Moon, asteroids, and Mars are GO!

let me answer the second question first, then I'll take the second.

I have said it many times before on this board, and I'll keep on saying it:

There's no good reason NOT to do it!
If you take this aproach, people will better understand the necessity of human spacefaring.

There are several good arguments for human spaceflight, like there are for robots too,...but the bottomline remains: Why send robots if we can send man?

There is really not such a thing as deficit,...it's just a matter of looking to it with the right amount of wisdom, so you will be able to make the right decisions!

For instance: are you aware of the fact that if you personally don't understand the reasons for human spaceflight, there are dozens of others who do?

You really should try and question this leadership more and test it to the bone,...but there's no way to know upfront how it's going to be like when a leader is in place.

Sometimes,...Most of the times,...okay,...

Always

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the wrong decisions are being made. You are not up to change that are you?

Well: then you also should exept human spacefaring as our destiny, something you won't be able to change.

Than we landed on the second question:
Can it be done with a reasonable amound of money and resources?

my answer to you is : YES! it can be done.
in fact: every dollar spend in NASA gives a return of two dollars!!!

So to my opinion the leadership and the people who represent it,...are just plain idiots who go about there usual daily bussiness by thinking they can pull off a globalization while they get all the resources, (wich they don't) and while at the time laughing at attempts from civil industry to gain space acces.

Those are the industries who should be develloped! Have you any idear of the spin-offs it gives?

CLEARLY you don't.

In Europe,...the anual reports show a significant increase of spin-off industry,...now I don't know about YOUR country, but nevertheless: We Europeans DO have a future goal, outlined in the ESA's directive.

The best way to go about it would offcourse be coöperation, but to say that, would mean to be blind or plain ignoring to the fact of indiscrepancies between visions upon politics and especialy the power that comes with it.

Some good decisions are needed,...

Futhermore, I question your motivation upon space exploration:

It's not going to take long from now, before the world can say: we determined a few habitable planets (several systems with comparable sun's are under scrutiny and 44% of the time there seem to be formed habitable planets)
But even so: people like you will say: "So what, we don't need spaceships! We just need some fresh air to breathe and some more room to live and some more wealth for all and some more comfort and some cheaper resources"

People like you will always sit on their buts and be negative,...and fail to SEE that all what you're asking for is in fact OUT THERE!

You people have a serious lack of vision, no offense, but really,...you should try and see that space-faring is indeed verry, verry beneficial for mankind.

Maby not for the sakes of you,...but for that of your children and grandchildren. Because they will inevitably be victems of OUR waste-culture,...

Man, what future are you looking at? I know for one thing this: there's hope for humanity as a whole within my vision. Any lack of that would make living this live unbarable.

 

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....Would Bin Laden support Bush in his plans to shoot another mooncrater in the US-deficit?

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Just exactly how much can this much debated deficit grow before really bad things happen to the us ?

About the return of investment, some NASA bought and payed for studie done by (muhahaha, kidding right?) independant MC Kinley showed that every dollar invested in space would return 7 dollars , I am just asking myselve, in how many years ?????

You know, I am a space enthusiast and I am European, so I don't directly have to pay for Bush re-election spaceprogram, but still I feel the need to express caution about the program...

 

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From the editorial in today's Washington Post:

And that's from Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society (www.marssociety.org) and author of The Case for Mars and Mars on Earth.

 

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buffys

In order to believe that bunch of rhetorics, I would also have to believe Saddam had nuclear weapons. It's a load of propagandist crap, I wanna see the numbers.

Fukushi
There's no good reason NOT to do it!

There are more then enough reasons not to do it now. If you wanted it, then you should be able to wait.

