NASA: We're sending humans to Mars | Hacker News Reader

NASA: We're sending humans to Mars

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1,424 pointsdidgeoridoo586 comments

Sometime in the past fifty years NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. And then there is all that pork that goes around with the entrenched contractors. The tale of the last Mars program that NASA put together is a great example of this. They got handed a technically sound plan to get there in reasonable time with reasonable resources. Then every org-unit in NASA wanted to add their own part to stay relevant and it got so bloated both technically and financially that it had to be put to rest.

So unless they convince me that they managed to get their internal structural problems under control, I don't think they get anytime to Mars within this century. And certainly not before the private sector does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

p.s.: There is a free movie on YouTube telling the tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w

> political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape.

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization.

Name every place in the solar system where NASA missions currently are located. Outside the solar system? Where they have gone historically? Their achievements are staggering; history-making events are routine; they are by far the greatest explorers in the history of humanity. Certainly they aren't perfect and every organization can improve, but they do pretty well.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too

It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become.

* In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately.

* In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company.

Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity.

Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.

> Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization.

SpaceX. I agree that NASA has done more for space exploration than the private sector and that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA funding, but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin. I would guess that NASA will be the first to land a human on Mars, but I would also guess that they will lift off in a SpaceX rocket.

SpaceX sits atop decades of resources in what constitutes sound aerospace engineering practices, and is being helped by the fact that their scope is far, far more limited than NASA's.

Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.

I think limited scope is exactly the point made by skriticos2.

I don't doubt that a private entity is as capable of scope creep as a massive federal government institution.

But I suspect mission-fatal scope creep occurs with less frequency with private entities than with massive federal government institutions.

"massive" being the critical word, not "private" or "federal" or "government"

Their scope is to colonize Mars. NASA's scope is to land a man on Mars.

In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.

SpaceX's scope is irrelevant until they can be viable without substantial assistance from Mars, from the point of view of the private-is-better supporters.

It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project.

It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.

SpaceX's scope is first and foremost to continue as a profit maximizing entity. NASA exists to improve collective scientific knowledge and research. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is, and therefore, acts like a business.

Without a firm mandate, a deadline and a budget it's kind of hard to pull off a Mars landing, or any sort of endeavor past Low-Earth Orbit.

SpaceX is not well run because of magic private sector pixie dust. It is well run because of Elon Musk.

For every Elon Musk there are a million private sector apparatchiks who run their organizations with all the efficiency of a Soviet shoe factory (see Comcast for a particularly pernicious example).

Sure, but Musk would have MUCH less impact if he were inside an organization like NASA. All of his talents and advantages would be dampened to the point that they would make very little difference in the organization.

And why do you presume that?

I think if he were running NASA it would probably be run pretty well.

Comcast is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CMCSA & CMCSK), which makes it liable to a host of external pressures, legal and otherwise, that SpaceX as a currently privately-owned company is not.

None of which have anything to do with why they suck.

SpaceX is better at putting a pound of stuff in LEO than Nasa per dollar by a massive margin. But that's all they do right now.

I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

> But that's all they do right now.

Well that and launch to GEO and design and build human spacecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2) and are closer to cost effective re-usable rockets than anyone ever has been.

> But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

I don't recall saying that rockets are more important than payloads, but neither one does much good without the other. I'm not even sure where you are drawing the line between payload and rocket. Is the rocket that takes people to Mars a payload, or the rocket that lands on Mars, or the rocket that leaves Mars?

I am excited about SpaceX because they are dramatically reducing the cost of space exploration and industry. This makes everything NASA wants to do cheaper and more likely to actually happen.

It's more than just NASA funding, a large number of the top guys at SpaceX are or were ex-NASA engineers (or NASA contractors). It's no coincidence that SpaceX hq is where it is (in El Segundo literally next door to Northrop, Raytheon, Lockheed, and so on); it makes the hiring that much easier. SpaceX is what you get when you cut through all the bureaucratic bs which plagues the NASA organization and let the NASA engineers do what they know how to do. Brilliant stroke on Musk's part, gotta hand it to him.

SpaceX is nothing compared to NASA in scope (and history) and would be even less without NASA's (and general government) past work and experience.

> but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin.

...using NASA's money. SpaceX's money is coming from NASA. So, no, SpaceX is not doing more per dollar than NASA is.

And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars. Let's first see if they can even get people into LEO first (using decades of research and knowledge that NASA paid for, of course)

Amount done per dollar = total done / total spent

It is fair to count everything SpaceX has done with NASA money as stuff NASA has gotten done, NASA still has an astronomically larger denominator.

> And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars.

fwiw NASA does not either and SpaceX is much closer. The Falcon Heavy is expected to launch next year and will be capable of putting 14 tons in a trans-Martian orbit to Mars.

In some way the assumption that the private sector can do it better is supported by NASA itself, it's why they have contracted missions to the ISS out to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, who have managed to successfully fill those contracts for $500 million (less money than NASA was spending on a single space shuttle launch). I have tremendous respect for the work NASA has done, but there are deep flaws at the agency, and they realize it as much as everyone else does.

NASA says their average space shuttle launch cost was $450 million.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shut...

edit: forgot the "million"

I should have been more clear. $500 million was the cost for the entire commercial contracts program, as someone else pointed out below that is ~$150 million per launch. Whether NASA spent $450 or $500 million on a shuttle launch is somewhat irrelevant, either way it is far more than the cost of private missions performing the same service.

The Shuttle was originally an Air Force partnership where NASA was supposed to also launch the USAF's payloads, including spy satellites and the like. The 20-ton payload created major compromises as far as reusability and then the USAF wasn't interested once the thing was built.

1 shuttle launch: $450M (reality) 7 people 53,600lb to LEO

1 SpaceX dragon launch (ignoring for a second that it doesn't exist yet): $160M (target) 7 people 7,300LB to LEO

So even if the Dragon V2 comes in at its targetted price and capacities (and all historical evidence says it very much will not do that), it'll take 7 launches of it to match the payload of a single Shuttle launch. Doing some quick math here... 7 * $160M is... a hell of a lot more than $450M

So pound for pound the shuttle is half the cost of the Dragon V2's estimated price.

And in terms of actually mission profiles take something like STS-31, the Hubble launch. Payload mass there was 26,187lbs. Assuming that weight could somehow be split perfectly into 7,300 chunks and assembled in space that's still 4 launches on the Dragon V2, or $640M.

the flaw starts that there 535 people who can tell NASA what do to, mostly indirectly but some are able to do it directly. None work at NASA.

This is of course the problem with the DOD as well, when the people tasked to do a job have to take into account the whims of politicians just how do we honestly expect it to be a job done well.

Of course this does happen in private industry as well, there is much ado about not rocking the boat, going with the flow etc, usually masked as some faddish project management system; only a moron wouldn't do proper project management, right?

Where did you get the idea that a SpaceX launch costs $500 million? The entire Commercial Cargo development contract with SpaceX was $400 million. The subsequent commerical resupply service contract is for 12 missions for $1.6 billion. If you spread the development cost over all those flights, it comes out to be ~$150 million per launch. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Commercial_cargo_contrac...)

I think you misread the previous comment. It was referring to $500 million for a contract that included many launches. I agree that it could have been more clearly stated.

> the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported

Well, the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives.

(1) There are unfair practices in the private sector like monopolies and fraud... which are at least nominally against the rules in liberal democracies. If we allow that the government fails to enforce its rules, I'm not sure why we're confident about its ability to execute in other areas.

> the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives.

I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership.

If a government leader fails to often, they change their direction (as many politicians do!) or lose their job.

> I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership.

I'm not talking about leadership, I'm talking about organization. As in bureaucracies. It's extremely hard for any leader to streamline an organization. It's possible though difficult in a private organization. I'm not familiar with a national government that has, say, dropped its headcount by 50%.

If a private organization can't successfully make that sort of change, it gets disrupted eventually. But governments don't get disrupted like that without something drastic happening.

One could make the argument that the organizations that manage their processes with the least amount of in-fighting will be the ones that survive.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

The difference is that NASA will likely keep getting their money regardless of whether they can come up with a viable plan. In the private sector, investors are usually not interested in financing an enterprise if it can't produce a viable plan.

I don't think there's much difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of professionalism of the teams. The big difference is the incentive of the two companies: SpaceX either has to turn a profit, or their owners have to be willing to provide capital without seeing a return. NASA has no such restrictions, and can keep operating without turning a profit.

It's a lot like nature, really. Zoo animals don't have to hunt for food, and can lie around all day and be fed. Wild animals have to hunt for food, or they die. So if a wild animal were to meet a zoo animal, and a battle ensues, who wins? The animal that is used to lying around all day, or the animal that has to fight to survive? The two animals are not different in quality (both may be lions, for example), but they operate with very different incentives.

It's not necessarily pretty, but it works. Wild animals grow strong because if they don't, they die. Private companies grow strong because if they don't, they go bankrupt.

>"These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported."

Sure, here's one study that supports that assumption: http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf

Took a bit of searching, seeing as I don't have access to any Journals. However, I did find more references, and no doubt you'll find quite a bit of other studies in the citations of this one.

>"Their achievements are staggering;"

So has their budget. I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D, but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

Alternate view: we could be a little less warmongery for a decade or so and easily fund the entirety of NASA's history 4-6 times over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...

A further alternate view. We could stop the warmongering entirely, and the NASA funding... Using all those combined trillions of dollars on making the world a better place.

On a side note, I completely agree with you. To us there are completely varying degrees on what we consider useful spending. And on the war-funding we are in agreement; that money should be used first before NASA's funding.

