If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
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In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc.
Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending.
This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.
Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars and cars were not meaningful competition.
These days cars are affordable, and light rail has to be better than cars to be competitive, and do so well enough to entice a significant portion of the population out of their cars to be affordable. In practice this means dedicated right of way, which is far more expensive to purchase and fit out as a rail line than just laying some rails on an existing street. And of course modern safety, environmental and just plain bureaucratic regulations also inflate the prices of public works considerably compared to the good/bad old days, particularly in the US.
Sidenote: so do many modern tram systems.
That disadvantage is actually a good thing when you're buying real estate, a bus route can change but my tram stop has much more permanence.
It also doesn't have to be an either/or thing, my local trams are dedicated in large parts but on road where congestion is lighter.
I'm aware of those factors, but I still think we took a wrong turn. Maybe not in the US due to the population sparsity and sprawl, but in Spain and many other European countries, if we could connect every town or city of more than 10K people by either rail, light rail or tram (instead of having spent billions on highways), that would cover 80% of the population. A large majority wouldn't need a car, and could instead use Uber-like services for the last mile. Pollution and emissions would be much less of a problem, and quality of life in cities much better.
But that's what happens with gradient descent, it can lead you to a local minimum...
There is an element of busywork too: local officials are always elected by promising change, they have to be seen doing something. So on odd years they put in something, and in even years they take it out...
They wouldn't need it, but I bet that majority would still want it.
* car sales do not drop, they oscillate depending on various governments subventions;
* vehicle fleet keeps rising (albeit slowly because the market is saturated);
* car owning per household has always been and is still on the rise (despite household size constantly decreasing);
* the distance travelled with cars keeps rising as well.
And visually, the amount of cars parked in the streets and along roadsides becomes insane. You already thought it was full 30 years ago, but now it is fuller.
Oh, and the cars become bigger every year. Not American-big, but still, on the way to it. For example, pickup trucks never took off in the French countryside in the last 50 years, not a single bit; but for a couple of years, it has started :-/
1) "suburbia" is now a thing in Europe too. Regular people cannot afford to live in city centres, they are the preserve of the wealthy. As population grows, more and more people are pushed further out, and they adopt suburbanization: big malls that cannot be reached if not by car, semi-detached houses in gated communities, etc etc. That's a lifestyle built for cars.
2) People will buy what manufacturers will sell. In a global market, car models are increasingly built with more than one country in mind. Inevitably, US tastes loom large.
3) The Hollywood influence cannot be underestimated.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/NY...
It's more like the area from New York to Boston
I'm sensing a bit of a Catch-22 in this hypothetical: How would the success of Uber-like services been impacted if 80% of the population no longer needed cars?
That's a convoluted, backwards and very funny way of saying "taxi". :-D
1) Communities were more local and relevant than today. This also means travel was more local and relevant.
2) Trams didn't have as much competition with other viable, automated means of transport.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_and_Old_Dominion_Ra...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/02/1...
Relatively modern cities, especially north american ones, would have grown along with the tram network, adding on "streetcar suburbs" as the city grew.
For example if a neighbourhood comprises of one major street lined with commercial with residential everywhere else, that was likely once a streetcar line.
At some point these cities threw out the trams and replaced them with buses and cars, but these cities weren't designed for that infrastructure.
Newer cities that are designed around cars are unwalkable stripmall deserts. It will be much more difficult to turn these into walkable transit oriented communities.
I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and economy and I'm sure it does. But work a soup kitchen for a day and you'd realize we have economies of wealth built on the back of despair and hopelessness.
Our society needs to change to be a space faring one. Maybe I'm stupid and a traveling to space would initiate the change we need. I just can't see how.
Those few people who are going to soup kitchens are typically so crippled by their own internal issues (e.g. mental illness, impulsive criminality, addiction, total inability to manage money) that their productivity is extremely low or negative. Nobody's taking anything from them because there's nothing to take.
In fact it's the opposite of what you said. It's the people in the soup kitchens who are living (e.g. eating soup) on the back of the healthy, productive people running the economy. Just ask: Which group would suffer more if the other group disappeared?
And before those full of moral rage jump in here, no, I'm not saying they deserve to suffer, etc. They don't. But nor is the underclass a productive group being forced to hold up the wealthy. It's not the medieval era any more; in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability.
They're also, you know, human.
I blew several hundred dollars on air travel this weekend, for fun. People in soup kitchens are not living on my back. They're maybe living on my pinky nail.
Mental illness and addiction, btw, are illnesses. They're no more "crippling internal issues" than, say, diabetes.
>air travel for fun i too enjoy living in an economy that has certain segments that are wildly productive.
