Moon, asteroids, and Mars are GO!

Manned spaceflight is not the only sexy technology.

 

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Fine. Show how these programs created returns that could not have been created through unmanned flight or investment in other areas.

 

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I strongly deny the very idea that you, someone who hasn't even bothered to read the full editorial pages of the Washington Post, let alone the primary source material,

I refuse to talk to someone who is debating with himself. I have never said that there was no opportunities in space. What I am saying is that the US can't afford, and you have yet to show me where the US will get these funds? You are debating with a mirror not with me.

and who has absolutely no notion of the involved tasks and technologies, could think up any kind of realistic estimate for the entire project.

I didn't make that $1 trillion up, look at the thread please. Your going in circles Sparks. These issues have already been dealt with.

That a spending cut which has to happen will happen?

Dean does not support cutting the military budget, the only one who I have heard to support that is Clark, and one can only take that with a grain of salt. Also the US military budget is expected to consume $1 trillion by the end of this decade (economist), the trend is against you Sparks, now Ziggy come back to earth please.

Damn straight I deny it - any idiot can see that Bush's motivations have nothing to do with China and everything to do with being seen as a "president with vision" just before an election. And NASA's motivations have squat to do with China and everything to do with manned spaceflight.

This is something that I did not deny, I said that this moon program wouldn't even exist without the tacit Chinese plans for the moon. If it wasn't the moon and China it would have probably been a new war. You cannot logically deny the influence of China's ambitions for the US going back.

No, it didn't. Not even close. Totally incorrect. You're comparing a stalinist state with a capitalist one and not even bothering to note the economic and socio-political differences. Which makes this discussion a waste of time and bandwidth.

No not Stalinist, that is rhetorical please Central Planned. Which you and Mr.F are endorsing, spending HUGE amounts of government money to prop up a economy, create minimal jobs, and drive the economy into the ground. Alas the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s, the USA and the USSR, becoming merely cosmetic in differences.

 

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It feels more like debating with a wall. You have no idea of what's involved in the programme, yet you feel fully qualified to give over-arching statements stateing why it cannot possible work and how it cannot possibly be worth the investment, and that that investment cannot possibly be funded and that there's no possible way that that funding can be found by cutting military spending.
All of which are farcical in the extreme, because they ignore historical fact.

No, you didn't make it up, the office of budget control did and they're the ones I was referring to in that sentence.

How do you know? Do you really think any politician would be publicly advocating that in an election year when the incumbant has been spouting so much garbage about possible threats? The only one who could is Clark, and he can only do it because he was the head of NATO until recently.

Don't be daft. The fact is that China's not seen as a real threat. And Bush is most certainly not doing this in response to them, either for real or for effect. He's doing it to be seen as a "visionary" and nothing more. China might not exist and he'd still have done this. You want to know why this went ahead? Because of the positive feedback they got in polls when they floated this balloon just before the 100th anniversary of powered flight speech.
The important point though, is this - the motives don't matter. This is a chance to get mushrooms out of shit.

Stalinist is the correct term and implies central planning, a feature also seen in the US - and so saying Central Planning is not only inaccurate, but misleading.

Nope, that's not what's being endorsed.
Tell me, does the word "Clementine" mean much to you at all?

 

No, but it is the sexiest. As shown by the correllation between the space programme's activity level and the number of engineering and science graduates produced.

 

No thanks. That's been done. It takes several books to cover fully, and even then it's only possible to show what returns the programme created - it's totally impossible to prove that those returns could not have been created by investment in other areas, random brilliant ideas, or flying pigs from venus. It is, in other words, a misleading and disingenous question which in fact does not have a valid answer of any kind. A politician's favorite kind of question I suppose - but I'm not a politician, I'm an engineer. And as I'm not being paid to type here, I'll just point you towards amazon.com and let you read. I suggest you start with :

Hardersen, Paul S. The Case for Space: Who Benefits from Exploration of the Last Frontier. 1996. 192 p. $19.95.

 

I'm also an engineer, and I don't see any return worth the amount of money we've dumped into the manned space program. I have read about the supposed benefits, and do not see these types of benefits as being limited to the space program. I do however see much more money spent per return for the space program than in the private sector.

