There are several news stories about how NASA has had to cancel other programs, including the nuclear powered rocket program, to work on Bush's idea for getting us back to the moon in 13 years, as opposed to the 7 it took after John F. Kennedy said it, in 1962, when he wasn't lying. I was just thinking. Many other programs will fall by the wayside to try to get us back to the moon. What happens when a future President decides to cancel the moon and Mars projects? Then billions of dollars will have gone down another rathole like Homeland Security. Then we won't have the moon or nuclear powered interplanetary ships. We won't have any space capabilities and China will own the moon.
Let China own the moon. I would rather own the sea floor. Star Wars is no good for shooting down ICBMs but it can destroy Satellites. China can't use the moon against the USA. Trying to use the moon would cost more than using the sea floor. Good bye NASA, you cost too much.
Read Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Have we really gotten this stupid? China can build "flying anvil" rockets to be launched from the moon that can get to Earth on small black powder charges. They can be guided for less than 200 dollars worth of hardware. They can be coated with ablative materials. An even bigger threat is if they build mass driver launchers. There is a lot of iron in the lunar soil, so even if those drivers require a certain amount of iron in everything they send, they have it. This would make it possible to bombard the planet with city-killer meteors. It takes 25 times less energy to drive a projectile to Lunar escape velocity then it takes to drive it to Earth escape velocity. This means a much cheaper driver and a much smaller power plant. I think you'd better take a really hard look at what it actually costs China to get rockets to the moon. There is a huge advantage when their contractors only cover costs plus a small percentage. There is another huge advantage when they don't have to spend hard currency for most of their hardware.
Such is life in a "democracy" ...the people of a democracy usually get just exactly what they deserve! I could also ask why we're spending billions of dollars to rebuild a city BELOW SEA LEVEL!? I could also ask why we're spending billions to rebuild New Orleans, when we seem to allocate nothing to rebuild the OTHER parts of the nation that have been devastated by storms?! (Ahh, news sensationalism at work n' play, huh?) With regard to your original question: You must remember that the President does not decide these issues on his own ....all such matters are voted on and approved by the congress. So please don't JUST blame the president ...he ain't really got much power in our system of government. I also wonder why you call Homeland Security a "rathole"?? You don't think that we should protect our harbors and airports and public transportation systems? ...and protect our borders from illegal entry? Baron Max
Here's a thought– move large quantities of aluminum and some magnesium to the moon, along with some water. Use the aluminum, iron and magnesium to make thermite powered steam engines. Cheap fuel until they get the reactors online.
You know, Baron Max, if the dikes had simply been built to Cat 5 specifications, they would have saved a lot of money over rebuilding now. Why rebuild a city that is below sea level? Because it is a major seaport that does over 100 billion dollars in trade. People live there because it takes a lot of people to operate a seaport. The workers who work the seaport deserve a decent town to live in. It's worth some risks and it's worth taking care of.
Agreed. But it doesn't take a city the size of New Orleans JUST to operate the seaport! And more importantly, if they rebuilt it for that purpose, then none of the area would be BELOW sealevel. I just love hindsight arguments and the ever-popular Blame Game ...they're so much fun, but mean absolutely nothing to the present situations/conditions. "If all humans loved their fellowman, then we'd have no wars!" ......LOL!! "If the fox hadn't stopped to take a shit, then he'd have caught the rabbit!" ...LOL! "If the girl hadn't fucked any guys, she wouldn't be pregnant!" ...LOL!! Thanks for your insight (or is that "hindsight"?) Baron Max
The United States' space program is a perfect example of governmental incompetence. Kennedy set his moon-by-1970 goal as a direct response to the Soviets' lead in heavy-booster technology. It was an excellent rallying point for U.S. high-tech industry and a political gamble with a great potential payoff. The science wasn't so hot, since more exploration could be done unmaned, but never mind. The U.S. aerospace industry started at zero and built the Apollo program from scratch (well, with a lot of help from the Germans, but never mind) and July of '69 was in my mind the high-water mark of the United States as a world power. Once the first landing had been achieved, Congress then proceeded to cut the budget. After all, politics had been the only thing driving it and once the political end had been achieved there was no reason to continue. They pissed away all the technology, the expertise, the hardware (there where SIX COMPLETE SATURN 5 ROCKETS available in 1973, and they just let five of them rot) and most crucially the momentum. NASA, fighting for its very existence, sold Congress a bill of goods. They said "hey, we've got this great idea for a Space Shuttle - it'll fly every two weeks and turn a hell of a profit!". Well, budgets were squeezed, engineering compromises made and we got a very expensive, very vulnerable and not terribly useful fleet of spacecraft. For twenty five fucking years we've been going in circles, and now that the shuttle has had it, what are we going to do? Apparently we are going to reheat Apollo designs and pick up where we left off thirty two years ago. I just can't believe it. See http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/space_advocacy/111005_appropriations.html Enough of the rant.
