Chandrayaan 1 captured by Moon
news.bbc.co.uk
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The last mission to the moon was in 1972, since then the technology for interplanetary travel hadn't advanced. There's so many complaints that there's no reason for landing humans on the Moon or Mars, and generally yes there's nothing there that a robot can't do. Except all the people stating this neglect the fact that there's billions of dollars worth of potential income tied up in what's necessary to get to Mars.
If humans can safely travel to Mars, then the whole prospect of space stations becomes easily accessible. Not to mention that finding a light weight radiation shield has applications all the way from portable x-ray machines for the third world to being able to efficiently build nuclear powered aircraft. Hell, nuclear ramjets have already been tested and low-weight radiation shielding could help push to a completely reusable launch vessel.
If we're looking for new places to live, I think on or under the sea is a more practical initial direction.
If you're wondering just how much 3 trillion dollars is, well that's like the entire cost of the Iraq War there in one rock. Hell, you could buy Alaska and still have like 2.5 trillion to spare.
This is the ridiculousness of the arguments against advancing space exploration and technology, because there's more gold in one rock than in the entire world. That's not to mention, there's predicted to be asteroids containing mostly platinum and even more precious metals. For an asteroid of similar size to 433 Eros containing only 10% of its mass as a rare-precious metal like platinum, well that's when you get the capability to buy out the entire planet.
So I call 100% bullshit on people claiming there's no economic incentive in space exploration. There's more precious metals than anyone has ever dreamed of, there just needs to be a little spending to get it. Once companies like Virgin and all the other ones trying for space flight and then lunar orbits, it isn't going to be long before one of them figures out they can get to a rock like Eros and mine the hell out of it.
The value of gold will only drop to slightly below the base price of every other company in the world. Once Mr Ore Processor in South Africa can no longer pay for his billion dollar equipment to sift dirt, then the price becomes fixed. It's like coal in the UK, there's still millions of tonnes of reserve, but until the price gets high enough there's no point in hell of mining it.
So yes, you can't sell 3 trillion dollars of gold in a single day and expect to get what it's worth at market value. The prospect is that, you could probably undercut every gold producer in the world and still make a tasty 1.5 trillion (or more when companies start going out of business) in the long run. You could run it like the oil industry, just supply enough to try and keep the price in a nice range for the foreseeable future.
Edit: My point is that you'll make far more profit mining it as pure gold than the current processes on Earth. From a little research, global demand is already almost 50% higher than the supply. So supposing you sell the global demand of 3800 tonnes per year at half current market price, would still be 50 billion dollars a year, every year for 30 years.
Hell, if we're outside the well anyway, we could build the flippin thing from concrete.
In short, mining space solves just about all of our resource problems, up there and down here, forever.
But you're right. What we get from space is intangible. And that shouldn't be underestimated.
Visionary projects expand horizons; they're the essence of life; And that's just what "we" need.
A Mars missions must be manned, for these reasons. Sending robots is killing NASA; the public isn't interested.
We don't need another burning Alexandria. We need a big project, we need growth, we need to show our vitality.
i agree to u.y all guys wanna go to moon or else.
to find helium3 or other fuel.
lot of people in our world is now under starvation.??
It's one of those tired old saws that everybody believes, but I never bought.
The mistake many people make is thinking that that success can be repeated merely by giving money to NASA. The success of the Apollo program as an incubator of scientific and engineering accomplishment was directly tied to both the sense of mission that the participants felt, and the fact that it was widely perceived as a race with a rival power with potentially apocalyptic consequences for losing.
It's not categorically impossible to create that sense of mission anew, but recreating the overall context would be difficult. The closest we've seen to public programs that capture the competitive juices of the participants are contests like the DARPA robotic vehicle challenge.
As I stated above, I think the Apollo missions were unique in their historical context and unlikely to be repeated as a model.
BTW, I am an Indian and extremely proud of the steps my country is taking towards the big league.
1. It's better to hack something than design for perfection. India had a number of launch failures prior to this success, but kept at it at low cost. They literally launched early and got feedback :-)
2. The cost of creating technology start-ups is getting lower all the time. India did this on the cheap and was able to piggy back on years of prior work. It would be interested to see a comparison of the cost of getting into lunar orbit between 1945 and today.
3. It doesn't matter who you are, it's what you do that counts.
4. There are some places in the world that are best suited for particular technology start-ups: Boston and SV for software, anywhere along the Equator for a minimal delta-v.
When it comes to hacking spirit, they are pretty good though: http://www.isro.org/newsletters/spaceindia/octdec2003/webpgs... [Transporting a Sounding Rocket nose cone on bicycle during the early days of ISRO]
The google bait you want is "Orbital Mechanics"
http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/chandrayaa...