We could solve all that stuff easily right now without cutting NASA's budget.

> That's a trillion dollars that has been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

There, fixed that for you!

The old canard that space exploration has been a total waste of money just keeps popping up. Yet, our economy and the world itself have been dramatically transformed by the innovations and improvements coming out of the space program: solar energy, CAT scanners and MRI for medical applications, ceramic shielding, computer miniaturization, software methods, weather prediction, new kinds of materials, better propulsion systems for planes, food preservation, insulation, on and on.

There are many more. And then there are all the people who were inspired by the space program to go into science and technology fields.

I'd say $1 trillion, if accurate (the entire Apollo program cost about $200 billion in 2005 dollars) would be a bargain.

Compare this with, say, the Dept. of Education created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. It's cost about $1.5 trillion over 35 years, and for what? Literacy and math skills have declined almost every year since then.

Let's shrink federal spending in the entitlement and defense sectors, and put more money into space exploration and basic science, and I'll bet you we'll all end up living richer and better lives (and longer lives, too).

"Compare this with, say, the Dept. of Education created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. It's cost about $1.5 trillion over 35 years, and for what? Literacy and math skills have declined almost every year since then."

Could you provide references for the cost (including any programs it replaced) and the downward progression in literacy and maths in the USA since 1979?

It strikes me that more people are regularly communicating in writing than ever before and mathematics is sort of cool for the first time in several decades.

The Dept of Education's annual budget is about $70 billion and has been in that range for several years. I did a thumbnail estimate based on that. In fact the accumulated cost might be considerably higher.

The decline in literacy and math scores is well documented.

I thought I was aware of the early history of CT and MRI and am unaware of the space programme connection. Any chance you could point me at anything - my googling isn't getting me anywhere.

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinfaq.htm#spinfaq9

Nasa and Nasa-related contractors did not invent MRI and CAT scanners, but they contributed significantly to the technology as well as related aspects like digital image processing (developed at JPL for processing Moon images).

I mean, probably MRI and CT scanners would have been developed anyway. But space research definitely helped move things along.

> I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars.

Interesting, thank you, and much less than I would have guessed. Given their achievements, I think that's economical.

> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D ...

The economists call that "opportunity cost" and I agree. I'm always a little uncomfortable with funding NASA missions to Mars, etc., though I think the benefits are worthwhile. Also, NASA has produced much science, including climate change research, which I think is clearly a good investment (based on my limited knowledge of the marginal value of NASA's research).

> ... but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

Not really; it's not a matter of asking. Federal funds are limited and agencies fight wars, publicly and privately, over access to them. As in private enterprise, sometimes funding is decided on merit and sometimes politically.

Ironically, much of private enterprise is funded the same way -- from the federal budget.

If the only thing NASA had done were the two voyagers - for a trillion dollars it would still have been on the cheap.

The trove of scientific data they have gathered over the years is insane. And for the 60 years it exists, a trillion dollars is not much.

> One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D

Or borrow the money, or use wall street magic, or whatever. Also one of the recurrent critics of the current system is that corporations are slaves to the quarterly reports.

The problem with NASA in recent years is not that they spend a lot of money, but that they don't dream big enough.

NASA costs about as much as the Carried Interest tax loophole for hedge fund managers.

It's also a lot smaller than the 4.5 trillion sunk in quantitative easing.

Quantitative easing doesn't actually cost money. The fed buys securities with it and probably breaks even or makes a profit.

And proponents of both justify them as ways of making capital available to worth while endeavors. In my mind that rings true for one slightly more than the other.

Considering the population of Earth has more than doubled from around 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion in 2014 i hardly think we can blame NASA for spending a trillion dollars.

On the scale of world hunger over a 50 year period, one trillion is a blip. On the other hand spending a trillion on space research over 50 years seems well worth it if within the next 50 we can colonize other planets, moons or terrariums and ensure that the Human race has a backup should something catastrophic happen.

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition. Sometimes it even does a better job at killing, which is why private contractors exist for warfare, such as Blackwater/Academi.

If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks. But it does, all the time, because contracting is far more effective, and results matter.

It seems like your view of NASA is rather rose-tinted. Along with the impressive, courageous explorers, there are political opportunists and all of the other drama you'd expect of any large organization.

It will be interesting to find out whether the private sector or the public sector reaches Mars first.

EDIT: Regarding the political nature of NASA: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

That was a different time. In fact, it was an entirely different generation of people. But the important question is, in what ways has NASA changed since then?

EDIT 2: So, this is a troll comment, then? I'm becoming a little disenchanted with HN, actually. It's grown large enough that the voting system seems to be becoming less and less relevant. There's a certain effect that you see on Reddit where, if someone disagrees with your point, then they will downvote your comment and every subsequent comment you made, regardless of content. I've noticed the same thing happening here on HN, and it's a very recent phenomenon. I've also observed it happening to others, not just myself. I've restrained myself from talking about it, but I think I'll go ahead and speak up at this point.

I'm not sure what to do about this, actually. HN has always been a kind of second home to me, but now it's too large to have meaningful conversations. In order to even get into a position to have a conversation, you have to either be one of the top comments in the thread, or you have to reply to one of the top comments. This is less true than it is for Reddit, but it's definitely happening. The problem is this: Those who are quickest to a thread are usually the ones who will get those top spots, rather than the most reasoned or comprehensive comment. HN has some defenses against this; for example, all comments appear at the top of the thread for a limited time period, and ostensibly the voting system is supposed to keep the good ones there. But HN is growing so massive that those algorithms may need some tweaking, because the deluge of upvotes is making it difficult to achieve those spots.

But the distressing thing, for me, is that replies are becoming less and less logical and reasoned. For example, the question wasn't whether it's a good thing for governments to be contracting with the private sector, or what the negative consequences might be. The question was, is the private sector more effective than the government, in general? Yet the reply was "[privatization advocates] are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful," which is totally unrelated to the question at hand.

Anyway. What I just did is against the rules, so I'll stop now. Sorry. I'm just becoming concerned with the timbre of the site, and feel like there is no outlet to discuss this kind of thing.

> It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition.

I know that's a commonly repeated idea, especially in this forum, but I don't share that assumption and don't see evidence for it. I believe they are two different tools, each better at different tasks, with some overlap.

> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

Three thoughts: 1) Government doesn't contract out every task; the U.S. federal government has over 1 million employees and a $2 trillion budget, so it does quite a bit in-house. 2) Government does contract out many things; when they do it right, they are contracting where it's most cost-effective without undermining justice. There is much research showing that much privatization loses money but enriches the contractor. 3) Many of the contracting decisions are due to politics: Lobbying, and who has what donor or has which jobs in their district, for example.

Consider that many privatization advocates and those promoting the supremacy of the private sector are lining their pockets: They are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful.

The main difference is that private enterprises may fail if they do not deliver their product or the service to customers at a cost acceptable to the latter; government projects and departments do not have this check. This is not a guarantee that the private sector will do a good or even mediocre job, as they can make mistakes, malinvestments, get bailed out, or have rich and stupid customers. The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance, so government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent.

It is really a question of how one views the voice vs exit question, and how good a check those are (relative to each other).[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

"government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent."

In which universe?

Government projects get stopped for incompetence or wasting money about as much as they do in the private sector.

And it turns out that the private sector is just as capable of firehosing money at bullshit as the government is, otherwise all those repackaged loans wouldn't have screwed the economy.

There is a different limit on money for governments, given they back the money, but to assume that some form of cost/benefit analysis isn't generally practiced in public enterprise is to be working from a purely faith-based model of economics.

> The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance

I'm not sure even this claim is warranted, from either side. Each has mechanisms for attempting to ensure the link between funding/performance, but from my perspective it seems like those mechanisms fail as often as they work in both sectors.

> The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance, so government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent.

This cuts both ways - that's exactly why the government can and does shove money into things like infrastructure, basic research and, well, space exploration, while the private sector doesn't. There is no direct short-term profit motive for private sector in such endeavours. I emphasize "short-term", because the private sector is structured to care mostly about that. It takes a company to grow really big to invest in stuff like basic research - but at this point the internal structure of such company is more like that of a government than a free market.

The public sector is, by definition, more efficient than the private sector.

The main difference is the profit motive. When a government department does something more efficiently, it has to use that efficiency to either reduce cost or improve quality.

When a private company does something more efficiently, it can take the spare money and shove it in the pockets of its shareholders.

It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department will be more efficient than an equivalent private sector one; the Peter Principle may well scupper any efficiency improvements.

But governments do slash budgets or cut programs altogether. And agencies typically continue on because their existence is mandated by law and (unlike the private sector) they can't choose to just ditch those customers that cost a lot to deal with. There are big variations in administrative competence to be sure, but the logical conclusion of your argument is that if you hate the President (or rather, the administration of the federal government by a given President) then the logical thing to do is get rid of the government.

> The main difference is that private enterprises may fail if they do not deliver their product or the service to customers at a cost acceptable to the latter; government projects and departments do not have this check.

Every government executive's job (including appointees' jobs and to a degree every program), relies on a public vote every 2-6 years.

Democracy isn't nearly perfect, but as we've seen, neither are the markets.

You just described the problem with public schools.

> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

There are other possibilities: corporate lobbying, the revolving door, regulatory capture, plain old corruption ...

... which would lead to the civilization being destroyed (EDIT: subsumed) by a more effective one, if the private sector wasn't actually effective. Therefore the private sector must be effective.

