NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

Let me anthropomorphically assume there will always be a closer target to spend excess planetary resources on.

The Fermi Paradox is different. It's really about interstellar colonization, not just travel. It's basic geometric growth: the Universe is old-enough and geometric growth is fast-enough that, if interstellar colonization is possible, aliens would have spread across every habitable planet in the galaxy, just as all life does. They would already be here.

Therefore, there is some filter that prevents the vast majority of life from achieving interstellar colonization. Either the filter is behind us and we're the lucky first ones, or the filter is ahead of us and we are almost certainly doomed to stay trapped in our solar system until it is no longer habitable.

Only if it would apply to all alien civilizations.

The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being able to do so ourselves. And any explanation of the form "the ETIs wouldn't do that because reasons" just fails, because it just takes one event, over a very long time and large number of systems.

It is not a problem though. My friends in big pharma did better than me - big houses, cars, holidays, money in bank. I guess they will be on the Narcan gravy train too. Doctors have to drive fast Porsches too, don't they?

Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity.

Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

> Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit.

Not at all, you need to look at other sub-genres. The social, economic and military structures that form around slower than light travel are a mainstay of hard science fiction. "A Deepness in the Sky" is a great example. So is the first half of "Neptune's Brood" or the second half of "Accelerando". Any story that uses a generation ship as the setting, like "Hull Zero Three", also assumes sub-light travel. Or what would happen if present-day society discovered an alien race next door, like in "The Sparrow". Or maybe we need to make ourselves slightly less human to survive sub-light space travel. "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" explore the philospohical ramifications of that. Even "Ender's Game" doesn't have FTL travel.

Now space opera almost universally assumes that FTL is possible. Though there are exceptions, Ian Banks "The Algebraist" is my favorite sub-light space opera.

edit: Some hard sci-fi will still use wormholes, either as a normal thing or a macguffin. FTL communication is also common. Though FTL comms are getting less common in modern hard sci fi. Us readers like this and it makes for convenient plot devices as comm lag leads to misunderstandings.

TV and movies are almost always space opera, with "The Expanse" being the only sub-light TV production that comes to mind, and "2001" for film. But I don't know as much about film as books.

Charlie Stross tossed a few planet's worth of cold water on this:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke. Space travel is sub-light speed, and specifically takes account of time dilation as an integral part of telling the story.

Star Trek's warp drive actually does not necessarily move the ship at faster-than-light-speed, but by warping space-time around the ship ("warp bubble"), so only the effective distance crossed per time is faster than SoL. I'm sure many of HN's audience are already aware of that, but it's worth noting that this might in theory even be possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

There are lots of problems with this theory, but to me it's mind blowing that it cannot be fully excluded yet. I guess we will need AI superintelligence to find out.

Now this is rumor but I understand that through CERN particles were measured to be travelling faster then light. Just sayin....

Politics could resign us to an alien invasion?

I mean, cash could also appear from thin air on NASA's front lawn.

a shred of ancient spacecraft wreck would suffice

Back cover: Picking up where the last novel concluded, Grogdar continues negotiations to amass the requisite votes for an invasion. Plutar, still with a majority in the Dkystfit's upper chamber, seeks to block her.

Spoiler: Not much happens in this book. But maybe in the next!

It's inarguable that the final probability of contact is the product of a large number of non-certain events.

By that metric alone, and given that the probability of each of realistically pretty small... contact doesn't seem too likely.

Reflects on how we see ourselves doesn't it?

It won't be scientists because they won't want to alter what they're studying by revealing themselves.

like that time I investigated ant hill with my magnifying glass

> That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about.

Which is the opposite of what world leaders actually want. Jingoism is the name of the game right now.

I think competition might be more effective than cooperation when it comes to space exploration.

Martian soil contains non-neglible amounts of phosphates[0]. Phosphorus is highly important for the production of fertilizers and gets increasingly rare here on earth[1]. It wouldn't suprise me if 150 years from now, phosphates are imported from martian soil.

[0]: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html

[1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full

One "resource" that might justify a human presence on Mars is its relatively weak gravity well. Combine that with fuel production, and you are looking at Mars being the gas station to the solar system.

There are certainly places in the solar system that do have valuable resources and the fuel to trawl around the asteroid belt would be a lot cheaper if it could be lifted from Mars rather than Earth.

Not saying it will happen anytime soon, but that may be what the future holds.

Speaking of Great Space Ideas(TM) that I was incredibly excited about in highschool, whatever happened to space elevator research?

Here's the article from which that graphic is sourced:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-i...