>mental illness == diabetes a comment like this must stem from a complete lack of contact with the homeless. i am not virtue shaming you at all. the homeless, as a crowd, can be very off putting. This does not negate their humanity, but it definitely dictates which segments of humanity they regularly interact with. . my time amongst the homeless was a painful and informative experience. if you move around their world, you start to realize just how many of the street fam are where they are by choice. incompatibility with family or community, perplexing and unsettling addictions, habits, and proclivities (i thought people shooting up was going to be bad, but the eating of trash, hair, and feces was far more disturbing), and deep seeded mental trauma make many of the homeless community unreachable by the vast majority of society. the point is, there is no simple solution for outliers when we believe in the primacy of all human life. our society is an inevitable hierarchy, but our values preclude us from instituting a codified caste system. The homeless i encountered, lived with, and eventually fled from see no place for themselves in society in a general sense. specifically, i had conversations with erudite winos and brilliant heroine addicts, their cognitive assets hampered by their chemical addictions. i also got assaulted and chased by 20somethings with wealthy and compassionate family members who would wire them money and beg them to return. then there is of course the individuals who cannot speak coherently, which is a surprisingly huge barrier to community interaction. mental illness and addiction are illnesses, but MRSA and poison ivy rash are both "just" integument afflictions. Calamine lotion (handing out spare change, deifying the retched at snooty parties) will not help a staph infection.
Countries spend all kinds of money showing off their genitals in much worse ways. Think North Korea's nuclear weapons, or any of the Western nations' colonization follies.
How much has been spent on Olympic games in the last couple of decades? Would that be enough to get us to the moon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_the_Olympic_Games
Given the double-digit billions in operating budgets per game, we could probably get a Mars program going for the cost of two or three of those games.
The same way, launching the first Sputnik was a demonstration of military prowess: see, that thing flying over your head could be carrying a spy telescope, or a nuke.
None of this applied to the Moon landings.
For strategic / military reasons (money no objective) we can achieve much more than if profit is the only motivation.
[1. need a better source?] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/if-the-moon-...
Edit:
Elon Musk: With New SpaceX Tech, Rocket Costs Will Drop By A Factor of 100
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/908254079092002816?ref_s...
Also analysis / spaculatoin for BFR. Keep in mind we're only talking about sending stuff to Mars, not retrieving it. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3343/1
Edit 2 federal court set the value of the moon rocks at $50,800 per gram based on how much it cost the U.S. government to retrieve the samples between 1969 and 1972.
https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting-apollo17.ht...
And of course, as Andy Weir has been saying, tourism could be a major economic driver once reusable rockets get cheap enough.
So I think Musk is actually wrong when he says that he can BOTH send people to Mars super cheap with return tickets AND that there could not possibly be something of enough value on Mars to return to Earth even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?) prepackaged on the surface (gold is $35,000/kg or something).
...not that I expect a vibrant Mars export economy or anything. Musk's basic point about not expecting Mars to fully and profitably pay for itself with physical exports is correct.
it's $100k+ retail value, but wholesale value is much below that, more in line with gold.
Which is a bummer. The only thoughts I have contra that are that it's only expensive if you count the cost of the infrastructure - given that moving resources from outside of Earth to it isn't super unattractive.
Second it's possible that costs should be viewed not just Earth to outside of Earth but also outside of Earth to outside of Earth. That is to say mining water on the Moon doesn't make sense if the destination is Earth - it the destination on the other hand is another part of the Moon there might be some logic to it. You could in theory be cost competitive with the Earth as you don't have to get it out of Earth's gravity.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin...
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I think the report in question is "NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Conquering the Challenges of In-Space Manufacturing":
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011108
These may also be interesting:
"NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Overview and Update", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011109
"Additive Manufacturing for Human Space Exploration", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011644
The primary blocker for a rotating station as far as I know has been the mass requirement. If you have a structure above a certain rotational speed with a radius that is too small, the occupants are likely to become nauseous. From the research I've seen, the minimum size for a viable rotating station would be about 600 tons[1]. Moving that amount of mass into orbit would have been extremely expensive, but Falcon Heavy could launch it for under $1.5B, and the BFR for even less.
[1]: http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/GlobusRotationPaper.pdf (page 22)
Some rare earths are getting close to being worth it. That why a few companies are looking at nearby asteroids to see if they have enough of them.
But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months.
None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of.
Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's.
A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations.
And (personal opinion here) society as a whole is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.
In the moon race, NASA is so burdened by legacy wages and other costs AND the fact that Congressional opportunists grab the money that NASA was prevented from that course.
The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?
The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways.
Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether.
In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.
.. but not, as you pointed out, the biggest expense of all in the military.
The way back to the moon is the same reason as America went to the moon in the first place: competition and colonialism. As soon as China or India look like they might go back to the moon, the space race will resume.
Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won’t be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch will cost about $2B, and the first version will only put in orbit about the same amount of cargo a Falcon Heavy will for $90M.
The SLS won’t ever be canceled despite its awful economics because it’s diverting billions to favorite contractors like Boeing. That’s the problem. NASA could buy launch capacity for a fraction of the cost using commercial providers, but key congressional districts get no windfall from that.
The issues causing the debt are much much bigger problems that last centuries and are largely Republican-driven. They are things like overspending on War, keeping the poor population poor (war on drugs, cutting education spending, etc), that keep the population of the US unable to earn money and pay taxes, etc.
The problems are large and structural and they are not with NASA or their decision making. They are with Republicans.
Secondly, we are spending more on education than virtually any time on our history.
