Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.
“Why not send robots?” is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
This seems a flawed analogy in many ways: for one thing, Darwinism became accepted because of scientific evidence, something that has not happened with Freudianism or the arguments for manned space travel (and the fact that Freud proved to be a quack has diminished the power of his Word). For another, I can buy a copy of The Origin Of Species or Civilization and Its Discontents for fifteen bucks, but it will probably cost at least $200 billion to go to Mars.
Now, Wolfe is an unusually simple-minded (if at times exceptionally eloquent) exponent of any theory he adopts — his explanation of why he voted for Bush makes Erick Erickson sound like de Tocqueville. But I think a lot of support for manned space travel stems from the same place as Wolfe’s does, from the notion that having humans explore the universe is one of those things you can’t put a price on. Like freedom.
Of course, the problem is that here on earth you can put a price on just about anything. And when that thing is something like a mission to Mars or a World Freedom agenda, that price is likely to be more than anyone wants to spend. The obvious solution: cut corners. Only send 120,000 troops to Iraq when the Army War College recommends half a million. We can expect the same approach to manned space travel, as a friend who follows this stuff in detail explained to me.
After Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, the Bush Administration created a “Vision for Space Exploration”. One of the parts of the plan is that astronauts and cargo are launched separately. The proposed astronaut launch component is the Ares I, which is a solid-rocket first stage and a liquid-fueled second stage.
As far as I can tell, the sole reason for a solid first stage is cost. Solid rockets are cheaper but can’t be turned off once they’re started, which is why they weren’t used for Apollo and prior missions. They were used to save money with the Shuttle, and the first Shuttle catastrophe was caused by failure of one of the solid rocket boosters. The Ares I first stage design is based on the Shuttle boosters.
This week, the Air Force released a report saying that there’s 100% chance that a solid-rocket booster failure in the first minute of flight would kill the Ares crew. That report is based on a failure of solid rocket boosters in an unmanned Titan IV rocket in 1998. This is on top of an earlier report that the USAF wouldn’t even certify the Ares I for range safety. Here’s the Orlando Sentiel’s summary:
Air Force officials previously warned NASA they fear that violent shaking on liftoff of the Ares I-X, a rocket that will test the Ares I first stage, would disable the steering and self-destruct mechanisms, meaning it could not be destroyed if it veered off course.
If that problem is not fixed, the Air Force has said, the rocket cannot fly from Kennedy Space Center for fear it could endanger populated areas along the Space Coast.
Apollo was a “succeed at any cost” mission. The new missions are “succeed on the cheap” and it shows.
calling all toasters
Please don’t call it “Darwinism.” That’s a creationist name given to evolutionary science to make it sound like it’s based on an appeal to authority. Which, being science, it isn’t. Do we call physics “Newtonism”?
Riggsveda
From childhood I was always a huge supporter of NASA, and used to dream of being able to travel among the stars. And there is no question that the “side effects of its programs have given us irreplaceable life-enhancing technologies. But I don’t feel so gung ho anymore. The expected evolution of our behavior never caught up to our technical capabilities, and the last thing we need right now is to spread the disease that infected Earth with the Congo, Guantanamo, and climate death, to the rest of the solar system.
DougJ
Actually, people frequently refer to the limitations of “Newtonian physics” and how quantum mechanics is necessary to deal with them.
mistermix
von Braun was a great engineer, but he died more than 30 years ago, when computer technology was in its infancy. Also, the notion that computers replace humans is a straw man–for the Mars missions, computers on robots carry out the commands of controllers.
El Cid
Asteroid belt, bitchez!
The current impossibility of any of this is surely not a barrier, and we will be welcomed into the Asteroid belt as liberators, and it might take us 6 days, 6 weeks… I doubt 6 months.
Political Pragmatist
OT Alert:
Doug, catch this link to an article in the Las Vegas Sun that is absolutely must read by every American. Sound the alarm!
http://politicalpragmatist.com/?p=435
C-Street The Family
Nazis in Washington D.C.
El Cid
By the way, maybe it was just me, but I think one of the most daring and inspiring things we’ve ever done in space were the missions, particularly the last (and final) one to repair and upgrade the Hubble telescope.
monkeyboy
After reading Wolf’s 2004 book I Am Charlotte Simmons I got the impression that he hates and despises anybody younger than him. It was a very ugly pseudo “expose” from his perspective about what is wrong with American youth.
Given that, I wouldn’t trust anything the old fart says even though he dressups in white linen suits to emphasis his purity and connection to an older history.
Brachiator
This is kinda an apples vs kiwi fruit thing. Space travel, manned or unmanned, is a question about engineering, not about fundamental scientific principles.
There is that. But with the old space program, there was also a competitive challenge, the idea that we had to get to the moon before the Russians had a chance to do so.
This is a bad analogy which is nonetheless illustrative of the main point. We could have sent 2 million troops to Iraq and the result would have still been a disaster because there was no rational reason for the invasion in the first place, and there was no rationale for the war that made a damn bit of sense.
I love the idea of space exploration, even manned space exploration. And I don’t automatically buy arguments that we should always spend money “here” first.
But I am not seeing the rational reason for a manned expedition when unmanned explorations can get you useful information without the huge risk to human life and the staggering expense of getting a human crew to Mars and back.
