I looked at the Computer Technology section of your link, and that is really feeble. There are a few simple software packages. The most important item is 3d packaging, and every semiconductor maker is working on this area, and I suspect throwing more money at it than NASA is. I’m not very interested in this, but I have been exposed to it, and NASA has never been mentioned.
In fact ICs for space probes, far from pushing the state of the art, are a few generations behind it, because they must use fairly gross design rules to be rad hardened. I worked with people in a government lab fabricating chips for space missions, among other things, and they had to license designs from Intel because the stuff they wanted had been end of lifed years before. It was the kind of stuff sitting in your garage waiting to be recycled.
I’ve seen plenty of releases desperately trying to make research money sound like it paid off (and have even written one or two) and that is what this sounds like. This is a terrible reason to spend a lot of money on manned spaceflight.
I"m not an aviation history fan or anything, but I think a lot of the money to drive aviation innovations came from government contracts and war efforts. The government didn’t control the aviation industry, but I think it’s fair to say it pumped huge amounts of cash into it.
NASA and the government do still pump huge amounts of money into the aerospace industry, and NASA has these X-Prize type competitions to help stimulate innovation.
Private industry alone isn’t going to build a moon base anytime soon. Apparently there is the feeling that if private industry doesn’t do something, it’s because they are wise and it’s not worth doing, which I don’t always agree with.
I’m not certain that any of the CLV systems used by NASA could properly be considered "cost effective’. There is no way the Redstone and Atlas boosters used for Project Mercury could be man-rated under modern standards even if they were significantly relaxed. The Titan II GLV used for the Gemini program were technically purpose built but were largely similar to operational systems save for the guidance telemetry system and the removal of TVC and retro systems necessary for post-boost RV deployment; further use of the Titan system as a post-Challenger heavy lift booster indicates that while the system was reliable and reasonably scalable it was not cost effective (though given the cost of ULA missions to launch the Delta IV and Atlas V EELVs, it is arguable that it would have been better to stick with incremental improvements to the Titan family). NASA’s only truly purpose build launch systems, the Saturn family and the Space Transportation System (Shuttle) were not cost effective per pound of payload, though it can be argued that had Saturn production continued planned improvements and commonality along with a scale of economy with the Saturn INT and improved Saturn V and Saturn V ELV would have resulted in a substantial decrease in manufacturing costs. Vehicle integration and launch operations costs, however, are relatively fixed and end up being the majority of overrun costs, and don’t benefit much from a scale up of launch volume. (Boeing, which manufactured the massive Saturn S-IC and performed many of the vehicle system integration and system engineering tasks, never charged the government a dime over contract estimates.)
The only manned crew launch vehicle I would consider to be even approaching cost effectiveness is the Soyuz rocket family, which benefits from almost five decades of continuous evolution and the cheap labor for processing and launch operations. Despite having relatively poor performance for its size, it is proven to be extremely reliable and apparently relatively inexpensive to manufacture. NASA has never had a vehicle comparable in terms of cost.
The Ansari X-Prize is offered by X-PRIZE Foundation. NASA has nothing to do with this. NASA has issued the Commerical Orbital Transportation Servies and Commerical Resupply Services contracts to private industry, but these are milestone-based performance contracts, not prizes for demonstrating a complete capability. So far, only Orbital Sciences–an existing commercial launch vehicle with extensive government and military contracts–and SpaceX have completed significant milestones.
Government was a customer for the aircraft industry, and competition did rapidly accelerate the quality of the designs. I’d expect government to be a big customer of private space vehicles also. The trick is to not award contracts to a single company, but to purchase the best of what is out there - and help the business cases of rocket developers by having a bigger market than what is initially feasible with private enterprise only.
X prizes are great things - they spur far more development than they pay for. There were similar things in early aviation also - something like an X prize is what Lindberg won.
I’d love to see a good reason to go back to the moon. Hardly anyone loves Apollo more than I do. I had a party for Apollo 11, and I saw the Apollo 17 launch. But it makes no sense at the moment.
Fuck all, but I was responding to Bricker’s romantic nonsense about the universe, etc. (as a justification for you all wasting money on a manned mission to Moon in the near term for some romantic sci-fi dreaminess, ironic given his approach to American domestic policy - although in the abstract I often agree with that).
Do try to keep things in context, eh mate?
No bloody clue, but you might invest in some proper low cost exploitation on the most economic efficient basis first. That is clearly robotic. Which can be leveraged up.