 

Yes, there is a very good reasons not to do it: we won’t learn as much. Manned space flight is much, much more expensive than unmanned exploration. For the cost of setting up a useless base on the moon or sending a 'plant the flag' expedition to Mars, we could dispatch a large fleet of highly advanced robot probes and still have enough left over to fund all sorts of research into aeronautics and launch technology. We should not go to the moon or Mars until we actually have something to do there that can't be done cheaper by robots. You have to keep in mind that manned missions are orders of magnitute more expensive than robot missions. Even if a large percentage of the unmanned missions were to fail completely, we would still probably end up learning more and saving money. Consider this: the Mars Pathfinder mission cost $850 million. Let's say it costs $50 billion to send a person to Mars. If we sent astronauts to Mars they would no doubt learn quite a lot about the planet. On the other hand, if we simply set up the money into a bank account that accumulated 3% interest we would be able to launch a $2 billion probe every year for the 45 years. Which do you think will result in more scientific knowledge: landing a few people once, or sending 45 extremely well-funded probes?

Whenever someone questions the wisdom of spending money on manned space flight, supporters are always quick to jump in and say 'but every dollar that you spend on NASA generates X dollars for the economy,' where X is some figure that varies depending on who they heard it from. This is simply untrue. It's the sort of thing that people keep repeating without ever questioning because they want to believe it. The truth is that NASA has produced very poor economic returns on the investment that the US government has made in it. In 1989 NASA commissioned the Chapman Research Group, an economic analysis firm, to conduct a study on the economic benefits of NASA spending. Their report, An Exploration of Benefits From NASA "Spinoff", concluded that every dollar spent on NASA results in an economic benefit to the United States of only about 10 cents. The fact that NASA has managed to contribute a great deal to the economy despite such low returns is merely a reflection of the tremendous amount of money that NASA has received. Of course that's not to say that the other 90% of the funding was simply wasted, since spending that doesn’t result in economic returns often still results in advances in basic science. The point, however, is that you can't use spinoffs as a justification to spending any arbitrarily large amount of money on NASA.

It's also important to remember that there is no clear evidence that spending money on manned flight produces any more in the way of economic returns than spending on unmanned flight.

The difference between us is that you want what you think is 'cool', whereas I want what will yield the greatest amount of scientific knowledge and technological advancement.

 

Yeh, but eventually there comes that critical point where your probe lands on Mars, everything's cheery, and then it has to make an unpowered roll down a ten-foot ramp and you hope it doesn't tip over. And what can you do but press the "Go and please don't crack up because you cost a million billion dollars" button?

Of course, the present US plan is to send some poor punk to the Moon to live there for a while so that he can go stir-crazy and get cancer, and then come back and write a book. It might be nice if they had a better plan than "arrive".

 

Calm down, as I said, do what you will with that info. It's appropriate to this discussion so I posted it. No need to have a seizure over it.

Think of it this way, if you're sure bush is lying in the link I posted and his plan will bankrupt america then there's an equally good chance the whole mars/moon plan is a lie too and will never happen. See, problem solved.

 

EI_Sparks: Are you now suggesting that we should launch a $50 billion fossil-hunting expedition? I suppose it could be argued that definite proof of past life on Mars would have a value beyond any amount of money, but I still don't think it's a convincing argument. If such fossils existed there is no guarantee that astronauts would be able to find them, and I'm still not convinced that robots wouldn't be able to do it cheaper. Even if robots aren't as good as 'digging around in the dirt' as humans, we have to consider whether it would be cheaper to simply improve our robotics technology. Like I said in my last post, let's consider the opportunity cost of spending $50 billion on a manned mission to Mars. For the same cost, we could donate $100 million to the top 25 robotics research institutes every year for the next 20 years. Do you think that perhaps that would be enough to make robotic probes competitive with humans?

 

You didn't read the editorial or any of Zubrin's other writings, did you?

 

I read the portions that you quoted.