Thirdly, Obama was a democrat, at times had political majorities in congress, yet he never pulled us out of Iraq or Afghanistan, because it would be politically unpopular, and cost significant democratic party funders billions on contracting revenues.
Trump says he would cancel the F-35, but dame thing, same reasons.
Imperial congress has a turnover rate akin to the members of the communist party in the glory days of the USSR. They are all professional politicians who get re-elected by voting for what their financial backers want.
>republicans aliens dude meme We have gone 8 + 8 + 8 with 16 of those being Democrat president and ~10 of those being Left controlled congress. As you put it, the problems are large and structural, and the idea that the fault lies with one party, regardless of their actual hold on power, is preposterous in a deliciously propagandistic way. The War on Poverty, an abject failure, was started by a Democrat. The EPA was started by a Republican. The military industrial complex was basically instituted as well as exposed by the same guy, a Republican who came from a traditionally Democrat organization. Arguably the most ardent leftist president held power for more than 12 years, fundamentally changed the nature of commerce, raised a massive army, and freedom'd the shit out of half the globe. If you only see republicans as the problem, then you are going to generate a narrative that ignores many relevant factors. Just my .02
Edited for spelling and format.
Economically, this 20 trillion of debt reflects the private sector's desire to save as much as it does the US government's desire to spend.
It is economically damaging to remove treasury instruments as a savings vehicle. We have already seen what happens when the interest rates on them are plunged to zero - asset bubbles popping up all over the place.
There is no theoretical reason why local currency denominated debt instruments cannot keep being issued indefinitely. Only cretinous goldbugs and other people who do not understand how money works try to argue that there's a solvency risk.
The overall federal budget was much smaller then, too. If we take the peak cost of $3 billion/year, adjust it for inflation (about $23 billion/year), and divide it by the current federal budget, it would be 0.6%, or the equivalent of $5/week for someone earning the US median income. How many people spend that on "wants"?
And, it probably wouldn't cost nearly as much if you did it today. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket would only cost $10 billion total, and it would easily be capable of lunar missions. SpaceX tends to miss their time-related goals but hit their cost-related goals, but even if they're off by a factor of 2, it's still way cheaper.
Obviously we don't want to spend even that much, collectively, on doing it, otherwise we'd be doing it. But IMO the "what percentage of your savings would you invest in this?" question just shows why we should. It's utterly insignificant on the scale of national expenditures, and the results would be far better than you'd get from another squadron of F-35s or whatever.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-...
The national debt is mining resources needed for current operations from the future, rather than drawing down the stockpiles of those already mined from the past.
Claiming that debt is wealth is mistaken at best, and fraudulent at worst. Please reexamine your premises and analysis before repeating it.
Treatment of debt is at around minute 54.
I highly recommend exploring other macroeconomic theories. It is depressing how many of them amount to tricking productive firms and the labor workforce into believing a big lie of some sort, that allows some other more savvy entity to siphon value away from them.
Consumption is paid for by production. Imports are paid for by exports. Debt now is paid for by production later. Savings now is paid for by production earlier.
In theory, you can build an economy upon debts and repayment of prior obligations, but in practice, human beings are great at lying and making false promises.
It won't do me any good to read more of your favored economic theory if I disagree with its fundamental premises. And I do disagree with them. Therefore, I will also disagree with all conclusions logically derived from them.
That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained.
If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no.
If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter.
However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.
I grew up with Moonbase Alpha (although I am not expecting to be thrown into space by a major explosion) and want this as much as anyone else but is there any reason (mining, strategic, know benefits to research) which justifies the price?
The whole reason that NASA stopped innovating after about 1972 was that the costs were unsustainable.
I would love that we are the point where we need a base on the moon, but I don't know what would justify it other than tourism and we aren't that rich and it isn't that easy and safe just yet.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#Loss_of_political_suppor...
THIS kind of thinking is our problem imho - we are living in rich times and we should start behaving as such! We have more of everything than we need. Yeah, there are children starving or dying of preventable diseases somewhere in the world, but guess what, even if we'd be 10x richer there will still be. Or we'll whip out a world war or some runaway next gen bioweapons instead to ramp up the killing that way. That's who we (Homo Sapiens) fking are!
A space race would be a pretty awesome way to encourage competition and progress on a scale similar to that encouraged by the last "world" war. But no, instead we'll go for the "mass-surveillance-technology supremacy race" or "best AIs for trading race" or the "let's pretend energy is scarce and price-war on in while talking about solving climate-change race"...
GROWTH and EXPANSION are our only reasons of being and our own authentic good motivations as human beings, and infecting as much of the cosmos as possible with ourselves, aka "space technology" development should be our core drive as a species!!!
I personally believe in what I call natural next steps. I.e steps that are naturally extending previous ones.
To me, the next step is making the space station much more robust.
And focusing on AI might actually be a much smarter move as it might allow us to build a secure and stable moonbase before we could do it using humans.
So it's a very complex discussion where priorities might sometimes look like they are ignoring something like a space station on the moon, but actually end up being a better choice because it will allow us to get there quicker.
