I don’t think humans will make it to the outer reaches of our solar system, but whatever replaces humans as the dominant life form on our own hunk of rock probably will. The reason I believe this is because whatever destroys us humans will most likely leave the planet only habitable by an extreme life form that will have to evolve into something that can control its environment.
So humans won’t make it, but someday in the future there will be a colony on Uranus.
SSG Schwartz
That is certainly one possibility, but to say it with such authority like it’s the only possible fate of the human race is incredibly myopic. Count the things humans have accomplished that would’ve been dismissed as impossible a hundred years earlier.
And all of those things were within the realm of the laws of physics, so were not only possible, but probable. I can imagine traveling at several times the speed of light, but that doesn’t mean it may happen some day. I can imagine going to Neptune, and perhaps a vehicle could be designed that could take somebody there. But that would presuppose that humanity will survive the 50,000 years it will take to maybe overcome the impossible conditions of such an environment. I don’t see it happening. Periodic cataclysmic events on earth are a matter of geologic and fossil record. Species come and go. It just happens to be our 30,000 year epoch or so at the moment. The arrogance of humans to believe that they will go on forever just astounds me. I base my authoritative comments on the history of the planet. What do you base yours on?
Nothing necessary to colonize the solar system and beyond is outside the realm of the laws of physics.
This statement doesn’t make sense (you’re sure about the future because of the past? Doesn’t work like that), but to answer your question, Carl Sagan, for one, believed in and wrote extensively about it.
Well, we’re not going to colonize Mars “any day now,” so you may as well cross your fingers.
Exactly what’s going to make us extinct on Earth that being on Mars would save us from?
I don’t believe anyone can speak authoritatively about the development of technology and the human species more than a few decades out, and certainly not on the span of thousands or tens of thousands of years. It would be obtuse to argue that we could explore the galaxy with existing technology, but it would be equally without acumen to suggest that the technology of a thousand years from now will just be an extension of conventional tools.
As far as interstellar transit as being in violation of the laws of physics, while zipping around in spandex uniforms, setting phasers to stun, and reconfiguring the solar matrix for endothermic propulsion are as much fantasy as hopping through a wardrobe to Narnia, there is nothing that intrinsically prevents us from going to other stars. It just takes a lot of energy and a lot of time. In the thirty thousand year epoch previously mentioned, technolgy has gone from generating just enough heat from a campfire to prevent a man from completely freezing to generating megawatts from radioactive decay, so we’re talking a different of eight or nine orders of magnitude. We can at least expect a similar increase in capability in the future era. It is not implausibly that some day humanity or its successor(s) will go to the stars; just not in a wagon train as envisioned by television producers.
Stranger
I’m in between Cisco and Stranger, here.
I think space exploration for humanity over the next 50 years looks pretty bleak. I want so bad to see us go to Mars (I just missed the moon landings), and would love to witness a new and exciting adventure for mankind in my lifetime, but at best, I don’t think I’ll be seeing anything more than increased activity on the lunar surface, and a ton more robotic probes.
As for colonizing the solar system/galaxy, I think if humanity can reach a certain technological singularity, it’ll be doable, and probably inevitable. If we can create an artificial intelligence sufficient enough to handle all the heavy lifting of planning, design, and even construction of colonies (perhaps designed for genetically altered humans), then it’s just a matter of leapfrogging people from place to place.
As for galactic, one way to get over the timescales involved is to develop DNA printers and incubators to let intelligent machines to cover the distance, then use local resources to start a new colony from scratch on an extra-solar planet.
Of course such ideas sound like science fiction and flights of fancy, but I think it’s only a matter of time until we bring ourselves to a point to accomplish that which seems impossible, or even unethical right now.
There’s still lightyears of new technogical ground to cover, and chances are good that the human race has at least another few thousand years ahead of it (and probably a ton more). Think of how far we can get given that amount of time of exponential technological growth.
