U.S. because they were seduced by NASA like Craig was?
Then there’s education. The Department of Education spends more than double what NASA does. Could anyone please tell me what all that money has accomplished? Test scores have declined since the department was established. Most of its grand programs have been utter failures. It interferes in local education decisions. Would anyone other than a bunch of bureaucrats even notice if the Department of Education was cut in half?
But then there’s NASA. When interviewed, scientists and engineers will often tell you that their decision to pursue their educations started young, and often started with their fascination with the space program. This is personal for me, because my own decision to go into science and engineering was driven by the space program. I was smitten by it. When I was a kid, I did just what Craig Ferguson did - I wrote to various NASA centers, asking them for information. They always responded by sending me a thick package filled with blueprints, 8 X 10 glossy photos of astronauts or rockets, or any other random documentation they had lying around. Once I received an entire operations manual for Skylab, and it was one of my treasured possessions. NASA was responsible for me being where I am today.
How many other kids could say the same thing? I’m willing to bet you that NASA has had a bigger positive effect on American education than the Dept. of Education has, just as a side benefit of its main mission. And to inspire children, you need manned spaceflight. No matter how good robots are, they don’t inspire children in the same way as an astronaut climbing into a rocket does.
Then there are the psychic benefits. NASA has always been an inspiration to people around the world. How often have you heard the phrase, “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t do X?” That’s an intrinsically optimistic statement. It’s basically saying, “I’m not going to settle for this, because I know what we can do!”. Now it will be replaced by, “I doubt if we can do that. Hell, we can’t even put men into space any more.”
The benefits of manned spaceflight, of having frontiers, of having astronauts to look up to and to be ambassadors for your country and even humanity, are extremely valuable. As is the ability to glorify risk in the pursuit of the betterment of mankind - something else we seem to have lost.
I guess mostly I’m sad about this. It’s a very visible reminder that the world has changed. When I was a kid, we saw the future very brightly. Man was moving off this rock and into space. Progress and a better, more exciting future looked inevitable. Today, I see all our energy expended inward - squabbling over resources and fighting to divvy up our resources in an effort to make ourselves more comfortable and safe. Even NASA’s budget is being turned inward, with R&D being changed to focus more on studying Earth instead of studying space. I no longer see the future as being necessarily better than the present.
The destruction of NASA’s manned spaceflight program is just the most visible symbol of that shift.
Excellent post, Sam. I too got that wonderful manila envelope when I asked NASA how I could be the first man to walk on Pluto…
The thing is, “amazingly dumb” robots are astoundingly good (and efficient) at carrying out the data collection duties for which they’re tasked.
And do you have a cite for the comparison between failure rates of manned vs. unmanned space missions? I wouldn’t be surprised if that were really the case (we’re generally going to be more careful and reserved when a human life is directly involved), but I was just curious as to the backing of that statement.
True, but a three year old human wouldn’t be able to wander the barren scapes of Mars for 5+ years, gathering information. (Heck, a full grown human isn’t even close to being able to accomplish that.)
The whole point is that there are just some tasks that are better suited for automated machines, and some tasks that are (currently) better suited for humans. As technology continues to get more and more sophisticated, more of these tasks can be delegated to the machines, allowing humans to put their critical-thinking skills to better use elsewhere.
We have to fight the moon-Nazis there, or we’ll surely fight them here.
I’d like to see remote-controlled and autonomous industrial robots sent to the moon to start harvesting Helium-3, myself.
This one was called five years ago by Bob Park:
But how can you take what he’s saying there seriously? ‘staggeringly expensive program’?? 
Get real. The program doesn’t even cost the interest on the currently expanding debt! It’s a fraction of a percent of our budget. Cutting it will do absolutely nothing. How about ‘to see if humans can do what robots are already doing’? What is this guy smoking? First off, what robots do we currently have exploring the moon? Secondly, the robots we have on Mars? I’m the first to say that they have done excellent work. I’ve totally enjoyed the data we’ve gotten out of them. But really…they have been there for years and have explored the area of less than a medium sized city in that time. You could walk the total distance they traveled in a couple of hours, for the gods sake (well, maybe a day).
I don’t think that manned vs robotic exploration is an either/or proposition either. They both do what they do very well…and both have limitations and strengths that are different than the other. If we DID go back to the moon (or Mars), you can bet that the astronauts would be taking their own robots with them, in addition to themselves, because some tasks are best suited to robots. But I think that the human element is necessary too…and I think it’s complete horseshit to state that we want to send people up just to do what robots have already been doing.
-XT
Mate, people are not going to love America over bloody spaceflight, get bloody real. Like or dislike is about perceived impact, you’re just fantasizing.
Bother, people also imagined there’d be flying cars and nuclear rocket airplanes. That was all tripe and it will remain so for sheer impracticality.
