BABloggee Jason Marsh sent me an interesting picture he put together. He was thinking about what was current in our culture when Apollo 17 went to the Moon… the last time a human set foot on another world.
The date was 1972. Here’s what he put together:
[Click to embiggen.]
Hmmm. Gas lines. Viet Nam. Nixon. Elvis with Nixon. Disco.
It’s been too long. We need to go back. I certainly hope the President and Congress can figure out how; my biggest gripe about Obama’s space plan (scroll down to Point #4 in that link) is ignoring the Moon for other goals. I think we do need to go back to the Moon, create a base and then a colony there, and use that knowledge to go to asteroids and beyond (even concurrently, to tell the truth).
Posters like this one really drive the point home. It’s been too long.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:46 am
The moon is not important, Phil.
All that matters is that Muslims feel better about their contributions to math and science.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:49 am
Total agreement here. I’ve got a comic in file that touches exactly that point. At 38 years, it’s fast becoming as remote and unreal as WWII is for most people today. Not a good thing at all.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:51 am
Oh Crap, Lukester – we’ve already established that Obama doesn’t think that that is NASA’s primary role.
Phil – Obama didn’t exclude Lunar flight, in his April 15th speech. He just said there is more to do than just Lunar flight.
But with the compromise bill, demanding a shuttle derived rocket, we won’t be going anywhere beyond LEO anytime soon.
Thanks Congress
July 16th, 2010 at 7:52 am
I hear Saddam hid his WMDs on the Moon.
(Oops. That was the last president.)
I hear that BP is hiding the “real” results of their investigation behind the Gulf (Mexico, this time) explosion in a crater at the Moon’s south pole.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:53 am
Hey, my dad still has that HP calculator!!! He used it when he worked on the Apollo project.
Not to get too nitpicky, but Saturday Night Fever didn’t come out until 1977.
And I would love it if we went to the Moon again.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:54 am
Hey Phil, we should all meet up at Cape Canaveral with a bunch of bottle rockets strapped to lawn chairs and threaten that if they don’t go to the moon, we will. I want to feel the solar wind blow through my hair and swim in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) and fish in the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquilitatis).
What’s that? No, haven’t really read anything on this site. Just the headlines, and I look at the pictures. I’m glad there’s a vacuum up there, though. Gonna need to clean up after our PARTY! Sublimation of bodily tissue? Ya lost me. I think you’re talking crazy talk.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:54 am
Here’s a contrary view from Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg. Of course, we know what the opinion in these parts of scientists like Weinberg and Bob Park is.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575042920971568684.html
July 16th, 2010 at 8:01 am
Hm; could have chosen the pictures better. The Arab oil embargo was 1973. “Saturday Night Fever” was in 1977. There were major shifts in pop culture between ’72 and ’77.
At the time of Apollo, I remember thinking that the next generation would grow up with Lunar travel a commonplace. Instead, it’s just something in the history books to them. (History books? Sorry, I meant websites.)
July 16th, 2010 at 8:06 am
I still have my TI-2500 calculator, which I bought in 1974.
http://datamath.org/BASIC/DATAMATH/ti-2500-3.htm
Yes, it still works. Why do you ask? (Okay, the power switch is broken, so you have to turn it off by removing the batteries. But, with batteries in, it works just fine.) I still don’t understand why it required 4 alkaline batteries, but only 3 NiCad batteries.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:18 am
When I made that picture, I didn’t even know what “Saturday Night Fever” was, and I sorta goofed on the fact that it happened in the late 70′s, rather than ’72 / ’73.
There you have it. Walking on the moon is older than disco.
How many of these pictures do we remember. And how many will our children remember?
July 16th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Hey, Lukester, Saint Reagan did the same thing with NASA, reaching out to other nations.
Jeeez Republicans have short memories.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Sorry, I don’t see it. Walk on the Moon…been there, done that.
What is the one indisputable item that we need from the Moon (or by extension Mars) that machines can’t get for us cheaper and with less risk?
Defense? Industry? Pure Science?
Is it worth the cost?
Obama may have a point here…oh crap…I might have actually agreed with him…
Tom
July 16th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Challenger happened when I was barely 1. Even untethered spacewalks were stopped before I was born.
In my lifetime we have gone BACKWARDS in space endeavors.
This. Is. Not. Cool.
Alas, the only reason we aren’t yet on the moon is politics.
Every biography, documentary, etc I’ve ever read about the Apollo program had those that worked on it wondering when we’d get a chance to go back.
Alas, they’ll all be dead or dying by the time that happens at this rate.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:36 am
I like how Dark Side of the Moon is placed right before “moon”. And, yes, it has been too long.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Yes, yes it *has* been too long.
Wa-aay too lo-ong.
Now thanks to Obama its going to be .. FSM only knows much longer .. There’s no humans going to the Moon far into the indefinite future – certainly no Americans. Not for twenty or thirty plus years or more. For me, that’s what makes cancelling Ares-Constellation just unforgivable.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Even though I don’t think another moon mission is absolutely necessary, I’d still love to see one. Getting people excited about space exploration, especially the future generations of scientists and engineers, is just as important as testing whether chimps can throw feces in space. And I don’t remember NASA doing anything exciting during my lifetime. Well, except for breaking stuff.
(That’s not completely true. I’m sorry for not giving you all the credit you deserve NASA. You did get Hubble working when I was an infant. And the few robots sent to Mars were pretty cool.)
July 16th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Lyrics from “I Know It’s Mine” by Oysterband:
Everyone’s a witness
We’ve all been in orbit
Earth was blue and silver
A big toy balloon
We’re all a little older
The air’s a little colder <– No it isn’t!
Feels like 40 lifetimes
Since we walked on the moon
The bit about the air being colder bugs me, because global warming would suggest otherwise, but the rest of the verse could hardly be more pertinent.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:40 am
An interesting poster.
It certainly brings back memories.
I agree it has been too long and wish we had a program to establish a permanent presence on the moon, but just wishing isn’t going to make it happen.
I also did a little poking into the pictures. Saturday Night Fever is the biggest outlier.
I had an HP-35 calculator in college but it eventually died and got thrown away.
I have a Pong TV Video Game stashed somewhere in my garage.
The ski mask gunman picture looks familiar, but I can’t quite place it. When was that?
Also, what is the logo in the bottom right corner?
The gas line poster brings back a lot of memories. The Arab Oil Embargo started with the October War in 1973 and lasted till March 1974.
The Soviet Union began deploying troops and equipment to “enforce the cease-fire” and the U.S. responded by increasing the DEFCON (Defense Condition) from 4 to 3. DEFCON 1 would be full scale war and not just with Iraq or the Taliban.
I was a Titan II ICBM Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander at the time and had just started pulling alerts in the silo and we DEFINITELY wondered what was going to happen. Fortunately, both sides backed down (US and Soviets), the Arabs and Israel agreed to a cease-fire and it didn’t get any farther than that. I’m glad we haven’t gotten that close again.
Also, it’s nice to see the old Titan missiles getting put to a better use from time to time.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:42 am
@10 Tom (H.Type)
What is the indisputable item we need?
Experience. you can’t fake it, you can’t pretend to have been there. a moon base would give us the experience and practice needed to be able to reach out to the other worlds (except Europa, attempt no landings there).
it would also give us a valuable launch point that’s considerably further from the earth’s gravity well, thereby reducing by a not insignificant amount the amount of fuel needed to get wherever we’re going.
it also would give us a nice launch point to chuck all that nuclear waste into the sun, because let’s face it, that’s the best place for it.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:43 am
There are many reasons to go back. For starters, it’s the closest large object to us. That makes it easier to get to.
And there is this
And this
And this
I really like that graphic! I’m going to uh… ‘borrow’ it.
[credit will be given!]
July 16th, 2010 at 8:44 am
@10: Tom, what’s the alternative? Our entire species staying on one single planet forever (or until a disaster wipes us out)?
@16: Lewis, I hope your adorable little smiley face self isn’t going to use that graphic without permission from Jason Marsh (and attribution). Because that’s not called “borrowing”.
A little further into the future, I like to imagine a stream of robots gathering water ice in Saturn’s orbit and taking it to Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system: water depots. Even if we get past chemical rockets and don’t need it for fuel anymore, there are lots of uses for water.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:44 am
squirrelelite;
Munich. 1972 Olympics.
Hmm… Clickity, click. Yup, here it is…
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=1972+olympics+terrorist+attack
July 16th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Rammstein have a video about your moonwalk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6unDcYBQSpQ
July 16th, 2010 at 8:48 am
Saturday Night Fever being too recent is just all the more depressing.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:49 am
@Tom
Raw materials at the bottom of a minimal gravity well. Yes, dragging an asteroid to the Earth-Moon Lagrange point would be even better, but to do that you need a fair bit of hardware to throw about the solar system.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:55 am
I am amazed at how many people actually believed George W. Bush was making a serious commitment to return to the Moon and then move on to Mars. It was a cheap play for votes in 2004, writing a check that wouldn’t come due until after he was safely out of office. Now that this underfunded mandate has fallen apart in the wake of the economic devastation that is his primary legacy, the blame falls on his successor. Obama has crushed our dreams!
July 16th, 2010 at 8:55 am
Tom (H. Type):
Is that the overriding factor for everything that you do? There must be some “indisputable item” that you can’t get from a machine, cheaper and with less risk?
Where would the world be if people only did those things that had this “indisputable item”? What’s wrong with “science for science sake”, or “knowledge for knowledge sake”? What’s wrong with “we have no idea about the side benefits, or derivative information, that will come out of this”?
Have you never said “what will happen if I do X?”
July 16th, 2010 at 8:56 am
@Zucchi: Because that’s not called “borrowing”.
Did you forward this same warning to Jason Marsh himself, since his graphic is composed of numerous unattributed “borrowed” images?
July 16th, 2010 at 8:57 am
@ #3 Ferris – No doubt he doesn’t think it should be the PRIMARY role. The problem is that it has been defined as a “role” at all.
@#9 Daffy: What makes you think I agreed with it when Reagan did it? NASA is not and should not be viewed as any type of political/foreign policy agency. It’s job is to explore space and expand human knowledge of the universe, period. Also, who gives a crap what Reagan did? It was wrong then, it’s wrong now. Are you somehow suggesting that if Reagan did it it is ok for Obama to do the same?
July 16th, 2010 at 9:02 am
@Ken B.: I wonder if Tom lives with his parents and orders everything online so he never has to fret about the cost and risk of going anywhere.
I get annoyed when I see people griping about the cost and risk of manned space travel. We obviously have plenty of money to burn, just looking at our ludicrously bloated war budget, so it’s not like diverting a fraction of that into more productive pursuits would cost us any more. And nobody is planning to force people to risk their lives on space travel, so why don’t we leave that up to those who feel it’s worth it, like we do with other jobs that entail a lot of risk?
July 16th, 2010 at 9:04 am
[...] via [...]