Over what timeframe? All the evidence is that failed states can stick around for quite a while before collapsing or being subjugated. As the US has been (re)discovering the hard way, there's a massive cost in taking over a failed state even where the intention is to rebuild it and leave - and countries like Afghanistan and Iran were obviously dysfunctional for decades. Even the Soviet Union persisted for a long time despite its fundamental economic contradictions. Even if we hypothesize some similarly fundamental dificiency in the private sector of the US of the sort that Marxists are fond of toying with, in an economy of this size it might take most of a century to play itself out. Look at Japan, whose economy has been stagnant for 20 years and whose territorial security basically derives from the US nuclear umbrella.

History is littered with civilizations that had an extended period of corruption and decay before their final collapse. Rome is one example - its "death" arguably occurred over most of a century.

Anyway, your argument is really weird. It implies that all existing regimes are optimally fit since they exist. But that's clearly not true.

So, when private sector organizations contract to other private sector organizations for certain tasks/projects that is somehow qualitatively different then when government does it?

You've only been on HN for 450 days (I've been here 2500+), I don't think you can claim HN has gone significantly downhill since you joined.

IMO, this is a troll comment. If you are making a grand point, I don't see it.

EDIT: I'm not replying to your point because I can't understand your point. Apparently it's obvious to you, but it is far from obvious to me what you are saying.

I've been on the site since day two of its public launch. About 2800 days.

Why did this devolve into a number comparison contest, rather than addressing my main points?

EDIT: Oh, here we go. Now I'm looked down on with so much scorn that you won't even reply to me. Really? Edit wars?

My point was this: The average comment is becoming shorter, meaner, and less logical. Additionally, the value of the voting system is becoming diluted over time, as more people participate. Mainly I'd like algorithmic protection from people who downvote all of your comments regardless of how well-reasoned your followup replies are. Limiting people to one downvote per person per thread seems reasonable.

My thesis in the main discussion is that if you hand a job to the public sector and to the private sector, the private sector will accomplish it with fewer resources and more quickly than the public sector. The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. The counterexamples are the justice system and financial regulation, yet those are only two counterexamples compared to a huge body of examples.

Totally agree with your EDIT2. It is unfortunately why I am only using throwaway accounts now.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

Regardless of which one does it better, NASA is funded through forcefully-extracted US tax dollars. They can be as stagnant and bureaucratically bloated as they want to be thanks to moral hazard. I'll gladly support space exploration, but it should be using resources that are donated voluntarily.

I know I'm philosophizing, but let me challenge the views you express with the following: people opposed to government and taxes always assume that taxes are "taken" or "extracted" from private property. Historically, though, the opposite is true: private property was extracted from common property and given to private individuals. Shared property predates private property by more than a few millennia. In fact, private property had to be invented when the agricultural revolution came about. That an individual (as opposed to a tribe) could own something was a big revolution in human thinking, and an artificial cultural construct. This doesn't change much in how people think about distribution of wealth, but it seems like people, especially in the US, seem to believe that private property is the natural state of things and government infringes on that, even though the opposite is true. Society decided to let individuals own some things -- not the other way around.

I'm not under any illusion that "private property" is some kind of perfect solution (even libertarians schism into geolibertarians, libertarian socialists, etc. around the sticky issue), but let's not fly off into pure philosophy land here. This situation is pretty direct: the federal gov't, and by extension NASA, skims off my paycheck to fund what it thinks are noble endeavors.

Unfortunately this leviathan that nobly funds NASA also spends trillions dropping bombs on brown people halfway across the planet, funding revolutions to topple governments, and violently suppressing victimless crimes (e.g. drug use, prostitution) that have a very real negative impact on my life and the lives of others I have no qualms with.

If we could decide which systems to voluntarily contribute to, which ones would be funded?

But you can look at it the other way around: the US government is good enough to let you have your paycheck. Why do you assume the money is yours to begin with? The gov't also spends money on police and roads so that you'd be able to earn your paycheck, so it seems to me like it's doing the hard work for you.

And as to voluntary choice, why do you think that voluntary choice by the individual is more important than the choice of society as a whole? After all, you have a democratically elected government, so it represents the set of deals or compromises struck by the members, and various groups of members, that form society. How is that not voluntary? Who says your own individual will is more important than that of society? It seems to me that the current system is a lot more voluntary than the one you're proposing. In the current system deals are formed to pool resources together to achieve common goals. Because pooling resources is required to achieve some goals, how would that be achieved in your system? My guess is that people who have accrued more wealth (thanks to the government's work) will use their influence to advance the goals they desire, without taking into any account the will of most other people. Is that fair?

You can. It is called migration.

Same goes for roads and the fire department, amirite?

You don't think there are alternate ways to build roads or put out fires? I can tell you one thing, I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department so that my parents' house doesn't burn to the ground again when our shitty municipal fire department runs out of water.

edit: since I'm getting downvoted anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/whowillbuildtheroads

> I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department

Then why didn't you? Are there laws against private fire departments? Of course that's not a fair question because public fire departments suppress the demand for private fire departments, but do you think better fire departments would be available for comparative prices without public interference?

What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars? Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO, let alone get someone to the Moon, we can start talking about whether they'll be able to pull off a Mars mission.

Maybe a bit far fetched, but creating a colony on Mars would be the foundation of creating a new, highly advanced trading partner.

Colonists on Mars would have to deal with extreme environmental conditions and therefore be forced to invest the majority of resources in science and engineering instead of politics and entrenched systems.

Also, martians would be natural space travelers. Mars has a gravity that's less than half of Earth's, so they would get off that rock much easier and they would have a wealth of natural resources through asteroid mining that they could sell to earth together with advanced technology.

After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.

What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars?

For a company like spacex, the advantages are clear - if they can promote human space flight around the solar system, they stand to earn huge amounts of money providing the infrastructure/launches etc, so promoting a Mars Mission makes a lot of sense for them as a company. Even if it never happens they'd make lots of money from preparation, investigation of launch options and the renewed interest in human space flight. Of course that money has to come from somewhere, but I'm sure any such mission would attract all kinds of science missions and funding from national governments, particularly as it becomes clear they can pull it off.

No-one will make money mining down a gravity well like Mars, but there are plenty of other reasons to go there and to other bodies in the solar system, even if only for short periods for scientific investigations. Of course you can do a lot with robots, and personally were I to be investing I'd invest in orbiters and landers, not human missions. The public would disagree though and national governments are more likely to fund a first man on mars than they are another rover.

I think companies like planetary resources are also interesting as when one of them tows an asteroid back to earth orbit and starts mining and sending lumps of metal with a heat shield back to earth, or mining for reaction mass and selling it in orbit, that might be a game changer.

Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company, there are lots of examples of private exploration, and many examples of private individuals simply seeking funding from governments for an enterprise they had already decided upon, so it's hardly fair to characterise exploration as uniquely government funded.

Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO

This is already scheduled to happen soon - they're testing human-rated capsules at spacex for example, so it's looking probable over the next few years given the pressure to remove dependence on Russia for the ISS.

It's well worth watching Neil deGrasse Tyson on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CJ8g8w1huc "The 3 Fears That Drive Us to Accomplish Extraordinary Things" - if you look closely, the actual successful colonization of North America was driven by private enterprise. I gave a talk on this topic at the last Mars Society convention, in case you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BOOuGUnDek

> Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

Lookup the British East India company

> What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars?

Sponsorships, reality TV, claiming undiscovered land

I suppose its true that the private sector doesn't have the traditional governmental incentives of religious persecution, exploitation of indigenous people, proselytization, and banishment of undesirables to encourage them to seek out and colonize new lands. But who knows, maybe we'll come up with other reasons to do it in the future.

What exactly is the incentive for anyone to go to mars?

To add to the discussion... according to the briefing, they believe that all of the technologies required for a human mission to Mars are 15 years away, assuming that all technologies are fully tested. This puts an approximate time-line near 2030 [1].

Question from Scott Powers, The Orlando Sentinel:

"The technologies you talked about that are still a long ways from being fully developed, the EDL [2], the propellant and communications. Do you have a sense for what kind of time tables we're talking about, to get those to the point where they'll be able to be used in manned missions?"

Answer from Dr. James Reuther [3]:

"[...] To get all the way to the point where we are able to put 10 metric tons, 10 times what we can do today, to the surface or greater, which is what's really required for a human mission, is probably going to take until the beginning of 2030 before we have all of those technologies in hand, ready to go at that scale. And, that means that they're fully demonstrated and ready for that kind of mission."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU#t=2304

[2] Entry, Descent and Landing

[3] http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/about_us/bios/reu...

"15 years to launch" means it isn't happening.

I would love a Mars mission, but this isn't it.

SpaceX says Falcon Heavy will be able to put 14 tons on a mars trajectory, and it's having it's first launch next year. The soviet Energia could (theoretically) already do that almost three decades ago. What is missing from NASA's perspective?

I'm really curious why weight and propellant are even an issue. I imagine in 5 to 10 years private corporations will be making regular trips to space very cost effectively. I would think the smart idea would to bring as much as possible and assemble in space.

I'd suggest many smaller deliveries of supplies to the surface of Mars first, topped off with human cargo. They would find tools and supplies, and already-charged power cells ready on arrival.

I want to see a concrete plan. Dates on a calendar. Milestones and targets.

I want to be able to sit down and spend a weekend reading the step-by-step book-sized roadmap.

As far as I'm aware, there's not even a project name.

NASA is not going to put a human on Mars in the 2030s. I simply don't believe them anymore.

In all honesty, I saw an #Onion tag at the end of the tweet and I thought it's a story made by the onion - had to read twice to see it's Orion, though it has more credibility with my first interpretation.

It upsets me that NASA is reusing "Orion". It's another, very cool project using nuclear bombs as propulsion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

>>> NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape.

