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I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars.

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seemed very disappointed with me, as if by making a realistic assessment of today's politics that I was voting in that way. I'm all for spending money in Chryse Planitia instead of Helmand province. So is almost everyone I know. But I feel like the chance of the US government actually funding something serious in space is pretty much nil. And I have no idea how to go about changing that.

stevoo 9y ago
Creating interplanetary projects like the one above are extemely expensive. As the ISS showed is that costed !150 billion USD to construct making massive leaps into space should not be burden to a single country. With that the funding would be less, and the return even smaller. I believe a global space agency should be formed where each country can allocate the money they wish and set goals by panels to the direction that they wish to proceed. ( very hard i can assume ). That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about.
- philipov 9y ago
  > That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about. Which is the opposite of what world leaders actually want. Jingoism is the name of the game right now.
  - specializeded 9y ago
    Opposite of what lots of us want too, kumbaya circles didn’t fuel the space race!
- criddell 9y ago
  I think competition might be more effective than cooperation when it comes to space exploration.
sametmax 9y ago
Right now Mars doesn't have any resource with crave enough to justify this enormous cost. If suddenly we discover that there is something we can get money from, and not just knowledge, you'll get investers.
- maze-le 9y ago
  Martian soil contains non-neglible amounts of phosphates[0]. Phosphorus is highly important for the production of fertilizers and gets increasingly rare here on earth[1]. It wouldn't suprise me if 150 years from now, phosphates are imported from martian soil. [0]: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html [1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full
  - seanalltogether 9y ago
    Surely it must be more economical to recover/recycle it from waste?
    - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      The phosphates are washed off by rainwater and diluted into the watershed (eventually the oceans). In the ocean, it is very slowly converted by bacteria and eventually brought back by geologic processes uplifting sediment. For a while, we could mine the deep ocean floor...which might be comparable to mining on Mars.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The easily available deposits on Earth are expected to last longer than 150 years. It's unlikely to be worth the delta-v to bring it here from Mars before known deposits are exhausted. Even after that I expect deep sea mining or direct extraction from seawater to be more viable than interplanetary shipping.
    - bluGill 9y ago
chha 9y ago
But hasn't this generally been an issue since Apollo? Great Ideas(TM) emerge and people get enthusiastic about them, but fail to realize that the cost makes them difficult to carry out as intended. The Great Idea is then either watered down (Skylab, Space Shuttle) or comes to an abrupt halt due to lack of funding or for political reasons (Space Station Freedom, Constellation). I'm getting more and more convinced that it will take autocratic nations looking for prestige, or commercial companies offering cheap and exotic tourist flights for humans to get back to the moon. The US doesn't have the political strength or stability to plan such a mission at the moment, and keep it going for the ~10ish years it takes.
- lfowles 9y ago
  Speaking of Great Space Ideas(TM) that I was incredibly excited about in highschool, whatever happened to space elevator research?
carsongross 9y ago
If you'd like to know why NASA is getting less and less funding and can expect this trend to continue, see this chart from Five38/NYT: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fivethirtyeight-gov1-blog48011.jpg https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fi...
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Here's the article from which that graphic is sourced: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-i... I'm shocked that they are so brazen as to frame one of the categories as "entitlement spending". The neutral terms for the contents of this category are Medicare and Medicaid, pensions, retirement benefits, Social Security, welfare, and unemployment. You can also call them health insurance, retirement insurance, and unemployment insurance. Technically, retirement benefits are things to which retirees are entitled to. Workers took lower-paying government jobs after weighing the value of the salary now against the value of the promised pensions later, or contributed to Social Security (not so much a choice by individuals, but a choice by the government of the past) which allows them to take the benefits of the program now. This is the literal meaning of the word "entitle", not the pejorative that it's become. As far as health care and welfare go, I would argue that simply being human in a wealthy, modern society ought to entitle people to the right not die on the streets of preventable causes. I don't regret my tax dollars going to those causes, except insofar as they exceed actually providing health care and instead enrich the bureaucracy and megacorporations that are paid to provide it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnadler 9y ago
    "Entitlement spending" is a fairly common term used to describe government spending that benefits the people directly. I've seen it used in all kinds of places. I haven't heard it used in a derogatory way, though maybe I just haven't noticed.
eduren 9y ago
In regards to the cycler idea, he has even acted as a "customer" to a Purdue University team doing a mars feasibility study. They've recently released their report, in which they detail how a cycler might work in comparison to the original SpaceX ITS proposal. https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring/docs/AAE%20450-Project%20Destiny.pdf https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring... Buzz Aldrin with the team: https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring/team/ https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring...
honestoHeminway 9y ago
A coldwar - creating the ilusion that the other side wants to get there first.
mannigfaltig 9y ago
I have trouble understanding the enthusiasm about space. Space hostile and empty. Why not simply send space probes and rovers at a fraction of the cost and spend the money more wisely, for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming. Why do we need to make the exception for space and get drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration, when the rest of science is usually about sobriety and utility. Where is the sober calculation that space exploration is more effective than other ways of spending research funds?
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  because space is more than us and it isn't us. It gives us a non-nation based activity to pursue that is greater than the whole of earth. It represents new frontier, new resources and ways of thinking that transcend this planet. It is a form of evolution and of freedom that isn't shackled so much by our self-made problems of earth. There are new mistakes to make and that's super appealing.
  - zatkin 9y ago
    We can't even cope with the environmental issues that we have on our own planet, so we avoid that and instead look to plaguing the rest of the solar system and beyond? Good grief.
    - HarkMamilton 9y ago
      Environmentalism isn't an excuse to give up on every other aspiration humanity might hold.
      - justinator 9y ago
        I personally would vote in favor of putting space exploration on hold until we get a handle on the quickly accelerating environmental disaster we humans have set up that seems that it may just wipe ourselves out. Personally. One needs beauty in the world, yes, but one also needs to breathe.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
NPR had a story this morning about why our budget never REALLY changes. And all the debate about passing this current budget is largely non substantive. Basically it came down to special interest groups that really determine how our money is spent. If we want to not have 15-20% of the budget going to Helmand province, we have to start working against the lobbyists of private corporations who benefit from that... Or instead of solving the problem, we could allow military contractors to fleece us for EVEN MORE money for developing Mars travel infrastructure. If we gave them a way to transition to a more profitable business maybe they would voluntarily make the shift.
abecedarius 9y ago
I can see both sides of that conversation. Yes, pessimism is realistic, but also that judgement contributes to that reality. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The equilibrium can flip quickly after some unforeseen development shakes us out of it. Aldrin lived through such a flip -- I think it's hard to appreciate now how amazing aerospace developments were in the 50s/60s when the work was a societal priority. Kickstarter solved a kind of similar problem for entrepreneurs, where it used to be too hard to surface the hidden demand for a product. There must be something we could do about testing/exposing the support a political idea might have past the "activation energy" needed to roll into a different equilibrium. A simple poll isn't enough.

