Posted on 05/29/2003 3:07:05 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:03:25 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Are the Chinese serious about human space flight? Most definitely. And they are interested in doing more than simply going to low Earth orbit. They are headed for the moon.
For most of last year, the Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry looked at our nation's position relative to our global competition. Clearly, the Europeans are determined to challenge our preeminence in commercial aviation, and the challenge to our leadership in space is coming from the Pacific Rim.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
We can have a lunar campsite in five years. We can have a permanent outpost within ten years with a nuclear power source buried in lunar soil. With a nuke propulsion system we could be on Mars within twelve years. These are not my opinions. These are the conclusions of three major aerospace contractors twelve years ago. The estimated costs ranged from about $100B-$120B (1991 dollars) up to and including the first Mars mission.
Uh, you did catch the part about fuel for fusion reactors?? Fusion between He3 and H1 (protons) to yield He4 is one of the "easier" ones to initiate, with the benefit that the product of the reaction isn't itself radioactive.
Nope. Deuterium-3He fusion is an order of magnitude more difficult to initiate than deuterium-tritium fusion; it requires much higher confining pressures and temperatures. And we haven't even reached break even (power in = power out) on D-T fusion yet! This is the part that Schmitt always leaves out of his spiel.
Funny you should mention that. About the time we asked Baechtel to tell us what kind of heavy machinery could be modified to operate in a lunar environment, we started getting letters from various enviro-weenies alleging that we would pollute the moon with our efforts to explore the solar system. I'm still not sure how you can pollute a lifeless landscape but they seemed earnest.
Although the water is priority one, the Moon also contains abundant metals (for building large structures in space) and the plain soil has value as bulk mass for things like shielding from radiation. Also, energy can be collected on the Moon for solar electric arrays made on the lunar surface and beamed (by laser or microwave) to a variety of locations in Earth-Moon space.
Please go into space. Please go to the moon.
Please try to knock out some of our communications satellites.
(steely) (born too late to participate in our first space race)
I hope everyone interested in putting a U.S. flag up on the moon again writes personal checks and sends them to NASA with a memo what it's for. Personally, I can't afford your pipe dreams, I have some debts here on earth to take care of before shoveling more money into the bureaucracy to feel better about the accomplishments of the tribe.
Market has dried up. There has been space tourism for quite a while now, which has done little but give the Russians some pocket money while a few aviation-addled have made some commissions and consultation fees. There just aren't enough millionaires who want to ride, these days. Costs 15M a pop. Although you can fly a mig for a couple ten grand...
The whole focus has been on riding. Why? The probes accomplish much more, bring us much information. The thinking is that the public will not get excited without the rides. That shows a severe lack of imagination. And if NASA does not want to explore, but just wants to be the Master of the Great Ride, I don't want to pay for it. Shut it down, if its mission is no longer science.
It's also reality. Remember the human repair of Hubble? People couldn't get enough of it. People need to go, people always need to go. Robots can be useful but they won't replace human ingenuity and imagination.
I stand corrected. I was recalling that there is/was supposed to be some particular advantage to that fuel combination--it may have be that the reaction yields non-radioactive final products.
If they used their imaginations, they could find a way to make the probes more exciting to the public, if that's so very essential to continued exploration. And if it is, perhaps we ought to rethink the whole thing. This isn't Hollywood, and I'm sick of the spacemen celebrities.
Besides, given the recent accounts of Columbia, looks to me like very little human ingenuity and imagination were used. Looks to me like they gave up mighty quick.
Because people "on site" can do much more in a shorter time than any possible robotic probe. What the US needs to be focussing on right now is an advanced system for reaching LEO (i.e. "Shuttle II") that is less expensive to run and more reliable thatn Shuttle I.
NASA (of course) refused. They will never release their death-grip on the U.S. manned space program.
The exciting stuff is not this interminable, dangerous FERRYING.
Go to the Jet Propulsion Lab site, out of Palo Alto, for some real eye candy! And, thankfully, not a wannabe, egotistical jockey in sight, just engineers and physicists and the cool stuff they're building.
Cut out the seats and the life-support supplies, and see what we could send. Why send a probe to Mars, just a probe?
Why not send an ARMADA of probes to Mars, en masse, to disperse and return data? Such a lack of inspiration...
The exciting stuff is not this interminable, dangerous FERRYING.
Go to the Jet Propulsion Lab site, out of Palo Alto, for some real eye candy! And, thankfully, not a wannabe, egotistical jockey in sight, just engineers and physicists and the cool stuff they're building.
Cut out the seats and the life-support supplies, and see what we could send. Why send a probe to Mars, just a probe?
Why not send an ARMADA of probes to Mars, en masse, to disperse and return data? Such a lack of inspiration...
Instead, resources will go to trying to maintain that lucky celebrity who gets to ride.
All evidence points to the inability of humans to live long-term in space, anyway, no matter how many zillions we spend to manage that fact.
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