My best friend's dad was a NASA scientist for almost 30 years. By the time the 90's rolled around and in the post Challenger era, he used to tell us neighborhood kids the same stories.

He finally retired in the early 1990's when budget cuts, in-fighting and the struggle to remain relevant were just too much for him to take. He' still bitter to this day about how he felt politicians ruined the agency.

I worked for NASA, the budget cuts alone helped bring it to where it is today. In the 1980s, we were still using technology from the 1950s because we couldn't afford to replace it. Things have only gotten worse since then.

Love NASA but we heard this tune many times. If only 'we are going to Mars' actually took us there.

NASA is not even close... Not with this budget not with the current brain drain, and 1970's style management.

I'm definitely expecting the private sector to do it at least a decade before NASA does it.

I'm curious why people think it will happen in the private sector first. Is there some applied science, resource, tourism, or other value to be had?

We haven't seen a private sector moon landing yet (it's been 50 years since NASA did it) simply because there isn't much market value in putting a person on the moon. So why Mars?

I doubt it, the private sector only innovates if there's enough & immediate enough profit on the line. Even the libertarian darling SpaceX is just piggybacking off the research and hard work of the public sector (ie, NASA's work in the 50's -> 80's)

Because private-sector corporations never have problems with every manager wanting to add something to justify his/her budget and existence, resulting in a bloated over-budget under-delivered project.

Upside: you could end up owning your own goddamn planet!

Downside: you can't do anything with it.

You're not going to make the staggering costs back in space tourism, notwithstanding geeks' relatively high risk tolerance; you need the possibility of some self-sustaining economic activity.

You don't think they'll put humans on Mars within this century? Really? That's not a conservative statement. A conservative statement is, yea we'll probably get to Mars this century, but maybe not in the next 20 years.

It's not just that. The difficulties in sending a human to Mars and safely returning him/her are way beyond anything we have ever tried. It wouldn't be that bad to send a human to, say, Phobos, but Mars poses some extra problems, not the least of which is how to land.

An atmosphere too thick for retro rockets and too thin for parachutes is a major impediment.

So until I start seeing progress on those issues, I will see this just as sci-fi.

Why do we have to bring the person back?

Why would the private sector want to send humans to mars? Scratch that, why does NASA want to send humans to mars? Just because we can? Anyone know?

Why would the private market want to go to Mars? I can't think of a convincing reason, other than say maybe tourism

SpaceX was created to get to Mars. Elon Musk's reason is simply that he wants humans to be an interplanetary species. [1]

[1] http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-int...

@skriticos2: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141203050450-7...

Have you read anything about what's been happening at Microsoft? I don't think that private organisations are necessarily better.

I really enjoyed watching the movie. Always amazes me how dedicated some people like Robert Zubrin are towards their goals.

This is just stupid. What is the point? This will be extremely expensive, it will gut a lot of useful science programs.

Send robots! They are thousands of times cheaper and they get the job done. And when they die it is not a national tragedy.

Robots have been doing an excellent job of planetary exploration over the past 20 years or so. There is no reason to stop this. And this will mostly stop if nasa decides to seriously pursue a human mars mission, because such a mission will soak up most NASA resources.

The only reason to send humans is to satisfy the science fiction fantasies of a bunch of stupid fan boys. And everyone knows that these fantasies can just as easily be satisfied by a cheesy movie or TV show.

Now I have to emphasize the word stupid, in "stupid science fiction fanboys." If you were a smart science fiction fanboy or girl you would know that continued robotic exploration will make the science fiction fantasy of mars tourism much closer than a human mission.

If we keep sending robotic missions we can study the mars soil and perhaps move on to having the robots build stuff on mars. If the robots can build a base with solar based energy gathering, oxygen generation and even perhaps rocket fuel generation, then mars travel may become a regular if expensive thing.

Otherwise we will have a single mission that with great fan fare sends one or two people to stomp around on mars for an hour or two and quickly return. (Or even worse, perhaps die there). After the mission the whole thing will be scrapped and only the newspaper clippings and tv documentaries will remain. This is what happened with Apolo. It was great but it did not really lead anywhere in terms of moon exploration.

I think the ultimate goal with space travel is to reduce the risk of human extinction, which is a distinct possibility when we are confined to a single planet or planetary system.

Transporting and then returning humans to a "distant" destination will be a worthy milestone that will teach us a lot. We have to start somewhere.

Perhaps you're right: maybe we can more quickly achieve distribution of humanity by solely focusing on robotic exploration. But I just wanted to point out that satisfying science fiction fanboys isn't the only reason to travel to Mars.

It seems incredibly arrogant and short-sited to assume that humans would be able to somehow survive outside of their original environment. There isn't a grocery list of things we need to bring into space or to another planet. Everything on this planet is interrelated and inseparable in largely unknown ways.

I get the sense we're going to need to do some heavy genetic engineering before we're able to survive long-term on other planets. Probably more than anyone from this generation will be comfortable with. This of course will raise the question, have we really saved ourselves from extinction if what we save isn't exactly human?

I don't think there's anything wrong with your perspective, but what do you think about the potential in-direct value that could come from a mission like this? Such as inspiring young people to pursue STEM, or the general population getting behind and funding other exploratory missions involving robots? You say that most NASA resources will be soaked up. That's possible, but what do you think about the potential in-direct benefits of getting the human race excited about space exploration?

This is a very very expensive way to do advertising. You will be able to do a lot more advertising to shape people's perceptions with just a small portion of the costs.

Furthermore, government space exploration is essentially a business of elites. It is only a few scientists and engineers that are involved with the space program. It is only a couple of the most elite astronauts that will get to actually fly the rockets. The vast majority of americans will have to be inspired by watching it all on tv.

This all worked out in the 60s with Apolo, but the world is changing and America is changing. Americans are watching less and less TV and are more willing to do things.

If you want to inspire people to go into STEM, it will probably be better to spend money on new and interesting educational programs to get kids interested in science and engineering. Furthermore, spending money on adult education programs would probably also help.

We can already send robots to Mars. The challenge is sending living human beings. Thats where the innovations will come from, that goal will motivate and push progress.

"And when [robots] die it is not a national tragedy."

Exactly. No one, apart from a few invested souls, really cares. For this reason progress slows and innovation reverts to incremental steps rather than leaps.

So if a meteor wipes our earth, we'll still have robots on Mars. Now isn't that something to strive for?

Are you trying to be sarcastic? Because with the current technology, even if we do have manned mission to mars, if a meteor wipes out earth there will be no living humans on mars either. With the current technology any human mission to mars can only be on mars for a very limited time and will rely on earth for all of their resources. Thus, if a meteor wipes out earth, any mission to mars will die too.

If you want to build a sustainable mars presence, a manned mission to mars is not going to do it. We have to find a way to use resources on mars to sustain a human presence. That will require a lot of research into mars resources, a lot of engineering to build mars factories etc. I am not sure if this is possible at all but if it is, it is best done by starting with robotic missions. A robot can spend a year on mars looking for materials that can be used to make bricks (for example). A human, even if we can get him on mars, will probably have to go back in hours.

How much did Avatar cost to make? How much will it cost to go to Mars?

$237 million to make and advertise Avatar. [1]

The Space Review estimated in 2010 the cost of Apollo from 1959 to 1973 as $20.4 billion, or $109 billion in 2010 dollars, averaged over the six landings as $18 billion each. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost

True. But how much will going to Mars bring back?

It needs a human touch.

Fuck the cynicism. The fact that NASA finally has its head turned around to at least announce is indicative to me of a cultural, maybe generational shift towards giving a shit about space travel. Who cares who does it first, at least this is a trend in the right direction.

NASA has "announced" Mars timelines 20 years in the future many times before.

I have never seen their announcements in the past. Between SpaceX, the global international space travel movement, and hey even Interstellar, there is a lot more buzz around space travel. Plus, we have landed a rover on mars, plus people have landed a rover on a comet. NASA has had a hand in space advancement. I don't give a shit if they have been wrong in the past, the growing hype around space travel is exciting, and I refuse to be a buzzkill about it.

If you are citing Interstellar as a reason to believe this, I don't know how to help you.

For anyone else:

Obama in 2010: to Mars by the mid-2030's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_policy_of_the_Barack_Obam...

Bush in 2005: to the Moon by 2020, to Mars soon after 2030 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

NASA 1998: DRM 3.0 calls for first launch to Mars in 2011, human crew in 2014. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1998021...

Bush in 1989: 90-day report, which was a joke, but also 30 years to spend $300 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative

Exactly. There's not even anything you could reasonably call a timeline here, either. There's almost literally nothing to it.

Call me cynical, but I feel like NASA won't end up shuttling humans to Mars. Instead, NASA will more likely be shuttling government money between various contractors before having the program cancelled in the far-future...

Politics + exploration for exploration's sake always seems at odds.

Perhaps, but I feel like NASA is at a point where if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night.

Robotic space exploration is awesome, but it doesn't capture the human imagination the way a human mission does. I also think -- and the academic types be damned -- that there is a difference between sending a robot and actually going somewhere.

In the long term I think Mars will be settled by humans. Sending humans to land there for a bit is a first step, a fact-finding mission.

Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled. Mars is vastly more difficult to get to and provides an even more severe environment. It's going to be just like the moon - once we're there, we'll wonder why we ever bothered to go to this miserable rock. Leave the private industry to go there and do as they wish. After sending a small band of rovers there we haven't found any compelling reason to go, have we? Other than exogeology?