July 16th, 2010 at 9:05 am
Sorry Phil, this is one of the few areas I disagree with you.
I get that going to the moon and building a base there and learning to survive on the moon are steps towards a Mars mission and beyond. But we already have all sorts of data on how to live on the moon; we did that already. And we can create a vast majority of the conditions under which people would live on a lunar or martian base right here on Earth, except on Earth it would cheaper and safer.
What we really need and what NASA should really focus on are deep space vehicles and the related technology to carry people and supplies for missions to Mars and beyond.
I would also like to see NASA take a heavier focus on engine technology; both those that will power heavy lift vehicles into LEO and those that will take us from LEO to Mars. We can already build a metal tube and fill it with people and air and food, we just need that bit on the end that pushes it out to Mars. And really, we already have that too! But those engines are slow. We need something with a bit more thrust.
NASA doesn’t need to develop their own heavy lift vehicle, there are plenty available from Russia, ESA, Boeing and eventually SpaceX and perhaps others. Let’s get NASA focused on areas that aren’t receiving as much attention in the private sector as we’d like.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:05 am
Todd W:
And guess what’s playing on the radio right now?
July 16th, 2010 at 9:11 am
I am amazed at how many people actually believed [ANY POLITICIAN] was making a serious commitment to return to the Moon and then move on to Mars. It was a cheap play for votes in [ANY ELECTION YEAR], writing a check that wouldn’t come due until after he was safely out of office. Now that this underfunded mandate has fallen apart in the wake of the economic devastation that is his primary legacy, the blame falls on his successor. [CURRENT PRESIDENT] has crushed our dreams!
Fixed That For You.
I don’t know how many times we have to say this, REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS are EQUALLY responsible for the lack of NASA funding.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Naked Bunny with a Whip:
He better not be using a computer. Manned space travel was a major contributing factor in computers being small and cheap enough for “the average person” to afford.
And I doubt that anyone in the 1960′s said “let’s send people to the Moon, because we need cheap computers in every home”.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Pff… Moon. Leave it to the Chinese and go to Mars already!
July 16th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Hey, we finally have the answer to that age-old question
The answer?
July 16th, 2010 at 9:15 am
The most disappointing thing about the new Authorization bill that just left committee in the Senate is that it seems to have all the worst parts of the last couple of space policies in it: not going anywhere with permanence in mind (Obama), rockets that we might not really need (Bush, though finishing Orion and putting it on an EELV rocket might be a good idea, if it’s possible. Also, perhaps HLV, but I don’t know), etc. It doesn’t fund commercial crew with any significance, it doesn’t fund R&D (not much, anyway)… There were supposed to be amendments added that would fix those two, but I don’t know if they were added since I don’t have the full text. It’s just something of a worrisome time in the space community nowadays.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:19 am
@Blakut
Exactly.
Why go to the moon? Old and busted. Go to Mars.
It’s time for another space race.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:20 am
@Ken B
Interestingly, a street performer was playing some guitar selections from DSotM this morning as I was waiting for my train.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:23 am
Ken B. I totally agree there are times when we should commit ourselves to undertakings (even expensive and risky ones) for such ideals as “science for science sake”, or “knowledge for knowledge sake”. However, these and similar justifications, which Lewis pointed in his post, are now orbiting some 310 miles over our heads (ISS) without actually ever living up to those lofty goals. I’m just saying; if we want to sell this idea of going back, we need to have a real plan with actual measurable goals. “Science for science sake” is not that tangible.
…and Naked Bunny with a Whip, no I don’t live with my parents…but I do fret about going out…after flying fighters for a while in the USAF, I find driving on these highways a far greater risk. It just makes me want to stay at home and order in.
Tom
July 16th, 2010 at 9:24 am
@10. Tom (H. Type) Says: [July 16th, 2010 at 8:27 am]
No, our *grandfathers* might’ve been there before with Apollo and the US victory over the Soviet Communists in the proxy war that was the space race but our generation has NOT.
The generation of the late 1960′s to early 1970′s landed just six times, a dozen men in all. All on the Nearside, all only briefly during the Lunar day.
There has never been a woman – or an astronomer on the Moon.
There has only been one scientist – Harrison H. Schmitt, geologist.
Humans have not seen a whole lot of the Moon, not much of it at all.
Not its Darkside,
not its night,
Not its poles.
Not in person. Snapshots by robots are like a holiday brochure as opposed to an actual vacation.
There is so much we still don’t know and have NOT done.
Yes. It is very much worth the cost – and it will benefit us in lots of ways some of which we don’t know until we get there and find out.
Here’s a list of five possibilities for you – just for starters :
1. Helium three which could be a fuel of the future.
2. Possibly water ice, possibly minerals – we may find that extracting ores from the Moon works cheaply and easily and, of course, won’t have the environmental or social issues we get on Earth. Uranium mining on the Moon, for instance, could help stop the worries about radioactive elements being launched from Earth, avoiding the sort of protests that Cassini for instance suffered with its RTG component. Maybe we could actually build such spacecraft and launch them from the Moon itself?
3. The Moon also offers a low gee, hard vacuum environment which is could have its advantages for some industrial processes – and a wide range of temperatures. Ditto. The Moon would also be an ideal place for using solar power : long days, no clouds (or air) in the way, huge tracts of land available and some locations with permanent sunshine – polar craters. Plus need I mention a Lunar Farside radio telescope here?
4. The opportunity to practice colonisation and artificial ecological sustainability techniques and learn how to create artificial biomes (think the “Biosphere II” experiment) more rigourously than on Earth and perhaps more accurately – for planetary environments than space stations but in a way that may be more ethically responsible than on Mars – *if* Mars has some life forms of its own.
5. Dare I suggest tourism? No seriously, if places like Antartica and Mt Everest are becoming tourist sites of sorts (& they are) then why not the Moon too? People can actually fly in Lunar gravity. Landing on the Moon – building a home, a permanent colony there will likely make our ever more moribund civilisation fly again. It will inspire, it will change the national mood – it will lead to new art and ideas and open up our imaginations and opportunities.
I really think it will. If we return to our Moon and explore further then we create a future that is so much better and brighter and more confidently positive.
As for the “just machines instead” canard, we can and will use both – but people have versatilitilty, initative, and are able to do things machines cannot. Like feel and love and imagine and create and really think.
People matter in ways robots just don’t. Who remembers where they were were when the first robot landed on the Moon? Who can name it?
Who, out of those alive doesn’t recall what they were doing seeing Armstrong and Aldrin taking that “giant leap” – who doesn’t know who Neil Armstrong is?
I grew up thinking Human colonisation – human return to the Moon was likely in the next ten years or so. Its been that way for the last forty years. Bush had a visionand a plan for getting back there -for taking the next giant leap and exploring and developing space and Luna properly.
Obama – for all his “hope and change” hot air – killed that dream and will quite likely go down in history as the man who killed NASA’s human space program and certainly presided over the worst crisis, the most dreary and wretched lull in the history of the US space program. I do feel utterly disillisioned and betrayed by him and I am amazed the BA and others seem able to see it any other way.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:35 am
look at him, look at me, now look at him, and me again. sadly, he’s not me, but he can smell like me, ON THE MOON.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:37 am
16. Lewis Says:
By all means, borrow and let it spread around.
I’m probably not the best artist in the world, and yeah – there are a few problems with it. I didn’t even know that “Saturday Night Fever” was a movie when I found that particular image.
But I think the overall picture helps keep me motivated.
14. squirrelelite Says:
That logo? The Open Space Movement. http://bit.ly/cN2Xc2
Here’s a fun fact.
NASA’s FY2010 budget: 18 Billion
Total cost of Apollo program: 170 Billion (adjusted to 2005 values)
Total sales of cell phones in 2008: 35 Billion
Total sales of cell phones in the past six months: 68 Billion.
It stands to reason that we’re currently spending more on cell phones in one year, than the Apollo program spent in a decade. Now, instead of getting upset over that, imagine what a publicly driven space venture could pull together with a small fraction of the public’s disposable income.
After all, we already bought the Internet.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:37 am
I’m more concerned with the organizational structure of NASA rather than its immediate goals. At the moment it is run at the whim of the budgeteers in Congress who driven by the need to produce pork in large quantities have NASA doing the wrong tasks. The day to day task (and it should be daily) of getting to LEO etc should be in the hands of private business. NASA’s job should be the difficult science bits, the development of new tech the big plans etc. Meanwhile their meager budget is frittered away on making sure the firms that make shuttle components have busy work in an election year.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:40 am
At least the graphic includes the “Dark Side Of The Moon” album cover!
Personally, I do not think the human race is mature enough to resume (or should I say “start”?) continuous manned space exploration of other worlds at this point in time. The political farce of “let’s show the American spirit and beat the godless commies to the moon” was the impetus behind the Apollo program, not the true and noble spirit of scientific research.
Time and again, we humans have shown that we are too easily distracted by petty, small-minded things such as politics, money and war. What progress we have made in science throughout the centuries has largely been made in spite of all that. Science always seems to progress despite ourselves, not because of ourselves. Mostly, we have thus far proven ourselves incapable of looking up from the sidewalk and up to the stars. We are too busy trying to keep our human world from imploding and/or exploding to concern ourselves, at this point, with our ultimate destiny – taking our place in the cosmic community.
As much as the “Star Trek” fan in me wants to witness a manned Mars mission in my lifetime (and I am sooo disappointed that will not happen), I must feel more concerned with the message we are sending ourselves through our own actions. I feel that message is “We’re not ready yet”, and that message manifests itself in the fact that basic science is routinely assigned a lesser role in human affairs than say politics and war.
My opinion is that we should stay home and work on maturing as a species. While we are outgrowing our immature childish ways of politics and conflict, we should concentrate on redoubling our exploration of space through unmanned probes. Maybe if we take it one step at a time and don’t rush things, by the time we start routinely sending manned missions beyond low earth orbit, we won’t be the equivalent of a bunch of bratty, immature ten-year-olds being given the keys to the family car long before we’re ready to drive.
Yeah, I know, my comment makes no sense. Well, except to me. Nowhere in Phil’s comments policy does it say that comments have to actually make sense!
July 16th, 2010 at 9:42 am
Ken B: Because we can’t do either.
Even before the Shuttle was canceled, friends of mine who didn’t know too much about the space program were uniformly genuinely surprised (and a little upset) to learn that we couldn’t go to the Moon if we wanted to.
They were also genuinely surprised to find out how little money NASA gets — as compared to other government programs, or as compared to how much money Americans spend on other, more frivolous things (like, say, cosmetics).
It seems to me that finding an engaging way to educate people would go a long way to generating more political will behind the space program. I would happily take any opportunity offered me — and I’ve even tried to be somewhat pro-active in this vein, joining up with JPL’s Solar System Ambassador program to get the word out.
I wish I could do more. There was a lull in manned spaceflight after Apollo, but this seems even more directionless than then.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:42 am
@#3
Oh Crap, Lukester – we’ve already established that Obama doesn’t think that that is NASA’s primary role.
