Return to the Moon

I happen to think he's right on this. I still maintain that the manned programs are more grandstanding than science. They cause an enormous increase in cost for a relatively small incremental increase in capability. It's money that would be much better spent on artificial intelligence and robotics. Look at the ROI from the Mars landers and rovers. Even with the failures, they've been bargain-basement compared to what a single manned flight to Mars would have cost, and how much more would the manned flight have accomplished?

I understand the arguments for manned space exploration, and it's not that I'm unsympathetic to them ... to boldly go, and all that. But they're terribly inefficient. I say if you can get 80% of the capability for 20% of the cost, that's a good trade-off.

 

Not having manned flight as NASA's main priority defeats the point of NASA. It basically just turns it into a ferry for low Earth orbit. Which now we won't even be able to do anymore, so now we're going to have to pay the Russians to bring our men and women up. NASA will effectively stop making new science, now they're just going to collect data.

You really can't get 80% of the effectiveness for 20% of the cost. A probe can collect data, but that's it. What a human can do on the surface of Mars in 20min is more then every probe. Sending a man to Mars of course at first is just to see if we can literally do it. But once we have it under our belt it then becomes a race to be able to have permanent human presence outside of Earth. This isn't a pipe dream, we have the technology, just not the will.

$An extra $2-3 billion a year for NASA to do something that once can again inspire people to take an interest in science and create jobs is bad. Yet $200 billion over a year or 2 for "job creation" passes the test no problem. What does that even mean, any money the government spends will in fact at the end create jobs.

Or $8 billion in one year for high speed rail. What a waste. Yes it's a waste. Spending that little on high speed rail does nothing to actually improve rail infrastructure in the country, especially if the cities and states along the way don't invest in local infrastructure to make a car not nesseceary. This in itself has become a dick waving contest so America can now have the fastest train. Look where it's being built, LA to San Fran makes some sense, but most of the rest is in Florida.

Anyone been to Florida? You can not get around cities in Florida without a car except maybe Orlando and Miami, the urban sprawl is just too great. Money that could be used to actually make the Acela trains and such actually high speed, from D.C. to Boston, where the small geography and cramped population actually makes this viable, and where many cities along the way have good public transportation themselves, instead gets wasted on Florida where almost no one takes the train to begin with.

 

What exactly is this human going to do on the surface besides plant a flag and frolic about? That's basically all they did on the moon that couldn't have been done by a smart robotic rover. As far as "only collect data" is concerned, data is the whole point! Data is the soul of science.

And in the second place, don't limit yourself to current technology. This is what I meant by developing artificial intelligence and robotics. With the gargantuan amount of money that would be required for a manned Mars flight, you could develop very smart new rovers and robotic devices to study all kinds of things.

Even with current technology, there's no way a human could have accomplished even what the current Mars rovers have accomplished.

I don't know how you can say that. Do the Mars rovers defeat the point of NASA? Did the Jupiter probe defeat the point of NASA? How about the Saturn flyby? The Venus lander? How do those programs defeat the point of NASA?

 

If manned orbital flight is such a colossal waste of money, then why are Russia and the ESA still doing it? If it's simply for national pride, then I agree with them that there is some value in it.

For the taxpayer money that Wall Street can flush down the toilet in one bad month, we could hang onto some basic capability to get people into orbit, up to the International Space Station, or to repair the Hubble space telescope. We could have kept all our options open for later. How many multiples of the NASA annual budget have we squandered in Iraq with nothing to show for it other than body bags?

I find it odd that manned space flight started out as a Democratic Party project, but has now become solidly tied to the Republican Party due to its impact on defense contractors. I hate it when I find myself in agreement with the Republicans on anything. It just feels wrong.

Oh well...I just needed to vent. The decision has been made.

When young people look at engineering in America today, there is little for them to see in the media other than the Dilbert comic strip, and Michael Douglas' character in "Falling Down". It's nearly a worst-case scenario.

Urban trains for commuters take many more drivers off the road in places where the cost of new highways is extremely high. The high speed trains are a bragging rights project intended to offset the loss of manned space flight, and it isn't going to work. We will still be behind France and Japan.

