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Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality

367 points by jwfxpr 10y ago

tdhz77 10y ago
Does anybody know how one could get involved in Mars Settlement. I would like to help out and go.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  If you are serious, the easiest way is to start saving a fairly big chunk of money. The first people to Mars will be astronauts, and competition for those seats is extremely high. You are better off being person 50,000 and the way that looks like it is shaping out is with a fairly large cash outlay, or an extremely valuable profession that has a statistically lower likelihood of being learned within a couple years by a very motivated person.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Become an astronaut. I know we like to talk about privately funded trips to mars but the reality is the mission hardware for the first many missions is not likely to be entrusted to people who have not met rigorous requirements for spaceflight.
  - nickff 10y ago
    The requirements for spaceflight are not so rigorous anymore. There have already been paying passengers (who were non-astronauts) on Russian space vehicles. Much like with a commercial airliner, the pilot has to know what they are doing, and the rest of the people have to know how to sit down and buckle-up. The current issue seems to be that because it is so expensive to send people up, they only send up the very best they can train.
    - schoen 10y ago
      It would probably be different for orbital missions as opposed to interplanetary missions -- at least at first!
- otabdeveloper1 10y ago
  We will settle Venus long before attempting Mars. Anybody talking about going to Mars is spouting marketing vapor.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    This is a really odd claim. A Venus settlement requires flying cities. I have a hard time imagining how anyone thinks that's easier than a greenhouse on Mars. Wiki says: > Furthermore, water, in any form, is almost entirely absent from Venus. The atmosphere is devoid of molecular oxygen and is primarily carbon dioxide. In addition, the visible clouds are composed of corrosive sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide vapor.
    - bilbo0s 10y ago
      Especially in 300+ Km/H winds. It'd be like building a cloud city in Hurricane Katrina.
      - gene-h 10y ago
        Of course if one moves with the wind then the apparent windspeed, or airspeed, is zero.
        ceejayoz 10y ago
        I wouldn't assume there are no wind gusts on Venus.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    That's the first time I've heard anyone say that. Care to elaborate on why it would be easier than on Mars?
    - aetherson 10y ago
      So the advantages of Venus: 1. It's closer. 2. It has essentially Earth-normal gravity. 3. It has an atmosphere that can shield you from radiation and meteorites. 4. It's closer to the sun, so solar power works well there. 5. The atmosphere makes available a variety of useful elements that would be difficult to get on most other parts of the solar system. 6. As it happens, there's a fairly happy medium in the atmosphere in which pressure is something generally like Earth pressure and temperatures are something generally like Earth temperatures and that part is also above most of the really corrosive stuff in the atmosphere. The downsides: 1. You have to develop floating habitats. Those seem possible in theory, but would certainly be an engineering challenge, to say the least. 2. Every element that is not prevalent in the atmosphere of the planet (such as, for example, every metal) is wildly inaccessible. 3. It's a deep gravity well to get into and out of, and also you'd have to land and launch from flight, which is another big engineering challenge.
- gaius 10y ago
  Joining the Air Force is probably the most direct route, or becoming an expert in any of the technologies a settlement would need a human operator of, or both.
- vkou 10y ago
  Start by spending a winter in Antarctica. There's always demand for semi-skilled and quasi-skilled labour there. Plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, lab techs. You'll even get paid for it, and are almost certainly not going to die. Read some blogs about life in a frozen hell before you go - you may very quickly realize whether or not this kind of thing is for you. Most people find that it's not. [1] > Antarctica’s problem is that you’ve run as far as a person possibly can to “escape”. I heard about every relationship shattered by the distance to the Ice…and all the ones that ended before you even thought about coming to Antarctica. The strings of jobs and towns abandoned as you tried to make a new start, a new life, in the next town, or state, or country over. But once you get to Antarctica, there’s simply nowhere further to go. Then the station closes for the winter with no more flights for nine months. When things start going wrong for you again, because the common denominator in all the situations you’ve fled from is you, you’re trapped. So you’d better get acquainted with yourself OR you can just drink yourself to oblivion and kill the days so that you aren’t even there. I’m not going to put a number on how many people took the latter route, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any that really made the former work. [1] http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2013/06/alcoholism-in-antarctica/ http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2013/06/alcoholism-in-antarctic...
  - veb 10y ago
    Fantastic read! Thanks.
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.
- nickff 10y ago
  This looks more like a 'legacy' statement, where the president is trying to emphasize how much he has done in the arena of space exploration, and what his contribution has been.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    So it's just bluster.
    - sigmar 10y ago
      >Bluster: loud, aggressive, or indignant talk with little effect. Uh, no.
      - dexterdog 10y ago
        You're right. He wasn't aggressive about it.
        sigmar 10y ago
        Yup, yet I got downvoted heavily. I'll just take this to mean hackernews people aren't very knowledgeable about vocabulary
        10y ago
frederikvs 10y ago
from the article : 'the newly created Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships or “NextSTEP” program' They might have just googled for their abbreviations first, so that they wouldn't collide with an important historical operating system [0]. I get that it's hard to find an unused three-letter acronym, but with 8 characters you really should be able to find something unused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  To be fair as time goes on we're going to have collisions more and more to the point where I think we'll either stop caring about collisions or we'll stop caring about creating abbreviations / acronyms. I'm hoping for the latter :)
- nkrisc 10y ago
  A "historical" operating system. Hardly seems like a real problem.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Super_Jambo 10y ago
It seems like a failure of imagination to me that the main plan is to start off sending lots of people to Mars. People are heavy, they need heavy life support, they're fragile & they require complex infrastructure to survive. If any of that support infrastructure breaks or there's an interruption in resupply missions the people die. Probably they fight to see who dies first and waste valuable resources. Yes people are very versatile but almost everything useful is going to be sent from earth for decades. If the plan for building human supporting infrastructure is well thought out we shouldn't need much versatility. Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible. Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch). This seems a far faster way to build a self sustaining mars backup civ. Bonus in that at some point this leads to self replicating self directed robots at which point send them to the asteroid belt & everyone can retire. To that end anyone want to make a remote operated maker space? Buy some cheap land or warehouse. Ship in raw materials and see if we can build a robot factory by remote. Price of admission is sending a remote operated vehicle guess we can wire it up and broadcast it to the web. Hopefully that can fund someone to replace batteries when they inevitably run flat.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  The answer to all your questions is simple: our goal is colonization, not exploration. Without the people it will take a lot longer to see some non-obvious problems. And if you're sending a few people, you might as well send a lot.
  - Super_Jambo 10y ago
    That would be why I suggested building remote operated robot factory on earth first. So the humans here can see and experience the problems before they get to mars and have to wait for the next years window.
    - imaginenore 10y ago
      But you won't see the biggest issues anyway - atmosphere, crazy temperature gradients, potential poisons in the soil, psychology of no chance of survival if something goes wrong. Trying to simulate Mars is indeed useful, I agree, but it won't give us the problems of the actual colony.
nickff 10y ago