[citation needed]
Anybody remember Gil Scot-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon”?
July 16th, 2010 at 9:43 am
@5. Cindy
I don’t think you’re being picky. I was born in the early 60′s so I was very impressionable through the 70s.
Looking back I would consider the mid-60s to the mid-70s to be a “decade” as you could see how it flowed.
Once disco came along it seemed like a completely different time that didn’t seem to be a continuation of the past.
I think Travolta is way out of place in that image. He really doesn’t belong there.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:44 am
@10 Tom (H.Type)
What does the Moon have that we need?
Women!
http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Women-Moon-Sonny-Tufts/dp/B000059H85
And this is only once such documentary. Many others have been made exploring the plight of women on the moon.
Also, we’re 10 years overdue on finding the monolith. I doubt that the guys who put it there are gonna wait forever.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:45 am
33. Messier Tidy Upper Says:
“Obama – for all his “hope and change” hot air – killed that dream and will quite likely go down in history as the man who killed NASA’s human space program and certainly presided over the worst crisis, the most dreary and wretched lull in the history of the US space program. I do feel utterly disillisioned and betrayed by him and I am amazed the BA and others seem able to see it any other way.
I do agree, but it is more of a problem of “wrong place, wrong time” for Obama. Every politician since about 1970 has used NASA as political football and this is just the ultimate culmination of years of wretched policy.
I also agree the BA’s and most of these commenters actually think Obama’s plan is any good. BA himself initially called Obama’s plan “Bold and Visionary.” To his credit, he later edited out the “Visionary” part. But he still showed that for him, this is still a political issue, and he allowed his Obamalove to override his spacelove.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:46 am
Ok folks. Mr. Meri Lewis and Mr. Bill Clark have checked out the western part of North America –they made a couple maps and stuff …so I think we’re good!
They can write some books and we can make a few bucks off a publicity tour but actually doing that again? Well, that’s going to be spendy. Not really sure what we would do with all that wilderness anyway. It’s a lot more comfy to hang out here where everything is all cozy and established.
Yep, I think our lives are pretty good just as they are.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:51 am
@Ken B,
Thanks for the info.
Now I remember it.
Dark Side of the Moon was a remarkable record. I think it still holds a Billboard record for consecutive weeks on the LP best seller list.
I still have it on my MP3 player. And, it’s a classic cover design. I like the built-in physics demo.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Yeah dammit. Let’s put the generation of Lady Gaga, the BP oil spill, Abu Ghraib, Teabaggers, Twitter, Sarah Palin, Creation “Science”, anthropogenic global warming denialism, waterboarding, ringtones, preemptive wars, Fox “News”, Grand Theft Auto, Marvel comic movies, sequels to Marvel comic movies, Apple with ATT, botox…and so much more…on the Moon. In fact, let’s ship our entire species there so this planet can have a rest and maybe, just maybe, we’d learn to live within a closed system.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:53 am
When Robert Heinlien wrote “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, he was drawing parallels between the US old west and expansion into a new, unbounded environment. It would likely have similar developmental problems to the old west, ie, sociopaths, claim jumpers(we really need to develop some laws to address mineral/energy/water claims in space), etc.
Of course, as long as Luna has to receive its survival support from earth, it will never become an independent colony but eventually that independence will occur. Which is, perhaps, why there appears to be no incentive for earth to develop space colonization. It’s too fraught with long term political consequences(like the colonists telling earth to frak off).
I just wonder which nation will be first to develop really cost effective, nuc powered space craft.
They will inherit the solar system. I hope we have a broad representation of earthly cultures. It would be really boring to have only one succeeding in the colonization race.
Gary 7
July 16th, 2010 at 9:55 am
@33
You are grossly misinformed. Constellation project was a ill-conceived vision by the previous NASA administrator and, by extension, prior presidential administration. The crowning “achievement” of that project would have been Ares V: a massively overweight, hugely costly rocket built for just one thing — to go to Mars (how many of these do you need?). Ares I could barely, _barely_ sent astronauts to the ISS in a bare-bones crew module. So this project would have done two extremes: barely get people into space (Ares I), or send them to Mars at huge expense (Ares V). Contrary to what many believe, this administration did the right thing: Killed it.
Recently submitted there are plans for a sane middle ground that will preserve most of the Shuttle’s infrastructure AND keep experienced Shuttle workers that Constellation would have either destroyed or have to rebuilt from scratch. *That* is something that can be done within NASA _current_ budget outlays. Rather than whine about what this administration has done, they deserve praise instead because they didn’t kick this can down the road. They made a hard decision (killed Constellation) and made NASA rethink its plans for human spaceflight given the budget situation.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:01 am
Amen @#26. The blog replies get politicized so easily. It’s not criticizing Obama moreso than any previous government, they are all the same. The Obama plan kicks the ball down the road, AS DID the Bush plan.
And Amen again to #33, though I’m a bit miffed you stole my point before i could make. We keep saying “We’ve been there” in regards to the moon. At 38 yr/old, I can tell you WE have not done anything of the sort. That would be Gen X and Gen Y, even the younger end of baby boomers (born late 50′s early 60′s.)
We haven’t done anything hard and risk taking, we as a generation have been living off the fruits of our grandparents work. We are voluntarily abdicating our leadership, our drive, to other countries. And I really don’t understand why. I sincerely fear that our culture no longer is willing to sacrifice and take the hard road.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:01 am
I just finished reading Steven Weinberg’s “Lake Views”, in which he convincingly argues against manned space exploration (“The Wrong Stuff”, published originally in April 2004 in the New York Review of Books).
All the useful space-based science has been done with unmanned vehicles, and the manned space program is a money sink for misplaced romanticism/global political grand-standing that really hurts science financially.
[Update: oops, SLC got there before me.]
July 16th, 2010 at 10:09 am
If I said I was working on a project that was akin to “sourceforge.net” for aerospace applications, would anybody be interested in hearing about it?
July 16th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Looking at that Pong game makes it incredible to believe that we made it to the moon with that primitive technology. Almost makes you think that the whole moon landing was faked.
*head-ducks*
July 16th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Propulsion. That’s where the money needs to go. Now.
1. Radically reduce cost to orbit.
2. Develop interplanetary drive that shortens, say, a Mars trip to a few weeks. A few days would be the goal but weeks is an acceptable 1.0 version.
Everything else is pointless until those two goals are accomplished: from ground to orbit and from orbit to elsewhere.
When Robert Heinlien wrote “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, he was drawing parallels between the US old west and expansion into a new, unbounded environment.
Even as a kid I hated the wild west analogies to space. It’s just so far off it’s sad.
Pink Floyd cover for the win.
I actually played one of those Pong games at the pizza parlor my family frequented. Good pizza and birch beer, which is like root beer but with more awesome.
Crap, I’m old.
we’d learn to live within a closed system.
There’s no such thing as a closed system. In fact, it takes quite a lot of effort to create one for experiment purposes (like the biodomes mentioned above), and even then it’s debatable. If you go all quantum and include observer effects, well, forget about it.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:24 am
@58
Ok if human exploration is so costly, let’s put half that money into robotic explorations all over the solar system. But we’re hardly doing that… so much to discover, so little excitement in the public opinion… unless… maybe if we actually went there in person! — oh.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:25 am
Ray:
Not just “Women”… “Amazon Women”!
http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Women-Moon-Rosanna-Arquette/dp/B0000A02TY
July 16th, 2010 at 10:33 am
It’s time for another space race.
NO! That’s exactly what was wrong with the first one, and why it fizzed out. If we had worried less about racing and taken slower and more logical steps- much as Von Braun and others advocated- we’d probably already have the a small moon base by now, and orbital assets that contribute to a respectable segment of the GNP. We should have pursued the X-plane idea further, too.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:50 am
The political farce of “let’s show the American spirit and beat the godless commies to the moon” was the impetus behind the Apollo program, not the true and noble spirit of scientific research.
No argument from me on that (see prior post), but to say we should then do nothing is just a mistake along a different axis.
Time and again, we humans have shown that we are too easily distracted by petty, small-minded things such as politics, money and war.
Well, we can’t all be as divinely detached as you. I tease.
*Ideology* is the problem. Politics is just how to make societal systems work. There has to be agreement and consensus at some point for things to progress. Ideology is when you start ripping half (or more) of the pages out of the political playbook.
Money is the economy, and an active, vibrant economy is what drives R&D, or pays its taxes to support R&D in the government sphere. People really need to stop with the childish “money iz teh Evul!!1!” nonsense. Money and markets and property rights freed humanity from millennia of serfdom. If you think things are out of balance, get active in *politics* and try to find a better balance, but stop blaming the tools that led to you being able to sit there in comfort and effortlessly post on a global network. Or watch Star Trek. Just don’t burn half the playbook is all I ask.
War is many different things at many different times, but it is rarely “petty.”
July 16th, 2010 at 10:50 am
It was buried four million years ago. It is the height of arrogance to think we were meant to find it.
July 16th, 2010 at 11:11 am
There’s a large discussion of this picture over at http://bit.ly/dbxpOm
July 16th, 2010 at 11:12 am
Do people really think that a Republican administration would have gone to the moon sooner? Remember, the Republicans saddled NASA with bureaucrats who think the universe is only 6000 years old, didn’t like press releases that mentioned things happening “billions” of years ago, and tried to get the NASA website changed to say that the big bang was only one theory of how the universe began.
July 16th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Could not agree more.
And as for specific reasons to go to the moon again? Here’s a huge one (inset, bottom right). The moon’s shallow gravity well (and lack of atmosphere) makes it a great waypoint between Earth and the rest of the solar system. Down here we’re at the bottom of a very deep hole.
July 16th, 2010 at 11:28 am
Golly, thanks for the fix, Lukester @ 34. I totally forgot about how Clinton and Obama made these same empty promises about the Moon and Mars just to get votes.
…except they DIDN”T.
Don’t try to turn a specific into a general in an effort to prove that everybody is equally to blame. Your “fix” in factually incorrect.
And the Saturday Night Fever image is most unfortunate. It gives this whole thing a “Whalers on the Moon” feel.
July 16th, 2010 at 11:54 am
@ Jason…D-d-d-did I read this correctly? Please don’t tell us that you have never heard of “Saturday Night Fever” before. Oh, Jason, Jason, Jason. We need to get you out more, son. You’re definitely aging some of us here. However, even though choosing SNF was in error, the roots of disco do, in fact, date back to around that time. I really can’t recall exactly what the music style was back then. Classic Rock perhaps? Top songs were numbers like “American Pie”, “Without You”, and even that most inane song of all time “Popcorn”!
July 16th, 2010 at 11:56 am
@SLC – Great article you pointed out. It’s too full of common sense though.
July 16th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I don’t see the need to send humans to the Moon, much less create a base or a colony there. The Moon is, as we already know, a vast desert. It has a lot of things to offer scientifically, but I wouldn’t risk the lives of astronauts for that.