 

The Mars rovers though accomplish almost nothing, all they can do is literally scratch the surface and the atmosphere of Mars. A human with a shovel in 20 seconds can collect more useful data to be brought back and studied then the Mars rovers have done all together. And unlike the rovers they won't lose signal or get stuck in the dirt. The rovers help us understand the physical aspects of Mars more but what's the point if we're not making an effort to go there. I mean if we're going to study the universe Mars is probably the least interesting thing we can spend money on. Science should be applied, not just collected. We know the basics of Mars now, now let's move science even further ahead by applying it to getting a human for the first time in our existence to another planet. Once that happens the flood gates are opened.

This was the problem with the moon landings, we went, and now people think we're only again to wave our proverbial dick around. The original moon landings were supposed to keep going until people lost interest in them and congress slashed funding. We'd have a permanent colony on the moon by now if that didn't happen most likely. Going back to the moon isn't just about going, it's about setting up the basics again to start setting up permenant civilization outside the Earth.

The question is why are we always waiting to later? Space travel, health care reform, prison reform, repairing our infrastructure, everything. Why is it always later, we can do this now, why don't we do it now. What's the point in waiting. Learning about the moon and Mars without applying it is kind of silly considering we have the ability to do this.

Even the more practical applications of this. NASA creates jobs, good paying jobs that can't be outsourced. More importantly it inspires people, machines crashing into planets don't make the news. Can anyone here remember what they were doing during anything NASA has done minus the Challenger? Everyone remembers exactly what they were doing when we landed on the moon, the entire planet came together in collective joy, something that has basically only happened before at the end of WW2 and WW1.

Apollo inspired a whole generation of kids to be engineers and scientists. We were breaking new ground, doing something kids always dreamed of and it was actually coming to reality. I guarantee you the day a man sets foot on Mars the world will once again come together in collective awe. There are few things that are able to inspire to human species at such an emotional level, but people have been looking up at the moon and this redish light up in space since pre-historic times and it's in the collective sub-conscious of all of us. Just like flying was, always deemed an impossibility but within 20 years of the first real practical attempts, we had flight, and a whole generation was inspired to become novice pilots who had no idea what they were doing, but amazed people around the world.

We get told to dream, our president himself says we need to become innovative again, to reach for the stars and reinvent ourselves. Yet we don't. What message are we sending to the new generation. Look at the complete lack of interest most people hold in education anymore except to make money. Our country is not inspired, and we haven't been for a long time. I think it's especially true in America, for the past 14 years we've known a president that seemed great till he cheated on his wife, an idiot president where economic growth didn't translate into wages or jobs, the worst terrorist attack ever that completely destroyed the optimism of the post communism 90's America, 2 wars that are killing hundreds of thousands of people, deficits that are threatening to implode the economy, a decaying infrastructure of America, college that's becoming out of the reach of more people, and a society at the same time of what style has become mainstream(i.e. hip hop) and a very large and growing teabagger movement that both actually look down on education and what they call the "elite"

As it was I'll agree not much was practically accomplished going to the moon since we didn't keep following up on it except for deep soil specimens and rocks to study. Look how people remember the moon landing though, it's burned into the memory forever and unlike 9/11 it's a great thing to remember. But we need to start following up on what we start to 50 years in the future we're not trying to recreate what we doing 50 years previously. If anything I think the most practical aspect of going to Mars in our lifetimes is psychological. For people to literally start dreaming of the stars again. For the hope it gives the entire human race of what is possible can't be replaced.

If we're going to make an announcement that basically goes "Well, our budget deficit is larger then the total economies of most countries and we're going to freeze almost all federal spending to keep our country from imploding while not passing any health care reform" it wouldn't help for some optimism at the end of it "We're also giving NASA what is basically chump change in terms of federal money and we will be back on the moon within 10 years and on Mars within 10 more years."

Mars is literally the stuff dreams are made out of. People have dreamed about it since the ancient times when people realized it was not a normal star. People have thought there were canals filled with water, civilizations, Earth's twin, a new home for humans, ect since Galileo was looking at it from his balcony. Dreams are irreplaceable. Especially when they come true.

 

Madcap, that was a very good summation of the intangibles at stake.

Yes, we have already moved too slowly. Orion should have already been flying. We knew years ago that the Shuttle was a piece of shit, and we should have gotten busy working on a replacement rather than trying to patch it together and keep it flying.

