The Emperor's new Space Program

[Winner]

Your using Spirit as an example of failed robotics?!

No, I am using it to demonstrate the limitations of robotic exploration of the Solar System.

This is a rover that lasted over twenty times as long as originally predicted and has been operational for about six years. How much would it cost to get the same benefit out of human research?

If you want to ask this kind of question, I have a question of my own - how much more would have been done by the human crew in those six years?

Keeping a human alive on Mars is pretty expensive, and you need to bring them back.

Nope, keeping a human alive on Mars is child's play compared to getting him there and bringing him back. If you use the Martian resources (a.k.a. In-Situ Resource Utilization, ISRU), you can produce air, water and with these two even food, at least partially.

I doubt I need to explain the mechanics of space travel to you, but the main cost of every mission is getting out of a planetary orbit. It's actually easier to get to and from Phobos than to and from The Moon.

Uh, you need to expend less overall energy for acceleration/deceleration, but it's definitely not easier, unless you consider 6-month travel and ~communication delay irrelevant. Plus, you need to get all the fuel and habitation modules for a Phobos mission to Earth orbit first, and for that you need rockets. Big ones. And lots of them.

Rockets cost money and time to develop. Obama isn't giving NASA either. Go figure.

Hence why it costs about $20,000 dollars per KG to get out of Earth orbit. That means every extra KG we need for oxygen, heating, food and sanitation because of a human cargo costs an awful, awful lot. I wouldn't be surprised if we could drop a thousand rovers on mars for the cost of a single manned expedition. Not to mention the fact that robotics is hardly a stagnant field.

I didn't say that. But unless you can give me a self-repairing robot with human-like intelligence capable of conducting independent research on Mars, no robot will ever beat a human.

I don't really buy this long-term argument. The Earth is going to be habitable for a really long time.

I wouldn't bet on it, since we as a species are trying really hard to make it uninhabitable /sarcasm

Space colonization is hardly a pressing concern.

Sitting on your backside and leaving the hard work for the next generations isn't an approach I could applaud, sorry.

If we really want to help mankind long-term prospects we'd probably be better off financing basic research (For example, Particle accelerators). Our technology will improve tremendously, and space will still be there.

How is that mutually exclusive? We should be investing heavily into all kinds of reasearch, including human space exploration/colonization, and not wasting money in useless dumps which contribute exactly nothing to our long-term future.

 

[warpus]

Winner, why are you criticizing another country's space program, anyway? They don't have the resources right now to focus on some of the space toys you want to develop and build. They like fighting overseas wars, and that takes a big chunk out of their disposable income. Sure, you could argue that their priorities are messed up, but that's up for them to decide.

How is the Czech Republic's space program going?

 

[Anonymoose]

Edited. Didn't mean to offend anyone. Apologies.

 

[Benefactor]

Winner, why are you criticizing another country's space program, anyway? They don't have the resources right now to focus on some of the space toys you want to develop and build. They like fighting overseas wars, and that takes a big chunk out of their disposable income. Sure, you could argue that their priorities are messed up, but that's up for them to decide.

How is the Czech Republic's space program going?

Why is anyone discussing anything on here? It's not like anyones opinion on here has any major ramifications.

Winner thinks scrapping this program is stupid, other people don't. I think a debate is supposed to follow.

EDIT: Czech Republic is an ESA member. So I suppose its going better than Americas .

 

[Winner]

We could also build a colony at the bottom of the ocean, technologically speaking, and it would only take 5 - 10 years. Doesn't mean its a good idea, but its still a better idea than building a moon colony.

Why? What advantages would such a base have over a lunar base in long-term benefits? I suppose you mean deep ocean basins - no natural resources, mostly barren, the fauna can be explored with relatively cheap submarine missions.

Moon - full of resources, well placed for future industrial applications, relatively close to Earth, great place for all kinds of research involving astronomy.

As far as refuting your claim, this is just an outlined proposal by Obama, the US Congress is in charge of actually producing a budget. I'm sure whatever way the budget turns out, NASA will retain significant human spaceflight capabilities for the foreseeable future.

Is that your answer?

What capabilities? Space Shuttle will be retired this year, that's already been decided and confirmed. NASA doesn't have money for any extension of the programme anyway.

Orion capsule isn't ready, and won't be until around 2015. And even if it is ready by then, you'll have NO ROCKET to put it on, because this role was intended for Ares-1. Which has been cancelled.

In the medium-term, you'll need a super heavy-lift launch vehicle, this was what Ares-V was supposed to be. It's been cancelled too, as it seems, and there is NO commercial alternative even looming on the horizon. Nothing, nil, nada, nichts.