Our little robotic creatures are getting better and better each year. They are tough, resilient, don’t need oxygen nor food, don’t get homesick and they don’t complain nor go on strike.
July 16th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
@52. Josie Says:
LOL. Exactly.
I was going to post: “Imagine if after Columbus discovered America the Europeans never went back there?” But you’ve beaten me to it.
Whatever the politics, set the blame game aside for a second, the fact that we have chosen to say “no its all too hard” and given up on going back for the time being is just .. pathetic.
Humans have always wanted to see beyond the limits of the village. Curiosity and the desire to explore is hard-wired into our biology. (Mangled metaphor but nevermind.)
A society that stops exploring; that is so self-satisfied that it can’t be bothered to find out more and, yes, expand to new limits is a decadent, declining society. Look at what happened to ancient China and Japan when they shut themselves off from the outside world. Or at the Roman Empire when it decided finding new lands to explore and occupy and spread Pax Romana to was too much effort. Hint: it didn’t end well for them.
@46. GumbyTheCat Says:
Just like the dinosaurs did & we know what happened to them!
Seriously, we could be maturing into species-wide senility and a big rock comes down and wipes us out – or a supervolcano erupts or a pandemic kills off more than the Black Death did or we get “Death From the Skies in some form (I think a whole book was written by somebody on what could happen there!
) ..and that’s curtains. For Humanity. Period.
Besides *would* we ever mature as a species if we just sit back and give up? Your plan is NOT a good one.
Which is a very good thing because so many comments (incl. lots of mine) probably don’t either!
July 16th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Maldoror: All the useful space-based science has been done with unmanned vehicles,
Really?
Have you compared the science return of manned versus unmanned missions to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, adjusted to amount returned versus dollar spent?
I think you might be surprised.
Maldoror: and the manned space program is a money sink for misplaced romanticism/global political grand-standing that really hurts science financially.
There’s this, sure. But ultimately, only a manned program will show us how to live in space. And arguably, that’s the goal, isn’t it? To spread our little eggs out beyond just the one basket?
It seems that there are a lot of wet babies out here… must have been the bathwater they were in.
pheldespat: I don’t see the need to send humans to the Moon, much less create a base or a colony there. The Moon is, as we already know, a vast desert.
Not sure what you’re getting at here. If you had your druthers, would you keep people out of the desert, too?
pheldespat: It has a lot of things to offer scientifically, but I wouldn’t risk the lives of astronauts for that.
You’re not. Astronauts themselves are accepting the risk. That’s very different from asking you to risk their lives.
July 16th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Mr. Messier: “Obama – for all his “hope and change” hot air – killed that dream and will quite likely go down in history as the man who killed NASA’s human space program and certainly presided over the worst crisis, the most dreary and wretched lull in the history of the US space program. I do feel utterly disillisioned and betrayed by him and I am amazed the BA and others seem able to see it any other way. ”
Absolutely correct, but this is a problem that goes back to 1972 or before. I myself was a physics major and was horrified to learn that they were going to curtail the Apollo program in 1972 and even worse make a giant leap backward (not to make fun of the exhilirating comment uttered by Neil Armstrong) to the shuttle, a 30 year waste of time. So the roots of this wimpy attitude were plotted back then and Obama is just the latest lukewarm secretary carrying out the wishes of others. I remember the day Bush gave the speech and I asked the opinion of some engineers and it really seemed like there would be a “renaissance” in manned space flight. But that was 5 years ago and things seem to have fallen apart, this year even a good student told me her long time manager-father at NASA was laid off.
July 16th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Alternate Universe News Dispatch
April 28,2010
Earth News Network
A Hydrogen 3 well near the Sea of Tranquility had its blowout preventer fail, causing a release of the gas into the open areas of the Moon. A nearby Recreation Dome, the Kihniggt Pleasure Dome, was temporarily evacuated until the blowout was under control. The company, English Extractors, say they will pay the cost of any cleanup, according to their spokesman, Sam Bell.
-30-
J/P=?
July 16th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
At first, I had little problem with the US not going to the moon.
But afterwards, seeing what could be gained from it, I changed my views.
If Obama had stated that we’ll go to the moon later, I’d have little problem with that.
Perhaps someone down the road can alter thing (again) so where a lunar mission can be done. No reason going to NEOs exclude lunar trips.
Now, I feel that the way done with Ares and Constellation was doomed to fail.
After all, why spend billions on making a new rocket that was not much better than existing rockets and making another that was a bloated giant?
The ideas with Direct (specifically, Direct 3.0) seem to be the way we ought to have gone in the beginning. Had THAT path been taken, we probably wouldn’t have people worrying right now.
But hindsight is often 20/20, isnt’ it?
After finding this article, I do have some hope.
http://commerce.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=50faad79-f79d-4531-9f69-cf646b2b96ba
July 16th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Dark Side of the Moon was released in ’73, not ’72.
July 16th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
@Jeffersonian
Yes, the top album for 1972 was David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. However, the album cover didn’t look that great at 148×148 pixels.
July 16th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
As a suggestion – everybody should print off a copy of this picture, and roll it up tightly. That way, if anyone suggests that space travel needs to wait for new advances in technology, you can smack them over the head with it.
July 16th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Pi-Needles:
Or, alternatively, “imagine if after the Vikings discovered America, they did go back there?”.
And, before anyone whines over the concept of “discovering” something already known to others, realize that things can be independently “discovered” by more than one party. I have no problem claiming that I “discovered” that Africa and South America looked like they would fit nicely if you pushed them together. Yet, I make no claim to having been the first to do so.
July 16th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
The Vikings-in-America analogy is actually an excellent support for NOT going to the moon – because it’s a much better analogy for the moon landings than is Columbus.
At the time of the Vikings, the cost/benefit wasn’t good enough for Europeans to stay in North America. At the time of Columbus, it was.
At the moment, the cost/benefit isn’t good enough to put people on the moon for anything beyond a stunt, despite all our Heinlein&Asimov-born yearnings. Someday I assume it will be.
In my humble opinion, of course.
July 16th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
You know, sometimes I’m amazed at our lack of vision.
Back when the Apollo program was new, we had oodles of reasons to go to the moon, and stay there. NASA probably has an archive that nobody actually looks at right now because it’s too painful – they’re bitter about short-sighted Congress and the very same “immediate returns” thing I see here. How about:
* Telescopes that do not have to have advanced technology, interferometry, or adaptive optics just to combat atmosphere? Or size limitations due to booster availability?
* A 1/6th gravity starting point for all probe launches, regardless of size or complexity?
* An established base of operations for when (not if) that big asteroid is found to intersect earth orbit? Do we really want to tackle that problem the same way BP is tackling theirs?
* Long-term solar, cosmic, gamma and X ray observatories?
* Test sites for various energy technologies, stellar radiation shielding, and micrometeorite protection?
* Established human bases for problem-solving, and initial launch points for manned missions to other planets, especially when one of their moons shows up with life? The moon is like camping out in the backyard – you find out all of the issues with living remotely and still have a safety net;
* A return point that does not need reentry friction shielding?
That’s all just off the top of my head – I’m sure scientists can quadruple that list in a heartbeat. Just taking care of the asteroid thing is enough return on investment – curing the common cold simply means you’re not sniffling as the shockwave circles the planet, you know? I honestly can’t think of anything better to be spending money on.
Want to save money? Task the military with using robots for all of its endeavors. People are expensive to house and maintain. Why train soldiers over and over again when you can program once? (I have this great mental image of R. Lee Ermey and Number Five, but I digress…)
Science should never be aligned with the profit motive – we’ve got blinders on in this country. Science is always an investment, and continues to pay off throughout the entirety of human history. Gosh, imagine if we paid royalties, usage fees, and licensing to Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and so on? Well, we ‘d have a lot more college students getting into science, true, but no one ever talks about that as an economic boost. Get it while it’s almost free!
The moon is easy, it’s a freaking treehouse – there’s no reason for us not to be there. Going there creates more jobs, more industry, and renews interest in science. Of course we should go back. And that’s “we” as a species – there’s nothing that says this has to come out of the US budget entirely.
July 16th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
“The meek shall inherit the Earth” is a parable for manned spaceflight.
July 16th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Apollo was so extraordinary, and so ahead of it’s time, that using it as a measuring stick for progress, everything will come up short. Face it.
July 16th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Just like the dinosaurs did & we know what happened to them!
Wait… the dinosaurs stayed at home and launched space probes?
Was Velociraptor Jesus involved at any point?
July 16th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Indeed, and more important than this is that few alive today now have any memory of ever being a part of a humanity that was capable of doing anything but LEO. We are very close to becoming similar to Europe after Leif Erikson but before Colombus. See some population pyramids here:
http://www.pagef30.com/2010/04/apollo-leif-erikson.html
Luckily I think the supposed jaded feeling people feel about the Moon is just fluff, and that once we see images of the surface again they will really wake up. The images and video Kaguya sent back garnered a surprising amount of attention, and surface images and video will get even more. It is also lucky that simply psychology and logistics mean the US will not be able to ignore the Moon this time, as China/India/Japan will not be interested in being a junior partner on an American-led mission in the 2030s to Mars (and for a single flyby, no less) when they could be sending robots to explore the surface of the Moon now, and the US will certainly not be willing to sit by waiting until then while the rest of the world explores it.
July 16th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
@19 Gark:
Can you imagine if we decided to send our entire deep space exploration development programs up to a Moon base, and launch all the heavy equipment and probes off the Moon’s surface? It has 1/6 the gravity of Earth, that means way less lift necessary to get big items into space.
And technically, we have the technology to build a space elevator on the moon today. Which would cut those costs down even further.
Instead of building our interplanetary spacecraft on Earth, let’s build a moon base and build them on the moon, then launch them. In the short run it’s really expensive, but in the long run it’s way, way cheaper.
July 16th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
@42. Messier Tidy Upper:
That.
Was an awesome post.
July 16th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
@ 77. John Paradox
11ty,000/10
The Moon reference seals the deal there.
July 16th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
We’re not allowed on the moon. The aliens said so.
July 16th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
[...] BABloggee Jason Marsh sent me an interesting picture he put together. He was thinking about what was current in our culture when Apollo 17 went to the Moon… the last time a human set foot on another world. The date was 1972. Here’s what he put together: Read ahead [...]
July 16th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
We’ll go back to the moon once we can pay for it by developing the necessary infrastructure by exploiting near earth asteroids, not before. Of course, the Chinese may be back before then, in a politically motivated spectacular, much as the U.S. did in the late sixties and early seventies.
Really, anything else is just wishful thinking that would prove extremely detrimental to humans outside near earth orbit, if anyone was actually dumb enough to implement it (even the Shrub wasn’t QUITE that dumb, as he never came close to allocating the necessary resources, and I doubt many here will argue that he was plenty dumb).