I'm shocked that they are so brazen as to frame one of the categories as "entitlement spending". The neutral terms for the contents of this category are Medicare and Medicaid, pensions, retirement benefits, Social Security, welfare, and unemployment. You can also call them health insurance, retirement insurance, and unemployment insurance.

Technically, retirement benefits are things to which retirees are entitled to. Workers took lower-paying government jobs after weighing the value of the salary now against the value of the promised pensions later, or contributed to Social Security (not so much a choice by individuals, but a choice by the government of the past) which allows them to take the benefits of the program now. This is the literal meaning of the word "entitle", not the pejorative that it's become.

As far as health care and welfare go, I would argue that simply being human in a wealthy, modern society ought to entitle people to the right not die on the streets of preventable causes. I don't regret my tax dollars going to those causes, except insofar as they exceed actually providing health care and instead enrich the bureaucracy and megacorporations that are paid to provide it.

And the issue with this is the health care system, where the private companies get all the healthy individuals who can pay premiums, but the government has to pay the bill for those who can’t.

Single Payer would be less expensive than this.

What a terrible chart. By overlaying rather than stacking the areas it looks like almost all federal expenditures are now "entitlements"! Here's a stacked area graph since 1962, which makes clear that we've basically traded military spending for health care for old and disabled people:

http://www.painting-with-numbers.com/download/document/184/1...

I don't think that it's correct to say that NASA is getting less and less funding. At least according to the data on Wikipedia, NASA's budget has been between $15B and $20B per year in inflation adjusted dollars for the last few decades, and so increasing a bit most years to account for inflation.

The only budget metric that has been dropping has been NASA's percentage of the federal budget, and that's more due to the huge growth in federal spending rather than any decrease in the amount of funds that NASA has available.

because space is more than us and it isn't us. It gives us a non-nation based activity to pursue that is greater than the whole of earth. It represents new frontier, new resources and ways of thinking that transcend this planet. It is a form of evolution and of freedom that isn't shackled so much by our self-made problems of earth. There are new mistakes to make and that's super appealing.

I think that trying to reach difficult goals will spark new innovation. Also, it's not like there's a direct trade off.

I don't get it either. When it comes to manned spaceflight rationality goes out the window. Humans living on Mars makes about as much sense as homeopathy. I think it's some kind of nerd religion.

>Space hostile

Earth is hostile, too. A large part of human civilization is dedicated to making Earth more hospitable for humanity than it is in its natural state. We can do the same for space.

>Space empty

Only in a sense that a large container with a single fist-sized diamond is empty. It is empty on average. It contains an incredible amount of resources. Our solar system could easily house trillions of people (in O'Neill cylinders).

>for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming

We already spend much more on these, than on space research.

Do you want to build a safer basket ? Or invest in two baskets and split your eggs ? To some extent that is one argument, however space research in it's own right has generated a safer basket as well, as most engineering research is highly reusable. A lot of environmental problems for example could be solved via space based power generation that is beamed down.

Do you have any idea how many of our modern technologies were developed as a direct result of the space program? New technologies were needed to go into space and many of them have become essential for our lives.

MRI, LEDs, Anti-Icing Systems, Artificial Limbs, Land Mine Removal, Firefighter Gear, Water Purification, Pollution Remediation, etc etc...the list goes on and on. Studies estimate a $7-$14 return on investment for every $1 of NASA expenditure.

Source:

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html

Space probes may be cheap but they are slooooowwww. Most of the research done by spirit, opportunity and curiosity could have been done by a trained astronaut in an afternoon. As an example, in its 2623 day mission, spirit traveled less than 5 miles. Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans.

Some of you may be thinking, 'Hold on a second, if you took the money for manned exploration and poured that all in to rovers, surely you would get even more science done than humans could possibly do!" Perhaps, but I would argue that the research done to support the manned exploration should be counted in the scientific haul. Meaning that currently, for ten billion dollars, we could shoot rovers to every corner of the solar system using current rocket technology. But if we spent that ten billion dollars sending people to mars, we would have to develop new rockets, new infrastructure, new habitation technologies, cosmic radiation shields and much more. All that technology, plus the knowledge we gain on mars would be more valuable than simply sending rovers all over the solar system, partially because all that new technology would probably make it easier to later send rovers all over the solar system.

In addition to the above, there is also the massive pr power of putting people on mars. Everyone in the world knows Neil Armstrong, but no one cares much about luna 2.

Space is empty?

I don't understand. In practice we have explored space to see new worlds. Things are far apart but there's lots of stuff in space.

Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright.

We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one.

