16 ms·

Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars

223 points by DarkContinent 10y ago

anindha 10y ago
Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it.
- chamakits 10y ago
  This is a great analogy. It was Indigenous People Day yesterday in the US (aka Columbus Day), and it made me think what an interesting time it must have been to be alive at a time where there were widely mostly unexplored areas in the world, and how incredulous and shocked people must have felt when they found out of these unexplored lands (putting aside the fact that it had been explored and lived by other cultures they did not know of). Then I realized I do live in a time like that, with space exploration being that next frontier. What a time to be alive. I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further.
  - btown 10y ago
    Only this time without that unfortunate collateral damage to indigenous peoples!
    - cossatot 10y ago
      That's my biggest fear about Mars. We don't have a great record on Earth and might not recognize the damage done until it's irreversible.
      - kobeya 10y ago
        It is a dead rock.
        cossatot 10y ago
        1- Probably but not certainly, and a little caution (say, 100 more years of remote sensing exploration as technology improves) will go a long way. 2- I'm not so anthropocentric as to think that the only value in the universe is human value. It's not our universe; we're an infinitesimal fraction of it. Other life has inhabited earth for billions of years, and maybe other places too. The terrestrial or extraterrestrial environments have value for existing and future life, regardless of whether that is human life. And most of life isn't human, and won't be in the future either.
        kobeya 10y ago
        There is no sentient life in Mars. If there is microbial life on Mars, it is not making efficient use of its resources. I will not trade the billions of future people that might call a terraformed Mars home for some scum on the bottom of a rock.
        stordoff 10y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but I do wonder if life exists somewhere in the Universe that would view humanity in the same way.
        kobeya 10y ago
        No doubt. We'd best be ready. Thankfully astronomical data makes this unlikely at least in our stellar neighborhood, so we have some time to grow in both power and maturity.
        Can_Not 10y ago
        We have a small chance of exploiting 1% of Mars in less than 100 years. The sooner we get our first factory there, the sooner we'll know if there is any reason not to build the millionth factory.
      - 2AF3 10y ago
        afraid we are going to mess up a lifeless rock
        more_corn 10y ago
        It doesn't need to be alive to be beautiful. There is great peace and beauty in empty places. Mars has grand and majestic vistas: canyons and plains, dunes and mountains. Reducing it in your mind to a lifeless rock obscures the awe and wonder. It is the opposite of appreciation, it makes the idea small in you, worthless and not deserving of respect.
        friendlygrammar 10y ago
        There are infinite similarly dead rocks in the universe.
        drdeca 10y ago
        Similar [dead rocks], or [similarly dead] rocks ? Also, I think there are only finitely many eventually observable planets in the universe?
        kobeya 10y ago
        All of that requires an observer there to appreciate it. Messing up the scenery of Mars with industry is a champagne problem.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        noobermin 10y ago
        That is your perspective that it is beautiful. What if my perspective is that it is more beautiful inhabited, alive, and sustaining an ecosystem it probably hasn't for millions of years? Beauty is really subjective.
        krisroadruck 10y ago
      - noobermin 10y ago
        "Ruining a mountain side" is one thing when it sustains an ecosystem of life. It's harder to argue we are ruining something like a planet with no life.
    - valarauca1 10y ago
      Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility until man-kind had achieved 20th century medical technology. Even then it would have extremely struggled to handle 30+ million new cases of Small Pox, TB, Bubonic Plague, etc. Luckily as far as modern technology can show we're extremely certain Mars has no life we'll accidentally genocide while exploring/terraforming.
      - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
        > Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America.
        noobermin 10y ago
        I wouldn't call a slow migration that has no written record on the same scale as the exploration of the new world.
        valarauca1 10y ago
        >Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America Well yeah there weren't any human infectious illness where... there aren't any humans. This video explains the history of man kind's infectious illness very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
        sqeaky 10y ago
        And Europeans had no trouble crossing Europe. A single smallpox laden explorer would have started a plague in the Americas and a single native American would likely have died of one of the many plagues in Europe that Europeans had grown up with (and still often died from). The problem of safety is not always placed on the explorer, sometimes the explorer is the danger to his environment.
        crooked-v 10y ago
        The point is that entire classes of extremely common diseases in Europe basically didn't exist in all or most of the Americas, and many of those diseases spread very easily once even a handful of people had carried them across the ocean.
    - mc32 10y ago
      I think you mean intelligent life, as I'm pretty sure there are no people inhabiting Mars, native or foreign, at this time.
      - dtparr 10y ago
        I think that's his point. If they're not there, they're not able to be collaterally damaged. If there is intelligent life (or, any life as we define it generally), there's a pretty high likelihood our arrival could damage it, especially if we don't discover it until after arrival. (And "really especially" if we go the terraforming route)
        mc32 10y ago
        Gah, you're right. I read it as we mustn't... rather than there aren't any so we can't. My mistake.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    >I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further. You've got to be kidding. What "wonderful discoveries" do you think there's going to be out there? There might really be alien civilizations and worlds with lush vegetation out there somewhere, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to be limited to our own Solar System. The worlds here are not unknowns: we've been observing and probing them for many years now, and we know pretty well what's on them. There's all kinds of interesting things on these worlds, from a scientific perspective: gas/ice giants, oceans of methane on Titan, a weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn's atmosphere, ice mountains on Pluto/Charon, etc. But we're finding all this out just fine using robotic probes. I'm sure we'll find out more, and refine our knowledge further, with continued robotic missions. But if you're thinking that there's any good reason for humans to fly around the solar system and live on other worlds here, there just isn't any good case for it: none of the other habitats are remotely livable (the closest is the upper atmosphere of Venus of all places, if you really like the idea of living in a dirigible), and so the only real economic case to be made is mining. Most likely, we'd get a lot more mineral resources out of asteroids rather than planets or moons. But this isn't like Star Trek with all kinds of fantastical worlds out there to discover, plus alien cultures to make contact with. They might be out there, way out there, but we're still struggling with the idea of how to travel to our very nearest neighboring star system (Alpha Centauri), which is about 4 light-years away. Maybe this will all change if Zephram Cochrane invents the warp drive, but for now, there just isn't much reason for humans to do anything more than basic science missions in space, and hopefully asteroid-mining missions in the near future. We're not going to make any huge new discoveries any time soon, just more thing like "ooh, look at these weird ice mountains on this dwarf planet!". That's really interesting, don't get me wrong, and a great reason to send a robotic probe, but it's not like we're going to discover anything truly groundbreaking here in our own system. According to all our data, all the other worlds here are lifeless rocks or frozen wastelands or gas giants. This isn't such a great "time to be alive"; that time was back in the 60s-70s when they were first discovering stuff in space with the Apollo missions and various probes like Voyager, Mariner, etc. (and maybe in the 2000s when all the pictures from the Mars rovers started coming in; but how many pictures of red rocks on a red sky do you need to see before you realize there's nothing more to Mars than that?). It just isn't like the days when "the New World" was discovered, and Europeans were able to learn of and bring back fantastic new foods like cocoa/chocolate, maize/corn, learn about new cultures and brutalize them and steal their gold, etc. It's much more like exploring Antartica: it's a very interesting place for scientists, and absolutely worthwhile to do science missions on, but for everyone else the only possible reason you'd go there is as a tourist for a very short time because it's uninhabitable (though far more easily inhabited than Mars; at least there's breathable air there, and plenty of water just lying on the ground, there's even penguins and fish if you get hungry).
- yolesaber 10y ago