Especially if somebody tried to do it on the cheap.
calling all toasters
@DougJ:
1: Newtonian physics is only a term because it has been (in important ways) relegated to a specific case of a larger theory. Has this happened to Darwin’s theory? Do we now call quantum mechanics “Heisenbergism,” and relativity “Einsteinism?”
2: Do you actually not see the difference between the terms “Newtonian physics” and “Newtonism?” How about “science” and “scientism?” Do you not get that one is a field of inquiry and the other an ideology?
Dave Weeden
BBC news covered this a few days ago:
In other words, Tom Wolfe was dead wrong 40 years ago.
If the astronauts aren’t there to pilot the craft, and robots can gather soil samples and take pictures as well as they could, why send people?
Scott
What’s with all the wingnut willy-whacking about Mars missions all of a sudden? Is it just a side-effect of the lunar landing anniversary?
Bob Munck
As mistermix said, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s a “substantial fraction” and in the not too distant future it’ll be a “multiple.” And the cost of a PC is quite a bit less than that of a baby.
True, we’re much further from being able to write the programs to run such a robotic explorer, but that’s not as big a hang-up as you might think. Witness, for example, the Mars Rovers: they’ve both gotten into bad situations because of faulty programming, but we’ve been able to correct the programming remotely and reboot. (Well, not with Spirit’s current problem … yet.) That’ll be true until delays due to the speed of light become overwhelming.
It’s also important that sensors have become vastly more capable in recent years, in part due to nanotechnology. We can now do orders of magnitude better than the human senses of sight, smell, hearing, and taste. (Touch is still a problem, but those human explorers were going to be wearing gloves.)
I’m an old SF freak, weaned on Heinlein; I want humans to go to Mars, Jupiter, infinity and beyond. But I’ve come to realize that we can blaze the trail with robots.
The Raven
I think the most interesting places for research in the solar system right now are the moons of Saturn, where there is a chance there is life. (The atmosphere of Titan is not in chemical equilibrium.) Human exploration of that system is not plausible at this time. So robots to Saturn have been my pet project for some time now.
(A pulse-nuclear craft built and launched from orbit might be a basis for a manned interplanetary program. This implies, however, a permanent, extensive presence in orbit. Funding for that would be hard to come by.)
Scott, as far as I can tell, the wingnuts like Mars because Bush liked Mars.
Comrade Kevin
I think an awful lot of the pushing for a manned mission to, say, Mars, especially among non-scientists, is about giving them another opportunity to sit in front of the TV and chant “USA! USA!”
4tehlulz
@The Raven: Either that, or they know the Chinese will get to moon before we can even replace the shuttle.
DBrown
You quote the Air Force saying “100% chance that a solid-rocket booster failure in the first minute of flight would kill the Ares crew.”
Does the word impossible ring a bell? To predict that the solid booster has a 100% chance of failure cannot be true since no data baseline built on real statistical systems can truly predict 100% failure for anything (please, if that is true they could win the lottery at will). This proves either that the Air Force is full of shit or the person (misquoting it?) has fucked up.
Facts: Only one (of two) solid boosters on the shuttle has ever failed (in any manner, for that matter) out of hundreds used AND only because a hydrogen tank was within a meter of it did the crew get killed (the Ares I has NO such tank and does use the extreamly reliable shuttle solid booster.) The odds of a solid booster failing is, in fact, vastly lower than any liquid fueled rocket that has ever been tested to date.
That said, the Ares I avoids most of the real dangers of modern rockets for a host of reasons (Reliability is the primary reason but lower mission cost is a nice extra.) But more to the point, IF you are to put people into space using a rocket NASA’s current Ares approach is the best solution (the capsule has an escape booster that can pull it to safety even if the launch fails at the pad.)
Manned missions are a fact and the Ares I is a brilliant approach that should have been used instead of the shuttle. Building a base on the moon, however, is the stupidest waste of money every proposed by NASA. A Mars mission would be far cheaper than a moon base but that is off the point. If NASA is sending people to low earth orbit, getting rid of the shuttle and using the Ares I system is a great way to add safety and lower cost to orbit.
WMass
Before we send a manned mission to Mars we need an efficient, reliable way to launch stuff into orbit. Unfortunately NASA has always been addicted to rockets, and tends to ignore all the other ways to get stuff up there. Rutan’s White Knight is a great idea, which actually works and is much safer than shooting a rocket straight up. Anyone remember the mass driver concept? Find a nice mountain near the equator and you can accelerate stuff enough to either achieve orbit, or close enough that it just needs a small boost from an onboard engine or ground based launch lasers. Very little pollution and risk compared to current methods. But ever since NASA’s beginning they have been addicted to simple brute force. Sad.
WMass
@DBrown: “Does the word impossible ring a bell? To predict that the solid booster has a 100% chance of failure cannot be true since no data baseline built on real statistical systems can truly predict 100% failure for anything”
Maybe you should try actually reading it. It does not say that the solid booster has a 100% chance of failure. It says that IF the booster fucks up there is a 100% chance of crew death. Keep in mind that with solid rockets “fuck up” means massive explosion.
Brick Oven Bill
NASA has transformed itself from a proud center of engineering excellence to a sociology class with thrusters and spoiled, diaper-wearing astronauts.
Defund NASA.