I think our space programs should have stable funding, with discretionary amounts available to the whims of government income. I also think they should focus on science, and offer prizes to the private industry for the spiffy landmark adventures. I think those prizes should be substantive, though.

Frankly, we don't need new technology to get people to the Moon. There's no point in detailing a government bureaucracy to doing so. What's needed is a private incentive. Offer ... I don't know, a "billion dollars" to the company that can put 2 people on the Moon for a week and bring them home safely. These companies are already motivated to do this for the tourist industry, and so seed money in the form of prizes will make people more adventurous.

I am sceptical about this. It seems a better approach is to maintain government leadership through (in the best case) a civilian space agency which sets up the goals and cooperates extensively with the private sector and coordinate private activities. Until they can stand on their own (which is still decades in the future), I can't see how could space research/exploration do without extensive government investments and leadership.

On topic, I'm glad this program got the axe. There is no reason for humans to go into outer space at a cost of dozens of times what it would take for a robot to do the same thing. Given NASA's budget constraints, they should stop doing human space exploration entirely and focus on unmanned craft - we would discover so much more if we didn't spend billions of dollars sending people into low-Earth orbit. Just think if all the money for manned spacecraft was instead diverted to build several probes to the outer solar system and a number of state-of-the-art space telescopes that could use interferometry to actually see planets around other stars...

Sigh

OTOH, I certainly think we should continue to do basic research and unmanned space exploration. But I don't think we need to perform more incredibly expensive research-poor headline-grabbing Cold-War-winning gestures, like sending even more men to the moon, or even to Mars, for the forseeable future.

A mission to Mars is so not supposed to be that. Couldn't even, since the US would require extensive help from other space powers to be able to perform it.

 

[lovett]

If you want to ask this kind of question, I have a question of my own - how much more would have been done by the human crew in those six years?

It's not really a valid comparison. When performing a cost/benefit analysis we really want to be asking how much research a human crew can do per dollar rather than per year. I don't think it sensible to contend that human being are cheaper then robots; as I've said human space travel is prohibitively expensive. Human being have a nasty tendency to die when in places that aren't Earth and that necessitates a lot of rather heavy equipment intended to make a small bubble in space as much like Earth as possible. Your right to mention that expeditions need not carry around all the food, water etc their going to need but they do have to carry around all the recycling equipment that makes that possible. Including quite a few solar panels. As you said, people need habitation modules. They're very heavy. People also need to return to Earth. That means you have to lug the fuel required for the trip back all the way out of Earths orbit, carry it safely down to Mars, store it, lug it back out of Martian orbit and hope you have enough to get back to the 'ole motherland. The money we would spend developing, perfecting and performing human research could be spent far better on robotic research.

Sitting on your backside and leaving the hard work for the next generations isn't an approach I could applaud, sorry.

Should 19th century Europe have spent money researching alternative energy? Fossil fuels won't last forever and energy is pretty important for human survival. Yet, of course they shouldn't have. It's not a matter of imposing a burden on future generations but rather a matter of recognizing future generations will be far better equipped for the task at hand. We have more important things to worry about, things that will help said generations much more than rather primitive manned flight.

How is that mutually exclusive? We should be investing heavily into all kinds of reasearch, including human space exploration/colonization, and not wasting money in useless dumps which contribute exactly nothing to our long-term future.

Resources are finitite. We have to make the choice somewhere. I just don't see that there is any benefit to a space program centred around human flight. You haven't really argued that there is.

 

[Winner]

Winner, why are you criticizing another country's space program, anyway?

Because it has taken a very wrong turn?

They don't have the resources right now to focus on some of the space toys you want to develop and build.

That's where you're wrong my friend.

US defense budget - over 600 billion dollars, set to increase by further dozens of billions.

NASA budget - little over 18 billion. That's about 3% of the defense budget.

Money needed to keep Constellation up an running: 3 billion annually. That's 0.07% of the proposed $3.8 trillion budget. Practically nothing compared to the overall expenses, even compared to the bailouts the US gov. so readily distributed among large private companies.

Do you really think that he couldn't find another 3 billion in the budget? I can't even imagine that. He simply didn't want to or didn't care. Both alternatives are very sad.

They like fighting overseas wars, and that takes a big chunk out of their disposable income. Sure, you could argue that their priorities are messed up, but that's up for them to decide.

Aaagain, Russia kept its space programme running through:

1) Collapse of their state
2) Collapse of their currency
3) Collapse of their banking system
4) Collapse of their social security system
5) 2 wars in Chechnya

It got reduced, but the Russians never even pondered abandoning human spaceflight. They went through a hell the US citizens can't even begin to imagine (ithey really can't if they think this is the worst crisis that could have happened to them), and it still maintained their space programme.