If we don't get to space now, we will probably never get to space. Then it's only a matter of time until we get hit by an asteroid.

Or we'll just get killed by an engineered supervirus and skip the whole pre-industrial decay phase.

Going into space is our insurance policy.

Most people felt the same way about the Atlantic Ocean.

"Space hostile and empty."

This is a feature, not a bug. There is a small fraction of humanity that has the desire to do very hard and physically dangerous things. Another fraction who greatly enjoy empty spaces and prefer having great influence over the culture they live in. On Earth, very hard and dangerous can be found, but the activities are either recreational (mountaineering) or involve hurting other people (military, criminal life). Physical empty spaces are still around on Earth, but culturally empty spaces are gone. All land on Earth is either claimed by nation states or must remain unsettled by treaty (Antarctica). Have a small sub-set of humans desiring to leave the over-crowded tribe and cross that river, ocean, or desert for the chance to start their own tribe/civilization is probably necessary for evolutionary survival of the species.

Complaining about the waste in NASA's budget for human exploration, that I can understand, as they have not really advanced that cause since the moon shot. But to dismiss real human exploration all together ("drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration"), when a certain fraction of people need it for a fulfilled life, seems closed minded. Maybe a crack will form if you read this. With a world GDP of about 80 trillion dollars/year a few billion/year of public funds for human space flight does not seem unreasonable.

Part of the reason is the same desire to see what is at the other side that pushed seafarers, voyagers and adventurers for ages to travel across hostile oceans, mountains and deserts.

It is not that we "need to get drunk .. with romantic ideas of exploration" as a society; but as individuals enough of us do anyway. I personally see it as a good thing. We do need to watch the costs, which is why my hopes are with the industry or eccentric [bm]illionaires, not NASA which became very bureaucratic and risk averse.

It might sound trite, but the character from the Matrix played by Hugo Weaving related the Human Species to a virus. I think it's actually a startlingly accurate definition if you look at how we consume and expand, without finding a homeostatic symbiosis with the other forms of the environment.

It's in our nature to slash and burn and expand and grow, part of our DNA. Space tells people that they can continue being who they are, biologically, if you just find another world to find or build resources on. We want to be free to consume all we want, but want none of the costs or consequences.

Going to space is disaster management. By the time we find an asteroid that's going to cause another extinction event it will be too late to start space exploration.

Science that is "about sobriety and utility" is by its very nature focused on short-term, incremental gains.

> Space hostile and empty

and we have no guarantee earth won't become that way too.

If the worst should happen we will need to live without Earth or we will stop living. A big rock could come through any day.

I'm pretty sure the big reason Apollo was successful was that they had enough support to get the job done within that 8-year period. And, no surprise, Nixon's election heralded the end, although inertia kept it moving for a few years.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

The manned spaceflight portion of NASA doesn't really get anything done.

The area where they get things done is unmanned spaceflight. Politicians don't care for that so the people at NASA can just do their work without meddling.

I don't think they have got anything interesting done in manned spaceflight lately.

Yeah. You can see it two ways: The SLS is an embarrassment or an admission by Congress that they don't care at all about spaceflight.

It may work if during one administration they planned a program that is coherent and actually funded. All the initiatives over the last decade(s?) didn't make sense and were not even funded. In short, they didn't even try.

For some reason the unmanned missions are managed much better. I do a lot of reading about them and all the decisions, trade offs and plans seem to be the result of careful and realistic planning.

Also next year; James Webb Space Telescope.

The Moon has water ice in spots (and its low gravity and lack of atmosphere make that pretty easy to get into orbit) that could potentially be used to stock up a refueling depot for exploration further out in the system.

You could build a telescope there. Also managing infrastructure, survival, and resupply would grant loads of experience applicable to habitating Mars with cheaper fuel costs and a slightly easier abort option should something go wrong.

I think that it would be a good place to develop ISRU capability, to enable us to do further exploration targets in the future.

You misread the previous comment. The suggestion isn't a manned station around the Moon (which would have more negatives than positives versus existing LEO stations), it's a manned station on the Moon. There are plenty of reasons that having a base on the Moon would be useful. You can extract resources (including fuels, water, and construction materials) which would reduce resupply requirements, there's gravity which makes long-term habitation safer, and we'd start getting experience with manned stations that would directly transfer over to Mars. On a Moon base, if everything totally fails, you can always still get back to Earth and survive, or survive long enough for help to make it your way, so it's a lower risk than attempting to build a base from scratch on Mars. On Mars if everything totally fails, you're dead.