 

manned space program? I assume you mean the past missions (since there have been no others). Do you honestly assert that there was no value to it? Nasa has done many important things (and many useless) but of the ISS, the shuttle program and the exploratory missions NOTHING has had both the cultural impact and technological weight of the manned moon missions. I've said before that manned missions to the moon or mars are a risk (both financial and physical) but the payoff is beyond money alone. On the other hand the potential costs (not only money) can't be known until it happens.

What sucks about life is, this is the case with everything worth while.

 

We're all a manned space program.

 

has had both the cultural impact and technological weight of the manned moon missions
And these cultural and technological benefits are? Much of the technology NASA actually lists as being developed by them was already in development before they got involved.

 

Persol, perhaps you don't recall, but prior to the analysis of lunar samples, it was thought that the craters on the moon were volcanic in nature, as well all craters on the earth, and that meteor bombardment ceased around the time the earth cooled after formation. This was accepted scientific fact. As a result of apollo, it was turned on it's head, we suddenly understood what we were seeing at the KT boundrary layer, and suddenly we understood a threat to the entire species that noone had known existed to that point. Today we know of at least 2,000 near earth asteroids which will impact the earth causing massive levels of damage - the only unknown is when, but since NEAs have a total lifetime of less than a few million years, it will happen during the lifetime of the species. In fact, the probability of a NEA a kilometer across impacting the surface of earth (a near-extinction level event and certainly the end of our civilisation as we know it), between the year 1000AD and 3000AD is 0.4. So it's not a minor threat. However, it's also a major opportunity as subsequent analysis showed that the resources contained in these bodies was simply staggering. A single NEA could provide more metals than we would use in a century at present usage levels - and it's already in space where it can be used for orbital construction or aerobraked to the surface if we so desire.

Now, none of that was known prior to 1950 (at least not by people who didn't wear tinfoil hats). Absolutely no idea. None. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

And you want us to predict what the upcoming program could bring?

Why not just ask for next week's lottery numbers while you're at it?

And as to the "oh, NASA didn't really develop these technologies, they'd have come about anyway", please don't tell me that you can predict alternate histories, it'd be embarressing.
Fact is, no US agency has ever returned more per dollar invested than NASA. Ever.

 

Persol, you left out 'NOTHING' in that quote.

 

Sparks, it's preposterous to say what we now know about Luna would still be mysterious without manned landings: like saying we wouldn't fly airplanes without the Wright Bros. Apollo was a Giant Leap, but was more bravado than science. We are on the cusp of an explosion of our understanding of the macro and micro universe by casting off direct presence. Even for save-the-planet asteroid nudges, unmanned gets any job out there done better, faster, and more cost-effectively.

Sparks, I think your romanticism is clouding your reason. Otherwise, you should be able to name here a specific area of knowledge, that only manned spaceflight can accomplish now and in future, and why telepresence is inadequate or inferior for that mission.

If you are instead advocating purely recreational and propagandist spaceflight, then be honest.

 

A good look at the negative responses to the programme by Dennis Powell (no relation, Dennis Powell is a freelance reporter on technological/political stories) :

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/powell200401150834.asp

I probably shouldn't quote from it lest someone not read the original, but ....

In fact, that quote brings up the biggest problem with Bush's proposal - the funding. Simply put, there isn't enough in his plan to do the job, and more is needed. How much more is not certain - Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal comes in at around $20 billion over a decade or so. (For perspective, especially for Undecided, last year the US spent $750 billion on education). $20 billion over a decade is $2 billion a year. That's $1.5 billion less than people in general paid for
ring tones for mobile phones last year.

The problem is that the $12 billion Bush has mentioned (spread over a 5-year period) is $11 billion of already-allocated cash. Which means that programmes like the James Webb Space Telescope are now in dire trouble and there will be a lot of blood on the floor at NASA before this is done. The best hope is that little gets done in terms of decision making before the election, a democrat gets in, cuts military spending to a sane level and then funds the programme properly. Sadly, that's a rational course of action, something politicians from all sides seem to be wildly allergic to

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personally, I just want the smartest plan. I don't care who implements it.

 

Why hide behind Zubrin, and quote naysayers like Abelson?

Simply explain a specific and presently necessary mission that only manned spaceflight can accomplish.