There are a variety of ways to rise to --overcome -- a challenge. How one talks about doing such a thing means nothing in the overall scheme of things that depend on actual accomplishment. Talk is always a great distraction from having to make any sort of actual effort to confront a real world challenge head-on.
China does not have the industrial/technological capability to construct and operate a Aircraft Carrier , let alonethe finacial capability to keep it going . The Chinese space programme literally relies on Russian assistance which comes at a price . Americas best option would be to construct a large space station that orbits Earth that contains laboratories and an updated version of the hubble telescope . The question I put to you is this , other than international prestige what benefit did the US derive from putting 3 men on the moon ? Then answer this what benefit did the US derive from the least costly Hubble Telescope ?
Te Jen, you know what it means when budgets are squeezed and we end up with more expensive vehicles. It means that the budget axe was used to force NASA to accept deals that made more money for government contractors. Some of this is a lot like we didn't gain anything from all the R&D that went into the moon launches. We're going to be forced to do it over and over again for each vehicle, and that was one of the biggest benefits that might have been had from a standardized launch vehicle. One R&D effort produces a workable template and then we maintain it and upgrade it and save a few billion dollars. The Chinese are going to be able to put hardware on the moon by a very simple expedient. It's a lot like buying three cars to renovate and selling two of them for enough money to cover the costs of all three. They already have the money to capitalize dozens of moon rockets. Bear in mind that they don't have to spend nearly as much hard cash as Americans do and they don't have to build to American specifications or buy expensive American technology. They have been launching commercial satellites for American companies for ten years now. It is a reasonable guess that they get enough money from any two launches to finance one launch of their own on top of those two launches. These aren't all that expensive in scarce resources. Meaningful amounts of aluminum and other metals for a space effort run in the few millions of pounds. For a consumer economy these numbers run to the tens and hundreds of millions of tons. They can also buy a lot of the raw metals from US. The question to ask ourselves is, if we have to use the less expensive materials to build spaceships, could we do it, and how? How far would safety actually decrease if we use techniques that are suitable for those materials? Might it actually increase if we were forced to use more error tolerant hardware, like hatches that fit in a way that they won't jam if they are abused or off tolerance? What if we use good solid hardware instead of overengineered crap? What if we only cater to the needs of the ship instead of supplying porkbarrel to over-priced contractors? The Chinese way of doing things is often sickening, but they know how to get what they want. It does look like one way or the other we are going to wind up doing things more their way. How do we want this to fly? On our terms or theirs? If it's on their terms I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
People have been to the moon, no need to go back... Next move should be to Mars. -Shifty RUssian www.SexSlash.com Crazy Sex News Stories!!
Wrong, my man. We need a lucky find of a few thousand tons of carbonaceous chondrites on the moon to get the ball rolling, because we need the hydrogen and nitrogen from those rocks for raw materials, but the moon really is a good stepping stone to the further exploration of space. The only alternative is to find a dirt cheap way to launch payloads into space from the Earth. We need the moon as a platform for defense. We really don't have a choice because China will take us when it needs to and when it can. It won't even try if it can't win. I vote for not even trying. Some showdowns don't need to happen.