There's also the propellant depot scenario -- mine propellant on the Moon and use it to refuel ships that launch from the Earth. The Moon's gravity well isn't that deep and there are no atmospheric losses, so you can do farther/faster/cheaper launches using a smaller spaceship that reaches LEO mostly empty, then refuels at the Moon.

Getting to mars is not that much harder than getting to the moon. It takes longer but everything else is just a matter of more power.

Correct. In my post, I was assuming "lander" would either be a two-stage vehicle like the Apollo lunar lander capable of both landing and later ascending (with or without refueling) or a single-stage vehicle (like SpaceX is developing with ITS/BFS) that is capable of being refueled on the surface for ascending.

And yes, fueling up on the surface is a difficult problem to solve. It will involve at least extraction and electrolysis of CO2 from the Mars atmosphere (as NASA is going to demonstrate on the Mars 2020 Rover), but most probably will also include extraction of water, probably by using a robotic machine to dig up regolith (which contains at least 2% absorbed water almost anywhere on the surface of Mars) or buried ice, electrolysis of that water and reaction of the resultant hydrogen with CO2 from the atmosphere to make methane. (And in both cases of electrolysis, you'll be producing sufficient oxygen.)

This is, of course, partly why SpaceX is developing a methane-based engine for their next-generation launch vehicle.

But you have to develop the lander first otherwise you can't feasibly land enough equipment (using existing techniques limited to just a single ton) to refuel.

Yes it is feasible. The radiation regimes are not vastly different. They're within roughly a factor of two of one another. And since the transit time is about half a year, and we've had multiple people experience ~year-long trips in orbit at a time, I think we're well within our existing knowledge to say they'd do fine radiation-wise, though perhaps with a slightly higher risk than usual. Still better than being a smoker. That is not at all the showstopper.

If you choose to remain in orbit around Mars instead of landing, however, you'll be exposed to a higher dose. Mars' surface has a level of radiation that's below that of ISS plus contains plenty of material for shielding your habitat.

Therefore, the lander helps address the radiation problem as well by getting you down to the surface for most of the mission's duration (instead of doing initial missions in Mars orbit only due to lack of money for a Mars lander as is the current NASA plan).

(Using the ISS spare pool is only one possible solution, by the way, and not likely to be the most optimum.)

more manned money for NASA is just more pork for Alabama.

Use Falcon Heavy by SpaceX or New Glenn by Blue Origin for a fraction of the cost of SLS.

Orion may be worth keeping. It is limited to 4 astronauts which is probably too small a crew for a 2.5 year Mars mission. I do think that it could be built much cheaper, however.

With $10B and <10 years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA

SpaceX's ITS could be developed for a similar cost as SLS+Orion, while being vastly more capable.

That is insane. Take a USA tax funded public entity and spend the budget of it's most ambitious project in Israel or India. What are you talking about? And we already send money to Russia for Soyuz to get to ISS via ULA.

You want to outsource an incredibly ambitious space program to another country? That'll never happen and I don't know if it should either. Parts of it can be outsourced for sure, but that's it. Like Europe taking over parts of some space projects. Russia being paid for deliveries.

Keeping a geologist alive on the way and while there, and returning them, are a little expensive, though.

Very soon after the Wrights demonstrated their warped-wing technology worked, they were already trying to sell planes to the military. It didn't take long at all for people to figure out they could use airplanes for surveillance and bombing.

There's no such obvious commercial use to going to Mars. If you want resources, they're much more easily available in nearby asteroids.

Bill Nye is CEO of the Planetary Society, which has a very close relationship with NASA.

It would all go to my foundation.

NASA is made up of people, they can move freely. I just don't beleive in blind forced investment in a stagnant organization.

A not insignificant amount of SpaceX's funding (especially considering the critical time of that funding) is from NASA. They are also leveraging decades of NASA research in their engine and rocket design.

I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, and think they (and other like them) represent the future, but they have a little ways to go before they are completely financing their own R&D (at the moment they're still spending a lot of public dollars).

Given the huge investments NASA has made in SpaceX to date, I'm not entirely convinced that the split between public and private money in this space is as black and white as you suggest.

SpaceX arguably wouldn't be here today without NASA's cash.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-w...

Considering how little impact they've had recently with a $19 billion dollar annual budget, maybe what we're seeing is an administrative or leadership problem. It would suck for those involved if NASA got severe cuts, but in the long run the geniuses there would find jobs in the private sector like SpaceX and they could make a real difference.

You jest, but if I ever get the opportunity I will take a one-way trip to Mars without hesitation.

A better stretch goal would be to build a permanent presence there.