Comments on: Whither NASA: the Moon? Mars? Science?

By: web

web — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:43:09 +0000

Exploration is one of the greatest things we have as human beings, since the dawn of time we been exploring and expanding. Now that we have colonized every corner of this fragile and frail blue marble, it is time to go elsewhere. I know the spirit of exploration still lives on. However I doubt that the Americans will be the great space explorers. China is starting a space program, and so are so many other countries. The one thing I think that we forget when we look at the cost of these things is the payoff. The Apollo missions led to several advancements in wireless technology. Going to Mars would only help us to develop a more sustainable way of survival. So what if it costs billions of dollars. Give it a decade and the payoffs would be huge. We should at least be returning to the moon.

By: Stinky Pete

Stinky Pete — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:59:29 +0000

Has any explorer ever set out with “science” as their goal? Ever? To EXPLORE is to do just that. Scientific and technological advances will emerge as a by-product of the process. Man sees mountain, man climbs mountain. Man sees the Moon, man goes to the moon. Man sees Mars…

By: Martin E.

Martin E. — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:21:26 +0000

@29
Yup, greed is a great motivator. If there were something out in space worth billions back on Earth (and not too massive), there would be a Gold Rush by private investors. Cost to orbit would plummet. [It doesn't have to be expensive. The energy requirements are only like flying a 747 from the US to Australia; of course, we don't throw the 747 away every time we take a trip.]

Luckily, there IS something worth bringing back: Platinum. Take one small asteroid of the right type, refine out the platinum and you have some $30B worth back on Earth. Check out http://spacewealth.org/

There’s an awful lot of steps to take to find the right few asteroids, but they are all now feasible.
The right role for NASA is to act as an enabler for space resource development, just as the US Government did opening up the West after the Civil War.

Mining asteroids will be robotic, at first. But once a large enough infrastructure has built up, it will need people to service it efficiently, and we’ll be back in space and have the capability to go to Mars cheaply.

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:23:39 +0000

Aren’t the current LCROSS and LRO missions being funded by exploration, and not science?

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:08:29 +0000

One interesting aspect of this report is the absence of science. Out of 12 pages, science is mentioned twice.

They're preparing the scientific report, see here.

By: Robert Cumming

Robert Cumming — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:51:55 +0000

If it was all about science, the refurbished HST would publish about one three-colour image a year and we’d all be having trouble getting people excited about UV spectra.

But seriously: What does the research say about space exploration and public perceptions of science? My guess is that a large majority of people – politicians too, probably – sort astronomy, space science and manned spaceflight in the same box. Marked ‘SPACE’. Maybe that’s NASA’s fault, of course, but I don’t think that can be the whole story.

By: Jesse M.

Jesse M. — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:20:22 +0000

I think expanding humanity into space is a good idea in the long term, but there’s no good reason to put lots of money into it in the short term when there’ll probably be much cheaper options in a century or two, like space elevators to get us into orbit more easily or self-replicating mining and construction robots to build colonies on other planets that would be waiting for us when we arrive.

By: The Real Deal

The Real Deal — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:27:58 +0000

Whatever the funding, NASA has a bigger problem – competency. NASA no longer has the competency to design and build large launchers for the Moon or Mars manned missions. Go ask NASA to redo the Apollo missions using today’s knowhow, cost no object. They will fail.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:59:55 +0000

I don’t know how anyone could argue that the money taken from human spaceflight would show up in space science.

Sure,not dollar for dollar, but 60 or 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, absolutely. After all, it’s the same agency doing both, no?

By: coolstar

coolstar — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:14:38 +0000

Tod has his facts more or less straight but his causality wrong on the HST. HST was made to be serviceable to give the Shuttle someplace to go and something to do before the ISS was launched, primarily. I agree that the HST has been the single most successful scientific instrument ever built, but that doesn’t mean doing it the way it was done was the correct way. (thanks for the info on James Webb, but I still think great instruments should be named after great scientists or the people who paid for them…….). No one will tell you the total COST of HST over it’s lifetime, but it has to be in the range of $20 billion in current dollars (point of reference, Kepler will probably cost about $700 million or so over its working life). (few non-astronomers know that one gets, what, $100K plus for every Hubble proposal approved?). So, call that 20 REALLY good space telescopes, with maybe half of them still working and the way HST was done doesn’t look so good anymore. And in this alternative history, perhaps no shuttle catastrophes …..(yes, one can argue it could have been built anyway, but there’s no way to know, obviously). In this universe, losing space telescope missions, such as we now do on Mars missions occasionally, is part of the cost of doing business.

I have no problem with Orion going to L2, which is easily within its capabilities, but Orion can’t be JUSTIFIED by this consideration. Add in sample and return mission to NEOs and the start of learning how to bootstrap our way out of LEO, and I’d vote for it.