Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
buildtheenterprise.org
buildtheenterprise.org
A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69!
If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars.
But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit.
How. Incredibly. Disappointing.
I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas.
I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.
In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!").
Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer?
So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.
So the solution is to build a ship based on a design from 1965?
What you need is a space DC-3.
That's what needs to be actually built, but it's not how human imagination works. To capture imagination, you make people watch this:
http://youtu.be/_yijcWsLda8?hd=1&t=9s
or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DEw70LVWs
You need to touch the heart, connect with people's desires, emotions and dreams they already have. And be it or not, Star Trek, et al. is something that is closer to general audience than another rocket. I'm not saying "let's build the Enterprise", but we shouldn't ignore the popular culture vision of space, because it's mostly Hollywood, not NASA, who drive the dreams. Let's find a way to connect to that.
BTW., to remind everyone, the very first Space Shuttle was named "Enterprise" for a reason.
People (the vast majority, anyway) don't travel because they like to travel. They travel because they want to get somewhere. What excites their imagination is the thought of being at that place, not how they got there.
Part of the reason people aren't excited about space travel today is because there's nowhere to go. There's no orbiting low-gravity resort to vacation on, no Mars colony where Cousin Phil lives with his family to go to for Thanksgiving. And a big part of why those things don't exist is because getting people into space is a damn expensive and risky business, even today. If the only way to get to Disneyworld was to spend $20,000,000 and ride a thirty-year-old Russian relic, Disneyworld wouldn't exist either.
A cheap, safe and ugly ship would do a lot more to solve that problem than an expensive and beautiful one would.
So you're left with the question of which helps more: a beautiful/sexy vehicle, or safety and cheapness, the answer is basically one of detailed analysis. I suspect you're right about where the balance leans, but I also suspect it's possible to have both.
Partially because its tone didn't feel like a Star Trek intro, but mainly because it completely ignored the incredible achievements of the Soviet space program. You would at least expect a shot of Yuri Gagarin.
I felt something quite the opposite; I think that Enterprise intro actually best captured the spirit of whole Star Trek - the dream of exploration, advancement and excellence.
Fair point about the Russians though; they deserve more credit that they usually get nowdays.
Who cares what the public "could use"?
This is a self-defeating argument because you're starting with the premise that the govnermnet ought to be in the business of making people excited/happy, and then argue that therefore, we should build awesome space ships. Once that premise is accepted by society, it'll be all about wealth redistribution, healthcare, and regulation (and ultimately economic stagnation), and building space ships will be the last thing on anyone's mind.
This post also really bothers me because it's not like the public is a bunch of 4 year olds going "oooh, shiny." And if they are, we need to be finding ways to improve that problem, not playing to it. If society is that messed up, society is headed for the gutter anyway.
I'm not saying we should spend billions on pointless feel good projects, but if painting the space shuttle silver or making a robotic probe slightly anthropomorphic would convince hundreds of thousands of grade schoolers to stay in school and do lots of math, I think it's worth it.
And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life. It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.
1. I am not arguing that our evolutionary past should dictate where we explore. Rather, I'm arguing it must inform how we explore. Space travel is so lethal for our species that we are better off engineering machines, robots or beings that are specialized to operate in space.
2. The energy expenditure, economic cost and sheer distance of space exploration is many orders of magnitude beyond the costs of land, sea or air travel. Comparing terrestrial forms of travel to space exploration is disingenuous.
3. No endpoint. When the great explorers were trailblazing across the oceans there was a reasonable expectation of finding a suitable endpoint with fresh water, edible plants & animals, other people (!) and exploitable resources. With space exploration none of these things are present. We have to carry a suitable endpoint with us during the journey and plant it where ever we happen to land.
Expanding on that last point - imagine a specialized mars robotic explorer that goes on a one-way mission, taps in a sub-surface source of water, erects a basic greenhouse structure, goes into sleep mode for a few months, wakes up, plants some seeds, sleeps a while longer, etc. - it bootstraps a suitable endpoint for human explorers to inhabit years, decades or centuries later.
I was talking with a JPL engineer about SpaceX and he said something which really knocked me for a loop. He said "We don't live in space, we camp there." And by example he suggested what if there was no food, fuel, or running water in Barstow California. Everyone would have to carry what they expected to use from Los Angeles, stay for a while and then go back to Los Angeles to reload with supplies. Now imagine there is a toll gate on I15 outside San Bernadino that charges you $100M to use the road between LA and Barstow. Now what kind of town would Barstow be? A ghost town.
Space, and low earth orbit in particular, is the same way. We don't have any infrastructure up there. Just a single campsite. Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit. If you consider just that one problem, keeping fuel around. You see how far we are from living in space vs just visiting.
