Thankfully, we do have SpaceX et. al. who really are making some big strides -- but how do we multiply & speed up that effort? ... sorry, I'm being selfish, but I really want to go to Mars.
I think it's pretty much politically impossible. The first big space push was mostly a political pissing match (i.e. not really driven by doing it for its own sake). It's pretty easy to come up with other major challenges that most people will consider more important that also aren't getting funding ... so private industry looks more likely to get some traction. States might get interested if/when those efforts start to get more interesting or threatening.
Mars in your lifetime is implausible, but not impossible I suppose.
Chinese paper on plant-based life support systems for extended crew stays. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.12.426282v1
And then next one will be too, only with China
My understanding is that the Defense Department was interested in human manned spy satellites liked the planned Manned Orbital Laboratory early on, but that automation progressed to the point where it was preferable.
I think that's one thing people miss when they talk about lack of progress in space. We use space, a lot. The thing is, in terms of things we actually want to do, automated vessels work a lot better than manned ones. People who are focused on manned space missions aren't focused on space, they're advocates for one particular tech stack that's extremely inefficient at doing the things we currently want to do in space.
It's also beneficial if you want to start space mining, really essential for that actually.
You can easily do it without having objects in orbit. You can simply launch a ballistic cloud of debris at suborbital speeds and kinetic energy of the targeted satellite will do the rest. Time to hit could be shorter for an orbital system, but not significantly so. This is why I consider the recent news about the Russian orbital satellite killer to be a cheap fearmongering.
And then it takes a big rocket to get them back out of orbit. Such a waste of effort.
- Moon moves across the sky very slowly (relative to stars) which means that your spy satellite would have about 30 days to cover full earth, and would be able to see only a part of Earth at any given moment (theoretically half, but lot of it would be from very bad angles) - Moon is in an ecliptic? orbit, so spying on anything close to the poles will be from an angle - this might not be bad in all cases but the lack of flexibility is a big thing - Putting any mass on the Moon requires much more delta V than putting something in orbit. If you can put a big telescope on Moon, you can put several in Earth orbit or put one much bigger one.
Having capability to stage on the Moon would be interesting, especially if fuel can be made on the moon. It would be easier on human bodies and you have access to lot of resources. If you can find water and decent metals, that's a pretty good spot to fuel your rockets.
Moon is in an inclined orbit, which is slightly elliptic. I assume this is what you meant by "ecliptic" (which refers to the orbital plane of the Earth around the Sun). The orbital inclination has the most significant implications to Earth surface visibility, but the Moon is far enough that almost half of Earth surface is visible at all times.
For Earth observation, satellites are better positioned than a lunar surface observatory.
The moon isn't a great place for an outpost or staging point for exploration. Launches and descents are expensive and spoil all the savings. Maybe if LH2/LOX could be manufactured on the moon very cheaply (from water ice), it could make sense to do refueling for exploration vehicles parked on a halo orbit near Lagrange points.
But orbital refueling of cryogenic propellants (especially hydrogen) or manufacturing them on the moon aren't viable in the near future.
There aren't a lot of good economic or exploration incentives to go to the moon, unfortunately. It only has scientific and prestige value. The long lunar night (14 earth days) makes it a poor location for a permanent outpost.
All of that said, I'm all for going to the moon with humans on board.
About the ecliptic, I was trying to say that any observatory on the moon would have issues observing polar regions because the Earth surface in polar regions would be at a low angle. I know some spy sats "look ahead" to get better detail resolution but they have ability to look from different angles as well. Moon would be a bad spot for that.
Rest of it I mostly agree. One thing up to debate is whether an outpost on the moon would be useful. If you can manufacture fuel on the Moon, it would be very useful. Another aspect is human health in zero G. Moon with low gravity may be enough to help with long term human stay.
That's Earth's axial tilt of ~23 deg + the inclination of the lunar orbit w.r.t. the ecliptic of ~5 deg.
This means that when the moon is at its northest (above southern Florida), it has a pretty good view over the north pole (but it's at quite an oblique angle of ~60 deg), and the south pole is not visible. About 14 days later it's the opposite.
But yeah, I agree with the conclusion that the Moon is not a good place for a Earth observation for a lot of reasons.
The milestones that get people existed are when men reach places hitherto unreached, but there is no practical purpose to risking the life of a man who needs far more complicated facilities to survive, other than bragging rights.
The I.S.S. was largely a political and not a scientific endeavor, and it's a shame it consumed so many resources, that could have gone to more serious scientific efforts.
The cost of the I.S.S. could have easily given mankind nuclear fusion, — the ability to power entire countries with a couple of litres of seawater. It's strange where priorities lie.