July 16th, 2010 at 6:28 pm
#42 Messier:
“…who doesn’t know who Neil Armstrong is?”
Sadly, I suspect that a lot of younger people don’t!
I have a friend in his early 30′s – an intelligent guy with a degree – who, while he does know who Armstrong is, has honestly never heard of Buzz Aldrin! Or, for that matter, Yuri Gagarin.
While most people won’t know the names of any other astronauts or cosmonauts, you would think that everyone should at least know those three names – but they don’t. I hate to say it, but “history is a thing of the past” is no longer a joke!!!
#44 Jason:
Another way of looking at it; the total cost of Apollo, over 11 years from inception to end, was comparable to the amount which Americans spent per year on cigarettes!!!
July 16th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Until you find an economic reason to have a manned base on the moon, there is unlikely to be one.
Robotic missions generally make way more sense and with a few advances in technology we could have android robots to perform human like tasks on the moon.
Or a space born robot manufacturing plant, churning out more robots that are used for more and more research missions.
@Gark: Why would you want to send nuclear waste into the sun? While the chances of us unsettling the balance of the sun are minimal, why? You would be just as well off sending it to far off deep space. In my opinion, don’t use our planet’s most important energy source as a waste disposal site. Not to mention that the highest risk from a mission of this time is to actually launch the cargo into space. Lastly as I understand, some of the latest reactor technology reuses it’s waste.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Nope, makes no sense. We are monkeys that depend on a vast, interconnected ecosystem to survive and breed. Sending people to the moon in ’69 was no different than taking a bathyscaphe to the Mariana Trench, a silly stunt. There’s no way we can build a colony there, or anywhere else on the solar system. At least, not for a long, long time, till we can export an ecosystem. Or if we become something that isn’t so dependent on an ecosystem, some consciousness that can live off of just sunlight.
But regardless, going to the moon in the late 70s was just a show-off stunt, wholly unsustainable. It was a teen holding his breath and diving to the bottom of the reservoir to impress the other boys. Any talk of solar system colonies, with our present technology, is really really goofy. It’s lifeless out there. If in 4 billion years, terran life has been unable to gain a foothold in the moon or mars, to then think that H. sapiens can do it with some rockets and oxygen canisters is epic hubris. Silly!
July 16th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
What the hell is it with American national pride and going back to the moon? Even if you do it, which is extremely unlikely, you are still GOING BACKWARDS! You are still trying to catch up with the level of technology and infrastructure you had 30 years ago.
And quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing on the moon that is needed by humanity at the moment. Not He3, not moon dust, not vacuum. Same for Mars.
Maybe people should live in the present rather than in the past. The current infrastructure can barely support a space station (if that!), never mind a moon base.
There is no need to make orbital infrastructure at the moment. Everything that can be done in space can only be done economically with unmanned robots. Sending people is usually a waste of time.
What would be needed is not a one-off revisit to the moon, but developing an orbital infrastructure that can do that, as much more. But that’s not going to happen because the technology is too immature and right now, development should focus on energy issues rather than something as esoteric as space.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
We can put a man on the moon, but we still can’t make an IPhone that works.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
My daughter was desperate for a ‘microscope’ to look at the moon for her 4th birthday. I gave her one (telescope) but her first response to moon was tears. She thought I had lied to her about people having been to the moon. She couldn’t see roads or houses.
She has decided that she wants to be one of the first to live on the moon. I don’t know that she will live long enough.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Just because the gravity well of the Moon is 1/6th that of the Earth is no reasonable reason to return with manned missions to the Moon in the hopes of launching much cheaper unmanned missions. Either the entirety of any future spacecraft would have to be built on the Moon completely from lunar resources (where might the material to make plastics come from, for instance?) or the materials and/or parts would STILL have to be launched from the Earth to the Moon for a second launch. Creating the infrastructure of manufacturing necessary to build and launch future missions to the solar system (manned or unmanned) from the Moon is problematic at best.
The Moon is a dead end at this point. If we are going to extend the Columbus metaphor, it’s like suggesting that after Columbus had landed on Watling Island (or wherever his first actual landfall was), all other European explorations to the New World had been sent to Watling Island.
What needs to be done is, first, identify viable goals of human exploration of the solar system and, next, determine the means by which these goals can be accomplished.
The contentious argument over going back to the Moon with human missions is becoming more emotional than cerebral, unfortunately.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
There isn’t any resource on the Moon that is cheaper or easier to obtain from the moon than from earth, not minerals, not water, not uranium, nothing (except for He3, which is a boondoggle and will remain a boondoggle until feasible fusion is demonstrated – if you think He3 is a good reason to go back to the moon, then you should advocate canceling all manned spaceflight and investing those funds in fusion research, and restarting the manned program only after fusion is successfully and economically achieved) unless said resource is intended wholly for use in space. In which case it is much, much better to get it from the moon than from earth.
That means we shouldn’t be trying to go back to the moon. We should be trying to go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Mars, near-earth asteroid, Earth-Sun Lagrange points, or even just a network of self-sufficient orbital colonies. Doesn’t matter. Just pick a target and commit to it properly and get it done (whichever you choose it’ll bootstrap all the others). Then we go back to the moon as support for the primary endeavor, and we’ll get, as a subsidiary bonus, everything we wanted from just going back to the moon itself, for no extra cost at all.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
93. rabidmob Says:
July 16th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
“Until you find an economic reason to have a manned base on the moon, there is unlikely to be one.”
That doesn’t matter. The reason for sending humans into space is not to do better than robots at exploring distant planets and moons. Humans are nowhere near competitive with robots for cost, potential loss of life, etc.
The reason to send humans into space is to begin the very long process of learning how to become a spacefaring species. Visiting our nearest neighbor was a glorious achievement and studying NEO for decades has been very important. Those achievements won’t save any seedlings of humanity if/when we destroy our only home. Being able to colonize someplace other than Earth is our only chance for a few of us to survive global disaster.
“@Gark: Why would you want to send nuclear waste into the sun? …You would be just as well off sending it to far off deep space.”
I wish this notion would go away. We will NEVER launch our nuclear waste into the sun or into deep space.
There are millions of tons of radioactive waste on earth thanks to human activities.
It is impossible to launch even the smallest fraction of that waste to low Earth orbit, which is very easy compared to pushing anything fully out of Earth’s gravity well.
We will NEVER get rid of our nuclear waste by launching it into space. If one factors in the cost to launch even the most toxic of radioactive waste into the sun or deep space, nuclear power becomes unimaginably expensive.
Give up the fantasy of launching nuclear waste into space. It can never happen due to the extremely high cost of launching any payload.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
With all due respect, we need to get out of this Boone and Crocket mindset, and start thinking in terms of infrastructure and expansion. Stop thinking in terms of “Should we go to the moon” or “Should we go to Mars instead”, and start thinking “how many expeditions can we send to each per month”.
Space needs markets.
Markets need people.
Given enough public _involvement_, money and technology are a non-issue.
(It should be more accurate to say that the prospect of colonizing space is an endeavor so great that there is no hope for any space agency, private company, or multi-billionaire individual to afford it. The only entity that CAN afford it is the public itself.)
July 16th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
@ Blizno: If we destroy our home planet, what will stop us from destroying any other place we inhabit?
July 16th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
@87. QuietDesperation Says:
Actually the dinosaurs – or at least the smart Silurian ones ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_(Doctor_Who) ) – had a slightly different problem with our Moon!
July 17th, 2010 at 12:11 am
the “chuck it into the sun” line was mostly in jest, though if we did eventually generate an elevator it wouldn’t be a bad place to put it. things chucked into deep space tend to eventually hit other things, and by FSM i don’t think we want to be littering our own solar system with radioactive nonsense, do we?
July 17th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Minor nits: “Saturday Night Fever” didn’t come out until 1978, a good six years after Apollo 17 came home. The first disco record, Van McCoy’s “Do The Hustle”, was released, iirc, in 1976, four years after Apollo 17 came home, and the year that the Enterprise, the first Space Shuttle, was rolled out for aero/landing tests.
I also recall the first “Pong” machines not coming out until ’76 or ’77, a good while after Apollo 17 came home.
July 17th, 2010 at 9:32 am
As you said on Wednesday in the post about the photo of the Apollo 16 site,
“Someday we’ll head back to this spot. When we do, we’ll learn about how our artifacts have aged, and hopefully with a few decades of advances — as well as trained scientists to poke around in situ — we’ll learn even more about our nearest neighbor in space.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one whose immediate thought on reading that paragraph was that “four decades _is_ ‘a few decades’” and is much longer than those of us who were already in school preparing for careers in astronomy or space thought would ever pass before sending trained scientists (including us!) back to the Moon to poke around and in the opinion of many who just were fascinated by the space program of the Sixties just plain too long already.
July 17th, 2010 at 10:09 am
#108 Mike—You might want to double check your resources for all three of your “nits”.
July 17th, 2010 at 10:22 am
“Imagine if after Columbus discovered America the Europeans never went back there?”
I expect there are a lot of Native Americans that like to imagine just that.
101 cope
“where might the material to make plastics come from, for instance”
One of the reasons to return to Luna is to figure out what materials can be used for construction(we already have plenty of ideas along those lines). Like replacing plastics with silicon substrates.
Plastics are a by product of oil. Oil CAN be created from methane(CH4) under pressure and temp. Since methane seems ubiquitous in many solar bodies AND Luna was a hot body(for a few hundred million years) derived from earth, there just MAY be oil in deep lunar deposits. We won’t know until we’ve explored a significant proportion of Luna.
Mass drivers will work great in the lunar environment. They could even be used to land craft(just the reverse of magnetically accelerating a payload).
Living in lunar caverns, coated with melted silicon to prevent atmosphere loss, is just one solution to the hard rads and vacuum.
Gary 7
July 17th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Nothing, but the more places we put our roots down, the less likely it would be that we would destroy them all at the same time. Which is the point. When (not if) any one location fails, the others can offer support, recovery, and in the worst case, recolonization. In addition, each independent colony can be a launch point for further colonization projects.
However, this only works if each of the colonies are fully independent of one another. Indefinitely self-sufficient. If the space settlements are dependent on earth, and earth goes, well, then that’s the ballgame.