Because the cost benefit requires it, and the idea of sending out slow tugs to ‘populate the universe’ given a reasonablly expected mortality rate - drawing attention to the ongoing destructive value of space dust - without some really bloody advanced materials sciences, but even more important bloody well bio-engineered ongoing food and life support mechanisms is pure fantasy.
Never mind that whatever Sci Fi fan romantics desire, there is no real chance of this happening within any human time scale (that is, talking about it now is like a classic era Greek whanking on about visiting Greece, pure whankery).
See above re Greeks. (never mind that planning on a thousand year time scale is pure fantasy and magical thinking given humans can’t bloody properly plan on a ten fucking year plan…)
Re exploring the solar system, I was responding to Bricker’s wet-eyed reaction about universe or galaxy or whatever the bloody fuck he said.
Exploring the solar system - roboticlay on a cost effective basis until technology renders a “Wright moment” effective - is very sensible for medium term planning.
That does not require the Americans pissing away scarce resources on useless, emotion driven projects.
And jaysus, you know I can’t give much credit to the American Right here on their critiques of the American Left when the moment something appeals to them they bloody well dump logic and go all Emo…
Right mate, and there is nothing in physics that says I can’t find a way to punch a hole via some undiscovered means into a hypothetical parallel universe and draw power to play magician.
However, in any human relevant timespan, it’s fucking fantasy and not a fucking basis for an argument for a current expenditure of resources.
Jaysus, this kind of argument is worthy of the general Leftist blithering on about achieving global peace.
I can imagine all kinds of wonderful Sci Fi, doesn’t make it plausible or relevant in any relevant time frame.
Otherwise, I agree with this:
And
All of the above is spot on.
I find it ironic that many of the same posters here that are pretty rigorous on on-earth spending, get all romantic, misty eyed and fuzzy relative to space. Doubtless the weighting to nerds and sci fi fans (and I am a Sci Fi fan), but get bloody serious.
Well, that’s the problem. As Jerry Pournelle has said, there is no physical reason why the human race cannot survive another ten billion years – if we establish a permanent, self-perpetuating human presence off the Earth’s surface. But nobody is going to go live on the Moon or in an L-5 colony, and no corporation or even government is going to fund such a thing, just for the sake of something as remote and abstract as “racial survival.” If it’s a matter of overcrowding, we’ll fill up Earth’s deserts and Antarctica a whole lot sooner; at least you don’t have to manufacture air to breathe or worry about cosmic radiation. No, before space can be colonized, there has to be some way to make a lot of money or get a lot of strategic advantage out of colonizing space, and in the short run. And, so far, no such way is apparent.
Context? You take anyone pro-manned space exploration and paint them with the “sci-fi fan romantic” broad brush and you want context? Here’s some context: go look up the word and leave your hate-on for sci fi fans in some thread that pertains to it.
If the Chinese manage to launch a few big, flashy, smashingly successful manned space missions, like (pulling an example at random) a moon shot, then American funding of manned space exploration will shoot upward again. This is entirely unrelated to the practicalities of such spending. National pride is an end unto itself.
Please…drop all the Brit bonhomie, and also try and read what I’m actually saying, which is quite different than what you think I’m saying.
The question asked you is what in physics makes exploring or colonizing the universe IMPOSSIBLE. I realize that in your rush to try and straw man what I am saying, you didn’t actually read any of it, but could you try and answer the question asked you?
And, again, what in physics makes it impossible, which you seemed to be claiming? Let’s not get into ‘Sci Fi fan romantics’ here, since that’s just a straw man…let’s talk reality. Which part of physics makes it impossible, ehe? Mate?
For comprehension sake, and since you don’t seem to be grasping what I’m saying (I don’t think it’s a comprehension issue, I think you just didn’t bother to read it), I’ll translate into English for you:
In English, this means that you only need to try and break the light speed limit if you wanted to populate the universe in a couple thousand years. I’m responding here to your assertion that you HAVE to break the light speed limitation if you wanted to to expand into the universe at large in so quick a time scale. Here’s the thing, um, mate…humans have been expanding on this mud ball of ours for 10’s of thousands (really, hundreds of thousands) of years now. So, assuming there is nothing in physics that makes such expansion out of this solar system impossible (the original question you were asked, recall?), then there is no reason we’d HAVE to fill up said universe in only thousands (or 10’s of thousands, or millions…or ever) of years.