There's no proof of this because viable nuclear fusion has not yet been achieved. Humanity may never achieve this for all we know (though I sincerely hope we do).
Making a reasonable estimate when both started, nuclear fusion seems to be a smarter investment, for if it finally be there, the benefits are incalculable.
"The benefits" are currently very calculable, and direct economics of nuclear fusion is very negative. (The research benefit is unique though.)
For nuclear fusion to be of incalculable benefit to mankind, we need insanely small nuclear fusion that is energy-positive and sustainable in a simple way. "Insanely small" means smaller than Moon-sized, when we know that Jupiter-sized is too small/light in nature.
Sustained nuclear fusion for energy generation still faces daunting challenges.
We clearly have issues with underestimating the complexity of these engineering problems and overestimating the pace of technological progress. I'd also argue, albeit more contentiously, that we systematically underestimate the utility of a physical human presence at exploration sites, and the cognitive dissonance of our biases cause us to scale back our ambitions so we don't have to admit to the limitations of the remote-controlled approach.
Exclusively committing to remote-controlled exploration also avoids the thorny issues around deliberately putting explorers into harms way or even actual harm. I think Musk understands, knowingly or at least intuitively, that the debate is basically impossible to have; our culture isn't equipped for it. Necessity will drive us toward human space exploration. Safety will be to some extent needlessly neglected, and then there'll be vigorous finger pointing and "I told you so"s after the fact--after the sacrifices have been made and after the benefits have been secured for all. Basically the same pattern will play out as with any other area where prohibition or abstention is the official choice despite its patent unviability.
The limiting factor is much more mundane. Getting humans to collaborate selflessly on complex projects is difficult. Effective communication in large groups is a massive unsolved problem. That is what holds us back, not engineering complexity. Perhaps the true genius of SpaceX is using Mars to bring people together. Something the bean counters at Boeing never thought of!
This is only true if you were sampling the people trying to build them (which is mostly what the popular press did). Really there wasn't anything like consensus, but there was a lot of optimism.
Do you say that to mean 'anyone living's lifetime', or on the assumption that GP was alive for the 'moon landing 51.5 years ago' mentioned?
I just told my youngest kid this the other day:
When I was his age (~25 yrs ago), my dad told me with a bit of a sad look on his face, "I hope we return to the moon within your lifetime." At the time, I kind of laughed because, hey, we're sending people to the moon CONSTANTLY. It took me a minute to realize that I was sorely mistaken and that we haven't sent a human to the moon at ALL in my lifetime. I was taken aback.
All this history about Neil Armstrong and the Apollo missions and the space shuttles -- we even got to see from Cocoa Beach a shuttle launch on a family vacation. So much of it even from MY DAD's youth, him telling us about when he got to hear the famous "One small step for [a] man" live from his Scout Jamboree trip. All of that, and we haven't actually been to the moon in decades? It totally blew my mind.
I think before that moment, I must have assumed that it was Real Soon Now before we'd have a permanent base with people living and even being born. And to learn that we sort of gave up...
It's not unlike when I was six and remembered reading about fully autonomous cars that were coming Real Soon Now, too. Thirty+ years later and that reality actually seems farther away than I had imagined despite the actual progress we've made.
>The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 35 km above the Earth's surface.
With supersonic retro propulsion on a rocket that can be reused.
How do you then have enough fuel to leave?
You don’t, so you need to make the fuel with robots landed on one-way missions first. Luckily there are plenty of raw materials on Mars (in the atmosphere, soil and water deposits).
It’s very hard but it’s certainly doable if you can do the first part.
Luckily we have SpaceX.
If you want to have an industry of people who make X, then there need to be people employed making X, every year, for decades. And at more than one company, so that it isn't too fragile a career path. When X is single-use rockets there is the advantage that after one flight you have to re-build, whereas when X is tanks (or other long-lasting hardware) you have to choose to throw the old ones away.
The taxes raised to pay for SLS actually are screwing over the rocket industry because companies actually getting things accomplished have to compete for the highly trained engineers and scientists being wasted on SLS. There's no amount of "trickle down theory" that makes the SLS a net gain for society.
The space industry is one of the major resource sinks that prevent runaway economic growth that would destroy civilization as we know it: the so-called "economic supernova".
The natural result of scientific progress is a kind of economic singularity beyond which is entirely unknown territory. What happens to our civilization when the primary underpinnings are obviated by technology? No one knows.
So, NASA, FAANG, the Financial Industry, most of the lawyers, accountants, and bureaucrats, etc. are just make-work jobs to occupy productive people to keep them from inadvertently causing the apocalypse.
