Congress is working hard to ground NASA's Mars mission

I don't have a problem with NASA, as you do.
Your politics? Well as I said, if the aforementioned moron should disband NASA, space exploration would continue without it.
But I hope NASA is there to lead the way, with its obvious expertise.
With the rest of your rather confused post, I also note the benefits of robotic probes, including the sensational ESA probe that landed on a comet. Great work, you agree. But just as obvious is the fact that manned exploration will follow. Nothing at all like any cynical Buck Roger's swipe you like to imagine.

In essence again, I certainly hope NASA continues on in the same vain, along with Roscosmos, ESA, the Chinese, Japanese, Indians and in time Australia.
In fact as I have been suggesting for many years, to alleviate the admittedly costly venture to put man on Mars, it should be a united effort.
I hope there is no one in your country or NASA that would oppose such a united International effort.
I'm sure you'll agree.

 

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It always will be necessary for human exploration for the many reasons I have already listed.

 

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As I have stated many times on this thread, interplanetary human exploration is no where nears being needed. Robots are doing an adequate job of answering questions that we have. What questions that can't answered need to be gathered, and then manned missions mounted to answer them, if possible. We are not anywheres near that though. Any interplanetary mission we would mount now would only be for showing that we can do it if we want.

 

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Are you projecting there? That you think I have a problem with NASA. I don't really need to answer it ... but .. I will answer as I have answered countless times on this thread. I have a say because I pay taxes that fund NASA, and you don't.

My politics? That is irrelevant here. But, I'll remind you that you are the one that brought up politics of a single person. The OP brought up politics of US congress of a whole, but that is a different matter.

 

Robots are doing an excellent job, but the facts remain that human exploration will always be done, even if not completely necessary. Athough with space exploration it is necessary.
Try telling your view to the scientists of all types at NASA, or ESA or Roscosmos.
Try telling Marc Millis that, Aerospace Engineer with NASA Glenn Research Center and now head of the http://www.centauri-dreams.org/ Tau Zero Foundation......Try telling that to Mae Jemison, former Astronaut and now head of the "100 Year Star Ship"company http://100yss.org/
Try telling that to Buzz Aldrin, or any other astronaut....
You will not stop space exploration for whatever reason you have.
It will continue, just as it should, and whether lead by NASA or some other up and coming company....You ain't going to stop progress or the vitality, desire and need of man to explore and go where no man has gone before....if it is humanly possible.

 

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Yet you have been banging on about it for 17 posts now!

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And yet you have said nothing re my suggestion that
In fact as I have been suggesting for many years, to alleviate the admittedly costly venture to put man on Mars, it should be a united effort.
I hope there is no one in your country or NASA that would oppose such a united International effort.
I'm sure you'll agree.

 

http://gizmodo.com/5247705/why-we-need-to-reach-the-stars-and-we-will

We reached the Moon in a tin can, built a humble space station, and have a plan to reach Mars in a bigger tin can. But we need to reach the stars. And we will.

Yes, I know what you are thinking: "It's impossible."

And right now, you are right. Our current propulsion engines are, simply put, pathetic. We are still in the Stone Age of space travel. As cool as they are, rocket engines—which eject gas at high speeds through a nozzle on the back of a spacecraft—are extremely inefficient, requiring huge volumes of fuel runs out faster than you can say "Beam me up, Scotty."


We have cleared the tower
Solid boosters, hybrid, monopropellant, bipropellant rockets... all these would be impossible to use in interstellar travel, with maximum speeds going up to a maximum of 9 kilometers per second. Rockets won't work even using the effect of planetary gravity to gain impulse. Voyager—the fastest man-made spacecraft out there racing at 17 kilometers per second—would need 74,000 years in deep space to reach Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star located at 4.22 light-years in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest to our Sun.

But even if we were able to build a massive spacecraft with today'sexperimental—but feasible—propulsion technology, it will still take thousand of years to reach Alpha Centauri. Using nuclear explosions—like the ones proposed in the Orion project—would be more efficient than rockets, achieving a maximum of 60 kilometers per second. That's still a whopping 21,849 years and a couple months.

Using ion thrusters—which use electrostatic or electromagnetic force to accelerate ions that in turn push the spacecraft forward—would only reduce that amount marginally. Even theoretical technology—like nuclear pulse propulsion, with speeds up to 15,000 kilometers per second—won't cut it. And that's assuming we can find a way for these engines to last all that time. And let's not even get into the resources and engineering needed to create a vessel capable of sustaining life for such a long period of time.