This is a very optimistic view of the president's space exploration legacy. Cancelling George W. Bush's 'Vision for Space Exploration' may have been a wise political move, but doing so delayed the project by 8 years, with relatively little technical gain. We are now looking at spending 25 billion dollars for development, and 2 billion more per additional launch, with the aim of reaching an asteroid in the mid-2020s, and Mars in ~2040. I will be shocked if the Space Launch System (A.K.A. SLS, Senate Launch System) takes humans to the moon, and I will be dumbstruck if anyone uses it to go to Mars. The system is simply too expensive, and the projected launch rate is too low for it to be useful. In addition, the system is too politically vulnerable, as the program would have to survive more than 20 years for someone to use it to go to Mars. Much like the current president cancelled his predecessor's plan, a future president will cancel this one.
- chriskanan 10y ago
  Congress is trying to make it harder for new administrations to change NASA's direction. See this article from about 20 days ago: http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/senate-commerce-and-house-ss-t-committees-approve-space-related-legislation http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/senate-commerce-and-ho... The most relevant quote: The bill officially establishes in law that human exploration of Mars, including potential human habitation on the surface of Mars, is a NASA objective. It lauds the progress made by the SLS and Orion programs and requires NASA to submit a critical decision plan and strategic framework laying out the details of how it will achieve the goal of landing humans on Mars. Here are a couple related articles: https://www.inverse.com/article/21129-a-new-senate-bill-could-safeguard-nasa-s-mars-mission-from-a-trump-presidency https://www.inverse.com/article/21129-a-new-senate-bill-coul... http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senate-panel-authorizes-money-mars-mission-shuttle-replacement/90793160/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senat...
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    What makes you think this is more than just words? I get that this formally tweaks NASA's mandate, but it's not clear this would have any affect. After all, the Constellation program was not just an executive order by Bush; according to Wikipedia, > NASA Authorization Act of 2005...directed NASA to "develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program to promote exploration, science, commerce and US preeminence in space, and as a stepping stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program Indeed, your second article says > It’s not a legally binding bill. Future presidents or lawmakers, or even NASA’s own administrators would still be able to modify plans at their own discretion — and that’s inevitable given the development of new technologies and fluctuations in funding over the next couple of decades. > Nevertheless, by using explicit language never before used in federal legislation related to NASA authorization measures, the bill would make it tougher for future administrations to cut funding for the Mars mission or scrap the mission altogether. I'm not impressed by the "explicit language never before used in federal legislation" when comparing it to what's come (and gone) before.
simonh 10y ago
> And that brings us to the first thing we’re excited to discuss today. NASA has already begun laying the groundwork for these deep space missions. In 2014 we issued.... And then spends the next paragraph talking about something they did in 2014. The whole page is like that.
zipwitch 10y ago
I've been following space news since I was a kid in the 70s, and now I'm to the point where I find these repetitions of "Mars in ~25 years" to be more pathetically sad than anything else. Maybe Musk and SpaceX will succeed, maybe not. But either way, he's not playing the same tired tune I've heard my entire life.
- nickff 10y ago
  Musk is aiming for humans on Mars in 8 years (2024); this is one of the reasons I am most optimistic about it.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Has he even started working on figuring out how to keep humans perpetually alive in a sealed bubble? SpaceX employs a lot of rocket scientists, who have delivered pretty impressive results. What do its life scientists have to show us?
    - Super_Jambo 10y ago
      I think SpaceX's plan is to take your money and deliver you to Mars, what you do next is your problem. Assuming they can make that work and turn a profit well good for them. I mean their worst case is you get bored and take up space on a flight home. Slightly less worse case you die and provide some fertilizer for other brave colonists. Best case, martian backup to earth civilization and a whole bunch of new expertise for humanity. Assuming you give a damn perhaps you should look into it yourself?
    - erispoe 10y ago
      SpaceX is clearly focusing on one problem only: transportation. Because it's the transportation costs is the major roadblock to develop a commercial space industry beyond LEO. That's a smart move to foster an ecosystem of companies specializing in other aspects. Once it becomes possible to send people and cargo to Mars for a reasonable price, it starts to make sense to create a company specializing in, say, inflatable habitats. Bigelow Aerospace [1], doing exactly that, inflatable habitats, could benefit immensely from cheaper transport of cargo to LEO and to Mars. [1] https://bigelowaerospace.com/ https://bigelowaerospace.com/
kfrat 10y ago
Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality; So We Can Have a Nanotech Accident and it Won't Affect Earth. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
cydonian_monk 10y ago
As nice as this is, it really is little more than an empty recap statement, and leaves so many questions. When, exactly? There are seven or so decent launch windows between now and "the 2030s," so what are we targeting? With what money? It's nice that nextSTEP selected six firms, but aside from Space-X (who is not on the list, mind you) I can't see others willingly donating hardware and personnel without compensation. What steps are being taken to insure this project won't be hacked to death by political whims? More importantly: How can I (or any other individual) help? There's precious little actionable data in this release.
- savagej 10y ago
  Already taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP They really should have used a different name: https://www.nasa.gov/nextstep https://www.nasa.gov/nextstep
smoyer 10y ago
This work aboard the space station is the heart and soul of the first stage of NASA’s Journey to Mars; a stage we call “Earth Dependent.” The ISS and shuttle are (or in the case of the shuttle "were") broadly considered a waste. There was a recent article posted here that described how they really only existed for each other ... and to give NASA a public facing "expedition".
- nickff 10y ago
  The Space Shuttle was originally called 'station shuttle', as it was meant to service a large orbital space station (planned to be launched in the 1970s). Unfortunately for NASA, its budget was cut during and after the Apollo missions, and it decided to postpone the station, but keep the shuttle. The MIT course on the Space Shuttle is very informative; you might find the episode on the decision to build the shuttle particularly interesting.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw&list=PL35721A60B7B57386&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw&list=PL35721A60B...
  - smoyer 10y ago
    They also originally envisioned "Single-Stage-to-Orbit" and a turn-around time more like that of an airplane.
    - nickff 10y ago
      I don't know of any shuttle study that envisioned it being SSTO. The original shuttle configurations did contain a liquid-powered 'flyback booster', which was a first stage with the ability to fly back to the launch site. Many of these configurations also had retractable jet engines mounted on the shuttle orbiter, as well as fuel and/or oxidizer tanks in the orbiter, but all these options were nixed because of payload, cost, and schedule requirements. The quick turn-around was originally viewed as desirable, but other things were made higher priorities, and they gradually moved away from that objective.
theothermkn 10y ago
If the human settlement of space is to be made a reality, then the plans for it need to be more measured and realistic. First, it needs to be recognized that we don't know how human biology is going to cope with the radiation and gravity environment encountered in space. More precisely, we know that our biology copes poorly, and we don't know how to fix that from a biological perspective. The only solutions we have in our grasp are one, bring the gravity up to 1G with a rotating habitat, and two, shield humans from the radiation experienced in space with magnets and mass. Any reasonable plan to "settle" space must begin by addressing these. Second, Mars is just not the place to start, because it's too far away. People are fond of pointing out that Mars's atmosphere makes landing there less costly than landing on the Moon, but this ignores the fact that you have to bring life support and food along for the 4- to 6-month long trip. (The atmosphere is also very little help, for example, for Musk's plan.) It is more accurate to say that it is slightly less costly to land on Mars for a day than it is to land an entire Lunar base and live on the Moon for 6 months. Add to this the return trip time to Earth for emergencies (or the time it takes to send emergency supplies and crew), and the Moon wins, hands down. (Indeed, a better place to work out how to survive on Mars would be if you could find places on the Moon where we couldn't land and had to rely on weeks of overland travel from a landing site to get there.) Third, the absolute first step should be an experimental, shielded, rotating habitat (probably built from Lunar materials) in orbit either outside of Earth's van Allen belts or around the Moon. This habitat should be of sufficient size to address the effects of, at least, Moon-like (1/6) and Mars-like (1/3) gravity on human subjects for multiple years. It needs to either be able to spin up and down to these values, have separate sections for Mars and Moon gravity, or we need to have a separate base on the Moon. We already know that space kills us in many, many ways. Until we have characterized how we're even going to survive there, there is absolutely no sense in talking about settling there. Any announcement that doesn't address these directly is just PR.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  No information of that sort was available in JFK's announcement about going to the moon, either. You're right that this part is PR, but your expectation is too unrealistic to take it very seriously. If you're trying to insinuate that no one is considering these issues, I assure you, they are very aware.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
