Obama Space Plan: Return to Moon: "No Go"

I really don't see how there's any evidence to support that fear.

I posted this elsewhere, but here's BA's take on this: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/01/president-obamas-nasa-budget-unveiled/

 

Regardless of all this talk about whatever Nasa is going to do, China is going to take the lead. Period. The money thats gonna be wasted on this light rail nonsense could have given Nasa what it needed.. a true pity.. I'm sure JFK would be proud.

 

How so? The next thing the Chinese will do is to launch their Tianggong space laboratoy at some point during the early 2010s. With a total mass of merely 8.5 tons, the Tiangong is only a dwarf compared to the ISS (= 400 tons!). Any concrete plans for a manned lunar landing don't exist yet and if and when it will come to that is sheer speculation. China's potential of becoming a "superpower" any time soon is a usually overrated anway IMO.

I guess a Chinese moon landing would be the only thing that would actually lead to a serious American moon/Mars program though... just like Apollo was a result of Sputnik/Vostok. So supporters of manned U.S. mission to Mars should better pray that the Chinese will land a man on the Moon "soon". Because that's the problem: The Apollo moon landings were for a large part politically motivated. However, at the moment there's no pressing political reason to send men to Moon or Mars.

 

JFK really didn't care about space. He just wanted to beat the Russians to the moon.

 

The next person to stand on the moon's surface will be speaking Mandarin.

 

That was probably the case anyway.

 

Yes, I read that. I already knew the breakdown of how the money is to be spent. The question is how easy is it to cancel one of those little less "headline worthy" programs? NASA may be killed piecemeal.

 

It's possible, I just don't see why you'd think that was likely.

 

Does it matter what the language of the next person standing is? I don't give two shits if s/he speaks Mandarin, French, Swahili, or Canadian.

 

politicians.

 

as opposed to the countless politicians who benefit from the pork generated from the boondoogle known as constellation? or who have no actual intention of returning us to the moon?

 

Which civil rights do you suggest that we take away to encourage people to build spaceships?

 

Eh...the 3rd Amendment. If people don't want to fly into space we'll stick a Drill Sergeant in their kitchen.

 

Hey, Harry Saxon curtailed civil rights, and he got a fleet of black-hole powered rocketships that could've easily conquered the universe in just over a year. There's merit to the idea.

 

^You mean that bloke that looks like the Prime Minister?

 

Space exploration isn't just a political goal, its necessary? Why? Because the research involved in a manned mission to mars will generate technological dividends. It could also be a public works program. In fact building fleets of space ships would lift Americas economy out of the red. And it hinges on this. The resources of the world are running out. So its a necessity to get out there and mine the resources of other planets. In this way public works + resource mining=profit.

 

Unfortunately, those dividends do not neatly trickle down into consumer products and uses. It drives more innovation and invention, but it doesn't put alot of end product directly into consumers' hands.

Getting warmer.

THIS is the point that's hard to sell, though. As an extreme oversimplification, the real problem is that there isn't any oil on the moon, so nobody wants to fund a mission to explore it. If there was something else on the moon or near Earth asteroids valuable enough to directly benefit investors, you would have a cottage industry growing up around Cape Cannaveral in a matter of months.

Partly this is why alot of Sci-Fi stories hinge on some fanciful Unobtanium material being discovered in space as the impetus for colonization; usually it's helium-3 for fusion energy, sometimes it's something fancier like, say, Dragonite or Dilithium or carbon nanotube or whatever.

I submit that most of these things will never be valuable to people down on Earth, because sending them TO Earth will always be way more expensive than most people are comfortable with. A spaceborne industry and community, though, will find these resources not only essential, but a vital source of wealth, provided they're willing to accept near-permanent exile from Earth as the price of that wealth. But to do that, you need civilian industries and communities in space, and the only way to do THAT is to get civilians to start operating in space to begin with.

So NASA's on the right path. Bigelow has the money they need, now, to build their inflatable space stations and SpaceX has their ride. Things should start taking off from this.

 

^If you could find a nice high yield of something like titanium a case could be made to return it to earth. You mine and smelt the asteroid for the titanium, make cheap heat shields with the left over metals and send it to earth on a ballistic rentry. Since your only returning a very heat tolerant product, the heat shield does not have to be great. Have a ship standing by to scoop it out of the ocean = profit.

The hard part would be finding an asteroid with a precious metal and maneuvering it somewhere convenient like EML-1 or 2.

 

It seems to me that half the point of mining in space would be to avoid the energy cost of transporting the raw material out of Earth's gravity well. Unless you could somehow recover energy from the trip down (hmmm....), dropping space-mined materials down to the ground seems counter-productive. Better to just set up orbital manufacturing.

 

^Then you loose the cost effectiveness of a nice dense, non-fragile payload trying to survive reentry. Which in turn raises the costs on making a more complicated return vessel. Better to refine in space and do the manufacture on earth, except for those things you intend to use in space to begin with.