One can despise Russia for many reason, but this deserves nothing but pure admiration.

How is the Czech Republic's space program going?

And a cheap dig to conclude a post full of misconceptions, how poetic

 

[Benefactor]

Humans are much more interesting than Robots, nobody cares about the life and times of some Rover.

 

[El_Machinae]

Winner: I think the governments should still be funding the space research. This means satellites & robots, etc. This needs to be done because there's a public benefit to space research & it's under-invested-in through the market.

The space adventures should be left to the private companies. Someone upthread mentioned safety: modern governments need to be safe, private companies don't need to be. A company can engage in high-risk adventurism, and that's where we're going to see all the progress.

People are dissatisfied with NASA's 3% (irrc) fatality rate for human launches. Virgin Galactic, though, is shooting for about 1%. They're not promising iron-clad safety, they're promising risk. And there's a giant discount to adventurism if we're willing to accept some risk. If we tack on a reward system, countries get a huge bang-for-their-buck in space development. A gov't dollar spent is gone. A gov't dollar put into a prize pot often generates about 10x in private seed money.

 

[The Imp]

Sigh, we went to the moon with 1960-70's's technology, the lander equipped with a computer less powerful then a calculator. In every actual attempt to the moon, there have been ZERO deaths. In fact, the US had 2 separate missions to the moon in '69, a failed one in '70 that did not result in any deaths, another 2 in '71, and 2 in '72.

I am sick and tired of the bureaucratic bull that has beset NASA. We could have had a permanent base on the moon by now if we hadn't abandoned the Apollo program! It was tried and true technology that worked. Instead, we had this boondoggle called the shuttle program, which has accomplished little more then shuttling crap for science experiments.

The Russians had the right idea, they have been using the same damn rocket(with occasional upgrades) since the 60's, and are still using them, while the US has been grounded as if it was a little impotent Asian
country that occasionally gets to hitch a ride with the big boys. I believe that in roughly 50 years of service, Soyuz flights have only suffered 4 casualties, while the shuttle program has suffered 14 while only lasting 30 years versus the Soyuz.

The moon is a stunning sight, and since December 7, 1972, a stunning rebuke and a reminder of what could have been.

 

[Theige]

Why? What advantages would such a base have over a lunar base in long-term benefits? I suppose you mean deep ocean basins - no natural resources, mostly barren, the fauna can be explored with relatively cheap submarine missions.

Moon - full of resources, well placed for future industrial applications, relatively close to Earth, great place for all kinds of research involving astronomy.



Is that your answer?

What capabilities? Space Shuttle will be retired this year, that's already been decided and confirmed. NASA doesn't have money for any extension of the programme anyway.

Orion capsule isn't ready, and won't be until around 2015. And even if it is ready by then, you'll have NO ROCKET to put it on, because this role was intended for Ares-1. Which has been cancelled.

In the medium-term, you'll need a super heavy-lift launch vehicle, this was what Ares-V was supposed to be. It's been cancelled too, as it seems, and there is NO commercial alternative even looming on the horizon. Nothing, nil, nada, nichts.

I don't mean deep ocean basins. I mean wherever there are resources at the bottom of the ocean that would make sense for a colony.

Also it could be done at a tiny fraction of the cost. Please go look up the cost to establish a moon colony, if such a ridiculous calculation even exists. We're not going to have that kind of money available for a long time, and that is the next step in human space exploration, not 7 day multi-billion dollar camping trips on the moon.

Once again, this is a budget proposal. When you say "NASA doesn't have the money for an extension of the Space Shuttle program," you're not making any sense. NASA's budget changes every year, they can be given the money as part of the new budget.

Also, Obama's plan is to cancel the Constellation program, as you keep stating over and over. But...

In passing the budget for 2010, Congress included a clause that none of the money could be spent on canceling or changing Constellation — or starting an alternative — without its approval.

Its ultimately Congress's decision whether or not to cancel the program. We won't know exactly what the actual plans are for months.

 

[Desmond Hawkins]

I would rather have seen some social programs cut instead of this. Space travel needs to be our future. I mean, how in the hell are we supposed to find Pandora now?

You mean like the heavily subsidized employment program known as the military ?

On-Topic: So is NASA just going to morph in a space version of the FAA over time?

 

[The Imp]

You mean like the heavily subsidized employment program known as the military ?

On-Topic: So is NASA just going to morph in a space version of the FAA over time?

No, the Russians and/or Chicoms are coming

 

[Desmond Hawkins]

Chicomms?