I wonder why there aren't any realistic plans for using nuclear propulsion. Chemical rockets simply produce too low thrust. Using nuclear pulse/fission fragment rockets the solar system can be explored in a matter of months, rather than the years/decades that we're currently forced to endure. Project Orion was supposed to be feasible with 60s technology. Why aren't we trying to make similar technologies work?
- nickff 10y ago
  The main problems seem to be risk aversion and environmental groups. There will always be some risk to sending fissionable material on a very large chemical explosive (rocket); given our society's current risk aversion, it seems like a 'hard sell'. Environmental groups have been protesting every use of radioactive material in space for the last ~20 years, and seem likely to continue to do so; in the current political climate, nobody has the will to ignore them.
  - justin66 10y ago
    It's incorrect to characterize the opposition as coming only from "environmental groups," as if the opposition those groups embody isn't representative of a public that largely defecates itself whenever the word "nuclear" is used in a sentence. Ignoring the groups, or the people, isn't an option. Developing safer nuclear options and educating the public as to why they're safer might work, although educating the public... yeah.
- gene-h 10y ago
  For one, nuclear pulse rockets violate several international treaties. Fission fragment rockets, while the performance is impressive on paper, have yet to be demonstrated in the lab. Nuclear thermal propulsion has been demonstrated on Earth[0] and Nuclear electric propulsion has been flight proven[1]. NASA had a serious effort to develop and flight prove a high power(200 KWe) nuclear reactor[2]. This would have been used to power the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter[3] which would have explored Europa, Ganymeade, Callisto, and Io if things were favorable. The reactor enabled high power electric propulsion, high bandwidth communication(10Mbit/s), and even a full scale ice penetrating radar. This much power is hard to come by as far out as Jupiter. The entire effort lasted about two years before it got canceled because NASA needed to free up money for the (now canceled) Constellation Program. The thing I would like to emphasize here is that this was a serious effort with money on the table and a mission in place. The nuclear propulsion work NASA is currently working on is either a concept study, that is just investigating whether an idea can work at all, or not very well funded. The issue is getting the funding to develop the hardware and actually following through [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1867 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter
nostromo 10y ago
I'd love to see people on Mars in my lifetime. But the biggest problem longterm is that Mars will be a pretty miserable place to live. Right now you can move to Antartica if you really wanted to. Do you? I don't. And Antartica is a much more pleasant place to be than Mars for many reasons: you can breath the air, it's got water, it's quite a bit warmer, and you get almost twice as much sunlight.
- jaredhansen 10y ago
  This is such a tired argument. Yes, Antartica is less miserable than Mars. So what? Antartica is, crucially, part of Earth. It is missing the main thing Mars has to make it desirable, which is being another planet. If you don't get the point of ever leaving Earth that's fine, but don't pretend that $random_inhospitable_place_on_Earth is automatically better, for 'being on other planets' purposes, than another planet is.
  - nostromo 10y ago
    Yes, if you're only solving for "not Earth" then Mars is good match. But if your only goal is to leave Earth, why not move to the Moon? It's much more practical. Without a plan to make Mars more habitable for humans, Mars will be a lot like ISS or Antartica: a place where a small number of lucky scientists go for a few months before returning home.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Terraforming Mars is an undertaking that may well be beyond humanity, but it doesn't have to be the whole planet to make it effective (though that would be the safest).
    - kitsunesoba 10y ago
      The moon is only more practical in terms of distance/travel time. In every other way, the moon is drastically more inhospitable than even the worst day on Mars, so anything gained by the shorter distance is quickly nullified by the difficulty of existing there. If the issues surrounding transit can be addressed, Mars is by far a superior target for colonization.
pascalxus 10y ago
Before we spend the enormous amount money needed to settle humans on mars, I really think we should be spending that money or effort to help people settle Earth. Homelessness is still a big issue in cities. And last time I checked, the vast majority of the middle class hasn't even paid off their own home, not to mention property taxes. It doesn't make sense to build housing in outer-space when we can't even do it affordably on our own planet. IMHO Don't get me wrong. I think space is cool and fun, but that's what science fiction movies are for, and the discovery channel/books, if you want non-fiction.
- savagej 10y ago
  You aren't in charge of humanity's efforts. No one is.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  In contrast, I prefer to work on a problem that can be solved by technical achievements in math, science, and engineering within my lifetime. Don't get me wrong. I think utopian fantasy is cool and fun, but that's what Star Trek television series are for, and the history channel/books, if you want non-fiction. Sociological problems are at least an order of magnitude more difficult than space problems. When you send a robot to Mars, you don't have to worry about how much power it will embezzle from the communications array, or whether it will refuse to take its meds, or whether the value of the work it is doing is enough to pay its mortgage. You could quite easily spend 100 times the cost of a Mars colony on the people problems here on Earth, and achieve absolutely zero visible results from it. Besides that, unless you're going to force students into social work education rather than aerospace engineering, there would be a lot of skilled laborers leaving university with no useful jobs to do. You would be spending your money on them sitting at home, uselessly dreaming about space, rather than spending just a bit more for them to be actually working to advance technology.
- flogic 10y ago
  They're not really mutually exclusive problems though. Especially homelessness where the issue isn't technical so much as will. Other issues like say global warming may dovetail rather well with settling Mars. Our rovers run on solar power and RTGs. Which is fine for something small. But to even think of safely living on Mars. We're going to need to figure out how to run power intensive equipment like bulldozers and excavators. That means we'll need to deal with some of the more thorny issues related to energy and global warming.
dathmar 10y ago
More of the same from government promising Mars in X years. This will just be killed off by the next president. If this was serious it would have been announced at the beginning of his 8 years. We could have even put some of the ~550 billion spent on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. We probably would have gotten more bang for our buck. I also wonder how much of this was brought about just to point out that the US will not be supporting SpaceX's hopes of a Mars mission.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  SpaceNews.com said that this announcement "largely reiterated the space policy [Obama] announced in an April 2010 speech at NASA's Kennedy Space Center..." http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-move-ahead-with-plans-to-offer-iss-docking-port-for-private-modules/ http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-move-ahead-with-plans-to-offer-...
once-in-a-while 10y ago
I can't believe there's a serious discussion about this topic. Even if you overcome the technical challenges (which I doubt), people would get depressed on any planet other than Earth. All other planets are just insanely sad for human life. Our soul would suffer to dead...
- kobeya 10y ago
  You are projecting yourself. Not everyone share those views.
- strictnein 10y ago