NASA should be dreaming much bigger. How about manned missions to Jupiter? Maybe after failing at the impossible for a while we'll at least get a better concept of how far away the rest of pretty much anywhere in space is, and stop thinking about planetary exploration as a lifeboat for our species.

"if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night."

If that is true, they have already lost. Doing "something big" for the primary purpose of "avoiding fading into the night" is doomed to failure. (Again, per the other comments.) Take all that money and give it to Elon Musk and we'd probably get further. And I mean, just give it. Free and clear. To spend on hookers and blow if he wants to. We'd still probably get more out of it as a species. He doesn't want to ensure the continued existence of a big bureaucracy... he wants to get to Mars.

I'm sure there are people within NASA that want to get to Mars... but are they the ones in charge?

So you want trillions of dollars of taxpayers' money to have your imagination captured? Isn't there a cheaper way? Like a good book perhaps? Is your brains power to imagine so insufficient that capturing your imagination requires an enormous government program?

I am sorry about being dismissive, but I wish people would be more contemplative before sending our government headlong into the next boondogle. This is important stuff. We are talking about a lot of money here. Democracy is a duty is as well as a right. There are a lot of government agencies that would like to "capture your imagination", i.e., get you to write them a blank check, but we have to be a little more discerning.

That is an incredible over simplification.

Guess what, the Navy doesn't build nuclear submarines. They contract companies to build nuclear submarines. The Air Force doesn't build fighter jets. They contract companies to build fighter jets. NASA didn't build a lot of the Apollo tech, they contracted companies to build Apollo. NASA also contracted companies for Constellation, the Space Shuttle, Orion, SLS, etc.

It's how the government works.

There are some 100% government financed research labs. There is the question of how much oversight the government has over the contractor (service vs design/build). There are different kinds of contracts (fixed price vs cost+).

At no point in time was the government ever building things 100% on their own, it has always been a spectrum. We are moving towards the end of the spectrum where NASA moves one responsibility (launching unmanned payloads to LEO) to a fixed-cost low-oversight service contract. That's great. But it's not like NASA woke up yesterday and realized the private sector is good at doing this kind of stuff.

My frustration (and likely most people's frustration) isn't with the contractors - not at all. It's the politics that can change at the drop of a hat. The perceived effects of cancelled or scrapped missions is a lot of money and time spent with none of the payoff.

So many cynical comments in here. I can't disagree with the substance, because the past track record has been mixed, and because of the issues with NASA's political structure have been well documented.

I also can't disagree with the practicalists that suggest the money would be better spent elsewhere.

However, one thing I can't get past: I don't think humanity will ever escape self interested nationalism without space exploration. I have zero hope for the long term survival of our species, barring significant human cooperation.

So I get all the intellectual arguments, but I also dream that space could be the one freaking thing that joins our species together -- the understanding that we really are very similar. I think only space will provide that push.

My opinion is that without space, humanity will destroy itself in a matter of centuries, through environmental pollution, nuclear war, disease, or any of the other methods we've come up with in the last 100 years.

> My opinion is that without space, humanity will destroy itself in a matter of centuries, through environmental pollution, nuclear war, disease, or any of the other methods we've come up with in the last 100 years.

People say this, but I don't get what it's based in. Our track record for surviving is incredibly impressive. In fact, if there's one trait we humans have that's worth noting, it's our ability to survive, no matter the conditions.

I also find it amusing that predict that humanity will destroy itself in a matter of centuries after starting your post with "So many cynical comments in here." :)

I hear what you're saying. I had the first thought just after making my comment, and explored it a little more. I hope you'll indulge me, because I'm genuinely curious what you think.

It's really only in the last 120 years that humans have been able to inflict enough damage within a few generations to seriously damage our existence. So I limit myself to that era (and forward), because I'm focusing on human-inflicted extinction.

I have 4 or 5 nuclear near-events that very narrowly started a nuclear war. (I suppose I forget that humans will survive total nuclear war, but there would be so much death that I'm not sure I'd want to survive it.) We can add in global warming, although we don't know what the effects will be.

So 6 events or so in the last 120 years, 1 of which is still undecided. The "next few centuries" part was a bit dramatic -- but over the next 1,000,000 years, how many more near-misses will we have? Even if we survive 99%, there's still a pretty high chance that humanity is gone. And from reading descriptions of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think the odds of nuclear exchange were much higher than 1%.

I must confess to resembling the second comment. In humanity, I see a lot of hope, but I see also reason for despair. I guess the cynicism hit me a bit because it's people being cynical about the one endeavor I believe holds hope for uniting our species.

Alot of cynicism in the comments on this, so I just wanted to say I am excited and I believe in NASA.

Seeing as I was in my own world today, I just heard about this news. I was(still am) ecstatic and excited by the news just to be bummed down by the comments. I'm with you on this.

"I have no desire to do a Mars landing on our own," Bolden said (two years ago).

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012...

I've more faith in Musk than in Bolden. "[going to Mars has] always been a goal of SpaceX. We're hoping to develop the technology to do that in probably 12 to 15 years."

http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-0801-morrison-musk-spacex-20120...

There's something I always asked myself about Mars expedition: well I kind of believe that it's possible to put somebody down on Mars within the next few decades.

But... what about coming back to earth? Escape velocity is about > 5 km/s. Wouldn't you need to build a launch site having at least half of the power of our launch sites down here on Earth? How are they going to do that anytime near in the future?

So is it going to be a on-way trip? And if so, are they going to maintain a supply chain from Earth to Mars for the whole of the life time of those explorers? Water, air, food...

Most of the mass (fuel) will be waiting in orbit. They need to bring down to the surface only the fuel to get back to orbit so they won't need half of a Saturn V. They still need to launch a lot of fuel from Earth.

I wasn't thinking about the whole journey back home, just the first part of it which looks damn hard to me: how do you get a space craft away from Mars? You need to reach escape velocity, and that's 5 km/s (> 11000 mph).

You'll have to build a complete launch site for that.

Easier to manufacture the fuel on Mars. It only has 40% of Earth's gravity, so easier to lift to waiting orbital fuel depot.

This is why sending humans to Mars is stupid - at least in our current resource and energy constrained world. Humans requires suits, food, air, water, health support, housing, massive infrastructure to return back and so on. On the other hand, they don't contribute much more in terms of sensors or agility. I know most of you are now super uncomfortable reading this and you want to be poetic and tell me all about spirit of adventure and what not. But get this: We need to make best out of our resources and technologies. We can have self driving cars and robots working in warehouses and delivering pizza. Why do we really need humans on Mars? I'm all of sending humans to Mars once we have found almost unlimited resorvoir of enery and world GDP has increased to point where we don't know what to do with all the excess. But until then let's send 100s of robots to mars, let's survey as much land there as possible, may be establish robot colony there, send robots with more and better sensors. May be robots can even build there biosphere first over years to prepare arrivals of humans. That would be much better use of our limited resources.

On the bright side, you only have to send the people and not all the gear, so much less weight to accelerate. I couldn't find something to indicate how much less fuel you would need to send only a few people with an earth reentry capsule. you would of course need air and supplies for 200-300 days hmm.. I guess it will be somewhat a problem anyways..

Well as you could see in the movie "Interstellar", once you have left the earth you can just zip around everywhere with your little space dinghy :-)

I don't know if lot of people realize this but you don't "leave" Earth just in low orbit or even significantly higher up. In fact the actual gravitational force at the level of ISS is almost same as on surface. The reason you "feel" zero gravity is not because you are so far from Earth but because you have acquired so much velocity that you fall with same acceleration as other falling objects. This is equivalence principal that creates feeling of weightlessness. But objects at that height otherwise feel pretty much same pull of gravity as us on surface.

I imagine water can be got from Mars (as there is Ice on Mars), and from that plants can grow, which will produce both air and food.

> I imagine water can be got from Mars (as there is Ice on Mars), and from that plants can grow, which will produce both air and food.

I am doubtful there is enough air on Mars to sustain any Earth vegetation. The mean surface pressure on Mars is 0.6% that of Earth. Mars has virtually no atmosphere.

That would be a bummer for those personally involved wouldn't it? From astronaut to subsistence farmer.

At least somebody would make lots of money from the reality TV show that ensued.

Has there been any research into remotely building launch sites?

I feel like the significance of humans going to Mars is largely attributed to movies and pop culture.

It's the Paris Hilton of the astronomical world.

I don't want to be labeled a cynic, but do the benefits of sending humans to Mars outweigh the costs?

>I feel like the significance of humans going to Mars is largely attributed to movies and pop culture. It's the Paris Hilton of the astronomical world.

I think that may be conflating cause and effect. I'd argue a manned trip to Mars is a focus of pop culture because it resonates strongly with so many. The drive to explore has always been etched into a portion of humanity. For many(myself included) Mars stands as the currently realistic pinnacle of exploration for humanity. Along with accessibility of understanding the accomplishment you end up with our current Martian fascination.

>I don't want to be labeled a cynic, but do the benefits of sending humans to Mars outweigh the costs?

With anything as expensive and complex as a manned mission to mars, we honestly can never know until we try. It's impossible to predict what fruits, if any, it would bear for humanity. That's the nature of exploration and discovery. For all we know there's some infeasible to overcome barrier that makes the task of manned travel to Mars impossible.

Due to the intractable nature of quantifying the value of manned Mars missions I think the reasoning for doing so falls to a far more base human condition than a positive cost benefit analysis. On a personal level the desire for continued human exploration is hard to explain to those who don't possess it. There's an intensely disquieting internal sensation that comes with feeling stagnation at the bounds of human capability. It's not dissimilar to the urge for preservation of the Earth for future generations, or to rid the world of undue suffering. These drives, like exploration, aren't built on entirely pragmatic foundations. They can and do often fail to justify themselves on purely practical terms.