July 17th, 2010 at 11:30 am
60. OmegaBaby Says:
July 16th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Hey, you better duck ;0 Pong was one heck of a game if you had just downed a carafe of wine LOL and those Rocket Scientists that designed the Saturn V, they used slide rules; don’t suppose you would remember them HOL!!! took a semester to learn and I never did get the hang of it;9
but bringing it back to the present; without the commitment back then to the technological advances of the 60′s we would not have the Tech society we have now; and we have lived on that commitment for the past 50 years; I think it is about time THIS generation steps up to the plate and makes it’s own commitment that will push the envelop that much farther; the Shuttle Stack (not the Orbiter itself, that and IT’S infrastructure are history) is a legacy that this generation can build on, for a quick rocket development, on the order of 4-5 years; once the development is done, as per the Authorization Bill, the money is freed up to develop payloads for the destinations available to the 75mt to LEO rocket; the moon, the asteroids, the Lagrange points, Martian moons, as well as robotic precursor flights to Saturn and Jupiter, and possibly even Pluto and the Oort cloud; in 50-60 years all that is possible given the species’ will to do it;
I truly believe that given a start now, by the turn of the next century, we will have sent precursor robotic flights to the nearest star system; and there are some reading this that will be around to see if it comes to pass; in the meantime, my main dream is to see the first family in space conceive and raise a child there; either on “A” Space station or Lunar colony; when we do that, I will be able to rest peacefully, knowing my generation born before space flight, has done it’s part in preserving humanity;
July 17th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
@ 56. zeke Says: July 16th, 2010 at 9:55 am
Finally! an informed comment that points out exactly why the President made the right decision.
The reason the Apollo program ended early was simple, lack of any vision or long term program for NASA after reaching the moon. Reaching the moon was done for political reasons and not about science. Over the years, the NASA bureaucracy has just become a welfare program with the Shuttle program falling far far short of the promises while at the sames time the unmanned missions far far exceeding expectations. In Houston, you don’t hear the importance of the manned space program you just hear a lot of lobbying to protect jobs of the cash cow. Good riddance to Constellation.
July 17th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
This was the last time we walked on The Godfather.
At least that’s how I read it the first time.
July 17th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
@ ^ “the first Keith” :
Well, that is the sort of thing you’d only get to do *once* because then you’d get “rubbed out” pretty quickly!
@112. amphiox Says: [July 17th, 2010 at 10:43 am]
Exactly! Well said.
@ 114. Craig :
I strongly disagree with that esp. your last line.
Yes, there was a strong and driving political motive – which has been cruical in making the world as we know it today.
There has also been good science done as well. Having a political motive does NOT negate the fact that there were also scientific motives and accomplishments with Apollo (and the Ares-Constellation) program too.
I’d say the reason we didn’t go further is simple but different from yours -lack of leadership ambition & focus and lack of funding. In other words, we gave up based on human space exploration being too hard – despite JFK’s very accurate statement of doing these things precisely *because* they are hard! – and too costly. Although the money is :
1. an investment that retruns lots of benefits,
2. is spent on Earth not in space and
3. is tiny compared to the amounts of money wasted on other things and areas.
This :
http://spaceraceleadership.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/what-would-kennedy-do/
is well worth reading and makes a very good point or two too methinks.
July 17th, 2010 at 10:05 pm
@95. Neil Haggath Says:
Yikes. I do find that sad and surprising.
@99. Lugosi Says:
Sadly we can’t put a man on the Moon anymore either – which was kind of the point. We can’t get people above Low Earth Orbit these days & soon NASA won’t even be able to take folks that far.
@ 102. amphiox Says: [July 16th, 2010 at 9:30 pm]
Moon rocks? Knowledge about the Moon? The ability for people to fly and do other remarkable things in something that is neither heavy planetary gravity nor awkward and health damaging micro (“zero”) gravity? An ideal site for a (lunar Farside) Radio telescope sheilded from earthly interference?
Boy, amphiox, do you ever seem to have a poor imagination!
And be a Zero-Sum, Black & White thinker too.
Does it not occur to you that we can, and would be well advised to, study and fund *BOTH* human space exploration, incl. a return to the Moon, and also He-3 fusion technology?
But then why NOT our Moon?
As I noted before (# 42) : There is so much we still don’t know and have NOT done on the Moon.
There has never been a woman – or an astronomer on the Moon. There has only been one scientist – H. Schmitt, geologist – ever land on the Moon. Humans have not spent very much time at all on our Moon, nor have we seen much of it at all. Not its Farside. Not its poles. Not its night nor have we experienced first hand a full Lunar day. Not in person.
Why do you seem so adamant that these things are not worth doing?
Plus going to the Moon again and learning how to do these things in such a relatively closer and easier spot then enables us to learn and gain experience and technology that will help us better get to and explore those other more distant and difficult targets.
What if that target we choose *is* our Moon?
July 18th, 2010 at 12:56 am
As a matter of fact, I did in fact consider each and every one of these suggestions, and though they are each quite cool, it is my opinion that none of them, alone or in combination, is sufficient to justify the cost of returning to the moon as a primary target.
If, on the other hand, we pursue an integrated manned exploration program aimed at producing the capability for reliable, repeatable, sustainable travel to multiple destinations in nearby deep space, in which the moon is one of several secondary targets, then we would automatically obtain the capability for doing all of it, at no extra cost.
That’s really what we need, a general launch system that can go to many different places, with which we can choose to go wherever we want, and when done, use it again to go somewhere else. And that is what we should be devoting all our manned space program resources towards developing. Specialized launched systems, on the other hand, that are designed only to get us to one destination (like the Apollo program), will, like Apollo, invariably become technological and political dead ends that will wither and die whenever the political winds change.
Which is in fact EXACTLY what I said, except that I proposed we do the one first, and then the second, not both concurrently, so we can focus all our resources and attention to doing each one properly, in its good time. (Of course, that whole example was deliberately presented in its most extreme form, as it was partly in jest.)
They are worth doing, but the problem is that none of them, by themselves, can sustain a manned space effort. The primary goal of manned space travel is colonization, not exploration or science, because for exploration and science robots will always be more efficient for equivalent cost.
For colonization to be successful, the effort must long-term, and for that to happen, it must become self-sustaining – ultimately it has to be able to pay for itself, or it won’t survive politically.
We could, and doing so is better than choosing not to go anywhere at all, by far. But to me, the moon would only be the “second-best” choice, because the moon really isn’t that promising a destination as a primary target for colonization (where the ultimate goal is 100% self-sufficiency from earth), and if we choose it as the primary target, then the program is going to be at greater risk of failing to achieve its objectives and ultimately dying the same political death as Apollo.
On the other hand, as a secondary target, in support of some other primary target, the moon is a stupendous option, but we need to pick that primary target and go there first (and then return to the moon as the second step).
July 18th, 2010 at 1:08 am
I will also add that if colonization is successful, exploration and science always follow automatically, because exploration and science are things people do wherever they go. The total cost always ends up much, much cheaper than if you went for science or exploration as your primary justification from the beginning, because the colonization infrastructure makes subsequent science and exploration much, much cheaper.
July 18th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Noble goals…where are you gonna get the $$$$?
In North America, the majority of people are concerned with affording health care, good education, and a decent standard of living.
Space exploration is a very distant second.
Love to see it happen but it’s just not financially realistic.
July 18th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
We spent that saved money from the Moon program to cure poverty, discrimination and environmental problems here on Eath. How could anyone object about that?
Today, we no longer have poverty, discrimination, or environmental problems here on Eath. It is now better on this planet, than it has ever been in the history of mankind.
These new programs (which replaced the Moon missions) have been an absolute and astounding success, and we have a huge debt to pay to our wise government leaders, who canceled our failed Moon exploration programs.
Besides, all that NASA money was not being spent here on Earth…
July 18th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Eath is a fictional planet were poverty, discrimination and environmental problems were solved when the Moon missions were canceled.
Those of us who actually lived on EARTH during those years, know better.
Today, I cry when it is not possible for me to purchase 1 hour of internet control of one of the 10,000 robots currently roaming over the surface of the Moon. Sure it costs me $100 per hour, but for that one hour, I can explore the Moon myself.
What happened?
Before I die from old age, I want one thing from our space program:
I want to be able to control my own rented robot on the surface of the Moon or Mars, and explore any rock that I am personally interested in.
For me, it would be like I was actually there, after waiting for over 50 years on my dream.
July 18th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
@Lugosi: Putting a man on the moon? There’s an app for that.
July 18th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
@120 Frankjad
> Noble goals…where are you gonna get the $$$$?
So far, our little project has managed to put together about 400$ over the last few days, which it plans to send as a grant towards Copenhagen Suborbitals. ( http://bit.ly/dbt28p and http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com)
We’re hoping to reach around 5000$ or so. A relatively modest amount, but a good size for our project to kick off it’s operations with. http://bit.ly/aDGQRB
July 18th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
@20. Lewis Says:
Thanks for that & those excellent links – much appreciated and very true.
@28. Naked Bunny with a Whip Says: [July 16th, 2010 at 8:56 am]
I could well be wrong and I’m no expert in this area but my understanding is that those images would be “public domain” ones and thus (pretty?) freely available for use. They’re all iconic pics that you see frequently reproduced and used in papers, Wikipedia, artworks, etc … But maybe someone who knows a bit more than me can enlighten us all further?
@51. Lukester Says: [July 16th, 2010 at 9:45 am]
So Obama had a choice – fund and support the Lunar return program properly and break that negative cycle or not. He choose ‘not’ – in fact he chose to do the space program a lot more damage than any previous President by cancelling the more visionary Bush “returnj to theM oon” program which was just finally starting to take off – literally!
I agree. The BA is letting his political opinions over-ride his rational assessment regarding space exploration on this topic. Obama may have some things in his favour otherwise and science wise but his NASA and space policy generally has been abyssmal and extremely disappointing.
In My Humble Opinion Naturally.
July 18th, 2010 at 11:25 pm
@90. Angus Martin : Thankyou -glad you liked it.
@56. zeke Says: [July 16th, 2010 at 9:55 am]
I strongly disagree with your assessment there. All Ares I *had* to do was get people into space – to the ISS and to link up with the craft to take them to the Moon and Mars and elsewhere. Ares V would’ve been a great high-payload heavy-lifting rocket and would’ve done more than just Mars – although the capability to get people to Mars is more than impressive enough if you ask me.
Yes, the Ares program had its critics and opposition and teething troubles – so did Apollo. In fact, Apollo got off to arguably the worst start of *any* US space program and yet became its greatest triumph :
Moreover, that was *before* the Apollo 1 fire which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White.
It would have been easy to abandon Apollo altogether after that.
Just as it would’ve been easy to write off the Hubble Space observatory after its spherical aberration blunder. But thank FSM we didn’t – imagine what we would have missed out on!
Imagine what we may be missing out on now with Obama cancelling Constellation which also seems to be widely criticised and off to a troubled start just as Apollo & the HST once were. Just like them, given the chance (which Obama would like to deny it.) I’m sure that the Ares-Constellation program will make the critics (like you!
) eat their words many times over and end up as a truly marvellous and universally hailed success story. Given the chance.
Ares was finally, literally, just taking off – it had had its first – successful – test flight in October last year and was finally becoming a tangible concrete program with working – and flying machinery. Cancelling Ares after its first launch is like cancelling Apollo after Apollo 4 How stupid would that have been?/ How stupid is Obama’s decision now?
I disagree that killing Bushes plan wa s ahrad decision – it is all too easy togive up, tosay we’;ll save money and itwasn’t that poyular anyhow. The hard thingt odo is to say “Okay itsnot our plan but its what we’re committted to & by FSM we’ll fund it properly and do it while also loking furtherahead after it.”