El Cid
@DBrown: They didn’t predict 100% chance of failure. They concluded that there was a 100% likelihood that if the first stage booster failed in the first minute after ignition / liftoff, then the crew would be killed.
It’s an if-then, not an overall prediction of the probability of failure. Maybe there’s a vanishingly small chance of failure. But if you’re insistent upon designing escape / survival mechanisms for human crew at each stage of the mission, you have to include liftoff too.
Leelee for Obama
Surprise, surprise! Tom Wolfe is wrong about something else? No one could have predicted! Surely not! That guy is the most pretentious asshole I’ve ever listened to, even for a few minutes. I live here on the Space Coast, and while it provides lots of jobs, it would really suck if more astronauts were killed, or there were injuries of residents.
In other news, Tom Watson and Stewart Cink are going to a 4-hole playoff for the OPEN! Watson could have put it away at the 18th with par, but couldn’t quite manage it! Got my fingers crossed for the Old Son of a gun!
DougJ
Yeah, I see your point.
R. Porrofatto
Shorter Tom Wolfe: I’m with Krauthammer: I love invading other countries and space travel and I think someone should do both at their expense so that I’ll feel really good about myself, and don’t ask me how I feel about the tax cuts I got from my guy George Bush.
Skullduggery
@Brachiator:
Actually, you just demonstrated how apt an analogy DougJ wrote. While the original mission (humans on Mars or invading Iraq) is flawed, you can make it even worse by doing it half-assed. A properly sized and equipped army in Iraq would have done better than what happened. But it still would’ve been a mess, just like going to Mars.
LD50
CUZ PUTTING DOODS ON MARZ IZ REELY COOL, MAN!
DougJ
I don’t think they’re linen. That’s what’s so weird about them.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Needs more bubble graphics.
Leelee for Obama
@DougJ: Not certain, but I think his suits are tropical worsted wool. Just like the Brits in Bermuda, dontchaknow!
mistermix
@DBrown:
No, if the SRB failed in the first minute (actually the first 30-60 seconds) there’s a 100% chance that the crew escape mechanism would fail. The parachute would be melted in the debris cloud of the failed SRB.
Read the report linked — it’s pretty damning, especially because the USAF used photos from a real Titan IV failure to make the point.
DBrown
@WMass: I did reread it and what I say still stands – I see your point but you need to reread my post since the sentance clearly says 100% death for the crew if booster fails and such a prediction is nonsense – the Ares I has an escape booster on the capsule so any failure before, during or just after launch and the crew will survieve.
@El Cid: As for a small chance of failure being rounded to 100% is bullshit; 100% is NOT in any way similar or to be confused with any finite correction to 99.9 . 100% means it is a sure thing. Rounding to 100% is trying to eat your cake and having it too.
Dave S
I should probably state an opinion about a manned mission to Mars, but I really don’t have one. What I do have are memories of a daring challenge to go to the moon “because it is hard,” a serious feeling of pride when we got there, and an appreciation of the technology that was spun off into so many terrestrial applications and that generated so much money over the years.
Some high-tech spending would be a good thing, I think, at this point. And a lofty goal might lift our spirits a bit. Robots or humans, I don’t care.
DBrown
@mistermix: I read the report and I do not see now this Air Force study works without adjusting for the escape tower booster on the Ares capsule that removes the capsule far from the solid booster explosion/debries field. No where in their study did they include the escape tower velocity, burn time and added distance the capsule would achieve relative to the main booster. They used the fact that the capsule relies on simple left over momentum. IF that was the case for the Ares I design, then their statement would be valid. It isn’t and their argument is not applicable for the Ares I.
Their point about the shaking is valid but NASA claims it has that issue in hand (Maybe, but that is a separate issue.)
mistermix
@DBrown:
No – that’s the whole point, they won’t survive because their parachute (which can tolerate 400°F temps) will be burned up in the 4000°F debris cloud of the booster. So the escape capsule is essentially useless.
gbear
You can probably find a used trip to Mars on Craigslist for a lot cheaper. It pays to shop around.
JimPortlandOR
Isn’t the real question (humans vs robots) more about the huge increased in costs due to providing reasonable assurance that the humans don’t get killed, versus the less expensive cost of disposable robots?
In other words, is the increase in costs for humans justified by an even greater prospect for information than would be obtainable with robots?
In my mind, with what I’ve read, is that the human cost increase isn’t justified by the increased information return. In addition, the amount of testing on a human platform adds years/decades to a project that wouldn’t be necessary with robots.
I also find it interesting that this is usually a discussion about NASA investments, not a discussion about mankind’s investments. I would make it a principle that any manned mission would only be undertaken as a joint, multi-country agreement with multi-country funding, personnel, and facilities – and I’m not talking just token non-US participation. Space exploration is mankind’s agenda, not a USA! USA! rally. The cold war is over. The US empire is (or soon will be) over.
DBrown
@mistermix: I do not follow that logic. As I understand a parachute rocket escape system (based on the Apollo system), it only deploys after the capsule is pulled away by the escape booster (and that small booster shuts down and is ejected.) Then after a finite (but not zero) time, the parachute deploys. Under this situation, the capsule’s main chute is well clear of the main booster fire ball (unless that calculation was missed, of course.)
If the air force had shown such a system is not sufficent, it is simple to add a bigger escape booster and problem solved. I don’t see their point unless no such system is installed and the Ares I does have such an escape system.
