Poll: Spend $100 billion on manned flight to Mars?
Posted by epgrondine at 14:43, 22 Feb 2010Hi -
Does anyone here think it is all that important?
(PS - Just to introduce some polling bias, the NASA budget for finding the next piece of space crap headed our way has just been increased from $4,000,000 per year to $20,000,000. $100 Billion in
American English is $100,000,000,000.)
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Comments
22 November 2004
2 weeks 15 hours
We need these things:
(1) Heavy lift launchers. 1000 tons payload to the asteroid belt or Mars. Any technology, it doesn't matter. But without this we can't do squat.
(2) Ground control infrastructure. I don't think it matters what they control, it's pretty much the same activity down here.
(3) Cheap smaller launching capability. This lets in more players, like small scientific efforts, privately funded activities of all sorts.
What we don't need:
Putting all the money into one single goal. We don't know the best goal, but we do know that we need sustainable space capability. Sending the odd scientific instrument is only enough to fund the careers of a handful of scientists, and to send back some pretty pictures.
Also planning for a single big goal, at the expense of everything else, is a wasted publicity effort.
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We are the cat.
1 May 2004
19 hours 14 min
I support a Mars mission. But isn't it the same thing (or very close) to "sustainable space capability"? We already have earth orbit and can reach the Moon. The next logical place to go is Mars. You can land there and operate science missions, extraction, and so forth. Without a huge leap in propulsion technology, there really is not an alternative. To go anywhere else in the solar system, you would have to have Mars capability anyway.
Since a proper Mars mission would not be a simple moonshot affair, you would have to develop infrastructure to accomplish the goal. Things like space station facilities, shipbuilding operations, heavy launch, and long range communications are prerequisites.
The question is not so much "Are we going to Mars?", but "Are we going anywhere?".
22 November 2004
2 weeks 15 hours
The question is not so much "Are we going to Mars?", but "Are we going anywhere?".
Indeed it is.
The reporting about the cost of these missions is often misleading. For example, we don't have launchers to go to Mars right now. We don't have launchers for manned projects on the Moon either. Or for bit asteroid missions.
But, as an example, the $100 billion for Mars includes the cost of these launchers. All development costs and everything connected to it. Including the cost for coffee and donuts of the janitors on their well deserved breaks. As if none of these activities would happen otherwise.
Personally I favour manned missions to some asteroids, but these are much the same as Mars missions. The main differences is that the launch on the way back is easier.
Colonies on asteroids are also cheaper for the same reason. The drawback is that the colony doesn't have much gravity, which gives us more unknowns on the medical side.
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We are the cat.
21 February 2009
1 day 6 hours
I'm going to break my own stereotype here.
Space travel is hugely exciting and i think it is crucial in the future - not just the main exercise of course, but also all the spin offs.
With the economies in the state that they are though i question whether putting these projects back 20 years is really a bad thing.
I guess it depends on the tax burden relative to foreign competition. Don't wanna lose the experience over the time though so you have to give them something to do.
12 April 2007
26 min 3 sec
I always hear that space traveling would be great if we could afford it.
The question is: can't we really afford it?
Have the military-oriented black-ops budgets decreased during these times of economic recession? We know that Obama canceled the Raptor fighter jet, but what about all the other 'black holes' inside the military industrial complex that gobble billions of tax-payers' dollars annually?
I say that if the world would stop wasting so much money in sh*t like weapons, we could afford to feed and educate every single human in the planet, plus having colonies in the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the Jovian system.
Anyway, if governments won't dare to venture to space, private companies eventually will.
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
21 February 2009
1 day 6 hours
This makes we wonder whether being 100% correct in your own corner, then scaled to 10% right in the bigger picture, is still being right?
Pacifism (not that your arguing that necessarily by focusing on black-ops) is so good that i can't help but think it is right. 100% right even. But the fact that in the wider picture it doesnt work changes it. I don't know if it is wrong, right, or just a part of politics and political theory.
Over here in the UK we had Chamberlain (before Churchill) who is best known for his appeasement policy towards Hitler. Any analogy is weak of course, but if your in charge and you get this sort of stuff wrong a lot of people are going to die.
I agree with you, but i wish it really was that simple.
Companies will go into space. In fact given nationalistic tendencies i'd probably even prefer companies did it, rather than governments and countries.
22 November 2004
2 weeks 15 hours
Pacifism works great. There are only two problems:
- You can't get there from here. It is like a better energy state in chemistry, which you can only reach by going through a state that is much worse.
- Once you are there it is not stable. A small push gets you into wars again.
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We are the cat.
21 February 2009
1 day 6 hours
Couldn't have put it better myself.
I guess we could be even more worried about it than we might be.
If humans are not flesh and bone, but you and i are consciousness from another dimension then our nature has implications for that other dimension since that is where our nature comes from. Is pacifism impossible there as well?