The first section basically said that humans should go to Mars because they are more agile and adaptive than robots. While it’s certainly true that humans have advantages over robots, the advantages aren’t enough to make sending humans to Mars economically viable. The extra agility and adaptability just aren’t worth the extra cost. There are no obvious experiments that humans can perform on the Martian surface that could not just as easily be performed by robots at a much lower price. It's important to remember that the limitations on what sorts of data we can collect on Mars will largely be limited by the equipment that we send, and in most cases robots can operate the equipment as well as humans. It is certainly possible to concoct hypothetical scenarios in which humans would be able to do things that robots couldn’t, but the relatively small advantages of a manned mission don’t outweigh the enormous costs. Even in a scenario where data from a robotic explorer called for further tests that the probe wasn't capable of performing, it would still generally be cheaper to simply send a whole new probe on a follow-up mission.

The second section complained that we haven’t sent enough life-detection equipment to Mars. I agree with this, but there's no reason to believe that humans would be significantly better at operating gas chromatographs or carbon dioxide detectors than robots.

The third section contained some romantic prose, but no arguments.

 

Sending humans to Mars, is economically viable!
You don't have any Idear on the detail, you make uninformed comments, you're biassed upfront about a subject that is verry extensive and can't be answered right away and you try to make us explain why?

I could tell you why, but it takes to long to type it down I suggest that you first read up upon the subject and THEN make a consideration for yourself:

Because I think you just see some number with a lot of zero's and your mind refrains from thinking!

 

Calm down, as I said, do what you will with that info. It's appropriate to this discussion so I posted it. No need to have a seizure over it.


I didn't have a seizure, I just had a annoying feeling of reading irrelevance. Sorry...

Fukushi

Sending humans to Mars, is economically viable!


How? enough on the rhetorics, time to see these numbers. And please take in mind the fact of the current US deficit, and inevitable cost overuns, and delays...things you cannot predict mind you, and thus making this "economic viability" questionable at best.

 

Nasor, you need to read the full article at a bare minimum. Then you need to go read his other stuff. Then you get to criticise him with any weight at all. And if you really want to assault his argument, you'll need to actually read a lot more - economics, science, aerospace technology and so on.
Shouldn't take you more than four or five years....

Undecided, the numbers and their associated analyses have been published in numerous books over the past three decades. Go read one, don't expect someone else to spend their day typing in cliff notes on one for you from memory and then argue over their remembered numbers instead of the originals...

 

Undecided:

There's always a direct pay-off neccessary? No,...

Is there's always direct profit from an investment? No,...

Is there's direct return from a space mission? Yes,...

You want to see numbers? Use Google, I'm not going to do this for you.

What I can do for you is this: trying to shine some light trough that darkness of negativity for one thing!

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However: you ARE correct if you say that it would cost a lot,...

and maby,...just maby,...you are right about the fact that robots are a little-bit-less expensive.

but that's not the issue here!

Human space-faring is! And in order to do this, we must come up with some bright idears to make our future possible for us.

It's not a question about the money,...money can be found,...(apparently) look at Iraq-war,...your country is pissing away, two billion a MONTH!

If you make comparisions, then there's no way you can declare human spacefaring,
-a much more beneficial endevour- expensive, really!

So whatever the cost,...the principle is at stake,...
Thus it's a philosophical question!

Agree? (I know you want to see numbers but I gotta know where your philosophy stands on this issue, right?)

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And you don't even have to take our word for it:

here:
http://www.space.com/news/commentary_bush-plan_040113.html

read this!

 

I see a lot of Fearspeak here. If we go to the moon/Mars, then millions of children will starve and die? FYI, NASA is a tiny fraction of the total US budget. If anyone in power truly gives a damn about starving children, they would build a few less bombers and support daycare, low income housing and work projects, etc. for those who do need it. I am all in favor of that. NASA shan’t be killing any kiddies.

Remember, the president who is proposing this new program is the same guy who couldn’t spell NASA before he came into office and was suddenly in charge of it. He has no clue what this is really all about or what it takes to make this a reality. How can we expect the administration to commit to such a project when the USA has dumped most of its promises about the ISS? Is that how we are going to build a moon base or a Mars mission? “Oh, we decided not to build a return vehicle for you, it was just such a bother. But hey, good luck!”