Is there any particular reason why we couldn’t just build another Apollo-configured Saturn V (or brush the mothballs off an existing one) and send it up to the Moon?
Saturn Vs are hopelessly outdated. Even if we wanted to build one from scratch, where would we get the components? A lot of them aren’t made anymore. Of course we could re-design a Saturn V using modern components; but at that point we’re designing a whole new rocket anyway.
Of course they’re outdated- but they worked. They took a sizeable payload to the Moon and brought it back, which is pretty much all the next generation of Moon rockets will do, right?
I would have assumed that 90% of the components were built from scratch specifically for the lunar program anyway, so it shouldn’t be that hard to build them from scratch again. Did we forget how to make a bolt capable of withstanding shearing force X in the meantime? I was under the impression that the actual rocket was pretty simple.
Obviously, we’re not going to be building control systems that use vacuum tubes and transistors this time, but pretty much any electronic device we could build in 1960 can be built today with a hundred thousand times the power but a hundred thousandth of the mass and cost.
Ah. Well, that answers that.
Thanks!
First of all, the production tooling for the Saturn family of rockets was destroyed, and (reportedly) a lot of the detail manufacturing source drawings were destroyed or have been lost as the various contractors and subcontractors have been bought out, merged, or gone out of business. It would probably cost more to try to recreate the Apollo/Saturn system than it would to build a new design using modern materials.
Second, there is nothing about rockets that is “pretty simple,” not even the nuts and bolts, as discovered by the SpaceX crew when the Falcon I Flight 1 suffered a fuel line leak that was RCA’d to a fastener that, due to improper material selection, broke due to stress corrosion cracking. Every single functional component on a rocket has to be pedigreed, analyzed, FMECA’d, qualified, ELAT’d, measured, marked, and accounted for. When your car leaks oil because a gasket wore out or develops a shimmy because some mechanic didn’t properly tighten a nut, you drive to the service station or pull over and call a tow truck. When the same thing happens to a rocket, it falls out of the sky, presenting a hazard to anyone and anything below, not to mention the expensive payload it may be carrying. Space enthusiasts are often heard to moan about “the blizzard that paperwork that NASA requires to launch a rocket,” and while it is indeed a blinding storm of documents, every single one of those required documents exists because someone somewhere along the line forgot, neglected, or wasn’t told how to do his job properly. It’s that same mountain of paper that lets us go back after a failure or anomaly and (usually) figure out what caused the failure, even though the rocket is several thousand burned up fragments of junk floating in the Indian Ocean.
Third, while the materials and computing hardware have improved, the basic theory and practice of propulsion remain essentially the same. We’re still using De Laval-style nozzles pumping cryogenic or hydrocarbon fuels with turbopumps spinning at disturbing speeds. And yet, the design safety and reliability requirements of components today are significantly more stringent than they were during Gemini and Apollo, and even over the STS. The “safety requirements” applied on the Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas flights would make today’s range safety officer cringe and shudder.
Fourth, there is only one complete flight set of hardware that exists to build up a Saturn V, and after more than forty years of sitting on its side in Houston I doubt it is in any shape for refurbishment and flight. There are no existing CSMs, and only one completed LM at the National Air and Space Museum, which would probably cost more to refurbish and pedigree than it would just to build a new one. Even if the hardware did exist, it would again not meet modern reliability standards, and even a cursory overview of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program indicates that the successes can be attributed as much to luck (and some crackerjack piloting, like Neil Armstrong’s recovery and emergency landing on Gemini VIII) as to fail-safe engineering and accurate failure analysis. Even if Apollo-Saturn existed today, we wouldn’t be using it.
Finally, we no longer have the ground support systems for Apollo. The VAB and launch facilities at LC-39 were long ago modified to support the STS (and specifically to kill any plans for reuse of surplus Saturn hardware).
So no, we can’t just pull an old Apollo-Saturn off the shelf, dust it off, fuel it up, and light it off. It just doesn’t work that way.