Socraticsilence
You know Von Braun was a genius, one of the smartest men ever to work on the problem of space exploration- he’s also been dead for at least 2-3 decades- so I’m just guessing his conception of the limits of robotics, computing, etc. while probably correct in his time are far from the baseline we work with today- my cell phone probably has more total storage capacity than the Apollo systems for gods sakes.
Warren Terra
El Cid, the in-orbit repairs of Hubble were a great technical feat and have given us a great deal – but that can be a bit misleading. The design of the Hubble was constrained because it had to fit in the always-worse-than-useless Shuttle, the most expensive and inefficient launch system yet devised, to buttress the case for having the Shuttle in the first place. This was bad news for the Hubble even if it wasn’t related to its mirror problems. Then came the first and most important repair, which, while a profound accomplishment, actually was more expensive than just sending up a replacement would have been. The more recent gyroscope replacement missions may somehow have been more cost-efficient, but I rather doubt it. Mind you, repairing the Hubble may have been the only genuine accomplishment of manned spaceflight in 30-odd years, but even so I’m not sure it was the best way to get a functional Hubble – though it may well have been the easiest option to get funded, as we were going to have hairless monkeys in orbit whether or not they had any task worth doing.
MikeJ
Now I need to go to a bar and try the effectiveness of the line, “We choose for you to go home with me, and do the other things, not because you are easy, but because I am hard.”
DougJ
I think that’s right.
ThymeZoneThePlumber
Well then, you’d think they’d include the book with the Mars trip, at that price.
Ha ha. Actually, that blurb of yours is quite cool.
Darwin is The Man. Voyage of the Beagle is what I call a Car Book. I can carry it in the car and pop it open to any page at random when I want something to read, and just sink right into it.
mistermix
@DBrown: You’re just blowing smoke, my friend. The report clearly states “Ares capsule with LAS”. That’s Launch Abort System, i.e., “escape booster”.
For the LAS to outrun the debris cloud, which travels at a minimum of 250 feet per second, it would have to increase the velocity of the capsule by more than 250 fps, i.e., approaching 200 MPH, and it would have to do that almost instantaneously. What’s that, like 15 G’s? Far beyond human tolerance.
Eric U.
@DBrown: while this is technically true, I am reminded of a friend that made a $30,000 bet based on 5% probability of winning. Everyone I know thought he was nuts, and he lost. 95% is close enough to one when you are betting $30k, 0.999999*1/10^6 is close enough to one if you are going to die.
Warren Terra
Y’know, I understand why in the cold war we had to employ Von Braun, because he was the fastest route to getting nuclear ICBMs and deterring the Russkies, but now that the cold war is over and the old monster is dead can we please stop talking about him respectfully? My grandfather liberated Nordhausen for heaven’ sake, so I have some personal interest when I say that I don’t think there is much dispute about the atrocities for which Von Braun shared responsibility.
Persia
@MikeJ: It’d work on me. If, you know, I weren’t already married and went to bars.
Why can’t we put this can-do bullshit into clean energy, again?
El Cid
@DBrown: This may be one of the silliest arguments raised on this blog yet.
Likewise, there is some degree of probability that I would survive standing unprotected underneath the Ares rocket as the first stage ignited. Philosophically I wouldn’t be justified in saying there would be a 0% likelihood of survival, but in mission parameter speak I would be completely okay with someone brutely stating it as such.
So, perhaps for the purposes of the philosophically inclined, there is some non-zero chance that one or more of the crew might survive a failure of the first stage of the Ares within the first minute of flight.
After all, from time to time people fall out of the sky without parachute, tumbling thousands of feet, and survive with severely broken bones and the like, or manage to hit trees on the way down or something.
Yay!
Maybe the mission reviewer should have stated it in terms of the planned probability of success of emergency escape mechanisms within the first minute after ignition.
DBrown
@Socraticsilence: Van Braun was a NAZI pig and he over saw the murder of hundreds of Jews directly. I will never call him anything but a lying, self serving monster that should always have details of his V-2 slave labor/death camp added to every NASA account of that animal. Please do not give that monster such credit – many other Nazi’ scientist aidded him as did the SS. What he did for NASA will always be a stain on their record as a it is a shame on all Americans. That animal should have been tried and sent (at least) to jail.
(Anyone who clams that that animal didn’t know needs to do their own work and learn history – the pig knew fully what was going on in the V-2 mfg. camp and he often stepped over his workers bodies to see progress on a current rocket; he also directly ordered longer work hours after visiting the death camp one time – this creature was a true Nazi in every sense of the word.)
Linkmeister
If Republicans can claim there’s $500B in waste and fraud in Medicare and they can fund health care by eliminating that, then I can claim there’s $50B a year in waste and fraud in the DOD budget and it should be reclaimed and diverted to NASA. And I actually think my claim is closer to the truth (see F-22 discussions).
Problem solved!
Comrade Kevin
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown
“Ha, Nazi schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun
You too may be a big hero
Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero
“In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun
mistermix
On Werhner Von Braun, if anyone’s at all interested, I highly recommend this biography:
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=isbn%3A9780307262929
The subtitle is “Dreamer of Space/Engineer of War” and it expresses the complexity of the guy’s character. I agree with DBraun that the death camps are glossed over in his NASA bio.