 

So the half-ton of samples brought back were of little scientific use?
Crap.
There were a total of six landings on the moon and three automated sample return missions run by the russians. Those are the only sources of lunar material we have. And it was analysis of the samples that proved the nature of the craters. It really is that simple.

Indeed - but to say that it did not do real science is to deny reality. To say it brought no economic benefits is also denying reality.

Sure - if you know exactly what you need to do, exactly where the environment is (remember, even today they don't know where Spirit is to more than a few hundred feet in accuracy), and what that environment is like. If you want to try to land on an asteroid that's ten light-minutes away or more by telepresence, you'll have to find a way to get around the delay imposed by the speed of light. I believe you'll find it's more economical to actually go there instead....
And please don't tell someone whose job was telepresence that it can handle time delays. It can't, not unless you have a static environment and long periods of time to plan your movements.

Nope. It's not romanticism when you know the realities of what's involved. The fact is, a manned space programme with a definite goal is an asset in and of itself. But it produces more than you put into it. It is, in other words, highly practical - if you run it right, ie. a set goal, a set deadline, and a realistic budget, and noone coming in half-way through and changing all three things (which is how the shuttle came to be such a disaster).
Right now, we've got the first two items and the third is completely reasonable.

Okay, I'll name the second-biggest I can think of (the biggest is the NEA threat, but people seem to get this vision in their head of Bruce Willis when you try to rationally discuss that).
Energy. We (as a civilisation) need it. Lots of it. It's the primary requirement for our civilisation in fact, and now that India and China are heading for the consumption levels of the US, that need is getting so great that China's spending huge amounts of money on massive engineering projects like the Three Gorges Dam and others. But since 1977, there's been a plan for a cheap, environmentally friendly, long-term source of energy, namely solar power satellites. The idea's simple enough - you go to geosynchronous orbit, you build a solar panel array and beam the energy back down here in microwave form (not at the same frequency as microwave ovens, so you can stand in the beam quite safely, as proven by the lab experiments done on this in the late 70s/early 80s) to a rectenna farm that converts it to electrical form and injects it to the Grid. Total efficency is an order of magnitude greater than solar panels on earth, and total cost is less than a third of the cost of nuclear power or any fossil fuel alternative. The trick is, you see, that in geosynch orbit, the solar flux comes to 1200 watts per square metre of solar panel - and you can build panels kilometres on a side, pointing towards the sun for nearly 24 hours a day (there's a brief eclipse period of between ten minutes and 75 minutes daily, but over a year it comes to more than 99% of the time in sunlight).

The trick is to build them. What's the most economical way to do it? Well, actually, it's harvesting asteroids for metals but that's a bit past our technical ability for the next few decades. However, a lunar base would solve the problem. This is because a lunar base needs oxygen and can't afford to haul it up from the surface of earth - it'd be too expensive. So you land processing equipment on the moon (the techniqes involved are from the 19th century) and you process a mineral called ilmenite that's found in the basalt in the moon's maria. Ilmenite (FeTiO3) produces oxygen with two byproducts - rutile, a titanium oxide that's highly useful for building heatshields so you can save fuel on the moon-earth trip by aerobraking in the earth's atmosphere; and iron, which can be easily processed in one step to ultra-high-purity iron. This form of iron is as corrosion resistant as stainless steel and extremely strong, and makes an excellent building material. So you now have the structural metal to build the satellites, sitting in a gravity well one-sixth as deep as earths and without an atmosphere, making launching to geosynchronous orbit cheaper by orders of magnitude. Some elements will need to be shipped up from earth for construction - but the majority of the satellite can be constructed from lunar material, including the panels themselves using amorphous silicon panel designs.

(By the way, Ilmenite is the only source of Helium-3 on the moon, something that people seem to be throwing references to around like confetti at the moment without knowing what it is or why it's useful)

But you can't do it with robots. They're not capable enough for construction work, especially through a time delay. Not just in control, but in construction - we can't duplicate a human body well enough yet to do even basic manual labour, let alone clean dust out of a processing machine or cope with any of the thousand and one tiny, simple problems that operating machinery always seems to throw up.

And that's a professional opinion.