Just for clarity, my response isn't made with the purpose of persuasion. It's to help convey my entirely subjective view of things and perhaps illuminate the thinking behind some proponents for space exploration.

> I think that may be conflating cause and effect. I'd argue a manned trip to Mars is a focus of pop culture because it resonates strongly with so many.

Game of Thrones, Star Wars, etc, also resonate with society. Things in those movies aren't necessarily worthy of exploring. Conversely, cancer research isn't represented well in pop culture... but that doesn't mean it doesn't warrant pursuit.

The NASA went to the moon because the russians wanted to do it. Today's space exploration is shaped by cooperation, but sometimes a little bit of competition is needed to achive great thinks.

This is why i'm really hoping for the chinese to announce a manned mission to mars. It's the red planet afterall ;), and this could be a modern sputnik shock for the NASA.

Sputnik had military implications. Going to Mars doesn't.

That’s a valid point. But Sputnik had also a component of harmed pride (›most advanced nation‹); at least this should be reproducible.

This is like Kickstarter campaign. I don't believe until I see some serious things happening.

I have more fate in SpaceX or Chinese to put man on Mars then NASA.

I guarantee you if China or India were to make strides towards a serious Mars mission (i.e. they had a Moon landing) we would have another space race with the US involved. It's exactly what happened when the USSR sparked the first space race. Whether we would win, who knows, but there is still plenty of expertise and know how in about sending humans into space in the US ...

I really don't understand all the absolute trust in SpaceX, in terms of human exploration they have proved nothing thus far. Sending cargo to the ISS is a different thing than sending humans. Once they pull that off we can start talking about great strides they are making in human space exploration.

Otherwise it's still a risky venture that hasn't proven anything yet, the only reason to have so much faith in them is because you're over zealously infatuated with Elon Musk. Not to downplay any of his obvious success, but I still believe in seeing results in the same way you're waiting to see if NASA is going to do some "serious things". Let's hold people to same standards, shall we?

> I really don't understand all the absolute trust in SpaceX, in terms of human exploration they have proved nothing thus far. Sending cargo to the ISS is a different thing than sending humans. Once they pull that off we can start talking about great strides they are making in human space exploration.

I think the thing about SpaceX is it seems like they have no ulterior motives (no one honestly thought it was going to make money, until it did), and they seem to have some chance of success.

I also think your humans to the space station mark is entirely the wrong one, they could do that today if they were willing to accept a bit more risk, and will almost certainly be able to do it in the near future. But putting humans in space isn't solving any of the hard problems. Far more interesting will be if they manage to re-use a rocket (or even first-stage) with no or minor refurbishment... as re-use is the only way they will be able to achieve their goals (paraphrasing massively from what Elon has said on numerous occasions).

> Whether we would win, who knows

I like to think of "we" as humanity. Hence we would win, no matter which flag gets there first.

Quite right.

The Chinese are motivated for nationalistic and propaganda purposes, just like the United States was in the 60s. They'll eventually get to Mars.

Elon Musk is personally motivated, and appears to be able to make the construction and launch of space vehicles commercially viable. If SpaceX doesn't get to Mars, it will at the very least push the commercial space industry to the point where a competitor can.

NASA? They're beholden to a group of self-serving fools on Capitol Hill and the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (which changes every 4-8 years). They're subject to the whims of politicians, which can make the necessary long-term planning and execution of such an endeavor nigh impossible.

Er, why?

SpaceX has put exactly 0 people into orbital space at all, much less to the Moon.

China has only just made it to space and are still struggling with getting probes to the Moon.

Not to say NASA is going to be the first to Mars, but they are far and away the only ones with anything remotely resembling a track record to support it. Well, NASA and Russia, but Russia doesn't seem to be doing much in terms of pushing new programs.

What about India? Are they considering any mission to Mars?

They have launched a Mars orbiter. It's an amazingly well done and cost effective mission, but it's not on the same scale we are talking about here. Hopefully they will expand their program.

I honestly don't see the point of doing this. The scientific bounty from going to the moon was tiny comparing to the amount of resource put into it.

I think poet Gil-Scott Heron does a great job deconstructing the space-exploration efforts in "Whitey on the Moon". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

What? This is nonsense. We have an social and industrial complex that would not exist if not for the space program. This internet. Your cell phone. The attempt to do great exploration begets the technology, which changes the world. This has been true since sailing ship days.

I would guess if the capital and talent marshaled to send a man the the moon had been tasked to build a global mobile communications network we would now have a better Internet and would have had cell phones a decade earlier.

Some folks want to know how exploration can benefit them scientifically.

Other folks wonder what the point of science is, if not exploration.

I'm all for expanding frontiers of science.

I'd much prefer sending robotic exploration craft, though.

I don't see much scientific gain coming out of putting the people in space, while the massively increased costs associated of keeping people alive and well in space just subtract from scientific gains in knowledge and exploration.

Putting people in space is for PR, putting robots in space is for science.

Meeting the needs of humanity might be considered a point for science, differen than "exploration". It seems that the debate is whether we meet the needs of humans right now suffering on this planet, or if we meet the needs of the long-term species under the premise, the assumption that we are simultaneously unwilling or unable to solve the problems here on Earth that we ourselves have caused.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/01/nasa-orion-sp...

It seems they're just hyping this Thursday's mission.

That said, I don't know anybody could withstand a one year trip in a capsule the size of Orion...

I read some of the background material about Orion. The transfer mission will include much larger structures for crew habitation. Orion is there as the return-to-Earth vehicle which also provides something they call 'abort anywhere' - the ability to pull the plug on the entire mission at any point during the flight to Mars.

> That said, I don't know anybody could withstand a one year trip in a capsule the size of Orion...

It's possible that they'd use something like Bigelow's inflatable module for extra living space during the trip. A year in Orion without additional space and with two roommates sounds like Hell.

We just need to pick another country to race with. "Hey China! Bet we'll get to Mars faster than you!" Then we'll have Mars 2020.

It's not the same. The Soviets inspired a level of cultural disgust and existential terror in the US that China just can't match. We not only wanted to discredit communism by winning the space race, but make sure they couldn't glass us from orbit the first chance they got.

You ask the average American whether or not they'd pitch in to beat China to Mars and they'd say no. We don't have the nationalism to make that work anymore.

I'm not so sure on this... Competition is still a strong motivator, even if nationalism is waning.

We have to wait until the mid 2030s (20 years!) to put humans on Mars via the government's program?

I fear that this goal is not nearly ambitious enough. Set a deadline far away, and the time you "need" to spend preparing to meet that deadline will increase in order to fill the amount of time you have.

Some of it has to do with the mathematical realities of the solar system. Mars will be closest to Earth in 2018, but if we can't get there that quickly, after that Mars will not come nearly as close to Earth through the 20's until we get to the 30's[0]

[0]http://cseligman.com/text/planets/marsoppositions.htm

The variances in fuel over that ~15 year cycle are really minor. Normally launch windows to Mars open every ~24 months.

The closest Mars approaches (in a reasonable time frame) occur on a roughly 15-year period. The next one is in 2018, with the one after that being 2033. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#mediaviewer/File:Mars_oppo... and the associated article for a bit more detail.

That said, I agree that the plan is pretty pointless: when I was in high school, I was super-psyched that we were going to Mars in 2018. Couldn't wait. Then we got to ~2008, and we had to go from dreaming to doing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also decided to go to Mars in 2033. This time I'm less excited.

How big is the difference really? Another month or two travel time? Humans have spent over a year (Mir) and routinely do six month stints on the ISS. If you've got the tech to get to Mars and land there, then an extra month or two flight time is not going to kill you.

I say go as soon as we have the flight hardware built and qualified.

I just watched Neil DeGrasse Tyson's word on the subject yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxnCzz5oQE) and he quite agrees with you: "We're going to Mars in 20 years" is not what NASA should be about. NASA (and other space agencies) should strive to make space re-enter our culture so its benefits can rain on all aspects of our lives. In order to do that his proposal is to double NASA's budget and focus on building a suite of vehicles able to transport whatever they want. Kind of like the space shuttle but for longer distances, such as the moon, asteroids, Mars, Lagrange points... If you have perfected a space vehicle, going to Mars is about adapting that vehicle.

I'm not sure NASA has the budget to accelerate things the way they did during the Apollo era.

Isn't it prudent to spread out the $1 trillion cost over a couple decades? After all, we have to borrow every dime of that from future taxpayers. I'm including cost overruns.

Or are you willing to pay an extra $10K a year in taxes to get to Mars sooner?

NASA's budget over a couple decades isn't anywhere near $1 trillion. It's a skimpy little agency, relatively speaking.

The average taxpayer pays NASA $55 per year.

We're already scheduled to spend a similar amount on simply maintaining our (US) nuclear deterrent. Not that I think we should abandon it or that it lacks strategic importance, but I do wonder about scale, in the same way that I wonder if NASA could find more efficient approaches.

yes, and if weren't going to happen in my lifetime otherwise, 20-30k.

There are two possible scenarios where I'll get my hopes up that humans are going to Mars:

1. It is so close that it is obvious. A heavy lift human-rated rocket is in service. It is demonstrated that humans can live long duration without the radiation shielding of the Earth. The capsule is human rated (planned to happen in 2021). A robotic landing of the vehicle on Mars is done (a lot of Mars probes have failed on this step). That humans are selected / training. This goal is set for the 2030s, so it fails this criteria.

2. They announce a huge amount of funding to be spent within a few years. The pages I've read thus far don't suggest what funding levels are.