I really enjoyed the analogy of building a factory on a mountain top. I can’t think of a better description of the scope of what is being suggested. Yes, NASA does give us good returns on our investment, but over the long haul only. Building a road to the mountain top is a long haul project, so returns should be rolling in by the time we finish that road and start on the factory. (And yes, I have read The High Frontier. Very good book, I highly recommend it.)

A lot is being said about the returns on investment of manned exploration as a major reason to go forward, but that argument carries the hidden assumption that robotic exploration has no such returns. Does that make everything NASA has done except the Apollo and the shuttle inherently pointless wastes of money? Of course not, they bring similar returns as a manned mission would.

Should we put men and women on the moon and/or Mars? Hell yes! But maybe after a few more robotic surveys and some prep work. Buffys had some great suggestions on that. I go for that 100%.

 

LOL!

The money is not there, this is so revisionist. The US budget is $2.2 trillion yes, but US revenue is a mere $1.9 trillion. So where is this money?

$5 billion that just doesn't exist right now.

Thus why would it need a increase if it has the money?

I would support the moon program if it were a international effort. But since this seems to be a ego thing, I expect it will be another idiotic and truly wasteful compeition btwn China and the US.

Mr.F:

Yes it is, and philosophically looking from a utilitarian perspective we have more to gain by making more people healthy then the few capitalists who are going to benefit by exploitation.

Sparks:

Totally irrelevant, not only is it totally different economic conditions, it is a totally different technological, and political landscape. You don't actually expect me to believe something that was written 30 years ago to be relevant today.

And they will, if the money allocated to this could be better placed in healthcare do you actually disagree? For instance that $1 trillion could easily make the US into a universal healthcare state. Something’s matter more then others.

 

Exactly. I'm not opposed to sending humans to the moon or Mars; I just don’t think we should send them until we've come up with something for them to actually do there. At the moment, all that humans would be able to do would be limited to:

1. Look around.
2. Run tests on things.

That's it. We don't have the launch technology to build any sort of real industrial infrastructure in space. If we focused on developing low-cost access to space, maybe we would finally be able to build the huge space stations and lunar factories that everyone wants. But since robots can look around and run tests on things just as well as people, I don't see why humans should go at the moment.

Ah, I see. There are good arguments in favor of going, but you can't explain them to me and it would require several years of study on my part to appreciate them.

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I fear that is true. And as added disincentive, look how well the US held up on it's end of other international efforts, like ISS. Or Iraq for that matter...

Ummm, did you read the rest of that paragraph? If Americans want a universal healthcare state, they can well afford it. They won't ever do that because of politics and thieving HMO's and AMA, etc, etc. NASA is not at fault for all the worlds ills. They should not be punished for them.

 

Currently being invested in invading foreign countries. Happily, that's easily fixed...

To avoid having to terminate the ISS, shuttle or other projects, all of which are needed.

And you think it won't be? Sure, Bush will spin it as purely american, but the fact is that it won't be. It's like Beagle 2. It's an ESA project, ie. european - but it's never been listed in the papers as anything other than British...

Sadly, humans are stupid like that. The vast majority anyway. They don't bother to consider the options, they rarely educate themselves, and "long-term" to them seems to mean "an hour after my next meal".

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One, the regolith has been unchanged in 60,000 years (in fact for a lot longer, but we've only been about for 60,000 years in our current evolutionary state). Two, I said "over the last three decades", not "three decades ago". The High Frontier may be old - but it's not like noone's written other books on the topic since...

Yes - and do you really think Bush will ever support Medicare? He's already cutting death benefits from US GIs for feck's sake - you think he wants to keep them healthy? His record says he'd rather eliminate medicare.

Look, fact is this - it's a good programme. It will have positive effects and will provide significant economic returns in the long term. And it makes for a far better stirrup to technological progress than invading foreign countries.