 

i think there's a very serious unknown - human adaptability to space . we are animals specific to this earth . the last two Apollo missions were each but ~two days under the lunar gravitational influence . 3/4 the distance from earth to the moon it begins . we might wonder when hopeless madness begins . an intense and elemental home-sickness may not be survivable . the returning astronauts may have provided a clue of what's really psychologically possible - thus , robots .

how can we know ?

it will require a different sort of knowing beyond science .

we will evolve to it . may take awhile ...

 

No, try again, they've done studies on this from the 60's till now. In fact they just finished one in Germany where 5 or 6 people were locked in a capsule for 5 months to see how they'd hold up specifically for a Mars mission. And people have stayed on Mir and the ISS for months at a time. Even if we had never been in space you can't learn what will happen by not doing it.

Not to mention these are volunteers who want to do this, who spend their lives dreaming of the chance to do this.

 

..
those studies were done in orbit - absolutely within the earth's influence . true ?

dream on , be a long-time dreaming
then eventually you know
just what to do

in peace

 

Exactly, some people dare to dream literally for the heavens vs saying we can't do it.

 

What is your point?

 

Are you kidding?????? They have resulted in a colossal increase in the understanding of the Martian surface, and by implication, the solar system in general.

What is a human going to dig up that the rover can't? Can a human with a shovel on earth dig up more "useful data" to study than a backhoe? Put money into developing more even advanced rovers and they will produce orders of magnitude better results than a human ever could.

And the rovers can't kill people. And they only cost 10% as much. And they can stick around for years.

Reverse your question ... what's the point of going there if we don't understand the physical aspects? The point of this entire enterprise is to understand the universe, not grandstand and plant phony flags.

Regarding your other points about inspiration and following dreams ... this is something we agree on completely. There are a world of intangibles involved in the advancement of human knowledge, and they are expressions of some of the finest things that humanity has to offer. You are exactly right about this and I'm glad to see you point it out.

I'm just saying the higher dream is to learn about the universe. Not to beat our chests over something that can be done more efficiently another way.

And who said anything about waiting? We shouldn't wait.

 

No argument from me on that. But that's not the same as the Mars thing.

Yep. You're exactly right.

Just like when issues that arise from natural phenomena become politicized.

Like the process of global warming gives a rat's ass what political party you belong to.

You're saying the only way to get Johnny jazzed about science is to send men to Mars? I don't agree with that.

How did commuter trains get dragged into this?

 

If the U. S. economy was healthy, I wouldn't be so opposed to the manned space program. But given how much we are in debt and how weak our ability to sustain our standard of living, I think we need to make hard choices with taxpayers' money.

 

You don't understand what NASA has done for the world, and technology. It's very very very important. we already destroyed our spectacular lead on global private enterprise and manufacturing, we don't need china in even more control over our planet than now.

 

Well, I disagree. I'm an MIT graduate. I understand and appreciate technology. But manned space travel is much less important than building a high-speed rail system, for instance.

If manned space travel is so important, then privatize it and let the profit motive be the driving force and give the tax payers a break.

 

Actually it's not. High speed rail isn't practical in most of the US because of distance and lack of supporting infrastructure in cities along the way. Not to mention they finally start building a line in Florida where it's totally going to go to waste, that was nothing but an attempt to sway Flordian voters for November.

Also commuter trains got dragged into this because the amount of money just spent on a high speed train in Florida that no one is going to use could've funded constellation for the next 3 years. That's a true waste of money. The point being a $780 billion stimulus, a $700 billion bank bail out, a $1.4 trillion deficit, all of which does nothing but remind people of how fucked we are, and the big political weight to throw around when it comes to tax money is an extra $1.5 billion a year for NASA.

Jeez, the MTA in NYC has a bigger budget deficit then the extra money NASA wanted.

And for the last time, you can't privatize space travel except to lower earth orbit, there's no profit to be made. Private companies don't exist by losing money.

 

It has to be something high-profile that the kids can easily understand.

 

Robots.

 

We've been sending robots and the shuttle into space for 30 years and no one has given a shit in about 30 years. Rockets in themselves stopped being impressive in about 1960. Routine missions are not impressive to anyone in any technology field.