stevoo 9y ago

Creating interplanetary projects like the one above are extemely expensive. As the ISS showed is that costed !150 billion USD to construct making massive leaps into space should not be burden to a single country. With that the funding would be less, and the return even smaller. I believe a global space agency should be formed where each country can allocate the money they wish and set goals by panels to the direction that they wish to proceed. ( very hard i can assume ). That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about.

philipov 9y ago
> That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about. Which is the opposite of what world leaders actually want. Jingoism is the name of the game right now.
- specializeded 9y ago
  Opposite of what lots of us want too, kumbaya circles didn’t fuel the space race!
criddell 9y ago
I think competition might be more effective than cooperation when it comes to space exploration.

sametmax 9y ago

Right now Mars doesn't have any resource with crave enough to justify this enormous cost. If suddenly we discover that there is something we can get money from, and not just knowledge, you'll get investers.

maze-le 9y ago
Martian soil contains non-neglible amounts of phosphates[0]. Phosphorus is highly important for the production of fertilizers and gets increasingly rare here on earth[1]. It wouldn't suprise me if 150 years from now, phosphates are imported from martian soil. [0]: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html [1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full
- seanalltogether 9y ago
  Surely it must be more economical to recover/recycle it from waste?
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    The phosphates are washed off by rainwater and diluted into the watershed (eventually the oceans). In the ocean, it is very slowly converted by bacteria and eventually brought back by geologic processes uplifting sediment. For a while, we could mine the deep ocean floor...which might be comparable to mining on Mars.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The easily available deposits on Earth are expected to last longer than 150 years. It's unlikely to be worth the delta-v to bring it here from Mars before known deposits are exhausted. Even after that I expect deep sea mining or direct extraction from seawater to be more viable than interplanetary shipping.
  - bluGill 9y ago

chha 9y ago

But hasn't this generally been an issue since Apollo? Great Ideas(TM) emerge and people get enthusiastic about them, but fail to realize that the cost makes them difficult to carry out as intended. The Great Idea is then either watered down (Skylab, Space Shuttle) or comes to an abrupt halt due to lack of funding or for political reasons (Space Station Freedom, Constellation). I'm getting more and more convinced that it will take autocratic nations looking for prestige, or commercial companies offering cheap and exotic tourist flights for humans to get back to the moon. The US doesn't have the political strength or stability to plan such a mission at the moment, and keep it going for the ~10ish years it takes.

lfowles 9y ago
Speaking of Great Space Ideas(TM) that I was incredibly excited about in highschool, whatever happened to space elevator research?

carsongross 9y ago

If you'd like to know why NASA is getting less and less funding and can expect this trend to continue, see this chart from Five38/NYT: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fivethirtyeight-gov1-blog48011.jpg https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fi...

