The Europa mission is real and could very well happen
blog.chron.com
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Even more, it's continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA's space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don't have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.
Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.
I think that's an exaggeration, no?
The only way for a present Congress to bind a future Congress like so would be by way of a Constitutional amendment. That seems like overkill.
An alternative is giving NASA independence in the model of the Federal Reserve, FDA, or NIH. This is more workable. The problem is the public doesn't value space travel per se. There are sound economic reasons for maintaining an independent central bank. Voters understand the benefits of better medicine. But space travel is less accepted in itself. It is pitched as an article of national prestige, or as a way of encouraging other technological development.
At its core, NASA suffers from an asset-liability mismatch. Its liabilities, missions, carry decade-long terms. Its asset, Congressional funding, comes in election cycles. A myopic NASA, considering only projects realisable in the current election cycle, would be disastrous. Moving to locking in, each year, NASA funding for the next N years seems like a good first step. It avoids the messiness of NASA's year-to-year budget variance. It also side-steps the politics of granting NASA independence.
This would almost certainly be the best way forward.
NASA must remain an American company, headquartered in America, with (SOME_NUMBER)% of its workforce living and working in America. The highest authority at NASA is its version of CEO, and something like a board of directors. Their decisions outweigh political decisions. The board of directors may not be more than 20% (some arbitrary percentage) made up of people with a non-technical background.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
It would also be resisted at least as much by members of Congress who represent NASA's contractors, besides just its facilities (like Dana Rohrabacher, the congressman from Boeing). On the other hand, it would also naturally be supported by members of Congress representing at least some NASA centers and contractors who would clearly gain from the move.
A reform like this will also be boosted though by SpaceX as it keeps accomplishing more and more on a comparatively low budget, making forward-looking technologies readily available of its own volition (Grasshopper, Falcon Heavy, methane rocket engines that can use Mars in situ manufactured fuel, etc.), and creating more and more embarrassment for the traditional space program and its contractors (like the Senate Launch System (SLS)), and forcing everyone to ask, why can't NASA do that? Hopefully they will eventually shame Congress and the President into reforming NASA into a professionally-managed organization, i.e. reforming away their own control over it and making it more like a Federal Reserve for space exploration.
Not necessarily. Any constitutional amendment should be vague enough to survive for long periods. It should not even mention NASA, but make the exploration of Earth and other worlds something legislators cannot easily cut in favor of more convenient short-term gains and remove politics from technical decisions (which is what made the shuttle the sad thing it ended up being).
The amendment idea was actually a very clever hack.
This would operate like the National Highway Trust Fund, which helps maintain the interstate highway system and is funded through a fuel tax.
Because the money comes from a tax dedicated to the purpose, congress doesn't get to change the funding formula every time they pass a budget. While a future congress could dissolve the fund, that's a lot bigger step than adding or deleting appropriations during the budgetary hog-trading process.
But things are looking up and the biggest change is in launch costs. SpaceX thinks they'll be able to operate a reusable Falcon 9 for $5-7 million per launch. That seems crazy but if you look at the math it's pretty sound. That sort of change, with a first generation reusable vehicle even, will revolutionize spaceflight, especially unmanned space science missions. It'll make it possible to fund small space science missions using crowd funding. It'll open up interplanetary science missions to a huge number of colleges, universities and research organizations. A lot of the cost of space missions comes about due to the high cost of launch carrying through to every aspect of the mission (if the launch costs $200 million then you can't just launch a $1 million spacecraft, that's a waste, you also need to have a very high (say >90%) chance of mission success so you engineer accordingly).
Within the next few decades there will be fleets upon fleets of science spacecraft looking at the stars and roaming about the Solar System.
Space.com called it "awesome" and "stunningly realistic"[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report
[2] http://www.space.com/21247-europa-report-scifi-film-trailer....
0: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Europa_Report/70276016
1: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_s...
The mockups of mission branding and press conferences were rather well made though, so I can imagine why you'd get that impression.
One thing I liked too was that the crew was not composed of abrasive drama queens, which is refreshing considering the genre.
The depiction of space hardware is actually awesomely realistic (to some level of detail) but I don’t recall anyone praising it for realism beyond that. Because it very much isn’t. (Still, getting the actual space hardware right is something not many movies manage to pull off and pretty impressive on its own.) I don’t think it matters very much or reduces the enjoyment very much. This movie is very much not about space travel.