  I hate this analogy. Not only does it enforce the bullshit teleology of the White European as "discoverer" (you know people inhabited these continents, right?) but it also fails to take into account the massive technological shifts that have taken place. We can send probes to Mars, we are able to run mass spectrometry on it, we can analyze and monitor it from affair. The only reason to go there is hubris.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    I think GP is saying the explorers "discovered" it from their perspective. But otherwise, I agree, we already know tons about Mars.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    You say hubris, I say practice.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Second this wholeheartedly. The "explorers" did not have the ability to observe to any real degree the rest of the world before setting out. Not only that, but it wasn't just exploration it was expansion.
  - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
    Robots are great for running pre-planned experiments, but they're limiting. There are many experiments that the research community would love to perform but would necessarily require a human presence.
  - TaylorAlexander 10y ago
    Hmm. I'd like to understand this, but I have questions. I've imagined that we could do a lot more science with a human and some basic instruments than we could with a billion dollar Rover sent every ten years. I mean, just to sample a rock probably takes a week. A geologist on site could do that in an hour. Historically, when we can do something much faster we tend to do things with that we didn't do when it was very slow. For example when it took months to cross the country, it was a once in a lifetime thing for some and most never did it. Now we do it all the time, and generations of West Coast students have seen the Smithsonian. I think that there will be more value in sending humans to Mars than just hubris. I think we will learn a lot more about our cosmic origins, about the value of life and our healthy planet, and about ourselves as a species and culture. In fact, I think sending man to Mars is a key factor in getting us to appreciate this planet and the destruction we're causing here. I don't think Musk's end goal is to leave Earth, but to save it by making us value it again. Perhaps, on this scale, for the first time. To me, that's a lot more than just hubris. What do you think of all that?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  What on Mars is worth $500 a pound (in bulk) on Earth (this is something like the silly low price proposed by Elon Musk for transport)? People will probably pay a lot more than that for the first few thousand pounds of dust, but they certainly won't keep paying that just to have the same dust millions of others have. The vast resources of the Americas paid for the continuous trips back and forth and attracted settlers. What pays for going to Mars? What attracts (large numbers of) settlers to Mars? I get that there are people attracted to the "freedom" they would have outside of the established political realms of Earth, but what a terrible airless bargain that is.
  - doc_holliday 10y ago
    It'd be really interesting to see the economic comparisons of both against each other. I.e the cost per kg of payload shipping from America to Europe in 17th Century vs the cost per kg of payload shipping from Mars to the Earth in 21st Century. I suspect the Mars in current day is much greater, but ships and crew back then were not cheap.
    - mortenjorck 10y ago
      It's an interesting idea to try to compare, but I wonder if the world in the 1600s or even the 1700s is just too different from ours to find anything truly analogous. To look at the human transportation side: This account (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm) by a German who traveled to the new world in the 1750s is harrowing enough, but the way the cost of passage is paid is horrifying, even heartbreaking: He writes of indentured servitude in the same language one would describe slavery (servants are "sold") and often parents would sell their children in the new world to pay for the voyage, not seeing them again for years, if ever. We could try to bring this into modern terms by multiplying the US federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40 hrs * 52 weeks) by the median indentured servitude (four years) and get $60,320 to take a human across the Atlantic in 1750, but might be painting an apple orange. Still, it gives us at least a very, very rough idea of what a trip to the new world cost then, and a good sense of just how vastly more expensive passage to Mars would cost in the foreseeable future.
  - 10y ago
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. I don't know what the analogous economic engine could possible be on Mars. If Mars is going to grow, we need to be able to imagine someone saying "I'm moving my family to Mars in search of a better life. I just don't see that happening. Series or L2 station? Sure, someone has to refine the iridium before we send it down the gravity well. But why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars?
  - personjerry 10y ago
    > I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. But it did! There were very basic, underfunded French colonies in North America for example for at least a hundred years before they really sent a lot more people and realized the wealth that could be had. At the same time the colonizing countries also had great internal issues, but had they known how much profit could've been made from investment, undoubtedly they would've been colonizing in full force much earlier.
  - ipince 10y ago
    > why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars? ? New environment, new markets, new needs = lots of new and potentially huge opportunities. I'm asking myself the complete opposite question.
    - eropple 10y ago
      We know what's on Mars and there isn't much there that isn't better sourced here, unless you want to use what you source on Mars itself. And there won't be a significant consumption base there for literally centuries, if ever. I'm in favor of human off-world activities, but I think it's a joke to make some kind of free-market argument. We should do it because we should do it, not because of invisible hands.
- viach 10y ago
  > History has shown it was a good idea How so? For who?
- fail2fail2ban 10y ago
  Agreed. The Native American Indians knew how great America was.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- timehastoldme 10y ago
  I agree, for the most part. But can you explain why this is a valid equivalence? On the surface, sure, but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason. Also, some would argue that the disadvantages (e.g. disruption of local cultures, ambiguity of meaning in modern life) have outweighed the advantages.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    The natives might differ on good idea or not. ;) We'll start to know some of the benefit of getting there almost immediately. We'll know the benefit of Mars itself only decades or centuries later. > but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason Yes, it IS. Really. In choosing to do something difficult we focus on something that will need answers to questions we don't even know to ask yet. Some will produce answers that seem so specialised to have no reuse. Give it 5 years and some will be commercial successes. Others will lead to new ideas, branches of science, tech or products, and a steady stream of improvements to earthly things. Some will only be utilised years later, or ignored. Just as exploring the ocean's surface made it clear we needed marine chronometers (a life's work) and an understanding of scurvy. Those would take years to answer. Scurvy led to the first clinical trial, that the Navy ignored for 40 years. Or from the golden age of aircraft: SR-71[1], Concorde, XB-70 Valkyrie[1]. Just 3 examples, of dozens, each of which led to enough advances to fill a book. Two military, one prestige. Doesn't matter that the B-52 is still flying and the XB-70 was a dead end, we learnt lots of stuff, and it almost gave the US their own SST (Concorde). Aviation is mostly drilled out now. I'm a big believer in prestige projects - whether they work or not. Governments don't like that sort of thing any more. So unless other rich cashed out founders want to take the place of government and give us magic thing of the future... We're left with exploration and major wars (cold or hot) to hurl technology forward. With current mil tech I'd rather not have major wars, so, exploration it must be. Oh, why haven't we properly explored under the seas yet? Or, for a longer and far more eloquent version of this, see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html written in 1970 by NASA Director of Science. Mars, Tesla, Solar, Hyperloop. That's a lot on Mr Musk. I hope he crosses roads carefully. We need a few more crazy engineering imaginations. -- [1] If anyone is interested in aircraft, and can get to Dayton, Ohio, go to the USAF museum - they have the only Valkyrie, many of the X planes, a Blackbird and a huge inventory. Decent space and missile area too.
- freyr 10y ago
  > Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. Except that explorers in the 1500-1700s didn't have unmanned ships or remote sensing capabilities, and manned travel was their one and only option for exploration. We've come a long way since then.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. Not for the people already living on those continents it wasn't. For them, it was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. >We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it. This is speculation, and if you're implying that explorers to the Americas didn't foresee the benefits, you're completely and factually wrong. They might not have predicted, for instance, the discovery of cocoa/chocolate, but they did think there was gold there (and there was; the Spanish brought back huge quantities of it), plus many other resources like furs, plus the ability to grow many crops there like tobacco. With Mars, we've already sent a bunch of probes there and learned a lot about it. It's not some big unknown land any more. And there simply isn't any good reason for people to go there except for basic science. You sure as hell can't grow stuff there (and even if you could, getting it back to Earth would cost a fortune; we're not really short on arable land here on Earth, and we're constantly developing ways of more efficiently using what we have, with the next big thing being vertical farming): there's little atmosphere, little water, and it's cold and too far from the Sun. The lack of a magnetosphere and too much radiation probably isn't going to be all that great for your crops either (not to mention any inhabitants). The only foreseeable thing that could be done there is mining. But we don't need to go to Mars to get minerals; we have asteroids passing close to the Earth all the time which could be mined, and have very valuable ores in them. It's also possible to mine on the Moon, which probably has mineral resources thanks to all the asteroid impacts and lack of geological activity. Both of these are far closer and more feasible than Mars. I'm sorry, but "build it and they will come" isn't a law of the universe, it's a line from a silly movie.