This never works... People need to be forced into developing solution by creating more problems while solving existing one. Like "shit, the mars colony got wiped out by a diseases, no more humans to repair the stuff there, quick, figure out how to make robots that make more robots themselves, nothing else fits the budget". Or "shit, we underestimated the effects or magnitude of cosmic radiation on colonists, gotta accelerate work on those cures for cancer or we're fucked".
And "alternative priority" things like AI or, dunno, cancer-research, will never compete for the same money bucket as space exploration. They'll likely end up receiving significantly more money since space exploration will just increase their value by orders of magnitude. Economy is never a zero some game like "spend money on this vs. that" if you play it on a large enough scale since most stuff is either in excess of "creatable". Only real finite resource is "space you can practically reach to fast enough". Too bad some people have started to actually believe the made up rules of our "economy game".
Hmmm... now that I think about it, maybe our "economical game" is the problem: we've developed it so much, with manufactured needs and manufactured scarcities for the purpose of "hacking people into working the hardest they can", but now it's kind of turned against us. Maybe we need some serious rewrite of the code of global economy to start making the things that are technically possible actually possible...
Yeah, I know this kind of thinking... To many people have it. Hopefully I can try to "cure" at least a few from the "need for things to make sense" and to teach them to think more from the first principles of physics and the givens of biology. That's the only thing that needs to make sense.
Fixed that for you.
I love space much as the next guy, but i dont see why the government has to spend considerable sums for it. The only purpose for space is science, either aplicable to science in general or to the military, but im sure its not cost-efficient for all the science there is to be made.
So if people love the space, they should pay for the things they want to be done out there. No reason for Nasa to not crowdfund or SpaceX to get private money to build something. The people that want to go to space or get space stuff get what they pay for, and the people that dont, dont.
I dont find it reasonable to think someone making very little money has to pay taxes that somehow fund Elon Musk's journey to Mars.
No, it's not. Fuck science, it's just a tool. The goal is GROWTH and MULTIPLICATION and CONQUEST! We should learn to be proud of our "viral" nature and start acting more like it. If we could do the same with "magic" or religion or whatever, then we'd do it using that...
Someone has to pick up that bill.
I am sure we will get a base on the moon with time but technologically we aren't there yet.
Let's focus on build a solid and habitable space station then we can use some of that knowledge to establish a base on the moon. (once we have solved the resource issues)
I'm not opposed to an "ISS 2.0", but how much more would we expect to learn from it that we don't already know? I think it's already time to go to the Moon and/or Phobos.
We have plenty to learn when it comes to building not just habitable space stations but also comfortable ones most of which will be easily transferable knowledge to a moon base when the cost of construction have come down signiticantly by the means of ex. space x or even a space elevator.
There are so many things we could be spending money on which would make a moonbase way more likely to happen than just skipping over a lot of intermediate steps to get there.
Planets will have different g's so first making things in zero-g work seems to be a much more solid approach to developing a long term space program.
If you want to spread you need to learn how to deal with being surrounded by space and a space station is the best way to do that short of sending people out in space arks.
I don't think that follows at all, because I think engineering at 2g or 0.5g or even 0.01g has a lot more in common with engineering at 1g or 0.15g than it does with engineering at 0g. Zero-g is qualitatively very different from non-zero g; stuff like room design, plumbing, HVAC, material constraints (the need to avoid things that can powder) are totally different.
> If you want to spread you need to learn how to deal with being surrounded by space and a space station is the best way to do that short of sending people out in space arks.
Within the solar system all journeys are relatively short and it's ok for spaceships to not be closed systems. For interstellar travel I think space arks will be necessary anyway. There's no really plausible way to get to another star in anything short of multiple decades.
Those are mostly things that can be explored on earth, no need to build a moonbase to figure that out.
The opportunity with a space station is to figure out things that can't be explored realistically in other environments.
"Within the solar system all journeys are relatively short and it's ok for spaceships to not be closed systems. For interstellar travel I think space arks will be necessary anyway. There's no really plausible way to get to another star in anything short of multiple decades."
So it's much more useful what we learn on a space station than what we learn on a moon base. Being in space without access to any resources other than what you already have is a much more important thing to solve and solving that will allow us to reach other planets much easier, cheaper and safer.
I really don't see what advantage a moon base is giving us compared to a space station for now.
> The opportunity with a space station is to figure out things that can't be explored realistically in other environments.
The best way to explore the things we're going to need to live on other planemos is to live on another planemo. A space station involves solving a bunch of engineering challenges that are different from Earth, some of which are relevant to living on other planemos and many of which are not. A moonbase gives us more of the challenges we care about and less of the ones we don't.
> So it's much more useful what we learn on a space station than what we learn on a moon base. Being in space without access to any resources other than what you already have is a much more important thing to solve and solving that will allow us to reach other planets much easier, cheaper and safer.
Again long-term life on a space station has a bunch of challenges that are just irrelevant. To spread to Mars we'll need a moonbase-like environment on Mars - one that has access to rock and some chemicals, not floating in empty space - and while people will need to go to and from there that's a matter of surviving in space for months rather than years, and frankly seems like something we could already handle. Similarly spreading to the Jovian system and so on.