  People have lived in remote, desolate outposts on Earth for extended periods of time for a wide variety of reasons (military, science, etc). And that was without (basically) unlimited media to keep them from complete boredom.
- AgentME 10y ago
  Supposing that is a problem, then it will be just another problem that could be solved.
abalone 10y ago
What about making human settlement of oceans a reality? Like, not just the surface but the floors too. Seems like a suitably grand technology project with massive potential benefits. I never hear about it though.. not sexy enough? Doesn't capture the imagination?
- vkou 10y ago
  Equally pointless and uneconomical. If there's one thing we're not short of, it's living space in inhospitable environments.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat
anti_censor 10y ago
Barack trying to steal Musk's thunder?
eddieh 10y ago
Wow, so much naysaying here. When I hear about private plans vs government plans I think back to what Neil deGrasse Tyson said: > Private enterprise will never lead a space frontier. In all the history of human conduct, it’s as clear to me as day follows night that private enterprise won’t do that, because it’s expensive. It’s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you’re dealing with things that haven’t been done before. That’s what it means to be on a frontier. [...] The government is better suited to these kinds of investments. They have a longer time horizon. They’re not shackled to quarterly reports like you see in a private enterprise. I tend to agree with him. I'm betting on the government to get humans there first. But I'll be happy to eat humble pie.
sdegutis 10y ago
> "We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time." Wait, why? Why do we have to?
- jpindar 10y ago
  "because they are hard."
matchagaucho 10y ago
... but Elon has better video simulations.
danblick 10y ago
Question: it seems there is a lot of overlap between the technology required for space exploration and the technology needed for ICBMs. To what extent was space exploration in the Mercury-Apollo missions a way to make a huge investment in ICBM technology palatable to the public? Does anyone know good documentaries that discuss this? (Put it another way: how important was R&D done in the name of human space exploration to the development of ICBM capabilities?)
- exDM69 10y ago
  > how important was R&D done in the name of human space exploration to the development of ICBM capabilities? Not very important. By the time of the Gemini program, ICBMs had reached the capabilities needed. All the human rated launch vehicles after that were developed for manned spaceflight exclusively (unlike Mercury and Gemini programs which used missiles) and didn't have a lot of overlap with ICBM development. There might be other areas of military interest that overlap manned space flight efforts, though.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
As with similar NASA vision statements about space, this is heavy on the what "Send people to Mars" and weak on the why, "What do we gain by being space faring?" As a result it will be constantly under pressure from earthly issues that need money now. For example if you are a congress critter and asked to choose between funding a $1B for Zika virus research/abatement and using that $1B for 1/5 the cost of developing a new space booster system, people always choose the 'today' problem and delay the 'future' opportunity. No one wants to say "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent that money on a rocket." This is why I am a huge fan of the Commercial Crew and other 'private' industry programs. Let private industry develop the tools and techniques for space and unshackle from them the cold war restrictions. And yes, that is the elephant in this particular room. While the "west" wrings its hands over the PRK developing an operational missile capability, have you ever thought what a Falcon 9 looks like through that lens? As a military weapon it could be considered the first Intercontinental Ballistic Bomber. Think about that capability, a Falcon 9 with a payload capable of some re-entry steering, launches from a base in the US, lets fly the payload, and then flys back to base for the next payload. Ten of these sitting on pads in the Dakotas could put 100 tons of conventional explosive on to any target in the eastern hemisphere in about 45 minutes. That is the kind capability that SpaceX could "market" to third parties. And it isn't something nation states like private companies to have.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Look at the comments here, or on Reddit every time this subject is raised, and you have your answer. I'm sure that some people think in terms of, "Good attitude, good results", others are in it for the feel-good, and still others think that public interest in a major project is the only way to fund what matters. Mostly though, it seems to be extremely cynical PR aimed at people who should know better. Never mind the questionable value of trading one gravity well for another, never mind the issues of getting people there alive and healthy, and never mind the "why"...
- wolf550e 10y ago
  re: Why go to Mars? Dr. Robert Zubrin has an excellent answer in this 4 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs
hasbroslasher 10y ago
Meanwhile a significant number of people starve to death globally. Not to be the eternal downer, but I just can't understand how we haven't figured out proper income distribution but think we'll be able to deal with becoming extraterrestrials.
- AgentME 10y ago
  You could say this about any other endeavor. We're creating iphones while a significant number of people starve to death globally, etc. (If someone's response is that it's okay specifically because Apple is a private company, then well honestly I'd be a bit concerned about the preconception that capitalism is automatically moral. If minimizing the number of people starving was the goal that beat other goals, then taxes could be raised on companies like Apple until society put more effort into reducing starving than building iphones.)
  - hasbroslasher 10y ago
    Maybe it's just me, but if we suck at living on a super habitable planet then I seriously doubt our fitness as a species to live in less hospitable corners of the universe.
    - elsonrodriguez 10y ago
      There's 7 billion people on earth. I think we're pretty good at living here.
ryao 10y ago
I would prefer it if we made human settlement of the oceans a reality first. Human settlement of space has health problems that are not yet solved such as vision damage from zero gravity environments and brain damage from cosmic radiation. http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vision.html http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vis... https://www.rt.com/document/57fc69bac46188c6758b4599/amp https://www.rt.com/document/57fc69bac46188c6758b4599/amp Making underwater habitats is far more practical in the short term. Experience in making closed environments for human habitation of the ocean would be useful when the problems with space exploration are solved.
- tonmoy 10y ago
  New places to colonize because we are running out of livable land is not the main issue. In case of an extinction level disaster, most land/ocean based humans may be wiped out. Having a "backup" colony on a different planet is needed in this regard. And we are talking about colonizing another planet, so zero G vision problems would not be that much of an issue I guess.
  - prewett 10y ago
    What disaster are you imagining that takes out an underwater colony? It'd be completely sealed off from the water, so you could vaporize the entire ocean (unlikely) and atmosphere and it would still be okay. The only thing I could see affecting an underwater colony would be an earthquake, but I'm having trouble imagining an earthquake big enough to wipe out all surface life.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Underwater you have gravity, access to our biosphere, food, water, you can make air and make fuel. In space... well... The issue though, is that people want what's out there, they want to mine asteroids and somehow that laudable goal has been conflated with colonizing another gravity well in some minds.
  - science4sail 10y ago
fiatjaf 10y ago
With your dollars we can do it!
perseusprime11 10y ago
Do we even need the govt in this anymore beyond just encouraging companies like SpaceX?
cowardlydragon 10y ago
Just help fund SpaceX's plan OR Set up a moon base to help the plan OR Help nuclear pulse drives for the interplanetary trips.
Animats 10y ago
If this happens, it's going to be because Lockheed Martin gets their fusion plant going. Back in 2014, Lockheed Martin announced that their Skunk Works unit was working on building a fusion reactor.[1] Last May, the head of the Skunk Works announced quietly that they'd achieved initial plasma and were investing more money in the project.[2] The Skunk Works produced the U-2, the SR-71, and the first stealth fighter. They're really good at building things. They have money. They have very good people. If anybody can make this work, it's them. [1] http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm... [2] http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/05/03/lockheed-nuclear-fusion-generator-investment/83870398/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/05/...
prewett 10y ago
So I suppose a Cassini-budget probe to Uranus or Neptune in my lifetime is probably not going to happen with Mars sucking up all the funding? Mars is cool, but I don't think a Mars colony is realistic. I'd rather pay to see what the last two planetary systems look like.
tofupup 10y ago
neat
tofupup 10y ago
neat