fail2fail2ban 10y ago
It would be in even worse shape if that were the case. Obama and liberals in general assume unicorns will come protect them and that the military is bad. Meanwhile, the ISS is falling apart, we have no shuttle anymore (had to kill off any vestige of actual Republican leadership) and our fly boys have to hitch a ride to space in hollowed out Soviet cement mixers attached to the top of chemical rockets.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684576 and marked it off-topic.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  If the same is true in 20 years it will be a tragedy. But I expect cutting the shuttle program created space for private competition on that now-relatively-well-understood-as-far-as-space-things-go engineering problem and freed up NASA to focus on new challenges.
- buerkle 10y ago
  The shuttle was for the most part a terrible program. It cost an enormous amount of money compared to its benefits. It would have been cheaper to continue sending rockets than trying to maintain and fly the shuttle fleet.
  - wanderingjew 10y ago
    That's not entirely true. The shuttle could do things no other ship could, including what's on the drawing board. The shuttle could down mass a lot of stuff. Look at the long duration exposure facility, a bus-sized satellite filled with materials experiments. We have rockets to take that to orbit now, we don't have something that could bring it down. It's arguably the ISS, in its current configuration, would have been possible, and Hubble would have probably been abandoned 20 years ago without the shuttle. The shuttle had problems, but its greatest strength was a gigantic space bus, built to take big satellites up and down. In fact, one of the biggest missed opportunities coming from the SpaceX camp I'm seeing is a lack of science and payload applications for the BFR/ITS. Example: the James Webb space telescope will be launching soon. It's a 6.5 meter telescope with weird folding mirrors because of the limitations of the launch vehicle. The ITS has a seventeen meter payload. Put a big fairing and a transfer stage on the ITS, and you can deliver gigantic payloads to orbit like we've never seen. Want a radio telescope at Earth-Moon L2? ITS can do that, but no one has even suggested it so far.
sidcool 10y ago
No mention of SpaceX. If they can collaborate, humans can go to Mars by 2025
- palebluedot 10y ago
  I don't entirely disagree, but overall I think multiple independent endeavors may be the most resilient approach. In other words, collaboration may indeed the fastest path if all goes well, but multiple independent efforts may be safer, with a higher probability of success. Independent approaches also allow for slightly different techniques and technological approaches to the problem, which may have additional unknown benefits later on.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    One does not preclude another. As long as all parties involved share knowledge, they can pursue different paths while at the same time speeding up each others' efforts.
    - palebluedot 10y ago
      True, that would probably be the ideal scenario - independent yet collaborative.
- BigDaddyD 10y ago
  I was always told only the government can go to space and explore for humanity? You mean a private company is doing it?
  - night815 10y ago
    http://www.spacex.com/mars http://www.spacex.com/mars
    - y4mi 10y ago
      he's gotta be trolling. space x is almost 15 years old at this point and has consistently made it into the headlines within the last 10.
fail2fail2ban 10y ago
We aren't close to ready for Mars. We need a base on the moon.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  A near-earth asteroid might be a better choice.
  - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
    I'm not degreed so this is just my off the wall thinking but asteroid mining yes, definitely. I still think we need a Moon base, need to show we can run it successfully for around 2 decades then start seriously planning a Mars mission. As a kid, I'd have imagined we'd already have a successful Moon base. Asteroids, since I assume they move and possibly in odd orbits might be difficult to reach in emergency situations, I'd rather not see any nation's Astronauts stranded on a remote asteroid.
    - euyyn 10y ago
      Most asteroids' orbits have the same characteristics as those of planets. The problem I would see is finding a big enough NEO asteroid, that you actually can stand on instead of floating by its side, or having to worry about reaching escape velocity if you jump strongly enough. If one's willing to go to any asteroid, not just NEO, then Ceres could be a possibility. A quick search says the delta-v required to reach it from LEO is about half that to reach Mars' surface.
      - Roboprog 10y ago
        I was thinking that having a few feet of gravel between you and radiation would be useful for a base, as well as the ease of coming and going from a smaller body. I suppose it would be helpful to build some kind of centrifuge in any base to simulate gravity, as well.
- drakonandor 10y ago
  The gravity and atmosphere of Mars make it a more ideal candidate.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
I believe this bill cancels our no-commerce-in-space obligations under the Outer Space Treaty - American companies may now lay claim to and develop celestial objects.
- rayuela 10y ago
  Where does it say that? That would actually be a huge deal...
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Never mind, it may have been effectively nullified by the Space Act of 2015 [1]. It's a bit schizophrenic, however. One section states "a United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States." Section 403, meanwhile, confirms that "it is the sense of Congress that by the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sov- ereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body." [1] https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW-114publ90.pdf https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW-114publ90.pdf See Title IV Space Resource Exploration and Utilization
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
>> sitting on my grandfather's shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. >> More than 1,000 companies across nearly all 50 states are working on private space initiatives. These are my takeaways - the reason we do the hard things is because of a child like sense of wonder. And the reason we will succeed is because 1,000 companies is a lot. And I bet I am not the only HN'er wanting to be one of the next ones, to buy into the dream. Just take lots of tomato ketchup in case.
cndjdjvjjdnd 10y ago
And yet any sort of program that gets fleshed out right now will get trashed in about three months time when he leaves office and congress turns over. Yay, political infighting and sabotage!
- justin66 10y ago
  That NASA cannot plan reliably past the next budget actually affects a lot of things very negatively.
fitzwatermellow 10y ago
Wasn't clear if The President is referring to the NASA Orion Space Lunch System? The GAOs latest report suggested it would miss its 2018 first test launch due to technical challenges (software-related): http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-620 http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-620
- Kliment 10y ago
  I know it's a typo but I'm amused by NASA considering the difficulties of space lunch.
  - ajford 10y ago
    Hey now, have you tried any of that Astronaut Ice Cream? It's horrible! Clearly they need to improve space lunch!
    - Kliment 10y ago
      In fact, I have, and I quite enjoyed the texture.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    Clearly, more training on the Vomit Comet is needed :-)
  - crooked-v 10y ago
    Well, if you think about it, a lot of man-hours went into putting together the dining facilities on the space shuttles, testing food packets against the G-forces of launch, making sure that no normally harmless bacteria go crazy and decay everything in zero-G, etc.
- Ankaios 10y ago
  He's talking about Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP): http://www.nasa.gov/nextstep http://www.nasa.gov/nextstep SLS delenda est.
neximo64 10y ago
Politicians and the desire of legacy.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  If only we would feed the space industrial complex as we do the military one. sigh
  - chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
    We need to be a peaceful species if we ever hope to commune with ETIs and unlock the inner mysteries of the universe. According to Edgar Mitchell, the ETIs will not tolerate violence. Zero point energy is too powerful to entrust to warmongering space pirates (like us).
- epoxyhockey 10y ago
  And their actions to be repealed or cut by the next politician in line.
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    This is why cash prizes for advances that decrease the cost of space travel is the only thing a politician can do that has any chance of gaining my respect. It's action, not speech, and within a fixed time frame either tangible progress will be made or not. Twenty billion dollars to develop and demonstrate a reusable mass-driver system for deployment unmanned cargo to orbit? In the big scheme of things it's a drop in the bucket. But it would make a ton of other things much, much cheaper. The only problem is that it doesn't sound as sexy as a "vision" of space exploration decades from now.