Egypt Steve
I’m all for space exploration. But one of the serious problems is that space-exploration proponents tend to have a romantic view of exploration, as a sort of spiritual quest that “all” human beings long to take. This ignores history. The “Age of Exploration” inaugurated by Columbus only succeeded because it was commercially successful: there was plenty of money to be made in mining for precious metals, or plantation agriculture, in the Americas. Colonies that were not commercial successes generally failed.
The Viking landings in Newfoundland are a case in point: the Vikings explored America briefly, but did not find anything there going back for. At the end of the day, Neil Armstrong was our Leif Erickson, not our Columbus. Until we land on the outer-space equivalent of Mexico and find the outer-space equivalent of lots and lots of gold and slaves, space travel is not going to become self-sustaining.
malraux
That and humans take up a lot more space. Plus all the air to breath and food to eat. Plus, with humans, you are really supposed to have a plan to bring them back, whereas with robots, it isn’t considered bad form to just leave them there. All of that makes the act of moving humans into space far more expensive than robots. Plus robots can take greater g forces, can hibernate until they are needed, etc.
That’s before all the extra testing that human rated equipment will need, plus redundancies.
john b
DougJ, please stick to talking about things you know about. which is probably something.
LD50
Not true. From the Viking perspective, Newfoundland had a LOT going for it. Lots of fish and game, plus a longer growing season than Iceland and Greenland, and a VAST amount of timber that they desperately needed. The reason they didn’t stay was because (a) it was too far away from Norway and Iceland to keep it supplied such that it could stay alive (too expensive to maintain, basically) and (b) lots of people already lived there (i.e., Native Americans), who didn’t share problem (a) above and who were rather ill-disposed to the Vikings, since the Vikings had murdered several of them in their first couple visits.
Read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, it’s all explained with marvelous clarity there.
LD50
@john b: Oh, snap!
DBrown
@mistermix: Your point is valid since they do say the LAS system.
Still, this is merely an engineering issue. Assuming no warning and using five seconds to get well clear of the field (350 meters using their data for that time/size of the debris field) we have (using x = 1/2 (accer.) (time) squared), the acceleration required to clear is: 1/2 (350m)/(5 sec)squared or the capsule would need an acceleration of 28m/s2 (about three g’s – a very low acceleration rate for people.) Of course there would be a delay before chute deployment but that would only add to the distance and allow the crew even more safety. I do believe that the Ares I system could be designed to achieve that level. So the issue is improving the system, not whether the Ares I design can not work.
As for fifteen g’s, yes, that is a lot but humans can endure that for a few seconds (blacking out) in a reclined position so such a super fast system is very acceptable if it is needed.
@El Cid: For them to state what they are saying would require far more detailed studies and proof. Their numbers may be correct (i.e. 99.x % and rounding is ok for the situation) but saying 100% is an absolute and should not be used in a technical paper – no matter what you say.
chrsux
Look, let’s grant that Wolfe’s views on Bush and Iraq were laughable. But equating the validity of his support for Bush with his arguments for manned space exploration is equally stupid. To me, von Braun’s contention that our sentience may be unique in the universe compels us to follow his advice and make every attempt to ensure that we no longer have all our eggs in one basket.
Robotic missions are certainly of great scientific value, but by themselves should not be seen as a proxy for the ultimate goal. Robots do not capture the imagination; humans do. When the last Mars rover mission first transmitted pictures from the surface, the only reaction it elicited from our president at the time (Clinton) was an idiotic reference to the movie “Independence Day.”
Jason
I’m really glad people are pushing so hard for NASA to fix the climate change problem on Mars. Boots on the ground, people.
Dave
NASA needs the power of the Word? WTF is Wolfe talking about? NASA needs Jesus now?
El Cid
@DBrown:
Technically the term “100%” was not used. If you go and look at the original source, it’s “~100%”, or “nearly” or “almost” 100%: “CAPSULE ~100%-FRATRICIDE ENVIRONMENTS: Estimate of Secondary Effects of the Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) Destruct Debris Environment on the Constellation Capsule (Illustrated with the TitanIV-A20 Destruct of Comparable SRBs, Propellant Mass, and comparable MET of ~40 sec)” (PDF of PowerPoint here):
B) CAPSULE ~100% FRATRICIDE by SECONDARY RADIATIVE WILTING of NYLON CHUTES
The capsule will not survive an abort between MET’s of ~30 and 60 seconds — as the capsule is engulfed until water-impact by solid propellant fragments radiating heat from 4,000F toward the nylon parachute material (with a melt-temperature of ~400F).
AhabTRuler
Sigh, No, it isn’t. It is a weight issue. The report covers a very narrow window of MET, and one has to know what the weight penalty is for beefing up the LAS to cover the situation. As always, an escape system can be designed, but the real question is can it be implemented.
mistermix
@DBrown: Check this out:
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2007/02/orion-las-to-be-less-harrowing-than-apollo/
The Apollo LAS, which pulled 6 G’s, is considered “too harrowing”. Never mind 15 G’s.
Returning to the original point of DougG’s post, when we begin with the premise that human spaceflight “on the cheap” is possible, and assume that we can “engineer around” all of the consequences of cost cutting, we’re running down the same slippery slope that led to the Shuttle disasters.