367 points by jwfxpr 10y ago

tdhz77 10y ago

Does anybody know how one could get involved in Mars Settlement. I would like to help out and go.

3pt14159 10y ago
If you are serious, the easiest way is to start saving a fairly big chunk of money. The first people to Mars will be astronauts, and competition for those seats is extremely high. You are better off being person 50,000 and the way that looks like it is shaping out is with a fairly large cash outlay, or an extremely valuable profession that has a statistically lower likelihood of being learned within a couple years by a very motivated person.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ryanmarsh 10y ago
Become an astronaut. I know we like to talk about privately funded trips to mars but the reality is the mission hardware for the first many missions is not likely to be entrusted to people who have not met rigorous requirements for spaceflight.
- nickff 10y ago
  The requirements for spaceflight are not so rigorous anymore. There have already been paying passengers (who were non-astronauts) on Russian space vehicles. Much like with a commercial airliner, the pilot has to know what they are doing, and the rest of the people have to know how to sit down and buckle-up. The current issue seems to be that because it is so expensive to send people up, they only send up the very best they can train.
  - schoen 10y ago
    It would probably be different for orbital missions as opposed to interplanetary missions -- at least at first!
otabdeveloper1 10y ago
We will settle Venus long before attempting Mars. Anybody talking about going to Mars is spouting marketing vapor.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  This is a really odd claim. A Venus settlement requires flying cities. I have a hard time imagining how anyone thinks that's easier than a greenhouse on Mars. Wiki says: > Furthermore, water, in any form, is almost entirely absent from Venus. The atmosphere is devoid of molecular oxygen and is primarily carbon dioxide. In addition, the visible clouds are composed of corrosive sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide vapor.
  - bilbo0s 10y ago
    Especially in 300+ Km/H winds. It'd be like building a cloud city in Hurricane Katrina.
    - gene-h 10y ago
      Of course if one moves with the wind then the apparent windspeed, or airspeed, is zero.
      - ceejayoz 10y ago
        I wouldn't assume there are no wind gusts on Venus.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  That's the first time I've heard anyone say that. Care to elaborate on why it would be easier than on Mars?
  - aetherson 10y ago
    So the advantages of Venus: 1. It's closer. 2. It has essentially Earth-normal gravity. 3. It has an atmosphere that can shield you from radiation and meteorites. 4. It's closer to the sun, so solar power works well there. 5. The atmosphere makes available a variety of useful elements that would be difficult to get on most other parts of the solar system. 6. As it happens, there's a fairly happy medium in the atmosphere in which pressure is something generally like Earth pressure and temperatures are something generally like Earth temperatures and that part is also above most of the really corrosive stuff in the atmosphere. The downsides: 1. You have to develop floating habitats. Those seem possible in theory, but would certainly be an engineering challenge, to say the least. 2. Every element that is not prevalent in the atmosphere of the planet (such as, for example, every metal) is wildly inaccessible. 3. It's a deep gravity well to get into and out of, and also you'd have to land and launch from flight, which is another big engineering challenge.
gaius 10y ago
Joining the Air Force is probably the most direct route, or becoming an expert in any of the technologies a settlement would need a human operator of, or both.
vkou 10y ago
Start by spending a winter in Antarctica. There's always demand for semi-skilled and quasi-skilled labour there. Plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, lab techs. You'll even get paid for it, and are almost certainly not going to die. Read some blogs about life in a frozen hell before you go - you may very quickly realize whether or not this kind of thing is for you. Most people find that it's not. [1] > Antarctica’s problem is that you’ve run as far as a person possibly can to “escape”. I heard about every relationship shattered by the distance to the Ice…and all the ones that ended before you even thought about coming to Antarctica. The strings of jobs and towns abandoned as you tried to make a new start, a new life, in the next town, or state, or country over. But once you get to Antarctica, there’s simply nowhere further to go. Then the station closes for the winter with no more flights for nine months. When things start going wrong for you again, because the common denominator in all the situations you’ve fled from is you, you’re trapped. So you’d better get acquainted with yourself OR you can just drink yourself to oblivion and kill the days so that you aren’t even there. I’m not going to put a number on how many people took the latter route, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any that really made the former work. [1] http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2013/06/alcoholism-in-antarctica/ http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2013/06/alcoholism-in-antarctic...
- veb 10y ago
  Fantastic read! Thanks.

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.

nickff 10y ago
This looks more like a 'legacy' statement, where the president is trying to emphasize how much he has done in the arena of space exploration, and what his contribution has been.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  So it's just bluster.
  - sigmar 10y ago
    >Bluster: loud, aggressive, or indignant talk with little effect. Uh, no.
    - dexterdog 10y ago
      You're right. He wasn't aggressive about it.
      - sigmar 10y ago
        Yup, yet I got downvoted heavily. I'll just take this to mean hackernews people aren't very knowledgeable about vocabulary
        10y ago

frederikvs 10y ago

from the article : 'the newly created Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships or “NextSTEP” program' They might have just googled for their abbreviations first, so that they wouldn't collide with an important historical operating system [0]. I get that it's hard to find an unused three-letter acronym, but with 8 characters you really should be able to find something unused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
To be fair as time goes on we're going to have collisions more and more to the point where I think we'll either stop caring about collisions or we'll stop caring about creating abbreviations / acronyms. I'm hoping for the latter :)
nkrisc 10y ago
A "historical" operating system. Hardly seems like a real problem.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Super_Jambo 10y ago

It seems like a failure of imagination to me that the main plan is to start off sending lots of people to Mars. People are heavy, they need heavy life support, they're fragile & they require complex infrastructure to survive. If any of that support infrastructure breaks or there's an interruption in resupply missions the people die. Probably they fight to see who dies first and waste valuable resources. Yes people are very versatile but almost everything useful is going to be sent from earth for decades. If the plan for building human supporting infrastructure is well thought out we shouldn't need much versatility. Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible. Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch). This seems a far faster way to build a self sustaining mars backup civ. Bonus in that at some point this leads to self replicating self directed robots at which point send them to the asteroid belt & everyone can retire. To that end anyone want to make a remote operated maker space? Buy some cheap land or warehouse. Ship in raw materials and see if we can build a robot factory by remote. Price of admission is sending a remote operated vehicle guess we can wire it up and broadcast it to the web. Hopefully that can fund someone to replace batteries when they inevitably run flat.

imaginenore 10y ago
The answer to all your questions is simple: our goal is colonization, not exploration. Without the people it will take a lot longer to see some non-obvious problems. And if you're sending a few people, you might as well send a lot.
- Super_Jambo 10y ago
  That would be why I suggested building remote operated robot factory on earth first. So the humans here can see and experience the problems before they get to mars and have to wait for the next years window.
  - imaginenore 10y ago
    But you won't see the biggest issues anyway - atmosphere, crazy temperature gradients, potential poisons in the soil, psychology of no chance of survival if something goes wrong. Trying to simulate Mars is indeed useful, I agree, but it won't give us the problems of the actual colony.

nickff 10y ago

This is a very optimistic view of the president's space exploration legacy. Cancelling George W. Bush's 'Vision for Space Exploration' may have been a wise political move, but doing so delayed the project by 8 years, with relatively little technical gain. We are now looking at spending 25 billion dollars for development, and 2 billion more per additional launch, with the aim of reaching an asteroid in the mid-2020s, and Mars in ~2040. I will be shocked if the Space Launch System (A.K.A. SLS, Senate Launch System) takes humans to the moon, and I will be dumbstruck if anyone uses it to go to Mars. The system is simply too expensive, and the projected launch rate is too low for it to be useful. In addition, the system is too politically vulnerable, as the program would have to survive more than 20 years for someone to use it to go to Mars. Much like the current president cancelled his predecessor's plan, a future president will cancel this one.