- gxs 10y ago
  Exactly. Obama has been trying to smatter himself across history throughout his presidency with a lot of "first president, first president in X years" activities, and this screams of ME TOO-ism. Previous to this comment he's shown zero interest in space or space exploration - can't stand the guy.
pferde 10y ago
Translation: we discovered vast amounts of oil on Mars.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  The USA is the world's largest oil producer [0]. This is an antiquated opinion that ignores the complexity of the reasons we went into the Middle East, and is needlessly dismissive. A large amount of the crisis in the ME today is actually because fracking has driven down the price of oil so much. [0] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26352 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26352
  - Scirra_Tom 10y ago
    Wasn't one of the main reasons US went to ME because Saddam was threatening the petro dollar?
    - jandrese 10y ago
      That was before the fracking and tar sands boom. Also, the Iraq war was probably the least well justified war in modern history.
    - orly_bookz 10y ago
      It's not one of the reasons you'll read about in the news, no.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  That would be an absolutely fantastic reason to go to mars, because it almost certainly indicate the existence of large quantities of life on mars at some point in the past.
  - JackFr 10y ago
    Or evidence for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
clarkevans 10y ago
The relatively tiny budget spent on NASA is well spent -- the research opens minds, understanding of physics, and even commercial opportunity.
marvin 10y ago
Probably not a coincidence that this announcement arrives barely a week after SpaceX's absurdly ambitious Mars architecture announcement. It's a good bet that any politician meaning business about this will award numerous private contracts as part of the initiative. SpaceX intends to make manned exploration of Mars a lot cheaper than NASA has ever suggested possible, and cost is the main factor.
- chubot 10y ago
  Yeah I was surprised to see that he didn't mention SpaceX anywhere in the article. It seems that Elon usually pays tribute to NASA -- he did in his Mars announcement. It seems like if there are only two entities trying to go to Mars, and they work together through a contracting relationship, then it makes sense to mention the relation to the other one. Otherwise I'm just left confused about the two efforts.
  - blake8086 10y ago
    Maybe he just forgot?
  - amckenna 10y ago
    He didn't call out ULA or any private company. It gets tricky to call out specific companies in a broad statement like this one.
- destitude 10y ago
  The problem is NASA has stated they do not want private sector going to deep space. They think only the government should be doing deep space exploration and colonization. This is also why Elon specifically mentioned building parts of the ship for going to Mars in the Gulf states where there are already manufacturing plants for building components for NASA. Elon hopes to influence the public/politicians to help fund SpaceX instead of focusing on NASA doing it all.
btown 10y ago
The Destiny of Earthseed / Is to take root among the stars. "[God is] change we can believe in."
ttyltrful 10y ago
This is absolutely retarded! It's a huge diversion of resources.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't create accounts to post like this. We ask that commenters post civilly and substantively or not at all.
meira 10y ago
II Cold War has just begun and Obama is already trying to finish it with the same old move?
- yolesaber 10y ago
  The Cold War didn't end in 1969
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
Would have been nice to hear this earlier than the final minutes of his presidency. I have no faith that either of his possible successors give a damn about Mars.
- fail2fail2ban 10y ago
  Read your second sentence in the context of the first.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  I'd have given his words more credence if he hadn't canceled the Constellation project in 2010 [1]. It was in fact part of his original campaign platform in 2008 to cut funding to Nasa to pay for a national day care program. The day care never really got off the ground, but he did succeed in cutting Nasa's budget, forcing a lot of projects to shut down. I'm glad to hear he's had a change of heart about space, though it sounds as though he's counting on the private sector to do a lot of the work. And, of course, it means diddlysquat given that he's retiring in three months. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
arcanus 10y ago
Did Obama sign an executive order? Or is this a motivational announcement? As a contrast, in my field (computational science) Obama signed an executive order (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/29/executive-order-creating-national-strategic-computing-initiative https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/29/execu...) to enable the rapid development of exascale (next generation) supercomputers. Funding is arguably even more critical for space exploration, and without substantial action on this front I am skeptical this is going to have meaningful impact.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Just a quick flashback to President George Bush circa January 2004 [1]: Our second goal is to develop and test a new spacecraft, the crew exploration vehicle, by 2008, and to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014. [1]http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54868main_bush_trans.pdf http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54868main_bush_trans.pdf
- ap22213 10y ago
  What happened to that? Lack of funding?
  - InclinedPlane 10y ago
    It was a typical flags and footprints mission without much thought given to cost, so it ended up having a sticker price of about a trillion dollars, give or take. Congress hated it so much that they curtailed even the hint of talk about a Mars mission by NASA for well over a decade.
    - nickff 10y ago
      The current president's plan is a 'flags and footprints mission' (over 20 years from now). Where are you getting the trillion dollars figure?[1] Even the 90-day report came out at less than that.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration#/media/File:NASA-Main_budget_chart_14-01-2004.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative
    - internaut 10y ago
      Come on brah, you can 'lose' a couple of trillion down the backseat of the sofa at the Pentagon but you lose your shit when NASA asks for a mere 1 trillion dollars spread over a number of years? I feel pretty tall from this horse. Even the horse is feeling pretty aristocratic about the whole affair.
      - 10y ago
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Let's fix education, healthcare, banking, infrastructure, inefficient military, "warrior" policing, and prisons first. Then, if money is left over, we can go to Mars or just subsidize American's vacation trips to interesting places on this planet. :)
- bsilvereagle 10y ago
  I encourage you to spend some time perusing NASA Spinoffs: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/ https://spinoff.nasa.gov/ Granted, NASA is slowly turning into a regulatory agency compared to being purely technical, so we can't use the rate of technical advancements in the past to predict the future. However, I think NASA is one of the handful of federal agencies where I stand to see tangible benefits from my tax dollars.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I know about them. I just prefer the next initiative dealing with major problems with long-term ROI for the country. They can never seem to put money and effort into those things but they can go to Mars. (Rolls eyes)
- drakonandor 10y ago
  Throwing more money at it doesn't fix everything.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Did I say so? Or did I say they should spend more money on things that should have higher priority? Obviously, good people and planning should go with it...
helthanatos 10y ago
Even if Mars worked, it would be terrible for the Earth because it would give the first real nuclear asylum. Should leaders be able to live somewhere completely free of the threat of destruction, who knows what they'd do. Should it work, it can greatly hurt the human race; should it fail, it was a waste of money. I don't understand why people would be happy about this?
- EJTH 10y ago
  > Even if Mars worked, it would be terrible for the Earth because it would give the first real nuclear asylum. And it would be good for earth at the same time for the same reasons. I would consider it a good thing because of redundancy of life and humanity. > Who knows what they'd do Probably not something that they haven't already planned. Just look at Iraq, Libya and Syria and see what the US have done to those places. > Should it work, it can greatly hurt the human race But it could also open up a whole new world of adventure, exploration, innovation and conquest - something many humans still strive for.
- hehheh 10y ago
  Serious? I honestly can't tell. Do you think the only thing stopping leaders from killing billions is the fact they might also die or be otherwise affected?
  - euyyn 10y ago
    They must be so looking forward to life in the Mars desert!
markdog12 10y ago
> Editors Note: Barack Obama is President of the United States. Thanks
- gxs 10y ago
  That line was more so for people who stumble upon that article in 5 years, not necessarily for those reading today.
  - toggle 10y ago
    I thought it was a joke, suggesting that everyone is so caught up with the presidential election, they may have forgotten who the current one is. I thought it was pretty funny. :P
dingo_bat 10y ago
To all those questioning the need to go to Mars: because it's there.
chiph 10y ago
Props to Andy Weir and his book The Martian. Like how Star Trek inspired a generation of engineers and rocket scientists, his book is inspiring another generation to go even further.
nadezhda18 10y ago
Kennedy: We choose to go to the Moon