Brachiator
@malraux:
malraux and JimPortlandOR —
This is indeed the big question, and I wonder how the NASA planners have outlined possible solutions. A trip to Mars has to lift and transport astronauts and a huge amount of air, food and — most important of all — water. Enough cargo to get the astronauts to Mars, to provide for them during the planetary excursion, and enough to sustain them on the return to Earth. Then you have to shield the astronauts from radiation and overcome the negative effects of micro-gravity on their bodies (and prevent the loss of bone density).
Then you also have to provide for human emergencies that would happen even if you weren’t travelling to Mars. What if an astronaut gets seriously ill or requires surgery? What if an astronaut dies as a result of an accident or even from natural causes?
At least one crew member would have to be a surgeon, and you would also have to take along a mini-MASH unit in equivalent equipment. I don’t even want to think about what micro-gravity surgery might be like (or low gravity surgery if procedures have to be performed on the planet surface).
And if you have a mixed gender crew, the possibility of sex in space would be an additional issue. For all kinds of reasons.
The Viking landings in Newfoundland, mentioned in another post here, comes into play as well.
A Mars voyage is the Newfoundland problem multiplied by a million. You could not reasonably re-supply a Mars expedition from Earth, so everything that they need has to be provided for up front. And redundantly.
The costs would be enormous. And this is not even considering any scientific equipment that you might want to take along as well.
AhabTRuler
For those interested in such things, I recommend the <a href=”http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/298870main_SP-2008-565.pdf”?Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report, which is the most explicit (not medically) treatment of the interaction between the craft, the crew, and the environment in the immediate (ms) and intermediate (ms-mins.) elapsed time after an accident.
Many would argue that the problems that led to both shuttle accidents would continue to exist within NASA even were it to have an essentially unlimited budget, as it is rooted in the culture and management of the organization.
Vaughn’s >The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA deals with the issue, although not everyone agrees with her conclusions.
Ryan Cunningham
@mistermix:
Not just that, the human “computer” brain is extremely fragile. A robot doesn’t have to worry about cosmic rays. All this “Let’s just go to Mars already! It’s the next logical step!” business is failing to account for a very basic problem:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7753-cosmic-rays-may-prevent-longhaul-space-travel.html
anonevent
What are we doing as a country right now? Worrying about whether we’re going to be able to afford to pay for our next flat screen TV. This is not how we build a country that is going to be ready for the next 100 years. As we can tell right now, telling everyone that we need people to go into science and engineering jobs just goes in one ear and out the other. Americans are myop: The jobs that make the most money right now are the ones people are willing to go into; forget about any skill that requires a long commitment beforehand. The only way you will get Americans to do engineering jobs again is a major war, or a major project, forcing the pay in engineering and science jobs up. The depressing part is that the only way we’ll do any kind of collective major project is if some other country forces our hand.
Nellcote
More and better Hubble Telescopes please.
DBrown
@mistermix: You make good points but do not understand what they are saying – ‘too harrowing’ is not more than PR. Any average healthy 27 year old with an hour of training can endure six g’s. So your point is ‘blowing smoke’ to quote you.
Now lets look at the Air Force study with clear eyes.
Lets say you need to get to 200 mph (or 293 ft/sec) like you said (not true but what would that be in g’s?) Assume you have only one second (way over kill but lets see the numbers) to do that. Then we have velocity equals acceleration times time ( v = at) or 293 ft/sec/ 1sec = 293 ft/sec2 or (one g = 32 ft/sec2) or 9.1 g’s. This is very easy to endure for a few seconds by trained people lying down (I have experienced 7 g’s for three seconds while sitting up.)
Still, the LAS achieves only 6 g’s but burns for a few seconds (NASA does not give that value but we can use current values for small solid boosters). From the Air Force data you need only about one thousand feet to be fully clear by their photo’s but lets make it 4000 feet to be fully clear. To do this in about five seconds (the fire ball progresses to less than 100 meters (300 or so ft) in that time using their photo’s!) Then at six g’s for the solid booster escape value you would achieve 4800 ft of distance between the capsule and booster in five seconds. A very easy to achieve rate that the current Launch Abort System (LAS) to achieve.
I note that the Air Force shows the Ares capsule always within 400 ft of the booster. SO either NASA does not use the Appollo class system and is lying or the Air Force did not, in fact, use the LAS data. After seeing their data, I do not see ANY details on the LAS nor see the added velocities or distances such a system would add (why?) – in fact, all the details that might prove they really did the calculations are missing – must be a top secret data that the Air Force is hidding to prevent NASA from learning the truth.
tcolberg
@DBrown: What’s more, if the external tank hadn’t been there, the O-ring leak on the SRB wouldn’t have been a problem. Further, if the shuttle had an escape system like the one we have on Ares I, the crew would have lived.
If the new NASA chief could get the balls to do it, he should scrap the Ares I launcher for a better platform, perhaps incorporating the new escape system NASA just tested.
Also, DBrown, the Ares I system is maxed out. They would improve the abort system, but the rocket is already beyond its weight budget. That’s why we need a better platform.
As for those of you complaining about “doing it on the cheap”, that’s what happens when you get Bush issuing an order to do an extensive manned program without increasing the budget of an already underfunded program. How about we fund it properly? Then we could have the robots and the manned exploration.