chriskanan 10y ago
Congress is trying to make it harder for new administrations to change NASA's direction. See this article from about 20 days ago: http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/senate-commerce-and-house-ss-t-committees-approve-space-related-legislation http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/senate-commerce-and-ho... The most relevant quote: The bill officially establishes in law that human exploration of Mars, including potential human habitation on the surface of Mars, is a NASA objective. It lauds the progress made by the SLS and Orion programs and requires NASA to submit a critical decision plan and strategic framework laying out the details of how it will achieve the goal of landing humans on Mars. Here are a couple related articles: https://www.inverse.com/article/21129-a-new-senate-bill-could-safeguard-nasa-s-mars-mission-from-a-trump-presidency https://www.inverse.com/article/21129-a-new-senate-bill-coul... http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senate-panel-authorizes-money-mars-mission-shuttle-replacement/90793160/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senat...
- jessriedel 10y ago
  What makes you think this is more than just words? I get that this formally tweaks NASA's mandate, but it's not clear this would have any affect. After all, the Constellation program was not just an executive order by Bush; according to Wikipedia, > NASA Authorization Act of 2005...directed NASA to "develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program to promote exploration, science, commerce and US preeminence in space, and as a stepping stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program Indeed, your second article says > It’s not a legally binding bill. Future presidents or lawmakers, or even NASA’s own administrators would still be able to modify plans at their own discretion — and that’s inevitable given the development of new technologies and fluctuations in funding over the next couple of decades. > Nevertheless, by using explicit language never before used in federal legislation related to NASA authorization measures, the bill would make it tougher for future administrations to cut funding for the Mars mission or scrap the mission altogether. I'm not impressed by the "explicit language never before used in federal legislation" when comparing it to what's come (and gone) before.

simonh 10y ago

> And that brings us to the first thing we’re excited to discuss today. NASA has already begun laying the groundwork for these deep space missions. In 2014 we issued.... And then spends the next paragraph talking about something they did in 2014. The whole page is like that.

zipwitch 10y ago

I've been following space news since I was a kid in the 70s, and now I'm to the point where I find these repetitions of "Mars in ~25 years" to be more pathetically sad than anything else. Maybe Musk and SpaceX will succeed, maybe not. But either way, he's not playing the same tired tune I've heard my entire life.

nickff 10y ago
Musk is aiming for humans on Mars in 8 years (2024); this is one of the reasons I am most optimistic about it.
- vkou 10y ago
  Has he even started working on figuring out how to keep humans perpetually alive in a sealed bubble? SpaceX employs a lot of rocket scientists, who have delivered pretty impressive results. What do its life scientists have to show us?
  - Super_Jambo 10y ago
    I think SpaceX's plan is to take your money and deliver you to Mars, what you do next is your problem. Assuming they can make that work and turn a profit well good for them. I mean their worst case is you get bored and take up space on a flight home. Slightly less worse case you die and provide some fertilizer for other brave colonists. Best case, martian backup to earth civilization and a whole bunch of new expertise for humanity. Assuming you give a damn perhaps you should look into it yourself?
  - erispoe 10y ago
    SpaceX is clearly focusing on one problem only: transportation. Because it's the transportation costs is the major roadblock to develop a commercial space industry beyond LEO. That's a smart move to foster an ecosystem of companies specializing in other aspects. Once it becomes possible to send people and cargo to Mars for a reasonable price, it starts to make sense to create a company specializing in, say, inflatable habitats. Bigelow Aerospace [1], doing exactly that, inflatable habitats, could benefit immensely from cheaper transport of cargo to LEO and to Mars. [1] https://bigelowaerospace.com/ https://bigelowaerospace.com/

kfrat 10y ago

Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality; So We Can Have a Nanotech Accident and it Won't Affect Earth. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

cydonian_monk 10y ago

As nice as this is, it really is little more than an empty recap statement, and leaves so many questions. When, exactly? There are seven or so decent launch windows between now and "the 2030s," so what are we targeting? With what money? It's nice that nextSTEP selected six firms, but aside from Space-X (who is not on the list, mind you) I can't see others willingly donating hardware and personnel without compensation. What steps are being taken to insure this project won't be hacked to death by political whims? More importantly: How can I (or any other individual) help? There's precious little actionable data in this release.

savagej 10y ago
Already taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP They really should have used a different name: https://www.nasa.gov/nextstep https://www.nasa.gov/nextstep

smoyer 10y ago

This work aboard the space station is the heart and soul of the first stage of NASA’s Journey to Mars; a stage we call “Earth Dependent.” The ISS and shuttle are (or in the case of the shuttle "were") broadly considered a waste. There was a recent article posted here that described how they really only existed for each other ... and to give NASA a public facing "expedition".

nickff 10y ago
The Space Shuttle was originally called 'station shuttle', as it was meant to service a large orbital space station (planned to be launched in the 1970s). Unfortunately for NASA, its budget was cut during and after the Apollo missions, and it decided to postpone the station, but keep the shuttle. The MIT course on the Space Shuttle is very informative; you might find the episode on the decision to build the shuttle particularly interesting.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw&list=PL35721A60B7B57386&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw&list=PL35721A60B...
- smoyer 10y ago
  They also originally envisioned "Single-Stage-to-Orbit" and a turn-around time more like that of an airplane.
  - nickff 10y ago
    I don't know of any shuttle study that envisioned it being SSTO. The original shuttle configurations did contain a liquid-powered 'flyback booster', which was a first stage with the ability to fly back to the launch site. Many of these configurations also had retractable jet engines mounted on the shuttle orbiter, as well as fuel and/or oxidizer tanks in the orbiter, but all these options were nixed because of payload, cost, and schedule requirements. The quick turn-around was originally viewed as desirable, but other things were made higher priorities, and they gradually moved away from that objective.

theothermkn 10y ago

If the human settlement of space is to be made a reality, then the plans for it need to be more measured and realistic. First, it needs to be recognized that we don't know how human biology is going to cope with the radiation and gravity environment encountered in space. More precisely, we know that our biology copes poorly, and we don't know how to fix that from a biological perspective. The only solutions we have in our grasp are one, bring the gravity up to 1G with a rotating habitat, and two, shield humans from the radiation experienced in space with magnets and mass. Any reasonable plan to "settle" space must begin by addressing these. Second, Mars is just not the place to start, because it's too far away. People are fond of pointing out that Mars's atmosphere makes landing there less costly than landing on the Moon, but this ignores the fact that you have to bring life support and food along for the 4- to 6-month long trip. (The atmosphere is also very little help, for example, for Musk's plan.) It is more accurate to say that it is slightly less costly to land on Mars for a day than it is to land an entire Lunar base and live on the Moon for 6 months. Add to this the return trip time to Earth for emergencies (or the time it takes to send emergency supplies and crew), and the Moon wins, hands down. (Indeed, a better place to work out how to survive on Mars would be if you could find places on the Moon where we couldn't land and had to rely on weeks of overland travel from a landing site to get there.) Third, the absolute first step should be an experimental, shielded, rotating habitat (probably built from Lunar materials) in orbit either outside of Earth's van Allen belts or around the Moon. This habitat should be of sufficient size to address the effects of, at least, Moon-like (1/6) and Mars-like (1/3) gravity on human subjects for multiple years. It needs to either be able to spin up and down to these values, have separate sections for Mars and Moon gravity, or we need to have a separate base on the Moon. We already know that space kills us in many, many ways. Until we have characterized how we're even going to survive there, there is absolutely no sense in talking about settling there. Any announcement that doesn't address these directly is just PR.