223 points by DarkContinent 10y ago

Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it.

chamakits 10y ago
This is a great analogy. It was Indigenous People Day yesterday in the US (aka Columbus Day), and it made me think what an interesting time it must have been to be alive at a time where there were widely mostly unexplored areas in the world, and how incredulous and shocked people must have felt when they found out of these unexplored lands (putting aside the fact that it had been explored and lived by other cultures they did not know of). Then I realized I do live in a time like that, with space exploration being that next frontier. What a time to be alive. I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further.
- btown 10y ago
  Only this time without that unfortunate collateral damage to indigenous peoples!
  - cossatot 10y ago
    That's my biggest fear about Mars. We don't have a great record on Earth and might not recognize the damage done until it's irreversible.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      It is a dead rock.
      - cossatot 10y ago
        1- Probably but not certainly, and a little caution (say, 100 more years of remote sensing exploration as technology improves) will go a long way. 2- I'm not so anthropocentric as to think that the only value in the universe is human value. It's not our universe; we're an infinitesimal fraction of it. Other life has inhabited earth for billions of years, and maybe other places too. The terrestrial or extraterrestrial environments have value for existing and future life, regardless of whether that is human life. And most of life isn't human, and won't be in the future either.
        kobeya 10y ago
        There is no sentient life in Mars. If there is microbial life on Mars, it is not making efficient use of its resources. I will not trade the billions of future people that might call a terraformed Mars home for some scum on the bottom of a rock.
        stordoff 10y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but I do wonder if life exists somewhere in the Universe that would view humanity in the same way.
        kobeya 10y ago
        No doubt. We'd best be ready. Thankfully astronomical data makes this unlikely at least in our stellar neighborhood, so we have some time to grow in both power and maturity.
        Can_Not 10y ago
        We have a small chance of exploiting 1% of Mars in less than 100 years. The sooner we get our first factory there, the sooner we'll know if there is any reason not to build the millionth factory.
    - 2AF3 10y ago
      afraid we are going to mess up a lifeless rock
      - more_corn 10y ago
        It doesn't need to be alive to be beautiful. There is great peace and beauty in empty places. Mars has grand and majestic vistas: canyons and plains, dunes and mountains. Reducing it in your mind to a lifeless rock obscures the awe and wonder. It is the opposite of appreciation, it makes the idea small in you, worthless and not deserving of respect.
        friendlygrammar 10y ago
        There are infinite similarly dead rocks in the universe.
        drdeca 10y ago
        Similar [dead rocks], or [similarly dead] rocks ? Also, I think there are only finitely many eventually observable planets in the universe?
        kobeya 10y ago
        All of that requires an observer there to appreciate it. Messing up the scenery of Mars with industry is a champagne problem.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        noobermin 10y ago
        That is your perspective that it is beautiful. What if my perspective is that it is more beautiful inhabited, alive, and sustaining an ecosystem it probably hasn't for millions of years? Beauty is really subjective.
        krisroadruck 10y ago
    - noobermin 10y ago
      "Ruining a mountain side" is one thing when it sustains an ecosystem of life. It's harder to argue we are ruining something like a planet with no life.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility until man-kind had achieved 20th century medical technology. Even then it would have extremely struggled to handle 30+ million new cases of Small Pox, TB, Bubonic Plague, etc. Luckily as far as modern technology can show we're extremely certain Mars has no life we'll accidentally genocide while exploring/terraforming.
    - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
      > Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America.
      - noobermin 10y ago
        I wouldn't call a slow migration that has no written record on the same scale as the exploration of the new world.
      - valarauca1 10y ago
        >Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America Well yeah there weren't any human infectious illness where... there aren't any humans. This video explains the history of man kind's infectious illness very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
      - sqeaky 10y ago
        And Europeans had no trouble crossing Europe. A single smallpox laden explorer would have started a plague in the Americas and a single native American would likely have died of one of the many plagues in Europe that Europeans had grown up with (and still often died from). The problem of safety is not always placed on the explorer, sometimes the explorer is the danger to his environment.
      - crooked-v 10y ago
        The point is that entire classes of extremely common diseases in Europe basically didn't exist in all or most of the Americas, and many of those diseases spread very easily once even a handful of people had carried them across the ocean.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I think you mean intelligent life, as I'm pretty sure there are no people inhabiting Mars, native or foreign, at this time.
    - dtparr 10y ago
      I think that's his point. If they're not there, they're not able to be collaterally damaged. If there is intelligent life (or, any life as we define it generally), there's a pretty high likelihood our arrival could damage it, especially if we don't discover it until after arrival. (And "really especially" if we go the terraforming route)
      - mc32 10y ago
        Gah, you're right. I read it as we mustn't... rather than there aren't any so we can't. My mistake.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further. You've got to be kidding. What "wonderful discoveries" do you think there's going to be out there? There might really be alien civilizations and worlds with lush vegetation out there somewhere, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to be limited to our own Solar System. The worlds here are not unknowns: we've been observing and probing them for many years now, and we know pretty well what's on them. There's all kinds of interesting things on these worlds, from a scientific perspective: gas/ice giants, oceans of methane on Titan, a weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn's atmosphere, ice mountains on Pluto/Charon, etc. But we're finding all this out just fine using robotic probes. I'm sure we'll find out more, and refine our knowledge further, with continued robotic missions. But if you're thinking that there's any good reason for humans to fly around the solar system and live on other worlds here, there just isn't any good case for it: none of the other habitats are remotely livable (the closest is the upper atmosphere of Venus of all places, if you really like the idea of living in a dirigible), and so the only real economic case to be made is mining. Most likely, we'd get a lot more mineral resources out of asteroids rather than planets or moons. But this isn't like Star Trek with all kinds of fantastical worlds out there to discover, plus alien cultures to make contact with. They might be out there, way out there, but we're still struggling with the idea of how to travel to our very nearest neighboring star system (Alpha Centauri), which is about 4 light-years away. Maybe this will all change if Zephram Cochrane invents the warp drive, but for now, there just isn't much reason for humans to do anything more than basic science missions in space, and hopefully asteroid-mining missions in the near future. We're not going to make any huge new discoveries any time soon, just more thing like "ooh, look at these weird ice mountains on this dwarf planet!". That's really interesting, don't get me wrong, and a great reason to send a robotic probe, but it's not like we're going to discover anything truly groundbreaking here in our own system. According to all our data, all the other worlds here are lifeless rocks or frozen wastelands or gas giants. This isn't such a great "time to be alive"; that time was back in the 60s-70s when they were first discovering stuff in space with the Apollo missions and various probes like Voyager, Mariner, etc. (and maybe in the 2000s when all the pictures from the Mars rovers started coming in; but how many pictures of red rocks on a red sky do you need to see before you realize there's nothing more to Mars than that?). It just isn't like the days when "the New World" was discovered, and Europeans were able to learn of and bring back fantastic new foods like cocoa/chocolate, maize/corn, learn about new cultures and brutalize them and steal their gold, etc. It's much more like exploring Antartica: it's a very interesting place for scientists, and absolutely worthwhile to do science missions on, but for everyone else the only possible reason you'd go there is as a tourist for a very short time because it's uninhabitable (though far more easily inhabited than Mars; at least there's breathable air there, and plenty of water just lying on the ground, there's even penguins and fish if you get hungry).
yolesaber 10y ago
I hate this analogy. Not only does it enforce the bullshit teleology of the White European as "discoverer" (you know people inhabited these continents, right?) but it also fails to take into account the massive technological shifts that have taken place. We can send probes to Mars, we are able to run mass spectrometry on it, we can analyze and monitor it from affair. The only reason to go there is hubris.
- witty_username 10y ago
  I think GP is saying the explorers "discovered" it from their perspective. But otherwise, I agree, we already know tons about Mars.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  You say hubris, I say practice.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Second this wholeheartedly. The "explorers" did not have the ability to observe to any real degree the rest of the world before setting out. Not only that, but it wasn't just exploration it was expansion.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  Robots are great for running pre-planned experiments, but they're limiting. There are many experiments that the research community would love to perform but would necessarily require a human presence.
