Well, this seems to be and assumption for some reason. If private industry can amass the capital to build Nuclear Reactors, it can amass the capital to send a probe to Saturn. Are you saying that there is something special about such a probe, or that it is simply expensive. If it is only too expensive, then all that is required is the will to do it. Privately owned resources are certainly enough. We just have to convince enough people to contribute to it.
BTW, this approach would have 1 more benifit. If we were to convince enough people to contribute voluntarily, we would necessarily have to educate them about the values of the project. People would have to be more informed about what space exploration is worth and the kinds of things we learn there. Somehow I think this could only improve us.
Unless I’m misinformed, NASA had a budget last year of 6 billion for human space flight and almost 9 billion for Science, Aeronautics and Technology. This does not seem like too much money to raise in the private sector. Again, it would require a different approach to justifying space exploration, but it definately seems like we could afford it if we wanted.
Not much to add here, but isn’t there a chance that exploration will yield a pay-off by itself, perhaps by uncovering a new useful element or compound, or by giving us new data that leads to a groundbreaking new theory (such as relativity)? I won’t even pretend to know what’s going on at the forefront of physics and chemistry (strings and pocket dimensions? ), but surely something useful can be gleaned out there that would not be possible on this planet?
[ul]
[li]NASA gets a 5% boost in funding every year, plus an extra 800 million next year to kick off the program.[/li][li]All new funds must go to exploration development.[/li][li]Funding for the moon, asteroid, and Mars missions to come from retiring the shuttle. This will leave the U.S. without any manned space capability at all for a few years.[/li][li]The U.S. will establish a permanent base on the moon.[/li][li]Additional funding to come from NASA divesting itself of the international space station by 2013.[/li][li]The Orbital Space Plane, which was originally envisioned as a crew return vehicle for the ISS, mutates into the Crew Excursion Vehicle, which sounds like a multi-purpose spacecraft capable of moving around in orbit, plus moving to the moon and back, and even be able to fly manned missions to asteroids[/li][li]The first Mars mission will be orbital only.[/li][li]Bush will direct NASA to scale back or scrap all other existing programs that do not directly aid in this new effort.[/li][/ul]
If this is correct, then all I can say is, “Wow.” That’s some kinda big, bold step. And I’m not sure I like all of it. Especially that last part. There are a lot of very important programs underway at NASA, and I hope Bush isn’t thinking of scrapping them. The James Webb telescope, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, a whole bunch of other things. Funding for those programs is even more important than a manned mission to the moon.
Unfortunately, this all sounds too optimistic to me. What I expect will happen is that NASA is going to go away and design this new Crew Excursion Vehicle, and come back with an outrageous price tag. Then everything will be ‘re-evaluated’.
Assuming this isn’t all hype in the first place. But if it’s not, this Bush guy sure does swing for the fences…
What the article fails to point out is that the real plan is to save money by combining this with yesterday’s Immigration initiative, and staff NASA with sub-minimum wage illegal aliens. Get it-- aliens?
Anyway, it’ll probably work well in an election year.
As much as I’m opposed to this sort of stuf, I’ll still be following it closely. A permanent manned base on the moon. Very cool!
In the meantime, the next generation space telescope will be cancelled, as will the kuiper mission(???). The last year of an administratin is a very odd time to be making this sort of sweeping proposal. In the absence of evidence that Mars poses an imminent threat to the security of the United States, why not wait until after he starts his second term?
Listen, don’t worry so much about that last highlight you included. I can see a very good reason to develop a new orbiting telescope to find the asteroids we want to send men to. All this means is that science projects have to have moon base reasons. Remember all the probes we sent to all the inner planets as while we sent men to the moon? We learned a lot with each one of them.
We’ll have to wait and see what he means by ‘all existing programs’ - it could be all programs involved with manned space activities, directing them into this effort, or all other programs that were designed to achieve similar goals, like the OSP or other research projects into Mars or Moon missions. For instance, I doubt he’ll want to cancel the Prometheus project, because it will have direct application to a Mars mission. Hopefully, he’ll keep more of the really visionary projects going. I could be sold on cancelling Kuiper-Pluto - it always seemed to me that our scientific return bang for the buck was really questionable on that mission.
But we need a James Webb telescope, because Hubble will retire soon (especially with no shuttles flying), and we learn way, way too much from Hubble to ever want to go without it or its equivalent. And we need to build bigger telescopes and interferometry arrays, because they return huge amounts of scientific knowledge.
Incidentally, does anyone else talking about moonbases, asteroid missions, and a ‘Project Prometheus’ feel like their in a science-fiction novel?
Not if it has one, but if it is targeted for one. If we found gold on Mars, getting there is no longer basic research, it becomes applied research. I used to do applied research - there was no product or particular process expected, but there was a very clear goal of improving things. The way we distinguished things was by how long before we expected results. The stuff I did was supposed to yield answers in 2 to 5 years, beyond that it was basic research, which we weren’t funded for.
The 2000 prize was for work done 40 years before. The Bell Labs work was done before research collapsed - it was still reasonably okay in '97. In 1987 IBM was still doing basic research.