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Here's the article from which that graphic is sourced: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-i... I'm shocked that they are so brazen as to frame one of the categories as "entitlement spending". The neutral terms for the contents of this category are Medicare and Medicaid, pensions, retirement benefits, Social Security, welfare, and unemployment. You can also call them health insurance, retirement insurance, and unemployment insurance. Technically, retirement benefits are things to which retirees are entitled to. Workers took lower-paying government jobs after weighing the value of the salary now against the value of the promised pensions later, or contributed to Social Security (not so much a choice by individuals, but a choice by the government of the past) which allows them to take the benefits of the program now. This is the literal meaning of the word "entitle", not the pejorative that it's become. As far as health care and welfare go, I would argue that simply being human in a wealthy, modern society ought to entitle people to the right not die on the streets of preventable causes. I don't regret my tax dollars going to those causes, except insofar as they exceed actually providing health care and instead enrich the bureaucracy and megacorporations that are paid to provide it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dnadler 9y ago
  "Entitlement spending" is a fairly common term used to describe government spending that benefits the people directly. I've seen it used in all kinds of places. I haven't heard it used in a derogatory way, though maybe I just haven't noticed.

eduren 9y ago

In regards to the cycler idea, he has even acted as a "customer" to a Purdue University team doing a mars feasibility study. They've recently released their report, in which they detail how a cycler might work in comparison to the original SpaceX ITS proposal. https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring/docs/AAE%20450-Project%20Destiny.pdf https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring... Buzz Aldrin with the team: https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring/team/ https://engineering.purdue.edu/AAECourses/aae450/2017/spring...

honestoHeminway 9y ago

A coldwar - creating the ilusion that the other side wants to get there first.

mannigfaltig 9y ago

I have trouble understanding the enthusiasm about space. Space hostile and empty. Why not simply send space probes and rovers at a fraction of the cost and spend the money more wisely, for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming. Why do we need to make the exception for space and get drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration, when the rest of science is usually about sobriety and utility. Where is the sober calculation that space exploration is more effective than other ways of spending research funds?

Quarrelsome 9y ago
because space is more than us and it isn't us. It gives us a non-nation based activity to pursue that is greater than the whole of earth. It represents new frontier, new resources and ways of thinking that transcend this planet. It is a form of evolution and of freedom that isn't shackled so much by our self-made problems of earth. There are new mistakes to make and that's super appealing.
- zatkin 9y ago
  We can't even cope with the environmental issues that we have on our own planet, so we avoid that and instead look to plaguing the rest of the solar system and beyond? Good grief.
  - HarkMamilton 9y ago
    Environmentalism isn't an excuse to give up on every other aspiration humanity might hold.
    - justinator 9y ago
      I personally would vote in favor of putting space exploration on hold until we get a handle on the quickly accelerating environmental disaster we humans have set up that seems that it may just wipe ourselves out. Personally. One needs beauty in the world, yes, but one also needs to breathe.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

NPR had a story this morning about why our budget never REALLY changes. And all the debate about passing this current budget is largely non substantive. Basically it came down to special interest groups that really determine how our money is spent. If we want to not have 15-20% of the budget going to Helmand province, we have to start working against the lobbyists of private corporations who benefit from that... Or instead of solving the problem, we could allow military contractors to fleece us for EVEN MORE money for developing Mars travel infrastructure. If we gave them a way to transition to a more profitable business maybe they would voluntarily make the shift.

abecedarius 9y ago

I can see both sides of that conversation. Yes, pessimism is realistic, but also that judgement contributes to that reality. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The equilibrium can flip quickly after some unforeseen development shakes us out of it. Aldrin lived through such a flip -- I think it's hard to appreciate now how amazing aerospace developments were in the 50s/60s when the work was a societal priority. Kickstarter solved a kind of similar problem for entrepreneurs, where it used to be too hard to surface the hidden demand for a product. There must be something we could do about testing/exposing the support a political idea might have past the "activation energy" needed to roll into a different equilibrium. A simple poll isn't enough.