I'll happily listen to what they say, but I'm still skeptical.

EDIT: Expanded the conditions for point 1.

#2 is out of their control. I'd speculate that at least part of the purpose of this announcement is to shame Congress into ensuring sufficient funding.

Shaming congress doesn't appear to be effective at the moment.

Bush Sr. talked about going to Mars with SEI. Bush Jr. talked about it after Columbia. Skylab (the space station in the 70s) was supposed to teach us about long duration spaceflight in order to go to Mars (and we've been parked in LEO ever since).

I want to believe... And I like Zubrin's plan to go to Mars. As it could work with an incrementalist approach, and thus is pragmatic (and sounds like what they are doing). But the problem is that there is a long time before the work on the incrementalist dream starts and landing on Mars. Who knows what will happen to funding in the mean time.

I've done a bit of (very marginal) work for NASA, and the problem they have is that it takes 2 weeks and 5 signatures to get $200 worth of parts approved... while everyone is always in a hurry regardless. Just give your engineers $300 a month for miscellanea, it'll be faster and cheaper. I can see why being a federal agency they have to be spotlessly above-board when it comes to who does what with money, but there's a limit to that.

What ended up happening with my projects (PhoneSat and a couple other things) is that I was there part time, and just bought parts on my own dime, then I sent a global itemized bill for everything. It took six months but they did pay me back.

Huge PR move, but i dont think it's gonna work. Do people really need to "send a human" to mars? To prove what to whom (the soviets are no more). It's not like we haven't already been there and taken our pictures. Or that we expect any surprises from this mission. How about we make a plan to terraform Mars? Or to work on more mysterious things like genomes, like the brain etc? Sending a human to mars is a PR move, maybe typical of our times, but not useful.

Looks like the briefing already happened. Does anyone know if a recorded version is available anywhere yet?

It's up on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU

All this means to me is that somebody in the NASA PR department is leading a push to appear competitive with private companies. I imagine very little has changed operationally in the past few months at NASA. This announcement is only meant to conform to the ebb-and-flow of media, a battlefront where private companies have been kicking NASA's ass lately. (Maybe NASA PR wants to capitalize on recent virgin crash, chink-in-armor, lol).

This push is great but it's definitely a case of "fake it till you make it" from NASA vs the private companies, since they're all competing for the same funding. Honestly, I love it. It's great to see competition in the space race again. This time instead of nation states duking it out in orbit, it's private sector vs host nation state. It's great. Hopefully this leads to huge space innovations in the next decade, and we actually do send humans to Mars.

Go space yay. ~= >===|=>

Notice that nowhere in the graphic is there a Martian lander. This looks like a re-purposing of the Orion spacecraft into a twin configuration to support a one-off slingshot around Mars on an approximately two-year free return trajectory, with a few months spent close enough to Mars to get some science done and photaos taken. It's an idea that's been floating around for years, and not very interesting because it's a strategic dead-end.

I am very saddened. When I saw the tweet I thought we finally got a commitment from high up to land people on another planet, and not just aimlessly building random congress-designed porkbarrel crap with a hope to someday do something somewhere as will be decided later.

A commitment to land people on Mars on a strict schedule would do so much to overcome the bureaucratic stranglehold on doing anything interesting in space ... too bad this isn't going to be it :/

What exactly is the need to send humans to Mars? Why not robots? Is it worth risking a human's life for science, when a robot can do an equally good job?

> What exactly is the need to send humans to Mars?

Lots of reasons, some below. Primarily, the reason to send humans is because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe. Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

> Why not robots?

You ask as if we haven't been sending robots to Mars for the last 3-4 decades. (Edit: We should absolutely send robots. We should send way more robots than people. But we should still send people.)

> Is it worth risking a human's life for science, when a robot can do an equally good job?

Not sure if trolling. Humans have collectively agreed that it's worth 10,000+ annual deaths in the USA in exchange for the convenience of cars. So yes, 1-5 human lives on Mars is worth the science that they'd get done.

Also...there are no robot scientists yet. Maybe there will be in the future, but we can't bank on that and allocate budgets to imaginary robotic scientists that are better than humans.

I've been trolled haven't I?

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization,

I think there is immense value in continued unmanned Mars missions and yes, even in manned missions, but I don't think that a trip to Mars would be a step towards becoming a multi-planetary civilization beyond "we can ferry humans between planets." Mars is not and most likely never will be colonizable. We might have an outpost or a station like the ISS, but Mars' extremely thin atmosphere and low surface gravity (a third of Earth's) means that long-term habitation will never be practical barring extraordinary technological developments in planetary engineering, the medical field, and/or artificial gravity.

Personally I suspect the only long term colonization prospect in the Solar System is Venus - thick atmosphere and near-Earth surface gravity - but for obvious reasons we'd still need extensive terraforming to cool the planet and make the atmosphere breathable - seeding the clouds with oxygen-producing bacteria would be a first step towards both, I suppose.

No it's not trolling. I just want to see if a human's workload on space missions can be replaced by a set of sensors and robots.

> Primarily, the reason to send humans is because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe.

Sure, but why not send multiple robots and a bunch of sensors? Humans need food and water to live (don't know how much of the payload will be a year's worth of food/water), and are generally inefficient at converting food sources to energy.

> Humans have collectively agreed that it's worth 10,000+ annual deaths in the USA in exchange for the convenience of cars.

Wrong. This is why we need autonomous cars. Driving is best done by computers, and humans will agree that it is NOT worth 10k+ annual deaths a year just to give humans "the pleasure of driving".

Humans, as a species, have a very low bus-factor in planetary terms...

I agree with you on these points, but think the vehicle deaths makes for a poor comparison since we're not really advancing science in the same way. I'm guessing that NASA would have its pick of qualified volunteers for a manned Mars mission because of the science involved; people who would willingly risk their lives.

> because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe

Why not send bacteria which may evolve or may create environment for other form of life? If by known life you mean human, why is it so important to ensure the continued survival of human species in the universe?

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Only if we are able to make the Martian colony self-sufficient. This is quite a problem, as even major nations on Earth aren't really self-sufficient now. Any serious attempt at trying would most likely require tens of thousands of colonists and massive amounts of materiel to be transported to Mars and sustained there. This would require many, many orders of magnitude more resources than any plausible manned mission to Mars, which is already so expensive that nobody seems to be willing to do it.

Sure, but you don't need to send humans from the first try, though. First send the robots to build up the bases, then you can send humans in those comfy bases with Internet connection, large screens and 3D-printed pizza.

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Except that all planets in our solar system other than Earth are uninhabitable. So what benefit is sending a few humans to very far away and insanely inhospitable place?

It's a suicide mission for whoever goes. We don't have a great success even landing robots on these places. We've never even tried to return from Mars. Lift-off from Earth is hardly perfected!

Because we can. Climbing to the top of a mountain is also dangerous and usually of no practical value.

Because Elon Musk embarassed them when he repeatedly tells the tale of why he started his own Mars mission.

(because he went to the NASA website and they had no plans to go to Mars or to do much of anything since they got bored with the moon in the 70s)

> Is it worth risking a human's life for science

I'd volunteer, even if it was a one-way mission with a 10% chance of success.

“Men Wanted: for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

That's great, but volunteering for adventure etc. should best be left to private enterprises. When NASA is funded by taxpayer money, the goal should be science and not adventure.

Human life is cheap - we can get a reasonable astronaut to participate in a 10%-chance-of-death mission for about the same resources as participating in a 0.01%-chance-of-death mission; and it's just as ethical as, say, sending people to Iraq or to fly a test-plane like "SpaceShipTwo".

The only concern is if the advantages of having a human on-site justify the extra weight of the life support systems.

Keep in mind that there were deaths in the development of our space program in the past.

http://www.spaceanswers.com/space-exploration/heroes-of-spac...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...

I'm not a particularly big proponent of this or anything, but I've heard people in the know claim that humans would do a vastly, vastly better job than robots. I don't remember enough detail and it's too far outside of my area of expertise, but I think if you look you should be able to find some interesting information on the subject.

That's interesting. I'll try to look for a human vs. robot comparison.

existence proof. a necessary step toward multiplanetary human civilization.

If your goal is science send robots, if your goal is the eventual colonization of Mars still only send robots for now, if your goal is adventure send people.

Adventure is kind of a selfish goal, considering that only one or two humans get to enjoy the experience. All those resources and manpower is a waste if the rest of humanity doesn't benefit from it.

It's perfectly OK for a rich billionaire to do it...but NASA's focus should be science and not pleasure, I feel.

I don't think it would sound the same

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> That\'s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

The existence of Apollo is a curse that has made it almost impossible for NASA to plan any modest sustainable capabilities in human exploration.

Instead it's often "let's build our own huge rockets and launch a few huge missions per year". This makes it expensive and unsustainable. The development, the upkeep, the operations, everything is unscalable.

It's like if you want to create a new app, you decide you need custom transistors. Division of work. Added value. Concentrate on what your core competencies are. Start small and verify your solutions.

What are the physics behind the 20mb/s bandwidth limit over radio? He said more than that isn't "feasible", because of power requirements or why?

The information bandwidth in bytes/s is limited by the SNR and the bandwidth (in Hz) of the radio channel. The atmospheric "window" is only so large. At the same time, antenna's can only be so focused and transmit power is only so high. If you're interested in reading more about this look up "link budgets."

Not in my lifetime.

Somebody may get humans to Mars -- an effort that I'm all in favor of -- but given that NASA is kept on a short financial leash by politicians more interested in dumping money into their constituent areas than funding a long-term space policy, the odds that the United States government will be behind the effort are slim at this point.