July 18th, 2010 at 11:54 pm
Yeck. Typos and out of time to fix’em. Sorry.
To clarify :
I disagree that killing Bushes plan was a hard decision – it is all too easy to give up & quit, to say we’ll save money and it wasn’t that popular a program anyhow. The hard thing for Obama to do would’ve been to say:
“Okay, Ares-Constellation is not our plan but its what we’re committted to and doing and we can’t go back to the drawing board now. By FSM, we’ll have to fund it properly and just go ahead and make sure we do it while also looking further ahead into the future after it.”
***
If every administration cancels the spaceflight plans of its predeccesors we will never get off the ground. Period.
Quitting is easy and cowardly – and a huge betrayal of the nation he swore to lead well. By cancelling NASA’s manned spaceflight program, Obama is betraying not just the people of today but he is also spitting on the legacy of Apollo and betraying his (well maybe not *his* exactly but *America‘s*) grandfathers and fathers who worked so hard and put so much effort, money and love in getting NASA and its human space program where it was before he took over.
***
BTW. Video of the sucessful launch of the ‘Ares I-X’ test flight on October 28th last year is here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ZHzAvFuYc
With more information on the Ares program via Wikipedia here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I-X#October_28.2C_2009_.28Launch.29
and another Youtube video of how the Ares and Orion manned Lunar return program would work – if given the chance by a President that knows what he’s doing space~wise – is here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq_4Mm-1-C0&feature=related
Cancelling this program which was finally starting to take off and provide results – literally – shows Obama lack’s courage, lacks vision and lacks patriotism, at least on this issue. It means Barack Obama will go down in history as the President who, unforgivably, ended Americans (& others) dreams of being NASA astronauts and badly set back the United States of America by killing off its manned space program. It was a disgraceful, appallingly bad decision by B. H. Obama.
Obama’s *real* friends should be try to convince him to reverse his misguided and moronic policy here ASAP and avoid seeing him doing this damage to himself and to the rest of us – not cheer him on in his stupidity on this issue.
July 19th, 2010 at 1:07 am
In case folks are wondering why that reference, Apollo 4 was the first proper test flight of the Apollo program and the equivalent to where we are now with the Ares program :
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_4
Imagine if we’d stopped Apollo and cancelled it and the Saturn V after that first successful flight back in 1967.
How dumb would that have been? Think of all we would’ve lost and how badly it would’ve set us and the world back. Now think of how badly we are being hurt by Obama because that’s the exact equivalent point in regards to the Ares-Constellation program.
I really hope Congress over-rides Obama and prevents our Afro-Kenyan-Indonesian American President from getting his awful way here.
BTW. & Off Topic But what *do* you call an “African-American” that really does come from Africa and wasn’t raised in America?
July 19th, 2010 at 2:29 am
NB. To clarify : in my comment #128 – awaiting moderation now – I’m seriously asking the question & not casting aspersions against Obama. I’m happy to concede Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan Muslim father and American non-religious mother as he & wikipedia say.
The fact that he was then raised in Muslim Indonesia is a bit more of an issue and it is enough to make you wonder how much of a “truly” cultural American Obama really is in his “heart of hearts”? Or Westerner even. Especially given Obama’s happiness to have a favourite preacher who ranted on about “God curse America” and his clear willingness to embrace and appease the anti-American fundamentalist Islamic world. Perhaps the law should be that Presidential candidates need to have not only have been *born* American but have a *both* parents fully American and have been *raised* in the USA too? Not that I can see Obama proposing that particular reform.
(How did we ever end up with Kenyan-Indonesian-American B.H. Obama in the White House? Oh yeah, the alternative was McCain-Palin which was even worse.
)
@ 118. Amphiox :
(Emphasis added)
Then I’ll just note that in my opinion these suggestions are more than sufficient esp. in combination (& with other factors too) to justify the Lunar return as a primary target.
(Emphasis original but reversed for quotation purposes.)
True but I disagree that Apollo was “specialised” for just the one sort of mission – the LM was specialised but the main components of Apollo and the Saturn V were used for other missions – notably Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz link up as well. This, I think will (would have?) also been true of Ares-Constellation.
Besides *our* role in this – as interested public “consumers” & “beneficiaries” of space exploration is to see that “the political winds” do NOT shift away from space exploration. We in the public can play a role here by pressuring politicians and advocating loudly for the programs we believe in – which is kind of what I’m doing now.
Why not do both at the same time? Its not like the people doing the He-3 research and engineering need to be the same people that do the rocket science. We should be able to do both concurrently just as we have the scientists and others to do astronomy and geology at the same time, just as we can have the LHC and the Shuttle programs running concurrently and so on.
I agree. I’ll just add that part of the “long-term” factor is keeping on with programs that we have already been committed to. We can’t just change plans with every new President. Ares has been started, it is a long-term plan and thus we need to persevere with it. Obama can do other things too & he can make minor tweaks if necessary but cancelling something that is this far advanced is just NOT acceptable in my view.
So what if G. W. Bush came up with it, if Obama gets behind it and funds it he can claim “ownership” of sorts by making it happen on his watch. Cancelling it just because it was the last guys idea is not good and not smart and sees us go nowhere.
Well I disagree with that. The Moon is an excellent goal for developing technology and learning experience that can be put to good use in moving on to other more difficult and distant targets. Moon first, *then* asteroids and Mars is how I’d recommend we move ahead.
July 19th, 2010 at 2:42 am
@ 121. & 122 Steve Huntwork :
Exactly! Poverty and environmental issues cannot be fixed. Period. No amount of cancelling space or other projects will ever change that. Reality is that these issues will always be with us. This has been the case throughout history and has been demonstrated time and time again.
Cancelling Apollo and cancelling Ares does NOT necesarily mean that more money gets spent on these things and even if every last single cent of US money was poured into poverty and the environment these problems would continue. Poverty and environmental woes can be reduced and minimised somewhat and it is sensible to try and do so but, ultimately, for a whole range of reasons, they are part of the big bad world that we just cannot ever completely fix.
Cancelling the things like space exploration that we can do and that we all do benefit from (even the poor and the tree-hugging environmentalists) in the name of supposedly “fixing” poverty and the environment (&, for that matter, achieving the other beauty queen speech standard of “World Peace”) is plain dumb and crazy. It doesn’t work and never could.
Actually the best and demonstrably effective (although still only partial) answer to such issues is to keep advancing technology further and to keep a prosperous economy going where we can afford luxuries like taking action on environmental concerns* and have as few people as possible living below the poverty line.
—-
* Looks at how interest in doing anything about Global Warming and other environmental worries crashes whenever the economy slumps eg. GFC lately. look at how the worst nation’s environmentally are the poorest ones. People need to have three square meals a day lined up securely into their future before they’ll ever give a toss about the endangered Purple Spotted Belgian Screamapillar or whatever other cute’n'fuzzy is the trendy Left’s Cause of the Day.
PS. I know, a lot of posts by me in a row here but it beats one super-duper-long one doesn’t it? There’s a lot I wanted to say and respond to so sorry if I’ve gone on too much or too long. Thanks for your forebearance y’all.
July 19th, 2010 at 6:20 am
Blizno: Humans are nowhere near competitive with robots for cost
Again, I know this is a commonly-repeated meme, but have you actually looked?
If you compare the science return per dollar from Apollo versus the unmanned lunar exploration of the time, I think you’ll be surprised.
Blizno: Give up the fantasy of launching nuclear waste into space. It can never happen due to the extremely high cost of launching any payload.
Not to mention the safety factor. What kind of rocket reliability would we need to ensure that an accident during launch would not cause a catastrophe here on Earth? Ninety-nine percent? Is it enough to have one rocket in one hundred go bad? 99.9%? Is one rocket in a thousand acceptable?
Work the problem backwards. How much nuclear waste is acceptable to scatter into the atmosphere? Look at the amount of nuclear waste that needs to be gotten rid of. How reliable do your rockets need to be? How expensive would it be to make them that reliable? How many launches would be required? (Keep in mind that a rocket that falls into the Sun needs to cancel nearly all of its momentum as it is carried along by Earth at some 30 km/s — nearly three times faster than any Apollo mission ever went.)
There are many reasons to have a robust space program, but launching waste into space isn’t one of them.
Gark: things chucked into deep space tend to eventually hit other things
What kind of time scale are you talking about here? Do you know how big deep space is?
frankjad: Noble goals…where are you gonna get the $$$$?
In North America, the majority of people are concerned with affording health care, good education, and a decent standard of living.
Space exploration is a very distant second.
That’s because the majority of people have no clue how little the space program costs.
We spend a lot less on space than, say, cosmetics. Or movies. But even in these difficult times, people still seem to find it worthwhile to pump gobs of money into these industries.
frankjad: Love to see it happen but it’s just not financially realistic.
As long as people keep thinking it’s expensive, then it will be hard to justify to them at almost any point.
July 19th, 2010 at 6:23 am
MattF: There are many reasons to have a robust space program, but launching waste into space isn’t one of them.
On the other hand, I think it would be a great idea to move some hazardous industries to space if we can. We can’t do much to destroy the environment of a dead rock.
July 19th, 2010 at 6:30 am
Let’s see, spend billions and billions and billions of dollars to walk on the moon AGAIN, or land astronauts on an asteroid in deep space for the first time EVER….. hmmmmmm….. tough choice.
That’s a cool infographic at the top of this post, yes, but …
[cool graphic][good reason to go back to the moon]
July 19th, 2010 at 6:47 am
something went screwy with the text of my post….meant to say “sentimental reaction to an infographic is not a compelling argument for going back to the moon”
aw….fergit it….
July 19th, 2010 at 9:00 am
And going to the moon by itself is aiming pretty low compared to what we could be doing in space.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Jason Marsh: And going to the moon by itself is aiming pretty low compared to what we could be doing in space.
Given how big space is, isn’t just about everything “aiming pretty low”?
Seriously, though, it’s a lot more ambitious than what we’re doing right now. I think that’s the point.
July 19th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
I’m all for sending folks back to the moon, but only if there were some very valid, overriding, cosmic purposes, especially in this economy. I just don’t see any right now.
July 19th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
42. Messier Tidy Upper Says: “People matter in ways robots just don’t. Who remembers where they were were when the first robot landed on the Moon? Who can name it? ”
Depending on how you define “robot”, the first spacecraft to land on the moon and still function was Surveyor I in 1966. The first one to move around once it got there was the Soviet Lunokhod I in 1970.
For Surveyor I, I was planted watching the live TV broadcast of guys sitting in front of consoles (no pictures until after landing). For Lunokhod I didn’t see it until it was printed in Life magazine some months later.
Oh, it was a rhetorical question? Sorry.
- Jack
July 20th, 2010 at 12:57 am
We have computer graphics now. There will be no excuse this time for no stars or hidden wires. AND we won’t need to film it at Area 51, we can just outsource the fakery to China and let them do it. Nobody will figure it out.