All to reach a stupid red dwarf with no planets to explore. We may as well not go, really. You know, let's just save Earth from our own destruction and colonize Mars or Titan or Europa (if the aliens let us do that.)

View attachment 1074
Our ignorance is our only hope

It gets even worse. Our current understanding of physics—which says that nothing can travel faster than light—basically establishes that we will never be able to achieve space travel in a way that is meaningful to Humanity. In other words, even if we are able to discover a propulsion method that could get a spacecraft close to the speed of light, it will still take hundred of years to reach an star system with planets similar to Earth. By the time the news get back to us, we all will be dead.


And that's precisely the key to our only hope to reach the stars: Our ignorance. As much as we have advanced, we are still clueless about many things. Physicists are still struggling to understand the Universe, discovering new stellar events that we can't explain, and trying to make sense of it all, looking for that perfect theory that will make everything fit together.

That fact is that, since we don't know how everything works, there still may be something that opens the way to faster-than-light space travel. Discovering the unknown—like physicists have been doing since the Greeks—and harnessing new math and theories into new technology is our only way to spread through the Universe in a way that makes sense to Humanity as a whole. You know, like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars: Travel across the Universe in hours or days, not in centuries or millennia.

I'm giving her all she's got!
One of those yet-to-be-unraveled things is the Big Bang, the origin of the Universe itself. Our origin, the final question that we have been trying to answer since we came out of the cave and looked up the night sky. We still don't know exactly what happened, but the observation of the Universe from Earth and space probes have caused some physicists to propose many different models. One of these models says that, during the initial inflation period of the Universe, space-time expanded faster than light. If this turns out to be the case, it would make possible the creation of warp drives.

Yes, the warp drives.
Warp drives were first proposed in a logical way by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. He theorized that, instead of moving something faster than the speed of light—which is not possible under Einstein's relativity theory—we could move the space-time around it faster than the speed of light itself. The spacecraft will be inside a warp bubble, a flat space that will be moved by the expansion of the space behind it and the contraction of space in front of it. The spacecraft won't move faster than light, but the bubble will. Inside the bubble, everything would be normal.

A way to understand the effect, as Marc Millis—former head of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project at NASA's Glenn Research Center—explains, is to look at the way a toy boat reacts in the tub when you put some detergent behind it. The bubbles will expand the space behind the boat, impulsing it forward. In the same way, a spaceship with a warp drive would be able to do the same thing.

But while there have been already experiments in the laboratory that suggest that this may indeed be possible, we are still far, far away from developing the technology that would make warp drives a reality. To start with, the amount of energy necessary to bend space like this is way beyond anything we can produce today. Some scientists, however, suggest that antimatter may be the fuel that will make this possible.
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And please nacho, we all know it was mainly an American effort to put man on the Moon, but before you use that to again seemingly put everyone down, remember it was because of the WW11 and the capture of the German Physicist and Engineer Wernher von Braun among other scientists that gave the USA the edge to enable them to put a man on the Moon.
And of course with the immigration from Europe of other notable physicists like Einstein, Fermi, Szillard and others that enabled the US to construct the first atomic weapon.
So you see what an International effort can do.
It would also be Interesting to see how many foreign born scientists and personel are now with NASA...I'm sure there's a few Aussies involved.

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So let's not get all patriotic and then nasty about the fact that you as a citizen of the USA pay the taxes to keep NASA afloat.
Australia's part of course, albeit small, is none the less important with our 'scopes and even a US base in the Northern Territory.
Did you know for example it was the Parkes Radio 'scope in association with receiving stations at Honeysuckle Creek and Carnarvon in Western Australia first received the news of Armstrong and Aldrin having successfully put the Eagle down on the Moon's surface. We then as good Allies both in peace and war, radioed that to the NASA authorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes_Observatory

So although you as a tax paying citizen of the US and having more say in where your dollar goes, you need to know that NASA sometimes depends on a little country down under.
And I have visited the Parkes Radio 'scope many times...always Interesting and only 364kms from Sydney.

 

***k everyday people.

Everyday people never invented a damn thing.

Everyday people never painted The Last Supper.

Everyday people never sailed round the world single handed.

Everyday people never eliminated smallpox.

Everyday people never discovered how to manufacture a tool kit from a cobble of chert.

Everyday people never wrote To Kill A Mockingbird.

 

This post is nothing but a straw man (or, is it red-herring).