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  Hmm. I'd like to understand this, but I have questions. I've imagined that we could do a lot more science with a human and some basic instruments than we could with a billion dollar Rover sent every ten years. I mean, just to sample a rock probably takes a week. A geologist on site could do that in an hour. Historically, when we can do something much faster we tend to do things with that we didn't do when it was very slow. For example when it took months to cross the country, it was a once in a lifetime thing for some and most never did it. Now we do it all the time, and generations of West Coast students have seen the Smithsonian. I think that there will be more value in sending humans to Mars than just hubris. I think we will learn a lot more about our cosmic origins, about the value of life and our healthy planet, and about ourselves as a species and culture. In fact, I think sending man to Mars is a key factor in getting us to appreciate this planet and the destruction we're causing here. I don't think Musk's end goal is to leave Earth, but to save it by making us value it again. Perhaps, on this scale, for the first time. To me, that's a lot more than just hubris. What do you think of all that?
maxerickson 10y ago
What on Mars is worth $500 a pound (in bulk) on Earth (this is something like the silly low price proposed by Elon Musk for transport)? People will probably pay a lot more than that for the first few thousand pounds of dust, but they certainly won't keep paying that just to have the same dust millions of others have. The vast resources of the Americas paid for the continuous trips back and forth and attracted settlers. What pays for going to Mars? What attracts (large numbers of) settlers to Mars? I get that there are people attracted to the "freedom" they would have outside of the established political realms of Earth, but what a terrible airless bargain that is.
- doc_holliday 10y ago
  It'd be really interesting to see the economic comparisons of both against each other. I.e the cost per kg of payload shipping from America to Europe in 17th Century vs the cost per kg of payload shipping from Mars to the Earth in 21st Century. I suspect the Mars in current day is much greater, but ships and crew back then were not cheap.
  - mortenjorck 10y ago
    It's an interesting idea to try to compare, but I wonder if the world in the 1600s or even the 1700s is just too different from ours to find anything truly analogous. To look at the human transportation side: This account (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm) by a German who traveled to the new world in the 1750s is harrowing enough, but the way the cost of passage is paid is horrifying, even heartbreaking: He writes of indentured servitude in the same language one would describe slavery (servants are "sold") and often parents would sell their children in the new world to pay for the voyage, not seeing them again for years, if ever. We could try to bring this into modern terms by multiplying the US federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40 hrs * 52 weeks) by the median indentured servitude (four years) and get $60,320 to take a human across the Atlantic in 1750, but might be painting an apple orange. Still, it gives us at least a very, very rough idea of what a trip to the new world cost then, and a good sense of just how vastly more expensive passage to Mars would cost in the foreseeable future.
- 10y ago
tdaltonc 10y ago
I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. I don't know what the analogous economic engine could possible be on Mars. If Mars is going to grow, we need to be able to imagine someone saying "I'm moving my family to Mars in search of a better life. I just don't see that happening. Series or L2 station? Sure, someone has to refine the iridium before we send it down the gravity well. But why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars?
- personjerry 10y ago
  > I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. But it did! There were very basic, underfunded French colonies in North America for example for at least a hundred years before they really sent a lot more people and realized the wealth that could be had. At the same time the colonizing countries also had great internal issues, but had they known how much profit could've been made from investment, undoubtedly they would've been colonizing in full force much earlier.
- ipince 10y ago
  > why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars? ? New environment, new markets, new needs = lots of new and potentially huge opportunities. I'm asking myself the complete opposite question.
  - eropple 10y ago
    We know what's on Mars and there isn't much there that isn't better sourced here, unless you want to use what you source on Mars itself. And there won't be a significant consumption base there for literally centuries, if ever. I'm in favor of human off-world activities, but I think it's a joke to make some kind of free-market argument. We should do it because we should do it, not because of invisible hands.
viach 10y ago
> History has shown it was a good idea How so? For who?
fail2fail2ban 10y ago
Agreed. The Native American Indians knew how great America was.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
timehastoldme 10y ago
I agree, for the most part. But can you explain why this is a valid equivalence? On the surface, sure, but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason. Also, some would argue that the disadvantages (e.g. disruption of local cultures, ambiguity of meaning in modern life) have outweighed the advantages.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  The natives might differ on good idea or not. ;) We'll start to know some of the benefit of getting there almost immediately. We'll know the benefit of Mars itself only decades or centuries later. > but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason Yes, it IS. Really. In choosing to do something difficult we focus on something that will need answers to questions we don't even know to ask yet. Some will produce answers that seem so specialised to have no reuse. Give it 5 years and some will be commercial successes. Others will lead to new ideas, branches of science, tech or products, and a steady stream of improvements to earthly things. Some will only be utilised years later, or ignored. Just as exploring the ocean's surface made it clear we needed marine chronometers (a life's work) and an understanding of scurvy. Those would take years to answer. Scurvy led to the first clinical trial, that the Navy ignored for 40 years. Or from the golden age of aircraft: SR-71[1], Concorde, XB-70 Valkyrie[1]. Just 3 examples, of dozens, each of which led to enough advances to fill a book. Two military, one prestige. Doesn't matter that the B-52 is still flying and the XB-70 was a dead end, we learnt lots of stuff, and it almost gave the US their own SST (Concorde). Aviation is mostly drilled out now. I'm a big believer in prestige projects - whether they work or not. Governments don't like that sort of thing any more. So unless other rich cashed out founders want to take the place of government and give us magic thing of the future... We're left with exploration and major wars (cold or hot) to hurl technology forward. With current mil tech I'd rather not have major wars, so, exploration it must be. Oh, why haven't we properly explored under the seas yet? Or, for a longer and far more eloquent version of this, see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html written in 1970 by NASA Director of Science. Mars, Tesla, Solar, Hyperloop. That's a lot on Mr Musk. I hope he crosses roads carefully. We need a few more crazy engineering imaginations. -- [1] If anyone is interested in aircraft, and can get to Dayton, Ohio, go to the USAF museum - they have the only Valkyrie, many of the X planes, a Blackbird and a huge inventory. Decent space and missile area too.
freyr 10y ago
> Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. Except that explorers in the 1500-1700s didn't have unmanned ships or remote sensing capabilities, and manned travel was their one and only option for exploration. We've come a long way since then.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. Not for the people already living on those continents it wasn't. For them, it was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. >We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it. This is speculation, and if you're implying that explorers to the Americas didn't foresee the benefits, you're completely and factually wrong. They might not have predicted, for instance, the discovery of cocoa/chocolate, but they did think there was gold there (and there was; the Spanish brought back huge quantities of it), plus many other resources like furs, plus the ability to grow many crops there like tobacco. With Mars, we've already sent a bunch of probes there and learned a lot about it. It's not some big unknown land any more. And there simply isn't any good reason for people to go there except for basic science. You sure as hell can't grow stuff there (and even if you could, getting it back to Earth would cost a fortune; we're not really short on arable land here on Earth, and we're constantly developing ways of more efficiently using what we have, with the next big thing being vertical farming): there's little atmosphere, little water, and it's cold and too far from the Sun. The lack of a magnetosphere and too much radiation probably isn't going to be all that great for your crops either (not to mention any inhabitants). The only foreseeable thing that could be done there is mining. But we don't need to go to Mars to get minerals; we have asteroids passing close to the Earth all the time which could be mined, and have very valuable ores in them. It's also possible to mine on the Moon, which probably has mineral resources thanks to all the asteroid impacts and lack of geological activity. Both of these are far closer and more feasible than Mars. I'm sorry, but "build it and they will come" isn't a law of the universe, it's a line from a silly movie.