Well how old are you now?

It's an interesting statement because technological advancements are virtually assured to keep increasing the average lifespan (especially in industrialized and wealthy countries, excuse the recent dip due to obesity) and they're also virtually assured to keep making space travel a more viable reality.

Combine that with increased global cooperation (possibly deteriorating right now) and increased private competition and I think it's feasible.

I'm 24. I have a feeling I'll more than certainly see humans on Mars barring any unfortunate calamity to myself. I've also been saying I'd live until I was three or four hundred years old since I was a ten years old. So call me an optimist in a variety of ways.

Everything I've said is totally from a layman's perspective and I truly have not given the question much thought besides an initial excitement at the prospect upon reading this headline and checking out the news.

My skepticism isn't based so much off of my age (I'm in my 40s) but rather NASA's track record when it comes to manned spaceflight.

I'm fairly confident that I'll see humans on Mars before I die. I just don't believe NASA will be behind the effort.

NASA's budget is the highest of all government run space agencies and is three times that of Russia, which is number two.

So your point is that russia's space program and the ESA (etc) are also underfunded then, yes?

Isn't that kind-of like saying "My water is WAY cleaner than yours!" when we both live in a swamp? My point being, sure, we spend more than the other guy on space but compared to just about everything else we spend pitifully little on it.

Yes, but you have to consider the difference in costs...

NASA pessimism is one of the reasons the politicians have little incentive to change their minds.

Pessimism has little to do with the actions of politicians.

If Senators and Congressmen believe that a $5B mission to study lunar cheese via sub-orbital flight would drive that money into their constituents' areas, they'll support it.

It has nothing to do with what the public at large thinks about NASA; it's merely a bullet point they can trot out at the next election: see, through my work in Congress I brought jobs to your area, re-elect me.

And THAT is why I doubt NASA can pull this off, because it's clowns like that who control the purse-strings. It's why we junked Apollo capsules for the Shuttle. It's why we have an Orion capsule in development now to replace the Shuttle. It's why the target for HSF went from the Moon to low Earth orbit, languished there for decades, paused briefly on the absurd notion of an asteroid interception mission as being viable, and is now back at Mars.

My pessimism in NASA's manned program is well-founded.

They have the ideas and the know-how, but their plans are at the mercy of self-serving, science-ignorant politicians.

SpaceX is more likely to get humans to Mars than NASA.

NASA's annual revenue is 73% SpaceX's market cap.

But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.

Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr

I'm doubtful that such a mission could be organized privately, just because there isn't any money in it. When humans eventually get to Mars, they might be riding a SpaceX rocket, but the mission will almost certainly be planned and funded by NASA or some other national space agency.

If SpaceX's approach shows promise I'd expect NASA's program to evolve to integrate it somewhat. SpaceX might become the launch vehicle for the unmanned portions, for example.

Research, development, and construction will all take place in, y'know, areas.

This is great but we should really colonize the moon first. It allows us to get all the necessary systems in place in a test environment. Earth is only 3 days away from the moon rather than 9 months to Mars.

It also makes sense to work on the moon first so we can use it to leap frog to mars rather than sending a shuttle through earths atmosphere.

> leap frog to mars rather than sending a shuttle through earths atmosphere.

But you still have to get the human through Earth's atmosphere and out of orbit anyways. Once you're out of Earth's orbit you might as well coast all the way to Mars because landing on the Moon doesn't gain you anything.

I suppose that is true, is it to early to talk space elevators? ;)

I'll believe it when I see it. This must be about the 20th such announcement from NASA, and the other 19 have sunk into the bureaucratic morass without a trace. I see no reason to think this time is different, particularly in light of the mountain of unfunded liabilities that are going to keep budgets tight for decades.

Yeah, I believed you guys when you told me that in early 70s. I stopped believing after the fourth or fifth time you gave up. Or maybe when it was when you stopped being able to even put people in LEO. Humans may one day go to Mars, but they won't be wearing NASA logos. Unless it's ironically.

The intriguing point to me that I haven't seen addressed on any reporting of the announcement is this:

Is the plan to put humans on the surface and then bring them back home? How do they intend to land and get back off of the planet?

(Forgive me if they addressed this in the video; I haven't had time to watch it yet.)

What is this, a positive side effect of Cold War II? I'm sort of joking, but not really.

The essential issue for Mars, as well as for most other issues, is the Republican Party's refusal to fund government programs. Until they change or are voted out of office, all planning and discussion are hot air.

That's not the issue at all. If you look at the historical budget of NASA[1] it has a very low correlation with Republican presidents[2].

The main issue is that they get a lot of misdirected funding that's mainly allocated as a function of short-term political interests, and that's an entirely bipartisan issue in the United States.

1. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/NASA-Budg... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unite...

I meant now, not historically.

Actually, funnily enough, the Constellation program got it's big funding push under Bush, while he was talking about all his typical Republican things.

Then Obama showed up, cut Constellation and privatized the launch industry, to cries of socialism and communism.

Neither party is going to fund the previous party's space mission. A mission has to be too far along to cancel by the time administrations change or else it will get the ax.

If Apollo was still trying to put people in orbit in 1968, Nixon would have ended it to little public outcry.

Neither party really cares. There has been one pro-space guy running for office in the past 15 years.

Unless you count goodspaceguy here in Seattle. http://info.kingcounty.gov/kcelections/candidatesonballot/pa...

GWB was pretty pro-space. But NASA can't get much done in one or two four-year terms.

I love all the people saying that Space-X's main goal is to turn a profit, or that they have to turn a profit. They're a private company, not a public one. As long as they still have people willing to do work for them for what they pay them(if anything) then a private company can do whatever it likes(legally) without making a profit at all. It's private, the goals are up to the whims of the owners.

2030s? Why wait 5-15 years after SpaceX gets there? I'm guessing it will be a little awkward when they try to plant the flag on Elon's lawn.

side note, you can get SpaceX flags here: http://shop.spacex.com/accessories-58/spacex-flag-bundle.htm...

> Why wait 5-15 years after SpaceX gets there?

This isn't the 70s where there was political pressure to do what-ever it takes lest the damn Ruskies beat you to it and make you look weak. It is reassuring that they are planning for what they can achieve safely rather than doing what-ever is needed to get there first (assuming that is in fact what they are doing, of course). And maybe SpaceX won't get there as fast as they hope - their plans do seem rather ambitious.

Maybe the whole NASA budget should be used for researching a better propulsion engine first, with the current technology going to mars is extremely expensive and inefficient, we are stuck with chemical propelled rockets since ww2, with a breakthrough in this area we could achieve so much more, we need to focus our resources better.

If you got the politics out of NASA they could do just about anything. I've worked at a couple different places in NASA and the talent varies from place to place. It's the politics that ruin everything.

Personally I would much, MUCH rather see this money spent on further exploration of other planets and their moons. Imagine having a rover on one of the moons of Jupiter. To me Mars is just not that interesting.

Cool, space launch system (SLS) is a great start! https://twitter.com/NASA/status/539814651404754944

It's a launch platform without clear future missions or funding. After the surplus RS-25 engines from the shuttle program are used (designed to be re-usable, they are heavy and expensive and will be destroyed by the launches) it's not clear what will power the launch vehicle. It's a very expensive big rocket with an unclear future in both engineering and political terms.

I missed the live briefing ... is there a replay somewhere that I can watch?

Found it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU

Is there any more substantive statement than this Tweet?

Wow! This is amazing, glad to be alive to see this!

What an amazing time to be alive.

Awaiting announcement of Commercial Crew to Mars program.

Love the fact that it was first announced on Twitter :)

Plutonium: The scary element that helps probe space's secrets.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29274491

Will they come back?

Can they come back?

Bush senior said so in 1989. Bush junior said so in 2004. Obama now says so ten years later.

I'll wait for hillary to send us to mars in 2050, thanks, women have more balls.

and at the ripe age of 103 no less...

We're all going to be immortal heads in glass jars by that point.

No no she will promise it twenty years earlier, just like everyone else. She'll be 80 or something and everyone would have forgotten by then.

It about time!

So uh, Mars is smaller than Earth now?

Relative sizes of planets and stars:

http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/star-sizes/

Not sure if serious...

You don't have any radiation shielding.

Why not try surviving under the ocean first? Fail Squad NASA.

"If you recruited the Mars crew out of smokers and sent them to Mars without their tobacco you would be reducing their chance of getting cancer." - Dr. Robert Zubrin

Sure! Let's destroy another planet with our insatiable resource seeking. Anyone know of any sci-fi tomes where humans play the role of an unstoppable galactic virus? If so, whoever/whomever wrote it may be onto something :(

The "destruction of mars" for the purposes of resource exploitation is a major theme in KSR Mars books[0]. Although the actual evil of resource exploitation and terraforming on Mars is highly debated in the books, with many perspectives represented.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0...

Interesting -thanks EthanH

Mars does not have a bountiful ecosysem. I would like to establish whether life has ever taken hold there for obvious reasons, but there are other candidates that are equally if not more interesting, such as Europa and Enceladus. Unless we find compelling evidence of life on Mars within the next decade or make breakthroughs in the fields of propulsion and habitation, then I'm all for nudging a few comets/asteroids into it and getting on with terraforming already. I'm not ashamed of our exploratory instincts.

What's wrong with destroying a lifeless rock if it allows us to propagate our species thus creating more life?

What exactly does "destroy another planet" mean, in this context?

Sorry, misread the reply. Mars, if found to possess materials we deem valuable, will be mined mercilessly.

You seem to be very concerned for a giant rock. I'm not quite sure that Mars' feelings are so easily hurt, though.

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