Namely, why could we go to the moon thirty years ago, but we can’t go to mars now? The answer is simple. Money. Thirty years ago, NASA was one of the government’s top priorities, staffed by competent people, and goal-oriented.
I doubt money is the only reason. Before we send a person to Mars, we have to be sure that we have at least a reasonably good isea of what to expect once the astronauts get there. Any nasty suprises could result in tragedy. Also, keep in mind that the crew would be in space for 3 consecutive years, which raises some serious issues. (extended weightlessness, medical treatment, food supply, psychological effects, etc.) Anyhow, NASA needs to take its time.
b) carry all the crap you need to do the same trip again (no Chevron stations on Mars)
Actually, some people have speculated that it may be possible to make the fuel for the return trip from gas found on Mars. Of course, we’d want to have send a robot to make the fuel before sending any astronauts, to make sure we would be able to make enough.
So maybe you figure we’re not into landing on Mars right away because we’re sure Russia (or China) isn’t going to beat us to the draw any time soon (no Sputnik equivalent)?
One of the reasons the space program has slowed to a crawl is because of the cover-your-ass mentality at NASA. The risks of Apollo would never be allowed now. It’s a political disaster if there is a fatality in space, so they are overly cautious.
NASA had erected all kinds of barriers to private space launch. Once it got out of the business of R&D (which is it very good at), and into the business of commercial space launch (which it is very bad at), we started to have problems. The shuttles didn’t come close to their original performance estimates or cost estimates. And the only way NASA could justify them was to be able to get essentially a monopoly on heavy space lift so it could charge outrageous prices.
Anyway, on to the private sector, where hopefully there will be a proper balance between risk and reward. One of the more interesting rockets now being designed is the Roton. It’s unique in that it uses rotors like a helicopter to land with. And the aerodynamic test vehicle is already flying. Check them out at www.rotaryrocket.com
How does the NASA monopoly work? I mean, what exactly do they have a monopoly on? If I were a kazillionaire and I wanted to by some rocket technology from private companies, and hire some retired astronauts, and fly out to wherever, would there be a law against it?
Yeah, I think there actually was a law. Any rocket flown from U.S. property has to get a ‘waiver’ from the FAA, and I believe other licenses apply, and you simply couldn’t get them. Someone else mentioned the restraint-of-trade NASA was engaged in. I remember reading an article a couple of years ago about how NASA was stifling innovation in private space launch, but I’ll have to dig it up since I can’t recall the details.
How sadly true. I visited their Huntsville facilities two years ago and the entire place (when not trying to get you to send your kids to Space Camp) was reason after reason to forgive NASA for Challenger and give it money. It was kind of depressing to see an organization that has advanced us so far begging for cash.
Yeah, I think there actually was a law. Any rocket flown from U.S. property has to get a ‘waiver’ from the FAA, and I believe other licenses apply, and you simply couldn’t get them.
Couldn’t companies just launch from outside US territory?
Sure, and Ariane rockets have been competing with NASA for some time. But then you have to get permission from the country you are launching from, and the logistics get uglier if most of your suppliers are in the U.S.
Of course they’re risk averse. Another shuttle loss (which is almost certain if we keep flying them long enough) would, a lot of people think, be the end of the US manned space program.
We’re a risk averse society. Everything has to be perfectly safe at all times in every possible situation. Fix our culture so we’re willing to take risks again, and I bet NASA will follow. But you can’t expect anything else from a culture that puts seatbelts on the kid-seats in shopping carts.
A thought experiment, say we could put together a manned mars mission for 10 billion that had a 50% chance of returning the astronauts alive, or a program for 100 billion that had an 80% chance. Which makes more sense? To me, the former - if one fails, you fix what went wrong and do another. I’m pretty sure there would be no shortage of volunteers that would accept a 50% risk of death to be the first humans to walk on Mars. Yet we’re not willing to allow that, apparently. But why not? IMHO, we place a truely irrational value on human life. We can make as many humans as we want - human life is not a scarce resource. If someone is willing to voluntarily risk his or her life in such a mission, I say we do a couple of the cheap, high risk missions instead of avoiding the low risk one because it’s too expensive. On a national scale, a few tens of billions is pocket change - we spend more than that buying airplanes for other countries.
Can’t give all the details, but a Long Beach, California company has built a floating launch platform and recently had a successful test launch from the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Launching at the equator gives a larger boost to the rocket (as long as you go east) than north or south of the line. (Which is why NASA launches most of its rockets from Florida.) And launching on the high seas avoids the whole FAA question.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
I’m not sure that launching from the high seas avoids the red tape. There are still intercontinental jetways overhead, and there have been a number of space treaty proposals that would essentially ban private enterprise from space. I’m not sure who would police it, but if it were a big enough threat to established interests in big government, we’d probably have something like a U.N. anti-space task force floating around.
And yes, when your society is risk-averse, your governmental institutions are going to reflect that. One more reason to take manned space launch away from NASA and give it to the private sector.