fail2fail2ban 10y ago

It would be in even worse shape if that were the case. Obama and liberals in general assume unicorns will come protect them and that the military is bad. Meanwhile, the ISS is falling apart, we have no shuttle anymore (had to kill off any vestige of actual Republican leadership) and our fly boys have to hitch a ride to space in hollowed out Soviet cement mixers attached to the top of chemical rockets.

sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684576 and marked it off-topic.
throwaway729 10y ago
If the same is true in 20 years it will be a tragedy. But I expect cutting the shuttle program created space for private competition on that now-relatively-well-understood-as-far-as-space-things-go engineering problem and freed up NASA to focus on new challenges.
buerkle 10y ago
The shuttle was for the most part a terrible program. It cost an enormous amount of money compared to its benefits. It would have been cheaper to continue sending rockets than trying to maintain and fly the shuttle fleet.
- wanderingjew 10y ago
  That's not entirely true. The shuttle could do things no other ship could, including what's on the drawing board. The shuttle could down mass a lot of stuff. Look at the long duration exposure facility, a bus-sized satellite filled with materials experiments. We have rockets to take that to orbit now, we don't have something that could bring it down. It's arguably the ISS, in its current configuration, would have been possible, and Hubble would have probably been abandoned 20 years ago without the shuttle. The shuttle had problems, but its greatest strength was a gigantic space bus, built to take big satellites up and down. In fact, one of the biggest missed opportunities coming from the SpaceX camp I'm seeing is a lack of science and payload applications for the BFR/ITS. Example: the James Webb space telescope will be launching soon. It's a 6.5 meter telescope with weird folding mirrors because of the limitations of the launch vehicle. The ITS has a seventeen meter payload. Put a big fairing and a transfer stage on the ITS, and you can deliver gigantic payloads to orbit like we've never seen. Want a radio telescope at Earth-Moon L2? ITS can do that, but no one has even suggested it so far.

sidcool 10y ago

No mention of SpaceX. If they can collaborate, humans can go to Mars by 2025

palebluedot 10y ago
I don't entirely disagree, but overall I think multiple independent endeavors may be the most resilient approach. In other words, collaboration may indeed the fastest path if all goes well, but multiple independent efforts may be safer, with a higher probability of success. Independent approaches also allow for slightly different techniques and technological approaches to the problem, which may have additional unknown benefits later on.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  One does not preclude another. As long as all parties involved share knowledge, they can pursue different paths while at the same time speeding up each others' efforts.
  - palebluedot 10y ago
    True, that would probably be the ideal scenario - independent yet collaborative.
BigDaddyD 10y ago
I was always told only the government can go to space and explore for humanity? You mean a private company is doing it?
- night815 10y ago
  http://www.spacex.com/mars http://www.spacex.com/mars
  - y4mi 10y ago
    he's gotta be trolling. space x is almost 15 years old at this point and has consistently made it into the headlines within the last 10.

fail2fail2ban 10y ago

We aren't close to ready for Mars. We need a base on the moon.

Roboprog 10y ago
A near-earth asteroid might be a better choice.
- fail2fail2ban 10y ago
  I'm not degreed so this is just my off the wall thinking but asteroid mining yes, definitely. I still think we need a Moon base, need to show we can run it successfully for around 2 decades then start seriously planning a Mars mission. As a kid, I'd have imagined we'd already have a successful Moon base. Asteroids, since I assume they move and possibly in odd orbits might be difficult to reach in emergency situations, I'd rather not see any nation's Astronauts stranded on a remote asteroid.
  - euyyn 10y ago
    Most asteroids' orbits have the same characteristics as those of planets. The problem I would see is finding a big enough NEO asteroid, that you actually can stand on instead of floating by its side, or having to worry about reaching escape velocity if you jump strongly enough. If one's willing to go to any asteroid, not just NEO, then Ceres could be a possibility. A quick search says the delta-v required to reach it from LEO is about half that to reach Mars' surface.
    - Roboprog 10y ago
      I was thinking that having a few feet of gravel between you and radiation would be useful for a base, as well as the ease of coming and going from a smaller body. I suppose it would be helpful to build some kind of centrifuge in any base to simulate gravity, as well.
drakonandor 10y ago
The gravity and atmosphere of Mars make it a more ideal candidate.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

I believe this bill cancels our no-commerce-in-space obligations under the Outer Space Treaty - American companies may now lay claim to and develop celestial objects.

rayuela 10y ago
Where does it say that? That would actually be a huge deal...
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Never mind, it may have been effectively nullified by the Space Act of 2015 [1]. It's a bit schizophrenic, however. One section states "a United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States." Section 403, meanwhile, confirms that "it is the sense of Congress that by the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sov- ereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body." [1] https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW-114publ90.pdf https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW-114publ90.pdf See Title IV Space Resource Exploration and Utilization

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

>> sitting on my grandfather's shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. >> More than 1,000 companies across nearly all 50 states are working on private space initiatives. These are my takeaways - the reason we do the hard things is because of a child like sense of wonder. And the reason we will succeed is because 1,000 companies is a lot. And I bet I am not the only HN'er wanting to be one of the next ones, to buy into the dream. Just take lots of tomato ketchup in case.

cndjdjvjjdnd 10y ago

And yet any sort of program that gets fleshed out right now will get trashed in about three months time when he leaves office and congress turns over. Yay, political infighting and sabotage!

justin66 10y ago
That NASA cannot plan reliably past the next budget actually affects a lot of things very negatively.

fitzwatermellow 10y ago

Wasn't clear if The President is referring to the NASA Orion Space Lunch System? The GAOs latest report suggested it would miss its 2018 first test launch due to technical challenges (software-related): http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-620 http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-620

Kliment 10y ago
I know it's a typo but I'm amused by NASA considering the difficulties of space lunch.
- ajford 10y ago
  Hey now, have you tried any of that Astronaut Ice Cream? It's horrible! Clearly they need to improve space lunch!
  - Kliment 10y ago
    In fact, I have, and I quite enjoyed the texture.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Clearly, more training on the Vomit Comet is needed :-)
- crooked-v 10y ago
  Well, if you think about it, a lot of man-hours went into putting together the dining facilities on the space shuttles, testing food packets against the G-forces of launch, making sure that no normally harmless bacteria go crazy and decay everything in zero-G, etc.
Ankaios 10y ago
He's talking about Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP): http://www.nasa.gov/nextstep http://www.nasa.gov/nextstep SLS delenda est.

neximo64 10y ago

Politicians and the desire of legacy.

wmeredith 10y ago
If only we would feed the space industrial complex as we do the military one. sigh
- chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
  We need to be a peaceful species if we ever hope to commune with ETIs and unlock the inner mysteries of the universe. According to Edgar Mitchell, the ETIs will not tolerate violence. Zero point energy is too powerful to entrust to warmongering space pirates (like us).
epoxyhockey 10y ago
And their actions to be repealed or cut by the next politician in line.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  This is why cash prizes for advances that decrease the cost of space travel is the only thing a politician can do that has any chance of gaining my respect. It's action, not speech, and within a fixed time frame either tangible progress will be made or not. Twenty billion dollars to develop and demonstrate a reusable mass-driver system for deployment unmanned cargo to orbit? In the big scheme of things it's a drop in the bucket. But it would make a ton of other things much, much cheaper. The only problem is that it doesn't sound as sexy as a "vision" of space exploration decades from now.
gxs 10y ago
Exactly. Obama has been trying to smatter himself across history throughout his presidency with a lot of "first president, first president in X years" activities, and this screams of ME TOO-ism. Previous to this comment he's shown zero interest in space or space exploration - can't stand the guy.

pferde 10y ago

Translation: we discovered vast amounts of oil on Mars.