oldmanjay 10y ago
No information of that sort was available in JFK's announcement about going to the moon, either. You're right that this part is PR, but your expectation is too unrealistic to take it very seriously. If you're trying to insinuate that no one is considering these issues, I assure you, they are very aware.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

I wonder why there aren't any realistic plans for using nuclear propulsion. Chemical rockets simply produce too low thrust. Using nuclear pulse/fission fragment rockets the solar system can be explored in a matter of months, rather than the years/decades that we're currently forced to endure. Project Orion was supposed to be feasible with 60s technology. Why aren't we trying to make similar technologies work?

nickff 10y ago
The main problems seem to be risk aversion and environmental groups. There will always be some risk to sending fissionable material on a very large chemical explosive (rocket); given our society's current risk aversion, it seems like a 'hard sell'. Environmental groups have been protesting every use of radioactive material in space for the last ~20 years, and seem likely to continue to do so; in the current political climate, nobody has the will to ignore them.
- justin66 10y ago
  It's incorrect to characterize the opposition as coming only from "environmental groups," as if the opposition those groups embody isn't representative of a public that largely defecates itself whenever the word "nuclear" is used in a sentence. Ignoring the groups, or the people, isn't an option. Developing safer nuclear options and educating the public as to why they're safer might work, although educating the public... yeah.
gene-h 10y ago
For one, nuclear pulse rockets violate several international treaties. Fission fragment rockets, while the performance is impressive on paper, have yet to be demonstrated in the lab. Nuclear thermal propulsion has been demonstrated on Earth[0] and Nuclear electric propulsion has been flight proven[1]. NASA had a serious effort to develop and flight prove a high power(200 KWe) nuclear reactor[2]. This would have been used to power the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter[3] which would have explored Europa, Ganymeade, Callisto, and Io if things were favorable. The reactor enabled high power electric propulsion, high bandwidth communication(10Mbit/s), and even a full scale ice penetrating radar. This much power is hard to come by as far out as Jupiter. The entire effort lasted about two years before it got canceled because NASA needed to free up money for the (now canceled) Constellation Program. The thing I would like to emphasize here is that this was a serious effort with money on the table and a mission in place. The nuclear propulsion work NASA is currently working on is either a concept study, that is just investigating whether an idea can work at all, or not very well funded. The issue is getting the funding to develop the hardware and actually following through [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1867 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter

nostromo 10y ago

I'd love to see people on Mars in my lifetime. But the biggest problem longterm is that Mars will be a pretty miserable place to live. Right now you can move to Antartica if you really wanted to. Do you? I don't. And Antartica is a much more pleasant place to be than Mars for many reasons: you can breath the air, it's got water, it's quite a bit warmer, and you get almost twice as much sunlight.

jaredhansen 10y ago
This is such a tired argument. Yes, Antartica is less miserable than Mars. So what? Antartica is, crucially, part of Earth. It is missing the main thing Mars has to make it desirable, which is being another planet. If you don't get the point of ever leaving Earth that's fine, but don't pretend that $random_inhospitable_place_on_Earth is automatically better, for 'being on other planets' purposes, than another planet is.
- nostromo 10y ago
  Yes, if you're only solving for "not Earth" then Mars is good match. But if your only goal is to leave Earth, why not move to the Moon? It's much more practical. Without a plan to make Mars more habitable for humans, Mars will be a lot like ISS or Antartica: a place where a small number of lucky scientists go for a few months before returning home.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Terraforming Mars is an undertaking that may well be beyond humanity, but it doesn't have to be the whole planet to make it effective (though that would be the safest).
  - kitsunesoba 10y ago
    The moon is only more practical in terms of distance/travel time. In every other way, the moon is drastically more inhospitable than even the worst day on Mars, so anything gained by the shorter distance is quickly nullified by the difficulty of existing there. If the issues surrounding transit can be addressed, Mars is by far a superior target for colonization.

pascalxus 10y ago

Before we spend the enormous amount money needed to settle humans on mars, I really think we should be spending that money or effort to help people settle Earth. Homelessness is still a big issue in cities. And last time I checked, the vast majority of the middle class hasn't even paid off their own home, not to mention property taxes. It doesn't make sense to build housing in outer-space when we can't even do it affordably on our own planet. IMHO Don't get me wrong. I think space is cool and fun, but that's what science fiction movies are for, and the discovery channel/books, if you want non-fiction.

savagej 10y ago
You aren't in charge of humanity's efforts. No one is.
logfromblammo 10y ago
In contrast, I prefer to work on a problem that can be solved by technical achievements in math, science, and engineering within my lifetime. Don't get me wrong. I think utopian fantasy is cool and fun, but that's what Star Trek television series are for, and the history channel/books, if you want non-fiction. Sociological problems are at least an order of magnitude more difficult than space problems. When you send a robot to Mars, you don't have to worry about how much power it will embezzle from the communications array, or whether it will refuse to take its meds, or whether the value of the work it is doing is enough to pay its mortgage. You could quite easily spend 100 times the cost of a Mars colony on the people problems here on Earth, and achieve absolutely zero visible results from it. Besides that, unless you're going to force students into social work education rather than aerospace engineering, there would be a lot of skilled laborers leaving university with no useful jobs to do. You would be spending your money on them sitting at home, uselessly dreaming about space, rather than spending just a bit more for them to be actually working to advance technology.
flogic 10y ago
They're not really mutually exclusive problems though. Especially homelessness where the issue isn't technical so much as will. Other issues like say global warming may dovetail rather well with settling Mars. Our rovers run on solar power and RTGs. Which is fine for something small. But to even think of safely living on Mars. We're going to need to figure out how to run power intensive equipment like bulldozers and excavators. That means we'll need to deal with some of the more thorny issues related to energy and global warming.

dathmar 10y ago

More of the same from government promising Mars in X years. This will just be killed off by the next president. If this was serious it would have been announced at the beginning of his 8 years. We could have even put some of the ~550 billion spent on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. We probably would have gotten more bang for our buck. I also wonder how much of this was brought about just to point out that the US will not be supporting SpaceX's hopes of a Mars mission.

greglindahl 10y ago
SpaceNews.com said that this announcement "largely reiterated the space policy [Obama] announced in an April 2010 speech at NASA's Kennedy Space Center..." http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-move-ahead-with-plans-to-offer-iss-docking-port-for-private-modules/ http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-move-ahead-with-plans-to-offer-...

once-in-a-while 10y ago

I can't believe there's a serious discussion about this topic. Even if you overcome the technical challenges (which I doubt), people would get depressed on any planet other than Earth. All other planets are just insanely sad for human life. Our soul would suffer to dead...

kobeya 10y ago
You are projecting yourself. Not everyone share those views.
strictnein 10y ago
People have lived in remote, desolate outposts on Earth for extended periods of time for a wide variety of reasons (military, science, etc). And that was without (basically) unlimited media to keep them from complete boredom.
AgentME 10y ago
Supposing that is a problem, then it will be just another problem that could be solved.