July 20th, 2010 at 2:07 am
[...] Moon five more times, the last being in December 1972. Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, says it’s been too long since we’ve walked on the Moon. I [...]
July 20th, 2010 at 3:01 am
@138. Jack Hagerty : No apology needed. Interesting.
You’d have to be one of the very, *very*, few who then who do recall the first Lunar robotic explorers – although I think you forgot the Rangers there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_program
& better source yet which I’d strongly recommend if folks are interested is the excellent accounts of this – & a lot of other space exploration programs – in Jeffrey’s Kluger’s ‘Journey Beyond Selene’ book. (Simon & Schuster, 1999.)
BTW. Thanks for also making me feel slightly less old given I wasn’t born for Lunik II or the Rangers, Surveyors or even the last Apollo landing .. just!
July 20th, 2010 at 3:44 am
@139. Strahlungsamt
Here’s a better “lunar” music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLsbfcsH-6k
Watch for the BBQ on the Moon at the end of the song – 3 minutes 30 secs in.
As for your comment, I’m not sure if you are actually serious or just doing a Poe but I suggest Moon Hoaxers check out the BA’s comprehensive debunking of that load of codswallop posted ages ago here :
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
Or if you think the BA’s too biased a source, given he’s worked for NASA, then how about the Mythbusters:
http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/db/science/apollo-moon-landing-photos-fake.html
Or just consider the following: Not only do we have the photos, the moon rocks, thousands of historical records, the confirmation of the opposing Soviet Union – the loser in the space race, a whole tonne of scientific data (incl. a whole new theory explaining the origin of the Moon – the “Big Splash” theory), the RADAR reflectors, the actual Apollo spacecraft in the Smithsonian and the word of many ham radio operators who evesdropped on the Apollo astronauts, etc ..
Not only do we have *all* that but ask yourself this: How many times do you think the twenty odd Apollo astronauts have been interviewed, debreifed and otherwise discussed and written about (& one case – Al Bean even painted about!) their experiences?
Is it really possible they are all not just liars but perfect liars that haven’t been able to be tripped up once?
Not to mention all the other hundreds and thousands of people that would have to have been in on the conspiracy!
I reckon its far easier to think we went to the Moon for real than the believe in the ludicrous idea that such a huge conspiracy and con could be pulled off and kept secret this long.
July 20th, 2010 at 5:48 am
#20 Frankjad:
“Noble goals…where are you gonna get the $$$$?
In North America, the majority of people are concerned with affording health care, good education, and a decent standard of living.”
Do you actually know what proportion of the United States’ GDP is spent on spaceflight? Clue – Phil told us, in a post on this very blog, not very long ago. In the current financial year, it was… wait for it… 0.3%!!! That isn’t just manned spaceflight; that’s the entire NASA budget! Even at the height of Apollo, it was never more than 1%.
So do you actually imagine that saving that 0.3% would make an appreciable difference to every American’s standard of living?
To put it another way, the entire NASA annual budget is comparable to the amount which the American population spends per year on cigarettes – but we don’t hear anyone whining that that money is being wasted…
July 20th, 2010 at 5:56 am
As for the “humans versus robots” debate… compare Apollo with the robot probes which the USSR landed onthe Moon at about the same time. Between 1970 and 1974, three Soviet probes returned samples from the Moon. ( There were actually six attempts, but three failed; compare that with Apollo’s 6 out of 7 successes. The first failed attempt was just a few days before Apollo 11, in an attempt to steal some of NASA’s thunder. )
Each of those probes returned only about 100 grammes of samples ( 170 grammes for the last one, Luna 24 ). By comparison, Apollos 15-17 each returned around 100 kilos of samples. So how far would research into the composition and origin of the Moon have got, if we had only the Soviet samples to work with?
July 20th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
On this day in 1969, Apollo 11‘s Lunar Module ‘Eagle’ successfully landed on the Moon at 20:17 UTC on July 20.
While Michael Collins was arguably the loneliest and most isolated man in history facing the job of flying the CSM home and leaving his companions dying or dead on the lunar surface if something went wrong, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took that first giant leap for Humanity onto the regolith of Mare Tranquillitatis.
Mike Collins was 38 at that time and is now aged 79.
Buzz Aldrin was 39 at that time and is now aged 80.
Neil Armstrong was 38 at that time and is now aged 79.
(Ages at landing calculated by me from the astronauts respective Wikipedia pages which was also the source for their current ages.)
The Apollo craft would land a further five times – 12, 14,15 , 16 & 17 from July 1969 to December 1972 and since then we have, rather staggeringly and pathetically, not returned.
****
PS. CSM = Command and Sevice Modules just in case anyone doesn’t know already.
July 20th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Messier Tidy Upper: You make some nice arguments. Notwithstanding my opinion that the moon isn’t the best primary target for the next step in manned space exploration, if we get a real, serious, committed moon program, I’ll be drooling with excitement. As I said before, the most important thing of all is to commit to a target and get it done properly, and everything else gets bootstrapped out of it, even if for whatever reason we don’t choose the best target (and frankly, we’ll only know in retrospect what was really the “best” target after we’ve gone to them all!). The perfect as they say, is the enemy of the good.
Frankjad: As others have said, we pay peanuts for the space exploration. But in the end, space colonization will pay for itself, the same way North America paid for itself. If Columbus landed in America and found a desolate, lifeless wasteland with no people, food, water, or mineral resources, then the Europeans would not have come back. And if space/the moon/etc really is a barren hostile waste with nothing to offer humans, then any and all manned space programs will be doomed to eventual failure. But of course, we already know that is not the case. There are riches out there beyond imaging, multiple earth masses of virtually any precious commodity you can think of, other than biological products, and of course the jury’s still out on that one.
The verdict of history is quite clear. The day a civilization (any civilization) stops looking outward and starts to worry only about internal concerns, is the day that civilization starts to die. And the track record for these civilizations actually solving those internal concerns that they abandon expansion in order to focus on? A big, fat, juicy zero.
So I can assure you with great confidence that we will NOT get affordable health care, we will NOT get good education, and we will NOT maintain our standard of living by abandoning a manned space programs. On the other hand, WITH a manned space program, we may solve some of these problems by gaining access to space based resources. (We might not, of course, but at least there will be a chance).
July 21st, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Tribeca Mike: I’m all for sending folks back to the moon, but only if there were some very valid, overriding, cosmic purposes, especially in this economy. I just don’t see any right now.
Why do you require “overriding, cosmic purposes” for something as cheap as Moon shots? Do you agonize over thirty cents you spend in every hundred dollars’ worth of groceries you buy, demanding that those thirty cents only be spent for “overriding, cosmic purposes”?
(“Cheap”, of course, when taken in comparison to other, vastly more expensive things that the government is doing with far less economic return.)
July 23rd, 2010 at 7:26 pm
We never landed on the moon. we did what we americans do best, LIE! just to win a stupid ass cold war.
July 24th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
I am always reminded of Niven’s “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?” phrase.
August 12th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Yes, as well, Saturday Night Fever caught my eye as not belonging.
I think the creator blew it. The perfect image would have been Elton John singing “Rocket Man”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GAKOLOnfV4
Great image tho
June 18th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
@Ken B
“Science for science’s sake” is something I agree with completely. The problem is, getting people to Moon is expensive, dangerous and complicated (with the current technology, anyway). My point is, you can use that money to get MORE scientific knowledge in other ways. Like automatic probes which require no food, air, water and other messy stuff that humans do, are more resistant to radiation, and so on.
I firmly believe that the only way for humanity to survive is start colonizing the outer space. However, I don’t see much use in another Moon mission if all they would do is bring back some rock samples or whatever. Now, if they were actually working on a plan to build a permanent (or semi-permanent) Moon base, that would be another matter entirely.
July 4th, 2011 at 2:29 am
‘For the 2010 fiscal year, the president’s base budget of the Department of spending on “overseas contingency operations” brings the sum to $663.8 billion.’
and theeeeeeeen…
“Seen in the year-by-year breakdown listed below, the total amounts (in nominal dollars) that NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2008 amounts to $471.23 billion dollars—an average of $9.06 billion per year.”
Millitary Budget: 663.8 BILLION
NASA Budget: ~9.06 BILLION
We want blow what we do have to smitherines roughly 73.3 times more than we want to explore the unknown… great state of mind huh?
July 14th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
The moon isn’t a place that should be colonized, in fact it’s not suitable for colonization. It however has an abundance of Helium 3, which can be mined and used as a fuel source. But other than that the moon doesn’t really need more research.
July 17th, 2011 at 11:42 am
Lets just put together our resources and build a TARDIS
July 22nd, 2011 at 6:38 pm
We never made it to the moon in the first place. It was a ploy to make the Russians feel like they lost the space race. Congrats to the government though, it worked.
August 6th, 2011 at 10:55 pm
I also agree with “Science for Science’s sake”, but I think that the general public needs a more tangible goal.
@That Guy:
I know *exactly* how you feel.
@ Director of Aeronautics Says::
If you think the moon is not suitable for colonization, then name one place (other than Earth) which is easier to get to and colonize. Mars is just too far away currently, and it has a (thin) atmosphere, which makes it more complex. The moon is a great place to get the experience we will need. Even if it becomes just a tourist destination.
@Zak:
Seriously?
http://i.qkme.me/eb6.jpg
December 13th, 2011 at 11:32 pm
Sending astronauts to the moon is a highly inefficient process compared to sending rovers and other machines to the moon. For example, spacecraft carrying astronauts need to take along an air supply. Air is added mass, requiring more fuel mass to escape most of earth’s gravity. Also, the decompressed portion of air that the astronauts breath takes up a lot of volume, increasing the surface area of the spacecraft, and thereby the mass of the spacecraft (in the form of the spacecraft’s shell (mostly made of metal alloys)), again increasing the amount of fuel mass required for liftoff. Also, fuel is required to transport fuel. The more fuel a spacecraft has, the more massive it is, and it needs more fuel to lift that fuel; thus compounding the increase in the amount of fuel required. Another example of astronaut inefficiency is that a spacecraft carrying astronauts needs to carry food, again adding mass via the food, adding mass by requiring a bigger spacecraft to contain the volume of the food, etc… and so you need more fuel to get the spacecraft to work. Also, rover can spend a lot more time on the moon, that is, unless you really feel like shipping a few years worth of food, air-filters, waste water recovery systems, some way of generating electricity, and all the other things you would need to keep the astronauts alive. Also, you can accelerate a spacecraft carrying a rover a lot more violently than you can accelerate a spacecraft carrying people. Rovers can be designed to take the G-forces. We do not biologically engineer people yet, so making a person who can take a lot more G-forces than most of us is not really an option. Because you can accelerate a rover a lot more than a person, maneuvering is much more fuel efficient. I would like people to live on the moon some day was well, but send remote controlled machines to build the habitations, not astronauts.