Human space exploration isn’t a neocon-only enterprise.
The Tim Channel
Plenty of other ways to die besides explosion at liftoff, so I don’t think the argument is worthwhile. Computers and robotics are now advanced enough to undertake much of the project.
Not against manned missions if there is some point to it. What is the point again?
Enjoy.
MikeJ
And if the crew had been a a robot we would have just built another one.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
From the WSJ article linked for his views on GWB:
George Bush’s appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his “great decisiveness and willingness to fight.” But as to “this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say–‘Fools like you!’ . . . But then they catch themselves, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.’
Really? The majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.
(Sometimes I’m even one myself, although rarely with such horrific consequences as enabling GWB in his efforts to gut this country.)
Fencedude
You can definitely tell who’s engineer’s here and who isn’t.
While the ~100% fatality rate for a failure is a scaaaaaary number, its meaningless without knowing WHAT THE CHANCE OF A FAILURE IS.
If its 100% chance of death for something that may happen .001% of the time…well, I can think of things that we do every day that are riskier than that.
malraux
Nope, its fuel for the return trip. Plus the fuel on the way there to carry the fuel for the return trip. Plus you need the fuel to take off from the surface of mars, plus the fuel to carry that fuel. The rocket fuel problem is really huge. And of course having to lift all that fuel from the surface of the earth to either be assembled in space, or a lift off directly.
DBrown
@tcolberg: I agree with you on the o-ring issue but have no data on the LAS so I will take your word for it. As such, could you supply me with this information? I am currently working on a manned Mars mission white paper to propose to NASA and could use such information (my system accounts for full radiation protection, all fuel and supplies, fully shielded Mars habitat and return rocket for a crew of four at a mass of under three hundred tons (for launch from LEO.)) Also, I do it with existing hardware (but plug my new super cermet.)
Egypt Steve
@LD50:
I admit I left what may be a crucial word out of my post: meant to write “anything *worth* going back for.” And that’s an economic calculation. As you say:
e (a) it was too far away from Norway and Iceland to keep it supplied such that it could stay alive (too expensive to maintain, basically.
Which is exactly my point. Just because there were desirable things in North America, it was not *worth* the trouble to try to get them — the overhead was way in excess of the potential benefit. And that’s the issue with Mars exploration, or manned exploration generally. The profits have to exceed the cost for the enterprise to ever, so to speak, take off on a permanent basis.
El Cid
FWIW, NASA is also testing a variant crew escape system from the LAS called the MLAS (“Max Launch Abort System”), which you can read about at NASA or on Wikipedia.
The July 8 test was reportedly successful.
Perhaps improvements on the LAS are reasonable to pursue.
El Cid
Are they soliciting white papers on this?
Paul MacDonald
So, going to Mars with humans instead of robots is a bad idea because it’s expensive and dangerous? Those, to me, don’t seem to be a good enough reasons. Nearly all of our advances as human beings have been both expensive and dangerous. Those that weren’t expensive were dangerous and vice versa.
A manned mission to Mars with an eventual permanent base is, quite honestly, a darned exciting idea. Without goals, what are we? I’d rather be a starry eyed optimist that supports a project that will make science cool, as opposed to more of the same negativity. There was a time when it was “don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.”
And no, there is no computer that rivals the human brain. They haven’t made one that is on par with that of an ant yet.
Badtux
A solid fuel rocket anywhere near a human being is a recipe for disaster. It was a disaster when used for the Space Shuttle, and it will be a disaster if used for Ares. A solid fuel rocket premixes the oxidizer and fuel together, meaning that if the rocket explodes, it is truly a disaster because they keep burning in a cloud of particles. If a liquid-fueled rocket explodes, on the other hand, combustion almost immediately stops because the oxidizer and fuel are no longer being mixed together in a stoichiometric ratio.
The Ares I first stage is a disaster in the making, and this needs to be stopped immediately. We know how to build good liquid-fueled rockets. If we don’t, the Russians certainly do. Solid fueled rockets simply have no business being anywhere around human beings who are trying to make it into space without turning into itty bitty little chunks of pink mist.
DBrown
@El Cid: No, but why should that stop you? Various NASA sites have people working in related fields so you can try looking at their site maps and try calling those people – these guys are often very interested and friendly if you know about their subject (i.e. do your homewok first – read all the papers they publish/co-publish and have information to add!) I once was invited and gave a talk to a NASA group at one of their centers on a shuttle related tpoic (went well but not what they wanted.) If I can do this, so can you but you had better know your shi … topic well. Thats all I can say with so little to go on by your post.
mistermix
@Fencedude: Hey, I’m an engineer, and here’s my conclusion about the 100% (or 99.999%) probability of fratricide on stage 1 failure: why have an escape system? Let’s just assume that a stage 1 failure isn’t survivable and then make a decision about whether using a solid stage 1 in human spaceflight reasonable.
My take is that it isn’t, but perhaps others think it’s OK to let human beings take that kind of risk.
PaminBB
“When the last Mars rover mission first transmitted pictures from the surface, the only reaction it elicited from our president at the time (Clinton) was an idiotic reference to the movie “Independence Day.””
Uh, the Mars Rovers A and B were launched in 2003, arrival 2004. They are still transmitting, albeit with some issues. Pretty good value.