Stranger
While I agree with most of the other stuff in your post…
I have to note that modern manned space flight aint that much better than that dangerous old shit. I could even make the arguement that the opposite is true.
Statistically, they are the same.
I’m reading Gene Kranz’s Failure Is Not An Option. There were indeed some interesting times. For example, The Four-Inch Flight. ‘Hey, I have an idea! Let’s depressurise the fuel and oxysizer tanks by shooting holes in them with a rifle!’ :smack: (Chris Kraft nixed the idea.)
I’d heard that somewhere, but I’d forgotten.
No, they aren’t. First of all, for manned spaceflight there are 126 STS missions to date, versus 7 Mercury missions, 10 Gemini missions, and 16 Apollo missions. The Mercury capsule had a crew of 1, Gemini carried 2 astronauts, and Apollo delivered 3 astronauts, for a total of 33 missions and 75 people into space, while the STS carries between 2 and 10 astronauts and has delivered roughly 800 people in space. This means that there is a much greater statistical likelihood of failure occurring across the breadth of STS missions (even with a higher reliability) and more fatalities in the instance of catastrophic failure.
With a few spare exceptions, the design safety factors required on the Shuttle were much greater than those on Apollo (and certainly the previous, highly accelerated programs) and the qualification and testing programs are at least as stringent, often moreso. There are a few caveats associated with this, particularly the stress margins on the Orbiter wing structure at max-Q alpha (necessitating flipping it for inverted flight on ascent), and of course the design flaw in the original SRBs which resulted in the Challenger breakup. The latter was more of a managerial problem than a technical one, however; both the problem and solution were known to both NASA and Morton-Thiokol engineers who were overridden because of cost and schedule issues. The safety factors and qualification requirements applied to the current Constellation program are so vastly beyond anything necessitated on Apollo as to border on onerous and handicapping, but that is the state of the union in spaceflight today; risk tolerance is not a politically correct discussion.
The fact that there were spectacular failures on Challenger and Columbia are actually a result of the risk adverse attitude adopted; when a design problem was highlighted that could increase cost and hold up schedule, the response was to ignore or bury the risks. However, the standards that current designs are held to are far more stringent (and in many ways more restrictive) than what was accepted on Apollo or its predecessors.
Stranger
I don’t understand this attitude at all. I may get flamed for saying this, but as long as astronauts understand the risks, I don’t see why a ~1% failure rate is so hideously unacceptable. They’re going to fucking space; there are bound to be casualties.
The national mourning periods after Challenger and Columbia were just bizarre to me. If you were so worried they were going to die, why the hell did you want them strapped to a giant firework?
Bingo.
The best and most mature rocket systems (manned or unmanned) available don’t have failure rates significantly lower/safer/better than 1 percent.
To require 1 percent for a mission to mars (vs lets read magazines in low earth orbit and document the bad health effects for the umptemth time) is absurd.
And anybody who thinks what ever they come up with is way safer than 1 percent is fooling themselves.
FTR, I mean a 1% mission failure rate, not a 1% component failure rate, which presumable would equal a 100% mission failure rate.
BS, IMO.
Nobody died in Mercury.
Nobody died in Gemini.
3 guys died in Apollo one ON THE GROUND IN A TEST in a rocket that wasnt flight ready. For that matter, the Apollos that flew later werent the same Apollos, as there was a total review of the whole system.
And each Apollo flight should count for double if not triple given that had to get to low earth orbit, leave low earth orbit, land on the moon with an unfixable rocket that nobody could inspect and take off again.
The shuttle has/had two serious engineering flaws. They fixed one. They are just crossing their fingers for the second one. The Apollo deaths were more from procedural stupidity (14 psi pure 02) than engineering flaws.
If your are goint to strap me in a rocket and send me to stars, I’d take anything over the shuttle. But I’d go on the shuttle too for that matter
Nuff said.
Outa here. Going canoe for a week. Hope I don’t die 