Europa Report is a bit cringe but probably the best you can do with that kind of budget and in that respect it’s pretty and also pretty realistic.
I can't imagine an astronaut praising the "physics realism" of the "buffeted by the wind in space" moment that caused the death of the male character. His momentum had clearly been completely stopped by the tether, but instead of rebounding back toward the other tethered astronaut (as had happened multiple, more realistic, times earlier in the movie), some unknown force kept pulling him away until at last the tether came loose. If the setting were terrestrial the force would be inferred by most viewers to be the drag of a moving fluid such as wind. What similar force exists in space?
I don't complain about the presence of unrealistic space plot device in unrealistic space movie, but there it is.
EDIT: Go to the movie with this exact shot to see what I mean: http://www.spaceanswers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Gravi...
(from this article: http://www.spaceanswers.com/space-exploration/3802/16-things... )
Normally neither do I, except if the movie's marketing made it an issue. I never actually researched realism claims about the movie (as I said, it came up during a discussion with friends, two of whom cited two different articles where astronauts had testified as to the accuracy of the movie's physics) until now. I have to say that claims of realism are in fact mostly confined to headline writers and journalists quoting astronauts out of context, for example when an astronaut referred to "stunning realism" of the special effects, that got mangled into "astronaut praises stunning realism of Gravity".
Reading the actual reviews, I still believe that misleading claims were made, but apparently experts were mostly quoted creatively.
Clooney throws off his tether which causes three things to happen:
1. A small amount of seperating momentum to both Clooney and Bullock, pushing Clooney further away and slowing Bullock towards the ISS.
2. Halving the force needed to stop Bullock's movement away from the ISS.
3. Freeing up Bullock's hands to improve her attachement to the parachute cord.
I have no idea if the math works out but I don't see the theoretical problem with the situation physics-wise.
Anyway, just looking at the previews I saw a enough holywood physics to give the thing a pass. The way the ISS was destroyed looked cool but the physics was terrible.
I suspect most people have similar pet peeves. I remember watching a action movie with an ER doctor once. They had the same sort of reaction but with the long list of injury's people would end up with. Or how many tech people get offended by computer techno-babel in movies.
They are shown rotating slowly, so it's sort of possible given an elastic parachute cord, but it's awfully contrived. You also have to wonder, given how slowly he drifted off, why Matt couldn't unstrap that empty thrust pack and use it as reaction mass, as Ryan does with the empty fire extinguisher later on.
The bigger gaffe for me was Matt's instruction to Ryan, right after the first hit, to detach from the arm on the grounds that it would carry her too far away. That makes no sense at all. Detaching won't affect her velocity except to add a sizable random component based on the point in the arm's rotation where she detaches, and since he's already lost sight of her at that point that's going to make her much, much harder to find.
All pedantry aside, loved loved loved the movie. Certainly the film of the year for me, and possibly the decade.
Infact, after Clooney's character unleashes himself, Bullock's character recoils back, which seems to agree with my elastic theory.
With a sub-billion dollar budget, the achievable science objectives would be severely limited. It would probably still be worth it -- these days we have to take what we're given.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Jupiter_System_Mission
(Wait, this is not Slashdot. Are these lame jokes allowed here when they are relevant? I know the site is moderated, but I don't know its netiquette rules. )
This judgement of what constitutes an advanced life form sadly carries a cultural component. If we encountered our own species at the very beginning of its intellectual journey, would we have labeled them a civilization? Would we have described them as having human-equivalent intelligence? It's tricky. But then we move hundreds of thousands of years ahead and suddenly there are monumental buildings and clever machines, suddenly you can meet individuals with astonishing capabilities, and now it's very easy to categorize them.
So if our hypothetical space Euroctopus species is in its early intellectual development, we might not be able to correctly attribute their intelligence. There's always the possibility of that development being stagnant too, and again we'd have a difficult time recognizing that. Therefore, the only real chances at discerning an intelligent civilization would be by either directly observing its behavior or by looking at the capabilities of their tools.
http://www.studenthandouts.com/photo_gallery/Pics1/MiddleAge...