At $54M/pop SpaceX will make somethings a lot more accessible in space. Putting some infrastructure in space like a gas station and a space tug, will go a lot further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
It would have involved firing payloads out of a very large cannon, then firing a rocket onboard to circularize the orbit, so this is not for manned launch, but we should be able to ship bulk items like fuel, oxygen, and water this way.
Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit.
We also burned up a perfectly good contamination free vacuum-proof hull the size of a 747 fuselage that was already 99% of the way in orbit. (External tank.)
I was thinking of terming them a "second rate power."
Though you don't even need to look at what he did for Iraq, right? His first project launched projectiles into space for the DoD iirc.
Using the math from "Rocket Propulsion Elements" [2] it seems like for anything other than a needle shaped projectile it would not be practical.
[1] http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/01/navy_railgun_test_0801...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutt... Pretty much everything there is to know about rockets that isn't classified.
The lesson is: "Sell them what they want, but deliver them what they need."
http://si.academia.edu/RogerLaunius/Papers/93299/_Public_Opi...
Price, safety, quality of the trip? It seems a long way out before space travel is a commodity such that a large percent of those wanting to travel can afford to do so. The majority of air travel now doesn't compete on style of the vessel, does it?
We don't need this, it's silly, we should not be taking it seriously. We already have the technology and the know how to build cities in orbit and colonies on Mars, we should do that directly instead of being distracted by this side show.
Edit: If we gave SpaceX a contract for a trillion dollars (only payable upon completion of each task) we could probably have 10 million people living on Mars by 2030.
"Sci fi fans taking on NASA engineers is too funny, but also a waste of time. We deal with real hardware here. Locked."
Bingo. The project is to build a very poorly designed spacecraft to perform a mission it's not well suited to for a ridiculously large sum of money. If we're going to build a spacecraft to journey to Mars, we shouldn't force it to conform to a 1960s fantasy hull design.
The requirements for a manned Moon or Mars mission are quite different from the requirements for an orbital mission or a TV show.
$890 Billion - licensing fees to Roddenberry estate & Paramount
$67 Billion - overturning relativistic physics
Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.
It starts with google goggles, proceeds to more integration and then becomes us.
I wouldn't say no to assimilation when I think about it.
The Doctor starts the checkup and says "how do you feel?" and you internally think, "lousy! I need you to remove it, get it out, now!" -- but that's not what you say. Your lips articulate instead, "Doc, it feels great, I'm almost ready to check out and get back to work."
You live the rest of your life a prisoner in your own brain, which has been co-opted and taken over by the artificially intelligent electronics.
I'd genuinely rather spend my day chopping wood, picking fruit or fishing, but no, I'm chained to a desk in front of Visual Studio 2010 pumping out code to prop up the insurance industry.
I still don't know why I do it. Something has taken me over and it's not artificially intelligent electronics.
Such an "AI parasite" has plenty of machinery inbuilt in the brain to take advantage of in order to have full control without causing dissonance in the host. Indeed, not only will it likely be a path of least resistance, continued dissonance may cause enough mental instability in the host as to disrupt some emergent balance in the brain. This would have an overall negative effect on the user AI as to motivate it to choose to not make the extra effort required to have the human suffer such a disconnect.
The question then would be in whether thinking of the AI as other is valid instead of expanding the notion of personal agency to accept such symbiotes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Manip...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#The_p...
The meat bit isn't all that useful so we need to get rid of it. In fact it's a pain in the arse.
The thing that is superposed on top of the meat is the important bit, you know like CDs don't really matter but the data (music) does.
Imagine if you had 1000 hands that worked in -50oC to 300oC, another couple Tb of persistent state and a rewire which allowed you to do sequential calculations efficiently (rather than lots of useless parallel ones), oh and you never had to poop.
Mission Statement: "100 Year Starship will pursue national and global initiatives, and galvanize public and private leadership and grassroots support, to assure that human travel beyond our solar system and to another star can be a reality within the next century."
“It is proposed that the US dedicate .27% of its GDP each year to the NASA Enterprise program. To get some sense of what spending .27% of the GDP each year will mean, consider that between 1963 and 1972, during the Apollo era, the US spent on average .50% of GDP per year as shown in the center column in the table to the right. This is about double the level of spending proposed for funding the Enterprise program.
.27% of GDP will be about $40 billion for the year 2012. $40 billion is certainly a lot of money to spend – but it’s not that much when you consider that the federal budget in 2012 is $3700 billion ($3.7 Trillion). $40 billion seems like pocket change from the perspective of federal spending. $40 billion is 1.1% of the 2012 federal budget. This compares to an average of 2.8% of the federal budget which was spent each year on NASA between 1963 and 1972 as shown in the rightmost column in the table above.”
Ship mass: 85,000 metric tons, or 85 million kg.