JBReefer 10y ago
The USA is the world's largest oil producer [0]. This is an antiquated opinion that ignores the complexity of the reasons we went into the Middle East, and is needlessly dismissive. A large amount of the crisis in the ME today is actually because fracking has driven down the price of oil so much. [0] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26352 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26352
- Scirra_Tom 10y ago
  Wasn't one of the main reasons US went to ME because Saddam was threatening the petro dollar?
  - jandrese 10y ago
    That was before the fracking and tar sands boom. Also, the Iraq war was probably the least well justified war in modern history.
  - orly_bookz 10y ago
    It's not one of the reasons you'll read about in the news, no.
throwaway729 10y ago
That would be an absolutely fantastic reason to go to mars, because it almost certainly indicate the existence of large quantities of life on mars at some point in the past.
- JackFr 10y ago
  Or evidence for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

clarkevans 10y ago

The relatively tiny budget spent on NASA is well spent -- the research opens minds, understanding of physics, and even commercial opportunity.

marvin 10y ago

Probably not a coincidence that this announcement arrives barely a week after SpaceX's absurdly ambitious Mars architecture announcement. It's a good bet that any politician meaning business about this will award numerous private contracts as part of the initiative. SpaceX intends to make manned exploration of Mars a lot cheaper than NASA has ever suggested possible, and cost is the main factor.

chubot 10y ago
Yeah I was surprised to see that he didn't mention SpaceX anywhere in the article. It seems that Elon usually pays tribute to NASA -- he did in his Mars announcement. It seems like if there are only two entities trying to go to Mars, and they work together through a contracting relationship, then it makes sense to mention the relation to the other one. Otherwise I'm just left confused about the two efforts.
- blake8086 10y ago
  Maybe he just forgot?
- amckenna 10y ago
  He didn't call out ULA or any private company. It gets tricky to call out specific companies in a broad statement like this one.
destitude 10y ago
The problem is NASA has stated they do not want private sector going to deep space. They think only the government should be doing deep space exploration and colonization. This is also why Elon specifically mentioned building parts of the ship for going to Mars in the Gulf states where there are already manufacturing plants for building components for NASA. Elon hopes to influence the public/politicians to help fund SpaceX instead of focusing on NASA doing it all.

btown 10y ago

The Destiny of Earthseed / Is to take root among the stars. "[God is] change we can believe in."

ttyltrful 10y ago

This is absolutely retarded! It's a huge diversion of resources.

sctb 10y ago
Please don't create accounts to post like this. We ask that commenters post civilly and substantively or not at all.

meira 10y ago

II Cold War has just begun and Obama is already trying to finish it with the same old move?

yolesaber 10y ago
The Cold War didn't end in 1969

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

Would have been nice to hear this earlier than the final minutes of his presidency. I have no faith that either of his possible successors give a damn about Mars.

fail2fail2ban 10y ago
Read your second sentence in the context of the first.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
I'd have given his words more credence if he hadn't canceled the Constellation project in 2010 [1]. It was in fact part of his original campaign platform in 2008 to cut funding to Nasa to pay for a national day care program. The day care never really got off the ground, but he did succeed in cutting Nasa's budget, forcing a lot of projects to shut down. I'm glad to hear he's had a change of heart about space, though it sounds as though he's counting on the private sector to do a lot of the work. And, of course, it means diddlysquat given that he's retiring in three months. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

arcanus 10y ago

Did Obama sign an executive order? Or is this a motivational announcement? As a contrast, in my field (computational science) Obama signed an executive order (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/29/executive-order-creating-national-strategic-computing-initiative https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/29/execu...) to enable the rapid development of exascale (next generation) supercomputers. Funding is arguably even more critical for space exploration, and without substantial action on this front I am skeptical this is going to have meaningful impact.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

Just a quick flashback to President George Bush circa January 2004 [1]: Our second goal is to develop and test a new spacecraft, the crew exploration vehicle, by 2008, and to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014. [1]http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54868main_bush_trans.pdf http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54868main_bush_trans.pdf

ap22213 10y ago
What happened to that? Lack of funding?
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  It was a typical flags and footprints mission without much thought given to cost, so it ended up having a sticker price of about a trillion dollars, give or take. Congress hated it so much that they curtailed even the hint of talk about a Mars mission by NASA for well over a decade.
  - nickff 10y ago
    The current president's plan is a 'flags and footprints mission' (over 20 years from now). Where are you getting the trillion dollars figure?[1] Even the 90-day report came out at less than that.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration#/media/File:NASA-Main_budget_chart_14-01-2004.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative
  - internaut 10y ago
    Come on brah, you can 'lose' a couple of trillion down the backseat of the sofa at the Pentagon but you lose your shit when NASA asks for a mere 1 trillion dollars spread over a number of years? I feel pretty tall from this horse. Even the horse is feeling pretty aristocratic about the whole affair.
    - 10y ago

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Let's fix education, healthcare, banking, infrastructure, inefficient military, "warrior" policing, and prisons first. Then, if money is left over, we can go to Mars or just subsidize American's vacation trips to interesting places on this planet. :)

bsilvereagle 10y ago
I encourage you to spend some time perusing NASA Spinoffs: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/ https://spinoff.nasa.gov/ Granted, NASA is slowly turning into a regulatory agency compared to being purely technical, so we can't use the rate of technical advancements in the past to predict the future. However, I think NASA is one of the handful of federal agencies where I stand to see tangible benefits from my tax dollars.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I know about them. I just prefer the next initiative dealing with major problems with long-term ROI for the country. They can never seem to put money and effort into those things but they can go to Mars. (Rolls eyes)
drakonandor 10y ago
Throwing more money at it doesn't fix everything.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Did I say so? Or did I say they should spend more money on things that should have higher priority? Obviously, good people and planning should go with it...

helthanatos 10y ago

Even if Mars worked, it would be terrible for the Earth because it would give the first real nuclear asylum. Should leaders be able to live somewhere completely free of the threat of destruction, who knows what they'd do. Should it work, it can greatly hurt the human race; should it fail, it was a waste of money. I don't understand why people would be happy about this?

EJTH 10y ago
> Even if Mars worked, it would be terrible for the Earth because it would give the first real nuclear asylum. And it would be good for earth at the same time for the same reasons. I would consider it a good thing because of redundancy of life and humanity. > Who knows what they'd do Probably not something that they haven't already planned. Just look at Iraq, Libya and Syria and see what the US have done to those places. > Should it work, it can greatly hurt the human race But it could also open up a whole new world of adventure, exploration, innovation and conquest - something many humans still strive for.
hehheh 10y ago
Serious? I honestly can't tell. Do you think the only thing stopping leaders from killing billions is the fact they might also die or be otherwise affected?
- euyyn 10y ago
  They must be so looking forward to life in the Mars desert!

markdog12 10y ago

> Editors Note: Barack Obama is President of the United States. Thanks

gxs 10y ago
That line was more so for people who stumble upon that article in 5 years, not necessarily for those reading today.
- toggle 10y ago
  I thought it was a joke, suggesting that everyone is so caught up with the presidential election, they may have forgotten who the current one is. I thought it was pretty funny. :P

dingo_bat 10y ago

To all those questioning the need to go to Mars: because it's there.

chiph 10y ago

Props to Andy Weir and his book The Martian. Like how Star Trek inspired a generation of engineers and rocket scientists, his book is inspiring another generation to go even further.

nadezhda18 10y ago

Kennedy: We choose to go to the Moon