There are alternative weird metabolisms that don't use molecular oxygen, but they are used by bacteria. Also the eukaryotes can do some metabolic steps without oxygen, but these steps don't produce too much energy and they are mostly used as an emergency energy sources.
If you were from a world where photosynthesis is rare and not very efficient, or maybe not present at all in nature (like Europa's dark oceans?), you would probably assume that no large organisms could use such a weird and inefficient process as an energy source, whereas in an open sunlit ecosystem like Earth there are lots and lots of photosynthesizing organism.
(I give the example of photosynthesis because it's actually a very complicated process: in order to achieve the kinds of efficiency that they do, the systems in plants and algae use very complicated mechanism that exploit even obscure quantum effects that are probably not used by any other biomolecular systems - there are studies using quantum tunneling to explain some properties of the molecules involved and others that talk about states similar to the ones in superconductors to explain some of the couplings and efficient energy conversions!)
For example, it's very difficult to make a family of many complex stable molecules without carbon, so the "organic" chemistry of other words is probably based in carbon as our organic chemistry. Moreover, organic chemistry actually means "carbon based" rather than "life based". Many of these carbon bases molecules are built also by inorganic means in other words and in deep space. It's possible to make some complex molecules with boron and nitrogen, but most of them are not stable enough to bet your life on them.
Other main detail is that you need some very energetic reactions, like combining the hydrogen in a molecule with oxygen to produce water. (The smaller example is CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O, but methane is not easy to store, so most of the time earths life depend on the combustion of more complex molecules like sugars of fatty acids.) It's a matter using oxidations and reductions to obtain energy in a weight efficient way. Oxygen is easy to distribute, big organic molecules are easy to store and use in chemical reactions in controlled setting.
So if you want to find whales, look for oxygen. In Earth's atmosphere is easy to find some strange non equilibrium mixing of oxygen from plants and methane from cows. (In any case, most of the oxygen and methane on Earth is probably produced by bacteria.) If you are really pessimistic, look for any anomalies in the spectrum.
I checked Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Potential_for_ext... . The article says that there are oxygen molecules in Europa! Mostly produced by the decomposition of water by the Sun's radiation. Someone estimated that the concentration of oxygen in water is enough to support fish equivalents, but it's an estimation not a measurement, and estimation are usually optimistic.
I think Star Trek IV actually made a good point. When deciding how to deal with alien sentients, observe how they deal with alien sentients. Human beings do pretty poorly in this regard. Imagine our finding sentient cetacean analogues under Europa's ice. What are the chances that whaling industry lobbyists would try to have them classified as animals to avoid awkward political implications for their industry.
If I were to place a bet, I'd say that the "3 zones configurations" is as important for life's appearance and evolution as having liquid water.
[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/nasa-s-bolden-no-american-le...
[2] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012...
NASA has a very hard time devoting resources to planetary science and exploration programs when key legislators continue to earmark NASA'S budget for (what are essentially) jobs programs in their own districts. SLS has shaped up to be a perfect example of that.
No magnetic field either, so tethers for orbital adjustment are out to. And it's flying out to one of the more radiation hard environments in the solar system, where we have very little data on what exactly it'll experience.
And it's going to be a long long way a way. 1 hour signal round-trip time.
Curiosity was a huge hit with the public, and although I'm not totally sure of this, I'm of the belief that it was a great success for NASA in a variety of ways.
I'm sure they'd be more than excited to have the funding for another probe.
And I admit, this is an extremely naive viewpoint with little more than my own excitement for such a mission (however shallow) and my intuitions about the nature of the scientists who work at NASA. I could be totally wrong.
What are we talking about here, expense wise? $5 billion over 15-20 years? Totally worth it.
Still worth it. I'm hoping our technology for traveling the solar system, and the robotic systems to explore it, will get cheaper and cheaper on a cost per unit of result basis (meaning the nominal cost will rise as expected, but the value we receive from our technology will rise much faster).
Yay, the broken clock shows the right time for this minute.
Quite strange.
I'm still excited. I think anyone who has read the Odyssey series by Clarke would be ecstatic too! :)
If he wasn't joking, he is in for a disappointment and I am depressed with the quality of people who are deciding these budgets. But if its that or more weapons expenses, take the money and run NASA!
Wonder if this is going to end well.