Nobel prizes can be rewarded for non-basic research. The invention of the IC, the 2000 award, was pure development. Penzias and Wilson were not doing basic research when they found the CBR - they were trying to figure out where noise was coming from. Sometimes you get really, really lucky.
Bush’s dad promised the same thing in !989, which obviously didn’t lead anywhere. The plans were eerily similiar. I am highly skeptical that this is just talk. If this plan actually goes through (HIGHLY DOUBT THAT), then I would be a Bush Convert.
FWIW, we’ve been guessing that that means code M (manned missions) rather than everything. I talked to the Webb Space Telescope people in Atlanta this week (big astronomy meeting) about some technical stuff and the initiative didn’t come up like I might have expected if they were in trouble. Ironically enough, given the way the thread has gone, it might be the R&A budgets that get hit-- the ones supporting groundbased research without direct, immediate mission applications. They got raided for the ISS back in the early 90’s, but I think everyone’s hoping that the numbers involved so dwarf the R&A money that there’s no point in going after them…
I hadn’t heard the part about asteroid missions. At least I’ve got that in my favor.
Yeah, I don’t think everything is on the block, because Bush highly approves of a number of those programs, from what I understand. Prometheus, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, etc.
Indeed. I admit to being a bit worried that JIMO/Prometheus will only be funded and allowed to progress to the point at which DOD-worthy products are generated, after which the funding gets cut. Hopefully not, though.
What is the rationale for a piloted Mars flyby? Either we’ll have the knowhow to keep humans alive in space for 2 years or we won’t. And either we’ll have the capability for landing and returning, which will be done robotically, or we won’t.
I’m not so sure it is that simple. If we limit the amount of fuel we have to send to mars we are more likely to be able to build a ship to get there in a reasonable amount of time. Do any of you remember the early projections for the size of ship necessary to put men on the moon and bring them back? Originally they were going to put 5 Saturns together to do the job. That was assuming the whole ship would accelerate halfway towards the moon, decelerate the other half, land on the moon, take off and repeat the process. You start by weighing the capsule that has to splash down. Then calculating the fuel necessary to get it from lunar orbit to the earth, then the fule to get that weight from the lunar surface to lunar orbit…
The whole process was simplified when we decided we could land a much smaller ship which would never have to fly in the earth’s atmosphere. Of course this introduce a whole slew of technological problems. Matching orbits for one.
Going to mars is going to involve a long flight in interplanetary space. That in an of itself is a huge technological goal. If we can do it sooner by dropping a probe to the surface, or leaving a satalite in orbit rather than landing, then cool.
Not sure where the DOD angle fits in but the object of sending humans to Mars is the act itself. Are we going to revert to an agrarian society or move forward? There may come a time in the future when Mars is colonized. The stuff of science fiction eventually catches up to reality.
I’m sold on sending humans to land on Mars, pick up samples, and use their geological training to understand things in a way we can never do with robots alone. Great. But I don’t see what humans can do on a Mars flyby. I can’t come up with any actual scientific reson to do a piloted Mars flyby. And I don’t see how it’s a necessary engineering step prior to a landing, like Apollo 8 plausibly was. If it’s really just “the act itself”, I’d just as soon save that chunk of the budget for a few years until we can send someone all the way to the surface.
I guess I should wait and see if there’s really something to complain about and hear the reasoning…
Baby steps. This isn’t about gathering science - it’s about learning how to work in space, travel long distances, achieve orbits around other planets, do useful work, etc.
A Mars lander that can carry humans and fly back off the surface is a big, big problem (and a big, big system). If you don’t need to do that, the whole problem gets much, much easier.
You can do lots of useful science without landing anyway. For instance, the mission could carry ten or twenty small rovers, drop them in areas of interest (including high risk areas we don’t dare fly to now), and they could be flown down under direct control by astronauts in orbit. This would allow them to place them precisely near interesting features on the planet, and instead of having slow, ponderous AI move the thing around the astronaut can drive it from orbit. You could even possibly do a sample return launch from the ground. If you don’t need people aboard, the vehicle can be much smaller (and much riskier).
If people are going to start exploiting the solar system, we have to get comfortable working in it and moving around in it. That’s the goal of this project. A moonbase is useful because it teaches you how to set up large outposts delivered by rocket, how to live in them, leave them and walk on the surface, fly off the surface and back into orbit, etc. Lessons learned from that can make transfer vehicles safer, make spacesuits work better, etc.
Some of this can be simulated on Earth, but in the end there is no substitute for that first time when you actually have to go out and do it. And as any test pilot will tell you, the first time you go out to do something like this, it pays to keep it as simple as possible.
That said, I don’t know that any Mars mission plan will be set in stone at the start of this program. A lot is going to depend on things like the science we get back from the current rovers and orbiters. For example, if that ‘sticky crust’ that it looks like the Spirit disturbed on landing turns out to be some sort of biological crust, then you can bet a manned mission to the actual surface will be sped up.
), but surely something useful can be gleaned out there that would not be possible on this planet?