The last quote I saw from NASA for the cost of a manned Mars mission was 20 billion dollars or so. If instead they announced a prize of 10 billion to the first private firm to land a man on Mars and return, it’d get done, and very quickly. Not only that, the number of competing firms for the prize would spur research into many different ways of getting there, which would be good for science. We would learn an awful lot more than if we just pick one method at the start and stick with it.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because of a simple metric-English conversion problem.
The engineers at the NASA subcontractor calculating thrust values for course-correction rockets were using the English unit pounds instead of the government-mandated metric value newtons. This miscalculation and communications breakdown resulted in an error of 56 miles, (after a journey of something over 4 millon) placing the final orbital path of the spacecraft below the surface of the planet.
It wasn’t a lack of money, or stupid politicians, or an apathetic American public that doomed the craft. It was the pigheaded insistence by many of the “technological” disciplines in the United States to adhere to an archaic, stupid system of measurement no other industrialized nation in the world uses.
Is the subcontractor going to pay the government back for destroying public property? Or is it not certain who was legally at fault? (I know who was morally at fault - anybody and everybody who inhibited the propagation of the metric system.)
Nothing I write about any person or group should be applied to a larger group.
As you can see, it’s not a Long Beach company, it’s Boeing, in Seattle. The home port for the platform is Long Beach. It’s a joint venture between Boeing and companies from Norway, Russia and Ukraine. And their most recent launch was not a test, but a successful placement of a DirectTV satellite into orbit.
But they aren’t going to Mars any time soon.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
I’ve got my money on Burt Rutan. This is the guy who built the Voyager which flew around the world, and he is pretty much a legend in aerospace design circles. He’s got ingenuity, capital, and a great group of people working for him.
So far, he’s had a hand in developing the Pegasus Rocket, the DC-X VTOL rocket, and his company built the aerodynamic test vehicle for the Roton Rocket.
He has a habit of springing new designs on people without much fanfare, and his design shop operates under strict security, so no one knows what he’s up to.
If you want a decent site for private launch information, check out www.Lunacity.com. The guy that runs the site, Mike Wallis, is one of the people going for the amature prize for orbit and launch. Very informative site, and he’s also enjoyable to see speak.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
Re: MCO - I will step out on a limb here and give my opinion that the metric/imperial units problem is a red herring.
Surely the most direct cause of the loss was the units problem, so it’s nominally correct to say that caused the loss. But my opinion is that looking at it this way misses the real issue, which had nothing to do with metric vs. imperial units. This, and other similar problems could have occurred just as easily if both the contractor and NASA had been using metric units.
Still, all things considered, an embarrassing way to lose a spacecraft!
Yes, that’s still nominally true. But in my opinion it is still a red herring. The way I see it is:
(1) There are often multiple, equally valid ways to specify design parameters using only metric units (or only imperial units). Sticking to one system does not imply a lack of necessity to check units, and in fact, such problems have occurred (but been caught in time) on other spacecraft and aircraft designed using only one system of measurement.
(2) There is a whole class of errors like this, ranging from simple transcription problems to slightly, but not wildly, inaccurate calculations, that happen hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the process of designing complex systems. These sorts of things have occurred in the shuttle, for instance, and in other spacecraft. The problem is the failure of any review process to catch the error, not which single error in particular out of potentially thousands happened to have snuck by and doomed the thing.
It’s sort of like this: say we’re standing 30 feet apart and there’s a fence between us, but the fence has a big hole in it. Now say I have at my disposal a rock, a brick, a baseball, a paperweight, and about a hundred other small, heavy objects. Now I’m going to pick 8 at random and throw them at you. I might be able to sneak one through the hole in the fence, or my aim might be off and I might just hit the fence. If you get hit with, say, the baseball, you might get a nasty bruise. And last week when we were here, I had a baseball too, but I had thrown the brick instead, and missed because it hit the fence. It’s 100% correct to observe that this week, the baseball is what caused your bruise. But if you want to avoid getting hit next week, is the solution to make sure I don’t have any baseballs? No, because I still have 99 other things to throw. If there’s no way to stop me from throwing something, perhaps a better approach is to fix the hole in the fence so no matter what I throw, you don’t get hit.
So IMHO, focusing on the metric/imperial conversion here is much like focusing on the baseball and ignoring the larger picture involving the 99 other small heavy objects and the fence.
Can somebody give us some more info on the ways that NASA is blocking commercial space flight? That doesn’t jibe with what I hear at all. I know that Boeing frequently launches rockets from Vandenberg AFB in Southern California, and the Sealaunch program isn’t a move to get “outside of NASA’s jurisdiction” at all - it’s exactly like jab1 said, you get a large benefit from the earth’s rotation when you launch at the equator. I work for an aerospace company, and I’m always hearing about some satellite or another that is getting launched by a rocket someplace, not on the shuttle.
I think it is true that NASA is trying to keep the shuttle program alive, but there are a number of replacements in development.
I think the biggest barrier to a Mars mission is what several posters have said - money. When the Apollo program was in full swing, it commanded a whopping 1% of our GDP - a huge undertaking. The International Space Station creeps along with $2 billion a year and constant politically-motivated design changes, and it has to kick and scratch to get that.