(FWIW Bucky Fuller calculated that the inflection point to runaway wealth was in the mid-1970's. We're fifty years over due for the end of history.)
http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html
Men on the moon was just a gimmick. I'm pretty excited by all the stuff we keep sending to Mars. There's another rover landing there in just a few weeks' time.
It's not just NASA and SpaceX. We've recently seen Israel go to the Moon, Europe and India go to Mars, Japan return samples from an asteroid, and China return samples from the Moon. Who knows what one of them will do next. The only value I see in having people on the Moon or Mars is in working towards a permanent colony that could eventually become self-sufficient. Anything less and what's the point? We have robots to do almost all the stuff humans used to be needed for.
Space is making progress at incredible rates right now. It's moving faster than it ever has in history. So I'm not sure what the issue is.
https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-opt...
(similar to, but not the same as, zero attenuation fiber optic from the fictional book Artemis by Andy Weir) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_(novel)
It ain't The Martian, but if you like the hard sci-fi of The Martian, Artemis is more of that (except with a touristy moon base).
"Using estimates for the theoretical loss limit of ZBLAN glass, a 2,000-km length of ZBLAN fiber could have the same optical loss as 10 km of silica fiber, which would be an extraordinary performance gain."
https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zb...
"Fluoride fibers inherently provide naturally a much wider bandwidth than silica with up to 100x usable number of data channels, <2 petabytes per second of data with no amplification for 1,000km or more and no need to carry power for said amplification lines. By comparison, current undersea cables use one repeater for amplification every 100-150km, at a cost of ~$1M each."
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
There's a lot up there but it's still not that big and there's limited space for new arrivals. SpaceX largely exists because of the government contracts to launch to the ISS and for various NRO launches there's not enough public need for launches alone to sustain a rocket industry is what I mean. Especially for human launches, the only reason to have a human rated orbital capsule is to service the ISS.
Also, the free market would never have built a design like the space shuttle. Pushing very heavy wings and landing gear into space doesn't make sense and never did.
Musk figured out a far better way to make a reusable rocket. All it needs is a bit of extra fuel that is burned at the last second.
(Playing the Lunar Lander game in college, I soon realized that the minimum fuel burn to land it was to fall ballistically and go to full power as late as possible, hitting 0 fps just as one touched down.)
Where the 2nd space shuttle was the fuel tank, and it lands somewhere down range, and is then transported back to the launch center by barge.
I think it might be time to accept that in these cases its pretty often not the inherent efficiency of the free market - which can often be less efficient than alternatives - but the ineptitude of the US government and it's agencies as far as doing things efficiently.
There are US politicians and functionaries that admitted publicly that they made the government less efficient for ideological reasons to make the free market look better.
That doesn't mean it was profitable. The price could have been set for political reasons. Or it could have been set by the marginal cost of the launch, ignoring entirely the development cost that was written off when the USSR collapsed. Or it could have been enough to simply pay for the weight of the astronaut in a rocket that was going up anyway, like a hotel will sell rooms at a deep discount just to not lose as much money if it cannot otherwise. If communism produces goods and services cheaper than the free market, we'd be awash in Soviet goods.
The US government produces goods and services at "cheap" prices, but the losses are made up for by the taxpayer.
> which can often be less efficient than alternatives
I'd like to see a case of that.
Which we aren't, because they're undercut by Chinese goods...
Well, perhaps I should have tried living in those fantasy Soviet Unions some people on the internet love so much. Those must have been magnificent states!
That said, it is certain that the soviet system was suboptimal in a great many ways.
But, crucially to the fact at hands, 1960s' USSR produced better rockets to send people to the ISS, at a lower cost, than 2021's USA, so there something beyond the free market in this particular case.
Also, Falcon 9 wasn't the product of a government contract.
Source: another anecdotal evidence, my youth lived under the horror of communism.
See: FDR New Deal / The Green New Deal
It's also the framework I think of when I use my own phrase 'New New Deal', as in a jobs program that focuses on building fresh public infrastructure (not-broken window jobs).
>The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 35 km above the Earth's surface.
Said another way, such a mission could probably be completed with one or two falcon heavy launches. That's basically equivalent to 3-6 falcon 9's worth of fuel, and a falcon 9's fuel cost is something like $200k. So, $600k-$1200k in fuel.
A spaceship system actually suitable for going to Mars would probably use cheaper fuel than falcon heavy. By the time it's actually built, though, inflation and politics will have made the fuel expensive again. So my best guess is a cool $1million!