I call it practical, and I hardly think that mastering bio-engineering and genetic sciences to manipulate and build genes is parochial.
It is, however, grounded and not dreamy emotionalism.
That would be that wee problem relative to light speed, mass acceleration and limited energy.
Unless you come up with the magic means to exceed light speed, populating the universe is dreamy nonsense.
What does a moon base have to do with light speed? That’s the problem I have with Obama’s attitude about space. Not just his attitude, but a lot of like-minded folks. Let’s wait until it’s easy to go to space! What’s he waiting for? FTL? How ignorant. Space travel and colonization is never going to become easy if we just wait long enough. That’s like saying we shouldn’t have wasted time building Kitty Hawk because duh, if we’d just waited long enough someone surely would eventually build a Boeing 737, and then everyone could fly! It’s even more ridiculous than that. Is Obama seriously waiting for some FTL-like breakthrough? Seriously? There aren’t going to be any huge breakthroughs that make space travel suddenly safe and easy. Technological progress just doesn’t work like that.
Whether or not we go to the moon ever again really doesn’t have much to do with plans to populate the universe, which is indeed fantasy. Our plans are not:
- Go to moon.
- Go to Mars.
- Go to Pegasus Galaxy.
Does Obama really think we should just hold off on space until #3 magically happens?
That’s it? That’s how you back up that all ‘physics suggests’ that it’s impossible?
-XT
I’m one of those guys who thinks the benefit of our space program is the knowledge we get out of it. The question is - given a limited amount of money, how do you spend it? Human exploration, or robots? To me, the answer is perfectly clear, but then again, my priority is on the knowledge we get. The romance of having a human in space isn’t important to me.
We don’t have robots exploring the Moon because we don’t need to explore the Moon. We’ve been there already. The idea of a Moon base was to help us get to Mars.
And how far could a human mission explore? Probably not as far as the rovers have. The robots served for years beyond their mission goals. Could humans have done that? The robots don’t have to come home, but I assume that America won’t expect our Marsonauts to sign up for a one-way mission.
The deal is, we can send thousands of robot missions for the same budget as a single human mission, and do it decades sooner. What do you want a human to do that the existing rovers couldn’t? Sure, you may come up with something, but with robots, we just build that capability into the next robot and send it. What if a human mission discovered that it needs a different tool for the job? We have to send another human mission, while thousands of good robotic ideas for missions go unfunded.
There’s just NO comparison. If your goal is knowledge, robotic missions are the clear answer. If you want romance, which I don’t, then go with humans. But be honest about what your goal is in that case.
Missed the edit window:
Why would you need to exceed light speed to populate the universe? You’d only need to do so if you wanted to populate the universe in a few thousand years. And this has nothing to do with either exploring our own solar system or with the possibility of going to other solar systems that aren’t thousands of light years away.
Then, of course, there is nothing in physics that says you can’t bend space and time so that, even if you aren’t in fact exceeding the speed of light, your apparent speed can be many times that of light. If you could compress space in front of your space craft and lengthen it behind you, for instance (something that, afaik, isn’t impossible by the laws of physics as we know them today), you could travel much faster than light speed, while not breaking any laws of physics. How? Beats me…but then, they didn’t really know how to travel at the speed of sound a hundred years ago. We might get there in a hundred years…or a thousand…or never. But, there is nothing in physics that ‘suggests’ it’s impossible to do so…we just don’t know how to do it now. There are other ways that aren’t outside of what ‘physics suggests’ to get around the light speed limitation thing as well…or, we could go the cold sleep route, or living ship route, or…
It’s a fair question. And I agree, it depends on your priorities, and how long you are willing to take to achieve anything. To me, as you say, the answer is perfectly clear…if it’s an either/or thing, I think human exploration is more important than robotic. However, I don’t believe it has to be an either or choice. What I think NASA REALLY needs is direction. I think we could have robotic missions AND manned missions, within NASA’s current budget, if they only had clear and concise direction and clearly defined goals…and if they were given the direction to team and partner not only with private industry but also with other countries.
Really? We explored a couple football fields worth of the surface and we know everything? We know where the water ice is? We’ve explored the craters? We know everything there is to know about the moon?
Why not as far as the rovers? There are manned rover designs that let the astronauts go out for days or even weeks at a time. The rovers have gone a couple miles from their original landing sites. Are you saying that a manned rover could do the same??
Really? Where are the thousands of missions then? We haven’t had real space exploration in decades now…so, where are the thousands of missions? Strangely, I can’t think of more than a handful of robotic missions…and they seem to take a long ass time both to put together, get there, and to actually DO anything. Plus, you know, a lot of them seem to fail. No?
I agree that there is no comparison…they both do different things.
-XT