There have always been two parameters - weight and reliability - that drive costs, and they are related. The more reliable a spacecraft is, the heavier it will be. This forces the size of the rocket up, increases complexity, increases costs and because there's more invested in each launch, that puts more pressure on everything to be even more reliable, and so on. A nice vicious web of relationships. We have a host of new materials that weren't available when they were building Apollo and the Shuttle. Why not build a lunar module out of carbon fiber, kevlar and other lightweight materials? I bet you could easily cut the weight of a 1960's LM in half. Get rid of those huge legs and footpads, too. Just use a pair of helicopter skids. You're right about government contractors, too. I suppose the smart thing to do is let Scaled Composites build spacecraft - they did a nice job with SpaceShipOne - and a single company is always going to do it better than a buch of aerospace giants divvying up a government pie. One more word about reliability. In 1943 we sent young men over Germany in bombers. They knew they had about a 1-in-25 chance of not coming back on each mission, and they had to fly about 30 missions. The math was not encouraging, but very few guys failed to do their duty. Now, the U.S. could have given them more armor, better defensive guns, etc., but that would have cut down on the bomb load, therefore requiring more missions and consequently keeping the overall risk the same. Space exploration ought to be viewed the same way. It's risky, boys and girls, but if we keep spacecraft simple, we can fly more, learn faster, make changes to hardware easier, build infrastructure out there and ultimately make it as routine and safe as transatlantic flight. If you can't accept a 1-in-50 crew loss rate, then go do something else for a living.
We need people who know the hardware who can sort out what we need and don't need, and what can be purchased off the shelf. Right now we have had two accidents that had a lot to do with compromising safety to throw a bone to the environmentalists. The Challenger exploded in part because they weren't allowed to have asbestos fibers in the sealant between the parts of the solid fuel boosters. The Discovery was because they weren't allowed to use Freon to expand the foam, which would have made a foam that wouldn't fall off. We need a set of avionics systems of known reliability that we can stick with for a series of boosters that can be assembly-line manufactured and throw out the extraneous bullshit like reusable segmented steel cylinders for the SRBs. We need a station out there that can be serviced by smaller spaceplanes with solid fuselages that need a lot less crap attached to them to make them reliable, and incidentally can use thicker metal for the hulls. Then we need Earth to Moon ferries that will never land on a planet that has air, to ship materials and people back and forth under low acceleration. I think that we also need to eliminate the plumbing between the external tanks and the shuttle engines. We need heavy lift boosters that can place large payloads in orbit cheaply, which the Chinese already have and we don't, and when we have that, it takes next to nothing to get them from there to the moon if we have some high specific-impulse engines that will work on a few hundred to a few thousand watts of electricity. From the moon it takes less than 4 percent of the power to leave again, so one other need is a series of small dependable boosters that can send a boat to lunar escape velocity. We should have had a base by 1980 and just dared the Soviets and China to do anything about it. One thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't cost that much more to build ten of a given design than the first reliable model of that design. There's a joke about two fishermen who spent $5,000 to go to their dream place to fish and caught only one fish. One of them said "It's a good thing we only caught one fish." If a system is put together at a cost of one hundred million dollars and it produces only one vehicle, that vehicle costs one hundred million dollars plus the absolutely necessary markup that the contractor charges so that he can stay in business. It can cost millions just to close an assembly line and he's earned his profit. If it costs half a million dollars for raw materials for that vehicle and you make a hundred of them, then a hundred of them costs one hundred and fifty million dollars, or 1.5 million dollars a piece. This is why there were five Saturn V vehicles left when the Apollo missions were ended. They ran off several because it didn't cost that much more than building one. Why would contractors put the screws to the government? Most of this is because they have to cover costs and make a profit before the government cancels programs and cuts back. If they don't they will be unable to fulfill any more contracts. I personally would be for increasing the size of the booster for a moon mission, if we were going to fly direct to the moon, and actually making a heavier vehicle which may also be cheaper to build and safer. The Lunar Excursion Module was horribly unsafe because they had to save a few pounds and they made the walls of a metal foil that an elbow could poke through. It was also, I suspect, horribly expensive to roll sheet metal to those specifications along with the reliability requirements. Compare this to the fact that technology is capable of building scuba tanks with great reliability that can hold 4000 atmospheres, not PSI, but atmospheres of pressure, along with the necessary valving. At that density the compressed air is denser than liquified air, and people can carry these things on their backs. We might well get increased reliability and safety with simplified systems.
China can definitely use the moon against the USA. Not only is it cheaper to send a rocket or a kinetic kill vehicle to the Earth's surface from the moon than from Earth to the moon, it is also cheaper than sending it point to point on the Earth. The moon is the ultimate high ground. It is much easier to bombard us from there than it is for us to bombard them.