No matter what planet you need to go to you need to spend a lot of time in space. Furthermore no matter what planet you would want to explore you would need a space station to explore from. It will also be the best way start the exploration as you can use your knowledge from the space station we have on earth.
So no matter how you look at it, in space in zero-g is going to be the majority of the endeavour.
Furthermore, we are simply not even close to be able to live realistically far from earth let alone able to afford it.
There are so many things that need to be established before it becomes realistically sustainable and safe.
Days for the moon, months rather than years for Mars, and we've already had people on space stations for that kind of duration. 3 years for the Jovian system which is a step up but not a huge one.
> Furthermore no matter what planet you would want to explore you would need a space station to explore from.
I don't see that at all. Unmanned satellites would make sense, but the surface (or possibly an aerostat for some planemos) is always going to be a much more human-friendly environment in terms of gravity and radiation shielding.
> It will also be the best way start the exploration as you can use your knowledge from the space station we have on earth.
This is circular reasoning.
> Furthermore, we are simply not even close to be able to live realistically far from earth let alone able to afford it.
Which is why the moon makes sense as a next step. It's challenging but doable.
Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable.
Two weeks a month on the dark side of the moon.
"I don't see that at all. Unmanned satellites would make sense, but the surface (or possibly an aerostat for some planemos) is always going to be a much more human-friendly environment in terms of gravity and radiation shielding."
You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it.
This is circular reasoning.
Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then.
The knowledge we have obtained on earth will help us when we put stations in orbit around the planets we want to explore.
The more solid we can make those stations the better for everything else.
Which is why the moon makes sense as a next step. It's challenging but doable.
No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds.
Days versus hours - exactly. A step up in risk, to be sure, but not a huge one - realistically there aren't so many problems that won't kill you in the hours it would take to get home from the ISS but will kill you in the days it would take you to get home from the moon.
> Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable.
Space stations aren't profitable either. It's not about profit, it's about humanity spreading through the cosmos.
> You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it.
So how does a manned space station help with that? We already have satellites orbiting Mars and acting as communications relays.
> Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then.
"Knowledge of space stations will be valuable because we will build space stations because that will let us reuse our knowledge of space stations" is textbook circular reasoning.
> No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds.
So how do we get to there from here? I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first.
Suppose the goal is Mars, or one of the Jovian moons, or Titan. How would an ISS 2.0 put us any closer to getting there than we are now? What is it that we can't do now that we would want to test out with an ISS 2.0?
We're going to need surface habitats on these places, and building a surface habitat on the moon would let us test out the technologies and engineering that needs, in a place that's - relatively speaking - much quicker to get to and from, so safer and easier to iterate on. While a space station tells us some things that are relevant to building surface habitats, most of the things it tells us are only relevant to space stations. I simply don't see the need for long-term-manned space stations, and medium-term-manned space stations we can do already.
Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction.
They help by being a habitable space station which can be docked with. It might even be a place to escape and wait for rescue if something goes bad on the planet a much cheaper way to rescue than having everything based on the planet.
"I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first."
It's not about corporate profit-and-loss it's a matter of making it unnecessarily expensive.
There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon without any point that isn't mostly already solved by the ISS.
We need to learn how to build habitats off-Earth, out-of-atmosphere with all that entails (e.g. handling fine sharp-edged dust), and outside the van allen belts. And these things need to be closed systems that can be inhabited for decades at a minimum. At the same time, they'll be under nonzero gravity, and they will have access to bulk matter. That's a very different set of engineering challenges from a space station.
> There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon
But the cost-reduction techniques would be very different for planemo-surface bases than for space stations. E.g. a popular proposal for cheaper space stations is using inflatable modules to save having to ship up building materials, and that's a good idea for space stations. But on a surface under gravity, inflatables might not be structurally rigid enough, and building structures from the local soil might be a better option.
We have no idea so actually establishing a base on the moon isn't yet cheap enough that we can do it for the hell of it and we don't learn enough we aren't already learning with the space station.
Let's solve getting people and material cheap into space, lets solve better AI, lets have some optimal automated building processes on earth then we can talk about moving people and material up on a base on the moon just for the fun of it.
Whether on a planet or in space those challenges aren't much different and whatever you gain as knowledge on a space station you can apply to a moon base later on.
Furthermore, the challenge of building a space station and not suddenly run into budgeting or construction issues is many many many many times higher when it comes to establishing something on the moon.
Each new learning that could be done on the space station will come as at a much higher cost doing something we don't have good enough technology to do with-in a realistic comfort zone.
If you like me believe that technology is the primary forcemultiplier for any realistic development into space the trick is to focus on developing within our comfort zone, until we it within our comfort zone to risk a next step. Then you will actually end up with a space station much faster (and a mars station and an out ring station and a space ark etc) because of the exponential force of technology.
And if you aren't... haven't we already done that with ISS?
We haven't made space travel safe enough yet, we haven't made enough progress on habitats in space.
Plenty of things to figure out and a space station is by any means a much more effective way to do that both financially, when it comes to speed of iteration and ability to course correct and focus on improvements.