abalone 10y ago

What about making human settlement of oceans a reality? Like, not just the surface but the floors too. Seems like a suitably grand technology project with massive potential benefits. I never hear about it though.. not sexy enough? Doesn't capture the imagination?

vkou 10y ago
Equally pointless and uneconomical. If there's one thing we're not short of, it's living space in inhospitable environments.
greglindahl 10y ago
Try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat

anti_censor 10y ago

Barack trying to steal Musk's thunder?

eddieh 10y ago

Wow, so much naysaying here. When I hear about private plans vs government plans I think back to what Neil deGrasse Tyson said: > Private enterprise will never lead a space frontier. In all the history of human conduct, it’s as clear to me as day follows night that private enterprise won’t do that, because it’s expensive. It’s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you’re dealing with things that haven’t been done before. That’s what it means to be on a frontier. [...] The government is better suited to these kinds of investments. They have a longer time horizon. They’re not shackled to quarterly reports like you see in a private enterprise. I tend to agree with him. I'm betting on the government to get humans there first. But I'll be happy to eat humble pie.

sdegutis 10y ago

> "We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time." Wait, why? Why do we have to?

jpindar 10y ago
"because they are hard."

matchagaucho 10y ago

... but Elon has better video simulations.

danblick 10y ago

Question: it seems there is a lot of overlap between the technology required for space exploration and the technology needed for ICBMs. To what extent was space exploration in the Mercury-Apollo missions a way to make a huge investment in ICBM technology palatable to the public? Does anyone know good documentaries that discuss this? (Put it another way: how important was R&D done in the name of human space exploration to the development of ICBM capabilities?)

exDM69 10y ago
> how important was R&D done in the name of human space exploration to the development of ICBM capabilities? Not very important. By the time of the Gemini program, ICBMs had reached the capabilities needed. All the human rated launch vehicles after that were developed for manned spaceflight exclusively (unlike Mercury and Gemini programs which used missiles) and didn't have a lot of overlap with ICBM development. There might be other areas of military interest that overlap manned space flight efforts, though.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

As with similar NASA vision statements about space, this is heavy on the what "Send people to Mars" and weak on the why, "What do we gain by being space faring?" As a result it will be constantly under pressure from earthly issues that need money now. For example if you are a congress critter and asked to choose between funding a $1B for Zika virus research/abatement and using that $1B for 1/5 the cost of developing a new space booster system, people always choose the 'today' problem and delay the 'future' opportunity. No one wants to say "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent that money on a rocket." This is why I am a huge fan of the Commercial Crew and other 'private' industry programs. Let private industry develop the tools and techniques for space and unshackle from them the cold war restrictions. And yes, that is the elephant in this particular room. While the "west" wrings its hands over the PRK developing an operational missile capability, have you ever thought what a Falcon 9 looks like through that lens? As a military weapon it could be considered the first Intercontinental Ballistic Bomber. Think about that capability, a Falcon 9 with a payload capable of some re-entry steering, launches from a base in the US, lets fly the payload, and then flys back to base for the next payload. Ten of these sitting on pads in the Dakotas could put 100 tons of conventional explosive on to any target in the eastern hemisphere in about 45 minutes. That is the kind capability that SpaceX could "market" to third parties. And it isn't something nation states like private companies to have.

M_Grey 10y ago
Look at the comments here, or on Reddit every time this subject is raised, and you have your answer. I'm sure that some people think in terms of, "Good attitude, good results", others are in it for the feel-good, and still others think that public interest in a major project is the only way to fund what matters. Mostly though, it seems to be extremely cynical PR aimed at people who should know better. Never mind the questionable value of trading one gravity well for another, never mind the issues of getting people there alive and healthy, and never mind the "why"...
wolf550e 10y ago
re: Why go to Mars? Dr. Robert Zubrin has an excellent answer in this 4 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs

hasbroslasher 10y ago

Meanwhile a significant number of people starve to death globally. Not to be the eternal downer, but I just can't understand how we haven't figured out proper income distribution but think we'll be able to deal with becoming extraterrestrials.

AgentME 10y ago
You could say this about any other endeavor. We're creating iphones while a significant number of people starve to death globally, etc. (If someone's response is that it's okay specifically because Apple is a private company, then well honestly I'd be a bit concerned about the preconception that capitalism is automatically moral. If minimizing the number of people starving was the goal that beat other goals, then taxes could be raised on companies like Apple until society put more effort into reducing starving than building iphones.)
- hasbroslasher 10y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but if we suck at living on a super habitable planet then I seriously doubt our fitness as a species to live in less hospitable corners of the universe.
  - elsonrodriguez 10y ago
    There's 7 billion people on earth. I think we're pretty good at living here.

ryao 10y ago

I would prefer it if we made human settlement of the oceans a reality first. Human settlement of space has health problems that are not yet solved such as vision damage from zero gravity environments and brain damage from cosmic radiation. http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vision.html http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vis... https://www.rt.com/document/57fc69bac46188c6758b4599/amp https://www.rt.com/document/57fc69bac46188c6758b4599/amp Making underwater habitats is far more practical in the short term. Experience in making closed environments for human habitation of the ocean would be useful when the problems with space exploration are solved.

tonmoy 10y ago
New places to colonize because we are running out of livable land is not the main issue. In case of an extinction level disaster, most land/ocean based humans may be wiped out. Having a "backup" colony on a different planet is needed in this regard. And we are talking about colonizing another planet, so zero G vision problems would not be that much of an issue I guess.
- prewett 10y ago
  What disaster are you imagining that takes out an underwater colony? It'd be completely sealed off from the water, so you could vaporize the entire ocean (unlikely) and atmosphere and it would still be okay. The only thing I could see affecting an underwater colony would be an earthquake, but I'm having trouble imagining an earthquake big enough to wipe out all surface life.
M_Grey 10y ago
Underwater you have gravity, access to our biosphere, food, water, you can make air and make fuel. In space... well... The issue though, is that people want what's out there, they want to mine asteroids and somehow that laudable goal has been conflated with colonizing another gravity well in some minds.
- science4sail 10y ago

fiatjaf 10y ago

With your dollars we can do it!

perseusprime11 10y ago

Do we even need the govt in this anymore beyond just encouraging companies like SpaceX?

cowardlydragon 10y ago

Just help fund SpaceX's plan OR Set up a moon base to help the plan OR Help nuclear pulse drives for the interplanetary trips.

Animats 10y ago

If this happens, it's going to be because Lockheed Martin gets their fusion plant going. Back in 2014, Lockheed Martin announced that their Skunk Works unit was working on building a fusion reactor.[1] Last May, the head of the Skunk Works announced quietly that they'd achieved initial plasma and were investing more money in the project.[2] The Skunk Works produced the U-2, the SR-71, and the first stealth fighter. They're really good at building things. They have money. They have very good people. If anybody can make this work, it's them. [1] http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm... [2] http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/05/03/lockheed-nuclear-fusion-generator-investment/83870398/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/05/...

prewett 10y ago

So I suppose a Cassini-budget probe to Uranus or Neptune in my lifetime is probably not going to happen with Mars sucking up all the funding? Mars is cool, but I don't think a Mars colony is realistic. I'd rather pay to see what the last two planetary systems look like.

tofupup 10y ago

neat

tofupup 10y ago

neat