If the U.S. had spent the money that went to the war on (of) terror on the space program instead, we'd have one hell of a program. That's the part that really pisses me off. After all, the "defense" corporations (Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics etc) are not really in the business of making weapons. They're in the business of making money, and as far as I can tell they would be happy to make any product the U.S. government wants to buy. What do they care if they make spacecraft instead of fighter jets, huge wind turbines instead of missile cruisers. In my opinion that is what will tip the scales in today's world. Can we be energy self-sufficient, weaning ourselves off petroleum? Yes. Can we build a space program that is interantionalized and a thereby a source of great pride and wonder globally? Sure. All it takes is money, and we keep pissing it away on killing people. Our priority list ought to be 1. Robotically survey the moon from top to bottom - put Mars rover-type vehicles there by the dozen and do it right. 2. Go back to the boilerplate Apollo-type designs for the short-term. Keep it reliable and relatively cheap. Separate the functions of man-lifting and cargo-lifting. 3. Develop SpaceShipOne's flight model as a next step - a mother ship aircraft to fly to 125,000 feet, dropping a lifting-body vehicle that can get to orbit. The vehicle returns to the launch-site and lands by parachute. 4. Grow the space station - and build a second one that can push off to lunar orbit. Use it to facilitate a permanent base on the moon itself. Yes, we've been there, but it's a harsh environment. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere - that's its value. 5. Go get an asteroid and bring it into Earth orbit. Learn how to mine it and use it as a space station. Seek out other small asteroids that can be mined profitably for resources we need here and consumables needed for space exploration. 6. Go do the same thing to Mars' moon Phobos. Get good and comfortable there, then put a permanent presence on Mars. Terraform it with genetically-engineered life forms. But as I have said in other threads, if we don't solve the energy crisis, none of this will matter. Energy is the key - the nation that can bear down and figure out how to meet energy needs without petroleum will instantly become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. If no one does this before the oil wells peter out, then we're all screwed.
It is really sick that humans can't get their shit together and therefore must waste money on wars and security. Even if wars and security expenditures become athing of the past space exploration does not become a priority. Going into space is like a poor father buying a fancy new car when his kids are sick and the family is living in a rented shack that leaks. As for Metakron's chinese threat to use the moon to lob lethal debris at the USA, I think you don't have your facts straight. I think China could hide nuclear weapons in the USA cheaper than they could build a equally deadly weapon system on the moon. The USA would have more warning of an attack coming from the moon. The USA already has enough nuclear weapons to obliterate China. And China probably already has enough nuclear weapons to obliterate the USA. China does not need the moon to threaton the USA. The USA could fire ICBMs at any thing china built on the moon without killing civilians. The moon as a better weapon sounds like nonsense to me. How much black powder would it take to get something out of the moons gravity? Not as much as from earth but still a lot. Can you get anything that has delicate electronic guidance systems into space using black powder without damaging the gudance system? Read Robert A. Heinlein is a fiction writer.
You're not familiar with black powder rockets are you? The formulations are slightly different, but a lot of the thrust that lifts the space shuttle works the same way as a high quality black powder rocket. American hobbyists have a lot of experience using black powder type engines that can produce a thousand pounds of thrust or more. I saw on TV where they used three such units to launch a car hundreds of feet. Those units are pretty small. Put a thousand pounds of thrust behind 200 pounds of payload, launch from the moon, you essentially have 5 gs of thrust, and lunar escape velocity is about 7500 feet per second. You need an engine that can produce that thrust for 50 seconds. 200 pounds is a suitcase nuke with extras. "Delicate" guidance systems have been able to survive being launched in solid and liquid fuel rockets for more than 60 years. It isn't anything special for a guidance system these days to be able to survive 1000 Gs. The requirements are much less stringet when the rockets are launched from the moon. Even a 2 G launch wastes very little propellant fighting the moon's gravity. We can't hit the moon with ICBMs. They won't get there at all. That is what is meant by it takes 25 times as much energy to get up there as it takes to get back down. The only deterrent we have is to make it cost too much to attack us.
No, I am not familiar with black powder rockets. I picture cannons and bottle rockets. A cannon would give a nasty jolt rather than the smooth acceleration of the liquid fueled Apollo rockets . I suppose a bottle rockets acceleration could be smooth. What would your black powder rocket use for oxygen? Would you have them mix ammonium perchlorate brought from earth with the black powder? It all doesn't matter. Doing mining and major work on the moon would be more expesive for the Chinese than destroying the USA with what they already have here on earth. And the USA can send earth based nukes to any given point on the moon. You just like the romance of space.