Ultimately it's being driven by congressmen who only care about getting their kickbacks and it's being developed by ULA, an anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed, who only care about profit. And the companies themselves are also falling apart. This [2] is Lockheed Martin's CEO. One of the largest aerospace companies in the world is headed by a person who has absolutely no background whatsoever in aerospace or related technologies. Until 2015, this [3] was the head of Boeing - same story. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Boeing put an aerospace engineer in charge - they have sharply changed their direction and competitive outlook.
We have an increasingly corrupt government contracting work to companies who are driven only by money. Musk's success and the government's success in the 60s have something very simple in common. They were not driven by greed or short term self interest, but big picture ideology and aspirations. And it seems the whole notion of aspirations, beyond earning lots of money, is something that is somehow fading in society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Launch_Syst...
> NASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself.
"NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency."
As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.
On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.
An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.
(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")
"Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..."
But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.
There's a lot of institutional inertia and forces opposing any change (and change itself is just churn).
The science side of things has a much better track record, but the interplanetary stuff is done by JPL, which isn't really NASA, and most of the rest is mostly a-political (modulo the Earth sensing stuff, which I'm continually surprised isn't cancelled for global warming reasons).
Then there's private enterprise, which seems to be doing better. But I'm not entirely comfortable with the "Guilded-Age" model of development.
So, I dunno.
Edit: when I wrote, "Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out...", that should be "pointed out to me".
PS. You may have to do the search in incognito mode as it might log a cookie that you've visited the page already.
And somehow we have the gaul to wonder "why is going to the moon not working?"
Its almost like we're asking for something for nothing. Scientists and Engineers need to eat too. We need to buy new hardware. Train new people. If we wait too long, Musk will buy Cape Canaveral. We've already let Houston get turned into a museum rather than a launch pad.
I dont care how much you're gonna blame bureaucracy for this - this is poor leadership at the helm of our nation to gaslight folks this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Oppositio...
We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are lower today than they were in the 1960s.
[1] http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF-R...
They could print as many dollar bills they wanted until the Nixon shock.
That ended, and as a consequence the economy is not doing as well right now.
If not but because of exclusive deals (e.g: oil) it would be very hard to justify the dollar current value.
Some future cost estimates on getting there: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/27/world/blog-what-econo...
We have plenty of moon rock to run experiments on.
Any micro/low gravity experiment can be run cheaper in LEO.
There aren't any valuable resources there to exploit.
It's a bit like asking why we don't build a habitat on the bottom of the Marians Trench - we COULD, but why WOUDL we?
(Asteroids might serve better, though: a wider variety of stuff, comparable in energy cost but farther away.)
I wish the damn article would link to this new report, or at least give me the keywords to search for.
We go to the moon because materials are cheap because... we want to build what?
To send larger probes around the Sol system. To build larger orbital laboratories, LEO or otherwise. To build all supporting infrastructure for that. To manufacture things that benefit from microgravity conditions (like optical fibers, see [0]) to be used both on Earth and elsewhere. To enable large-scale Mars missions, including eventual habitation. To eventually access more raw resources than we've ever imagined.
--
Oddly, that's the more practical of those suggestions, because forming a few kilometers of perfect glass by letting it cool while dropping would seem to require a tower impressive in its own right... More relevant, there are QA demands with fiber-optics that don't seem to jive with a "let it hit the ground and throw out the lumpy ones" approach, much less the handling while in full gravity (which is where the issues are).
For example, the last resupply mission of Space X to the ISS included an experiment to product optical fibers onboard the space station, the goal is that these fibers will have a much lower number of defects in their crystalline structure then their earth produced counterparts, this means less refraction, which results in less signal loss over a longer distance which reduces the number of repeaters which reduces increases the overall signal speed.
Now, of course if you wanted to deploy these things on a world wide scale you'll need to set up a bigger shop then the ISS - which most likely will go out of service within the next decade anyway...
And while the moon does not provide a free fall environment such as LEO, the gravitational influence is still much lower than on earth itself and scaling up on a surface will most likely prove easier in the long term than doing so in orbit around the earth.
Barring drastic efficiency increases in launch technology (to a Star Wars style level of ease) a lunar base is essential to enabling a space economy not suffocated by heavy shipping and transaction costs incurred by the cost of fuel and launches. When the cost of shipping materials around in space isn't drastically more expensive than Amazon sending you a package, then you'll find out exactly what we want to build.
Also, it would take a lot more than just sending people there for them to be mostly be self sufficient like in the 17th century, because: - there is no oxygen, - there is no food, - there is no water, - there is no magnetosphere.
There is [water on the moon](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/multimedia/featur...).
With oxygen, water, and power, we can make food.
Appropriate radiation shielding is a matter of construction, which could occur on the moon itself using local materials ideally, or building underground enough to be shielded.
Moon habitation is something that makes little sense for its own benefit, but immense sense in an orbital supply chain for... I dunno... harvesting a few trillion dollars worth of minerals.
Space exploration will not be easy. Navigating accurately across thousands of miles of ocean on [a homemade raft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation) with only a coconut named Wilson and your hands isn't easy either :)
And carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium...
The lunar surface seems to have these elements in short supply, though C-type asteroids can provide many of them.
Good luck!