Effective exhaust velocity: 150,000 m/s (1 g, or 10 m/s^2, times the quoted specific impulse of 15,000 s)
This implies a power requirement of 75,000 Watts per Newton of thrust--half the effective exhaust velocity, since we're in the non-relativistic regime. For details, see for example here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse
Thrust required: 1.7 million Newtons (quoted mass above times 0.002g, or 0.02 Newtons/kg)
Total power required for thrust: 130 billion Watts, or 130 Gigawatts, or more than 50 times the power quoted in the specs.
Am I missing something, or will this ship need 50 sets of reactors to power its engines?
http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum/build-the-enterprise...
The design, aside from the overall shape, is completely divorced from the design of the ships in the shows.
:P
to my knowledge they are used in spacecraft that can afford acceleration cycles that last several years and "rapid" maneuvers that last several months. ion engines produce very little thrust but for a very long time. i'm not sure how practical they would be for anything except a lifetime spent aboard a ship on a never-ending quest to reach somewhere distant.
which says a pound of thrust and Sun -> Jupiter (483 million mi) in 19 months and mars in 39 days (from earth i think). edge of the solar system is another 88.8 billion mi. that's a long time just to get out of the solar system.
i always imagined the USS Enterprise to be an interstellar ship. but it could work as a solar system taxi as well :)
Basically, humans develop true AI first in the form of positronic computers/brains. Then, the AI figures out how to make Hyperspatial travel work, something humans had been unable to do.
Obviously we're nowhere near that yet, but one can dream.
1. http://literature.wikia.com/wiki/I%2C_Robot (search for 'Escape' or 'the brain')
Those few new shiny F-35 Joint Strike Fighters will cost "an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050"
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/
And you expect to build the frickin' USS Enterprise for 1 trillion ?
What we need in space now is infrastructure. Unsexy, boxy, gantried infrastructure.
Why can't I get HD video from the moon without pointing a 20m dish there?
According to this release, as of April 2012, the money supply measure M1 (currency + check-like thingies) consisted of $1707.9 billion, of which $1036.9 billion was actual circulating currency (not in vaults). So, yes. There is roughly $1 trillion USD currency circulating.
If you include savings-account-like thingies, M2, there is $9842.2 billion in money.
What we need to get the public interested in space is realistic, achievable worthwhile goals. 'Building stuff in space' isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, hence the ISS is a waste of resources. Building rocket ships so they look cool isn't worthwhile either, hence the appalling inefficiency of the shuttle programme.
At last we're going back towards projects and goals that are based on actual honest to goodness good engineering, like capsules for manned space flight and Planetary Resources' sober plans for asteroid resource recovery. This is not a bad thing! The space cadets had their day and they blew it badly. Time for some proper commercial engineering to have it's chance.
Heck, assuming the funds are to be spend at a constant interval it is 150 usd/year. Which is a lot less than the wars have cost.
Building X 'because we can' is never as good as building X 'because then we can do Y'. Planetary Resources have it exactly right - find an economic imperative to go into space, and ingenuity will follow.
Getting back to the moon and/or perhaps chasing asteroids seems much more practical at this time I don't think colonisation of mars will ever happen unless we gain the capacity to build bigger ships in orbit of earth, it just costs to much to get things up there. If we can solve the issue of getting basic materials and manpower into orbit and then set up supply lines that do not involve earth then we will be ready to start making caravels instead of rafts.
A space elevator would presumably need to use a range of as yet non-existent and/or unproven technologies (very long carbon nanotube ropes, etc).
And if we can refine those materials from asteroids, that cuts the resource extraction cost as well - no need to ship it to orbit. (besides, what if the manufacturing technique for said carbon nanotube ropes require a weightless environment?)
There's even research into using the earth's magnetic field to generate electric potential this way.
Then of course there's the collision and weather and so on and so forth.
It hasn't. Read tptacek's link to see why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009591
But we have been trying to solve that problem forever. It is not going to happen. Ever.
So might we not have fun as part of the 1/5 who make it to space?
I wasn't implying that we should abandon all current space endeavours so as to focus on humanitarian causes. I wasn't even implying that we will never do any advancements in space exploration without first solving these socio-political problems. But I don't see the current first world countries and their resources as having the means to do what is envisioned in the article (which is a far cry from our current space programs).
And note that I wasn't only talking about the economic stratification. One fifth of the world might be in an economic condition where big space exploration would be feasible but do they have the right mindset, education and motivation? Are they willing to throw away their greed and nationalism and collaborate with the rest of the first world to reach another milestone? Do they even value such an achievement?
I myself am a great advocate of space exploration. I was merely pointing out some inefficiencies in our socio-political ecosystem that are holding us back.
What we need to do is sample return from the moon's north pole and see if there really is a glacier there!
Saying that a man should be allowed to dream big and NASA are the ones who we should be laughing at considering they currently cant even send a man 100 miles into space.
Hopefully Elon and the new generation of space entrepreneurs will remedy this over time.