So, if it’s all magic, then you should presumably be able to state what in physics prevents it, yes? So…why don’t you do so, instead of handwavage about magic and such?
Let me help you out here…there ISN’T anything in physics that makes it impossible, and if you were wise, you’d just admit that and say something along the lines of ‘but it’s not practical at this time’. Then I’d agree with you, and point out that this has nothing at all to do with manned. explorations of the moon or Mars or anything else in this solar system. See? Wouldn’t that be easier than all this dancing around you are doing?
What’s a ‘human relevant timespan’? Is it, 1000 years? 10000 years? 100000 years? What is it…and how are you calculating it? It took humans 10’s of thousands of years to spread out from Africa, after all (not even counting that ‘we’ did it several times), and it took more 10’s of thousands of years for us to spread to every corner of the globe. Is that a ‘human relevant timespan’? Let’s say that a ‘human relevant timespan’ equals the time it took for homo-sapient to spread from Africa at the start and spread to every habitat they currently occupy, just to give us a ball park. Then let’s take a quick look at the progress humanity has made in the last, oh, say 150 years. Where will we be in the next 150 years? In the next 1000?
Pure ‘fucking fantasy’? Like the folks who said that going to the moon at all was something along the lines of pure fucking fantasy? As to your other point about the current exploration having nothing to do with any of this, that’s true and false at the same time. It’s not going to get us to Alpha Centari next year, that’s for sure. But it will increase our incremental knowledge of space flight, of the engineering necessary to support human exploration, and also give us real experience in doing so. We didn’t just sit around doing nothing until suddenly discovering how rockets worked and the build Apollo…it was an incremental and slow process of discovery and trial and error, all the way back from the first black powder rockets, through the early testing of different liquid and solid fuels, up to Apollo. If no one ever developed any kind of rocket at all because it wasn’t exactly what was needed (i.e. if the Chinese had said ‘well, this black powder rocket sucks, so let’s not use anything like this until we can get a rocket that’s good enough to go to the moon!’) then we would NEVER have developed the things. Same goes for every other invention the humans use…they all start off as barely functional (or even non-functional) but are incrementally developed over long periods of time until they eventually become MORE functional.
In the end, it really doesn’t matter if the US continues with it’s manned flight program or not. Not in the long run. SOMEONE will (or we’ll manage to kill ourselves off, or be killed by any number of natural disasters). The Chinese have a manned program, and if they manage to get to the Moon or to Mars, then it will be they who carries the banner at that point. Or it will be some other country years, decades or centuries down the road who will do it. To me, that will be sad, but I’m pretty confident that those who say that manned flight and exploration are worthless or a waste are completely wrong. I probably won’t live to be vindicated in that, but I’m pretty confident it will happen.
But I’d figure that what they lack in speed, they make up for with their ability to persist.
(By the way, thanks for the PhysOrg link. That was an interesting read.)
Agreed, but by the same token, how many human lives would have been claimed by the failures?
Ultimately, it sounds like we are in agreement that there are legitimate reasons for both manned and unmanned missions - we just differ on where the line is (or, perhaps, should be) drawn.
An Earth-based launch loop could cost as little as $3 per kilogram of payload. But if we’re mining the Moon, it’s the cost of getting stuff back to Earth that’s the real question. With gravity one sixth of Earth’s, a Lunar launch loop might cost more like $0.50 per kilo. About 100 kilograms of helium-3 is worth about $141 million. So for a $50 launch cost, we’re talking easy money.
The only issue is building proper mining facilities and the launch loop on the moon to begin with. But at $3 per kilogram that seems pretty feasible. What’s not feasible is the operating costs of a rocket, where we’re talking something more like thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram of payload.
Mining the Moon? Why? Oh, I’m sure there is untapped mineral wealth on the Moon. There is untapped mineral wealth in Antarctica; it remains untapped because nobody has found a way to conduct mining operations profitably in an environment where you have to dig through a mile of ice before you can scratch the dirt, and pay the crew extra-high wages for working there, and ship the ore to market with no roads or railways. But those are trivial problems compared to those of mining the Moon.
Well so, what’s the comparative cost of mining Antarctica versus the value of what can be mined?
Presuming a $90 billion project for mining the moon, if you can send back a few tons of helium-3 per year, we’d be making a few billion dollars every year. Adding in other resources, I suspect that the project would have paid itself back within 20 years. More likely, it would pay itself back sooner than that as costs dropped and further operations were opened on the Moon.