And I think my vision, and Elon Musks, has something more like autonomous driven lunar vehicles powered by machine learning and mesh networks for robust exploration. Like... 15 Teslas talking over wifi but with no traffic, no time limits, no pedestrians, no speed limits or laws against having jump rockets...
I totally agree we have to build PoCs, and test new equipment, and do science, and do engineering. But most of the "hard parts" WRT to survival have been done on earth [for a poor ROI on earth!], and the really hard parts WRT time differentials and manufacturing look very much like self driving cars and robots made for the moon or mars. Teslas and Foxconn, friend. Europa is just... what we do every day in Subsea exploration + what we do every day with our _amazing_ rover program.
I'm not saying we're there tomorrow. I'm saying that if our robots are there next week making oxygen generators and water pumps and harvesting and collecting, with steady resupplies of better robots and smarter factories, we could Kerbal ourselves f-ing far. H2O is rocket fuel - pure delta-v. Independent mining robots could extract the raw ore for our Expanse/BSG-ish space fleets over the next hundred years, and your grandkids could figure out how to spend an asteroids belt worth of mineral fortune :)
There are many Billions being spent on this pursuit today, in 2018. Cynicism aside, sometimes the VCs know a thing or two...
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[0] - https://www.inverse.com/article/33556-asteroid-mining-multi-...
No it isn't. Exploration of the new world offered obvious substantive benefits - the trees alone were priceless to a countries that had to manage forests very carefully, not to mention new and useful crops coupled with an abundance of land. In short, it was a no-brainer.
And it was extremely cheap compared to building space infrastructure, since food could be grown or purchased from the natives, there was air, sunburn was the only radiation problem.
In space we'll have none of that. There are unsettled regions on earth far more hospitable to human life than anything we'll find outside our gravity well. The idea we ought to sink trillions of dollars into and infrastructure to produce things that are already good enough is hard to justify.
Ships, structures, and anything heavy that we could avoid pulling out of earths gravity well would be big cost savers if we're putting around the solar system or putting up shop anywhere.
There are also some high-energy applications that could get dicey on earth but wouldn't be too bad to setup on a neighboring geographic area with no atmosphere or food chain to worry about.
Oxygen generators, habitats, water refiners, nuclear reactors... Ideally from autonomous building robots, these would be the foundation of long term habitation.
As far as I understand, in terms of easy access, yes - in particular resources that on planemos tended to sink to the core as the object formed and cooled down.
> I think an orbital station is also more attractive than the Moon from a delta-V standpoint.
LEO? Not necessarily. You still need to burn your way up the pretty steep gravity well.
Both the Moon and the asteroids are vital components of expansion into the Solar System; they're interesting in different ways.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#/media/File:Del...
See also this subway-style ∆v map of our system (inspired by a similar map for Kerbal Space Program): http://i.imgur.com/AAGJvD1.png. I feel it would work great as a poster on a wall.
The map really brings home the point that "Low Earth Orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System".
I mean, we burn piles of money just for fun. May as well burn a pile of money to put someone on the moon again. Doing it just because we can is a fine reason.
"Still got it!"
One tweak, though. Rather than forcing them to find a reason to go, i.e. gathering moon rocks, they should just let the astronauts play around. That's the goal. Go there, then turn on a webcam and romp around for a few days.
That would get the world thinking. And that'd be pretty cool.
It might get some baby boomers excited but I'm not sure about younger generations. It doesn't feel like an exciting, impossible mission today.
True for one side of the moon. The Far Side of the Moon (the part that never faces the Earth) is still mostly an enigma. It looks very difference from the Near Side and while we have mapped it, we don't have samples from it.
I would say a lunar mission is still called for, but for the Far Side.
That is what China's upcoming moon mission might be aiming for [1]: Chang'E 5 will conduct a sample return mission late in 2017, and Chang'E 4 will carry a rover to the far side of the Moon, the first mission ever to do so, about a year later.
[1] http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2017/20170920-cha...
I'm a Mars first guy but going to the moon would require building up vital tech in launch and space habitation.
Also its false that 'we CLOULD, but why WOULD we' the fact is currently NASA simply can not do and all their efforts to work in that direction again have pretty much been failures.
This is overstated. We could build a habitat on the moon. We cannot build a habitat on the bottom of the ocean; that's much, much more difficult.
Cost per kilogram delivered to LEO:
Saturn V (used for the Moon landing mission): $8,250
Falcon 9: $2,700 (price for an expendable launch)
BFR (hypothetical, in development rocket): $500
Just because it's cheaper to take the bus downtown doesn't say anything about the cost of airfare to another continent.
IIRC: Saturn V could put 100k pounds in lunar injection. The first SLS will be around 50k, the Falcon Heavy around 40k.
Layer versions of the SLS, should we choose to spend more tens of billions developing them, will eventually have Saturn V capabilities.
The BFR (as planned) will be the largest capacity rocket ever made. Putting 300k+ in low earth orbit. It’s designed to be refueled in orbit, so essentially it’s lunar/mars injection orbit payload caisvity is 300k+.
It’s also designed to be fully reusable, unlike the Falcon series that only reuses main boosters. So it’s claimed to be far cheaper than them, and they are already the most affordable rockets ever made.