 

That was a great explanation of very promising projects, through most of the post. Then and out-of-hand dismissal:

"But you can't do it with robots. They're not capable enough for construction work, especially through a time delay. Not just in control, but in construction - we can't duplicate a human body well enough yet to do even basic manual labour, let alone clean dust out of a processing machine or cope with any of the thousand and one tiny, simple problems that operating machinery always seems to throw up. And that's a professional opinion. "

Come on, all spaceflight depends vitally on automation and creative application of automation to new circumstance. You're making some sweeping statements. There are few environments as static as the Moon, asteroids, and to a lesser extend Mars. Autonomy can easily make up for time lag, and that's the only real and very manageable challenge. Human manipulation can never be direct in these environments: You can't take the gloves off, whether they are mils or miles thick.

Please explain one important construction task that is impossible robotically, that can only be accomplished in person by humans in clumsy pressure suits. You've been spending too long around junk. Take a look here at JPL's "professional opinions"- and so much more than opinions: demonstrations.

Space is an indefensibly expensive and unforgiving place for technophobes.

 

Indeed. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing here for a manned space programme at the expense of the unmanned one (that'd be a bit odd from somone whose job is robotics research). I'm saying that we don't yet have the technology to replace a human in the control loop at the site.

Actually, Mars is a highly dynamic environment where machinery is in serious trouble if the weather kicks up. Spirit is probably going to be lucky - previous landers haven't been. The russian Mars 2 lander never made it to the surface because of a dust storm and Mars 3 was shut down within 20 seconds of starting up when it landed by the same storm. Meanwhile, Mariner 9 was denied any view of the surface by that storm for nine months.
The problem is that martian dust isn't really dust - it's fines. And if you had to design a material to foul up machinery, you couldn't have done much better than fines, except perhaps to specify a planet-wide storm throwing fines all over the place.

Asteroids, though they don't have weather, are also a long way from static and predictable, especially if they contain volatiles which can cause unexpected outgassing.

And as to the moon, you're talking about mining the place, an inherently dirty, messy, decidedly non-static task. Believe me, we don't have robots that can work in that environment yet. I'm not even sure we have anything that could move about in that environment for very long - Nomad was tough, but it didn't have to deal with much in the way of debris...

No it can't. And before you say it, that's not a sweeping statement, that's the result of two years of my research work as well as the result of a few hundred other people working on the same problem. Autonomous robotics has limits. Yes, you can say "go here and don't bump into something", but you can't say "go here and clean that solar panel off and handle any problems that come up in the meantime".
If you were prepared to accept a ridiculously slow rate of work, maybe. And by ridiculously slow I'm talking about decades to do what a manned programme could do in five years. But you're also forgetting something. All the rovers we've landed on other planets so far (except for the Jupiter probe that was dropped into the atmosphere by Galileo and the upcoming Titan probe Huygens) are powered by solar panels.
Thing is, the lunar surface has a 14-day long night. What will you do then? Lots of duracell batteries? A manned mission involves a nuclear reactor for power - would you really want to let that run autonomously with a time-lag between you and it's control loop? Hell, that's the main objection that people have to the prometheus probe!

Maintainance.

Entirely possible - but the math's the same whether your robot is a COTS unit or a custom-built jalopy made from titanium and aluminium by JPL's finest.
And I wouldn't go saying that JPL know more than CMU about robotics if I were you, it's a rather funny opinion.

So I spend seven years working in a research lab and I'm a technophobe?

 

No, technophobe was just a barb. Please explain why maintenance cannot be done through telepresence. Interesting, how you avoided discussing the relatively static lunar environment, where you can sit for days, if you don't run out of air, with very little probability of unpredictable phenomena- It's a very quiet place on our timescale, a place where telepresence time-perception is no great handicap. Besides, in manned missions, the end scientific users driving the mission always had to deal with the very same communications time lags. There were constant delays as changes of programs and procedures became necessary.

Can you explain why Martian fines, duststorms, etc are not more critical problems when involving manned presence, and the potential disruption of life support? A robot can easily be far less vulnerable than the necessary technology to keep a human functioning well physically and psychologically overthe long term in extraterrestrial environments.

You mention solar power, as if sleep and all the other human bio needs are far less demanding. Long-term, human physiology just can't handle microgravity and radiation as well as robotics.

Back to construction, you dodged it and said "maintenance". So: What specific maintenance function can you name that is impossible with robotics/telepresence, that can only be accomplished by a canned human?