 

[Winner]

It's not really a valid comparison. When performing a cost/benefit analysis we really want to be asking how much research a human crew can do per dollar rather than per year. I don't think it sensible to contend that human being are cheaper then robots; as I've said human space travel is prohibitively expensive. Human being have a nasty tendency to die when in places that aren't Earth and that necessitates a lot of rather heavy equipment intended to make a small bubble in space as much like Earth as possible. Your right to mention that expeditions need not carry around all the food, water etc their going to need but they do have to carry around all the recycling equipment that makes that possible. Including quite a few solar panels. As you said, people need habitation modules. They're very heavy. People also need to return to Earth. That means you have to lug the fuel required for the trip back all the way out of Earths orbit, carry it safely down to Mars, store it, lug it back out of Martian orbit and hope you have enough to get back to the 'ole motherland. The money we would spend developing, perfecting and performing human research could be spent far better on robotic research.

It's perfectly valid comparison. Human spaceflight may be more expensive, but unless the robots can match human capacities in all relevant aspects, they can't do things which we want do do. A human on Mars will see a stone, grabs a geological hammer and checks it out in 5 minutes. A robot will probably need several days, and it will not be nearly as effective.

Not to mention the communication delay and day cycle limitations allow only few hours of operation a day. It will improve with better robots, but you can only go so far. One human mission lasting roughly ~3 years (including 12 month round-trip) would accomplish more than an infinite number of rover robots. So much for your "research per dollar" category.

Should 19th century Europe have spent money researching alternative energy? Fossil fuels won't last forever and energy is pretty important for human survival. Yet, of course they shouldn't have. It's not a matter of imposing a burden on future generations but rather a matter of recognizing future generations will be far better equipped for the task at hand. We have more important things to worry about, things that will help said generations much more than rather primitive manned flight.

That's a completely faulty logic. 19th century Europe invented tons of things that later led to practical applications and they did explore everything they could, even though it was expensive and risky. I'll go few centuries back in time to the era of Portuguese exploration again to illustrate my point:

They started as a poor, small nation with ships incapable of long voyages on the open sea. But, wisely enough, their rulers decided they wanted to find an alternative route to India, to bypass the Muslims and Venetians who were controlling the spice trade.

So, in the next decades, they slowly improved their capabilities through a gradual step-by-step evolution of existing technologies. Better ships, better navigation techniques, better provisioning, better organization, and so on.

At that time, they didn't even know for sure if Africa could be circumnavigated. Did it stop them? No. Their first voyages were short and often ended in tragedy. But they learned, and with every new voyage they got little farther. At each point they could just give up, return home and abandon the plan. Fortunately for Europe, they didn't give up.

Eventually, they succeeded and even though their first trip to India didn't exactly bring them riches (most of the crew-members died and the expedition's fate often hanged in the balance), they paved the way for future ones. It's actually much more impressive than what the Spanish did after they accidentally discovered America.

Back to the 21st century - in some aspect we need to be like the Portuguese: set up a goal and follow it. Change strategy if necessary, but keep on going. First the Moon, then Mars/the asteroids, then the outer solar system, then the stars. It will take centuries, but what else should we do? Degenerate here on Earth and wait for something to kill us all? I am not saying we shouldn't invest in our lives here on Earth, but we need to have some sort of greater goal. Simple surviving on our homeworld isn't exactly a goal I have in mind.

Resources are finitite. We have to make the choice somewhere.

The Universe is finite too, so let's just commit suicide, it's all pointless. Is that your point?

I just don't see that there is any benefit to a space program centred around human flight. You haven't really argued that there is.

I have, but I can't really make everyone understand - even though I am surprised to see how many people fail to see any benefit in having a human on the surface of Mars. It's like not seeing any benefit in going to the cinema to see a film, when you can ask your friend to capture few glimpses of it with his mobile phone camera. Sure, it's cheaper and you'll see some parts of the film, but...

 

[The Imp]

Chicomms?

Short for Chinese Communists.

Of course they really are not communist, but the name has a nice ring to it in my mind

 

[MobBoss]

You mean like the heavily subsidized employment program known as the military ?

If you think the military is simply a social aid program then we really wont be having a discussion.

 

[JollyRoger]

You mean like the heavily subsidized employment program known as the military ?

cash-for clunkers, wills-for-warriors, bonuses-for-bankers, caddies-for-no-daddies could all be cut in favor of money-for-moonlandings

 

[Theige]

If you think the military is simply a social aid program then we really wont be having a discussion.

How else are we going to solve the unemployment problem among minorities and in the South?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

It's about time Obama called that spade a spade and cancelled the damn thing. Project Constellation wasn't even anything new, just old concepts recycled in bigger forms to look like new. I wholly support this move to give more leverage to private companies. They can only do better, considering it's impossible to do worse than killing astronauts left and right.