For the nth time I'm not against space exploration nor am I against manned space exploration. I am against paying the vast sums of public money (called USA tax dollars here) for manned space exploration just for the sake of manned space exploration, or, just for vanity. If a specific robotic space exploration comes to a dead-end and nothing more can be gained from it, then put that point, and other points, in a queue and examine all of them in detail before committing manned presence on any of them.

For non-public money, or Australian dollars -- knock yourself out. I don't have any players there, and I wish yall well.

I hope now that this lays to rest you continually bringing this up.

 

No, you brought in politics of the one person, in an ideological-sort-of-way, which is the worst kind of politics. Don't try to project that on me. I have been talking about fiscal matters v. any need for manned space exploration.

 

Except that I have answered. THERE IS NO NEED FOR A MANNED MISSION TO MARS RIGHT NOW. And, I don't know of any time in the past any person or NASA opposed any international collaboration on a space mission. Do you have any specifics, or are you just floating that one up to see if it sticks on the wall?

 

Whatever you seem to think was a putdown by me was placed there because of you trying a slight of your own.

 

So when do you imagine there will be a "need"?

 

That's a hard call. In short, I don't know when exactly. We're getting good information right now from the robots, and there are still additional robotic missions that can be dreamed up to answer questions that are being/have been piled up, such as any biological activity now or in the past.

I don't see it being needed anytime soon, probably not until AFTER the 2020s or 2030s, and depending on how private space ventures take hold. Though, the "private space ventures" part may not matter, as they are mostly dependent on NASA/USA and Earth satellite launches for their funding. I don't see much money there for them to mount manned Mars missions (someone is making noise there though -- who is it, Elton Musk??).

How about you? When do you imagine there will be a "need" -- or, if you prefer the alternate question: When should we send a manned mission to Mars, and why?

 

Ahhh...quoting Jesus Diaz.
Jesus Diaz, is he an eminent Scientist?, Physicist?, Professor?, Cosmologist?, or?
More articles by Jesus Diaz : https://kinja.com/jesusdiaz?startTime=1426183380889

 

I think that robotic missions are great, but they are merely the precursor to manned missions. I do live in the US, and I do pay almost half my income to the government. The NASA load on an average taxpayer is about $150 a year. I pay about $600 a year to NASA, and would gladly pay more to support research that benefits all mankind.

I agree that we should start with robotic missions, as we have been doing. Eventually we will send people - not because there is science that robots can't do (although that is a less-important reason) but because we need to get all our eggs out of one basket (almost literally.) The world community benefits greatly by having a world-wide culture with different races, languages, foods, specialties, challenges and accomplishments - and this will be true for a human civilization on Mars as well.

I disagree. It might take 100 years but there is no reason that a Martian community needs to import anything from Earth once they are sufficiently established; Mars has all the raw materials needed to create anything we have here on Earth. (Much harder of course.) On the other hand, they will WANT to import things, just as Earth will want to import things from Mars. And that again helps mankind as a whole.

 

Ahh -- $600. Glad to see a number. That is more than I thought, though it is (I guess) dependent on the amount of taxes you paid (on 1/2 of your income). I'd almost bet that is on a BIG-CHUNK of income. I take it that the research benefits all of mankind -- whether it is robotic or manned. That's great and I'm all for it, but I'd still like to think by helping pay for it that I'd get some say of how it is apportioned out to robotic v. manned research. I think there is way more bang-for-the-buck for robotic missions.

I'm not sure we disagree. "100 years" doesn't seem to me to be "a foreseeable period of time" for space exploration planning. I'd like to read more on what you post, that Mars has all it needs to create anything we have here on Earth, and costs. I've not heard that before. Is there a topic or anything here, or links?

Maybe I'll go a little further (I might regret it though!!). I'm all for the government bowing out of most of the exploration, esp. manned exploration, and nurturing the private companies to take over. I though think the government has to be most of their market for the time being as I don't see too much of a private market developing past Earth orbit right away (how many people have the bucks & want to vacation on Mars for a month or two???). That also gives the privates the orbital tugs, and I would think they could make pretty good money at that.

NASA/Governments could step back in for purely knowledge seeking robotic scientific missions, and help on missions too costly for the private firms.

I guess I'm also for the mostly non-scientific non-manned mission to capture a small asteroid in an Earth accessible orbit, so that it can be examined. I wouldn't think there is a practical value to the minerals in it, but it would be interesting still the same.

 

Hohum....The usual much ado about nothing

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