The SLS is designed to be crushed and melted like a beer can after every launch, which is why it will cost $2B+ per launch.
Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion. By far the most expensive parts of the mission were the Apollo spacecraft (the Command Modules, the Lunar Modules) and the monstrous Saturn V launch vehicles. A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars.
In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today’s money). Compare these costs to modern day space travel, where companies like SpaceX charge just $133 million to launch a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The Falcon Heavy, which will be comparable to the Saturn IV, will be in the same price region.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-la...
SLS: $15,000
Falcon Heavy: $700
The truth was it’s stack had massive launch capacity, over 200,000 lbs. but it was almost all used up by lifting that space plane. A higher launch rate was never really possible. The solid boosters weren’t reusable without a huge amount of work, and the shuttles needed lots of maintainance between flights.
The BFR is designed with theses lessons in mind. It’s fully reusable and it’s seconf stage should be way more efficient. But we will have see how much maintenance it will require between flights.
(Though there is potential for another military race there too - the first country to put a deorbiting system on a near-Earth rock wins.)
I agree with you when we get to the offensive use of weapons. Though the US is only one of a number of players in that field.
Military competitions is what gave us microwave tech. Doesn't mean that if world peace suddenly happened, we would stop producing microwave ovens.
There is no price on the far future events, such as bollide strikes. If there where, suddenly the moon would have holiday resorts.
Though this is not caused by the religious aspects of modern capitalism, but by its core mechanism of work - people are forced to work on what earns them and protects their short-term profit (poor people to eat, rich people to not become poor people).
There seem to be only few people on the planet with simultaneously enough wealth and focused will to tell the market where to go, as opposed to being directed by the market - I'm thinking about people like Gates and Musk. Fortunately, one of them is hell-bent on getting to Mars; without that forcing function, we'd probably be talking about scrapping ISS by now.
(I don't feel like you can blame situation in NASA purely on capitalism though, at least not directly. They don't play the capitalism game. But they are controlled by politicians, and politicians play the capitalism game.)
This game involves people acting with self interest, and relates in some ways to access to/control of resources. This is the case regardless of economic system.
"Capitalism is moloch, yes, but government is also moloch. Anarchy is also moloch."
> Reaching the moon already was only done to compete with a faction outside the reference system.
Yes, going to the moon had to do with geopolitics but all this stuff about the 'reference system' is nonsense. Any geopolitical opponent could have led to the same result.
> Without commies to race and lean against, the western system decayed to just another nice decorated, well managed cotton plantation.
You are again trying to shoehorn your larged philiosophy about 'modern capitalism' into the argument. First of all it is absolutly clear to anybody with idioligical glasses on that NASA started to perfom less well long before it was clear to most people that the Soviet system was going to collapse.
NASA was young, flexible had lots of budget and thanks to a set of luck circumstances. The reality is that NASA has been burocratiesed and and largly been controlled by congress and presidents trying to use NASA for anything but space exploration.
Non of that has anything to do with the Soviet Union and some problem with 'capitalism'.
> There is no price on the far future events, such as bollide strikes. If there where, suddenly the moon would have holiday resorts.
Just like in democracy things only happen if large numbers of people can support it, neither capitalism nor democracy has done mutch to defend against meteors.
And nowdays it is actually capitalism that is driving the push towards people living of planet.
(Actually, the Tesla is 'just' going into a heliocentric orbit with it's apogee around the Mars orbit. That is sufficient to prove that it can get to Mars because it's just a matter of timing, which is relatively trivial, but it doesn't crash into another Planet and upsets planetary protection officers - yes, that's a job)
Ergo, space exploration technology should be a priority, even at massive costs, and even when those cost are measured in human lives and human pain and suffering. This, plus "defeating aging", plus "achieving superhuman general-purpose intelligence" (either by augmenting/improving human I or by developing AIs). Almost nothing else matters besides these. What fucked up global leadership did we end up with that they seem to have completely forgot this?
Who knows if we'll ever be able to actually get outside our local system, but we're never going to figure out how to do it if we can't even setup shop in the cosmic equivalent of our front yard.
People telling you things may not be particularly strong evidence, but you should still probably update your beliefs at least a little.
The large majority of people here are based in facts instead of religion and dogmas. As a fact-based society, we should be able to look from a distance and re-evaluate the facts with a colder perspective.
From what I observe, every year we are either 5 year away from settling on the moon (or Mars), every year there are nn reasons why it didn't happen (loop and repeat since the last 50 years).
Very few doubt the fact that selfies of astronauts smiling directly at the sun are possible (without injury).
Very few wonder why the first landing was a success, right on the first try even as other agencies (SpaceX) iteratively fail on the first runs.
Very few ask why the the original recordings don't exist any longer, only botched TV recordings.
The effect of radiation outside the earth shield is simply too strong. We have always sent animals during any space milestone before humans. Look up what happened to them, if you can find the records.
I'm an engineer. If possible, would like to see humans on the moon during my lifetime. Instead, we are taught that the sun orbits around the earth and burn apostates on the public square. We can do better.
Happy 2018! :-)