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/home/index.html
malraux
Well that and the payoffs aren’t necessarily all that great. We aren’t going to find anything there that could possibly justify mineral extraction. Sure we will learn a bunch about the development of mars, and practical engineering about how to fly people to mars, but nothing that will teach us about how to address global warming, water wars, health care, etc.
Fencedude
@mistermix:
I largely agree, but I haven’t been heavily following the Ares stuff so I’m not really clear on all the details. But my point still stands, you can’t just state that a failure is going to have a 100% fatality rate but not give the probability of a failure.
El Cid
@Fencedude: If it’s your focus at the moment to work on the escape mechanism, it doesn’t matter what the probability of failure is — it’s your job to design a functional crew escape system on the assumption that there is a condition of failure.
I’m sure, though, the other teams are very much working on systems issues including probabilities of failure.
Badtux
Regarding the LAS booster and the parachutes: Yes, the LAS lifts the capsule at 6G upwards. However: *THE FIREBALL EXTENDS UPWARDS TOO* in a cloud that expands as fast as, or faster than, the LAS can lift. With a liquid-fueled booster the fireball would dissipate rapidly because the oxidizer and fuel are no longer being mixed together in a stoichiometric ratio and the reduced rate of oxidation would result in the flames being quenched via loss of heat. But there is NO SUCH LIMIT with solid fuel, which has oxidizer and fuel already combined in a stoichiometric ratio. The net effect is that the parachute would deploy, and get burned up by the particles of solid fuel that accompanied the capsule upwards.
Solid-fueled boosters have no business being anywhere near a manned space capsule, just as large quantities of hydrazine has no business being anywhere near a manned space capsule (there is a *reason* why Russia never launched human beings on Proton, despite the fact that it’ll lift twice as much to orbit as the kerosene-fueled Soyuz).
Napoleon
Tom Wolfe is a real right winger.
That aside a perfect example of the logic of those pushing for manned programs like this was on perfect display in a podcast I was listening to as biking today. It was NPR’s Science Friday on the 40th anniversary of the moon launch and Ira Flatow (see link below for guest) and I kid you not one of them gave as a reason that we have to do a Mars mission is that if people like the Chinese or North Koreans did it first the future of freedom on Earth would be in question. That is totally insane (if the Soviets had beat us to the moon my money is on there would still be no USSR today).
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200907171
Fencedude
@El Cid:
Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean people using it as a “look this won’t work!” point can ignore that value.
Personally I support moving away from multi-stage rockets anyway, so I’m not exactly jumping for joy over Ares or anything.
DBrown
@Fencedude: As tcolbert pointed out, without a fuel tank right next to the leaking solid booster, no rocket would exploded in such a large fire ball. While the Ares I does have an upper stage (LH2/LOX) that tank is not in danger from a leaking solid booster. The Air Force pic’s are of a Titan IV rocket explosion – that is the main tank exploding after the solid booster started the process (a leak or explosion – they do not say), not the solid booster just by itself exploding. The Ares I can not suffer such an accident and even if its solid booster somehow exploded, there is no extra tank full of LOX and hydrogen right next to it to create such a massive explosion. The Air Force is full of shit since their pics are of a fully fueled Titan IV going up in fire. They are trying to pull a fast one and I fell for it as did a number of others.
mark
“So, going to Mars with humans instead of robots is a bad idea because it’s expensive and dangerous? Those, to me, don’t seem to be a good enough reasons.”
If the goal is to do science, which I believe it should be, then it should be clear to everyone that way, way more science can be done with rovers and obiters — orders of magnitude more science. Talk to some people involved in planetary science. They want data, not footprints.
What next after Mars? Land a person on Mercury, Venus or Jupiter? Think about why those are moronic, and you may have some insight into why many people think sending meat-based lifeforms to Mars is foolish.
Mike in NC
I’m guessing this annoying factoid wasn’t included in the one-page Executive Summary somebody prepared for Dubya to read. But having the attention span of a puppy, he decided instead to liberate the Middle East.
Anonymouse
Not sure if this was mentioned but the Shuttle has NO crew escape mechanism, for the obvious reason that the crew compartment and the main engines are part of the same gigantic vehicle. So, the period of time during liftoff where major failures would be fatal is much longer with the Shuttle than with any previous manned launcher or with the Ares system, and in general the ability to detach from the launcher in the case of failure is much more limited.
On top of that is the massive extra danger that comes from re-entry with an enormous spacecraft covered in heat-shielding tiles rather than a small capsule with a one-piece heat shield.
Any manned rocket system is likely to have some period of time during which a major system failure will be deadly. The question is, how likely are those failures, and how long is that period of time? A few-second window where failure is deadly may be worth it if the solid-rocket boosters are so much more reliable than a hydrogen-oxygen rocket that the overall chance of a deadly failure is smaller.
From what I know the SRBs are pretty simple and safe, and there are good reason to decrease the complexity of the launchpad systems by removing or reducing the amount of liquid-fuelling that has to happen just before launch. (But I certainly would want the safest possible system. I just have a hard time thinking that NASA is putting together a launch system that they don’t know is safe. Then again, they did invent the Shuttle…)
Dennis-SGMM
@Mike in NC:
Executive Summary:
“Pretending that we’re going to Mars will keep the tree-huggers from spending any money on satellites to monitor the climate.”
Bush: “Mars, bitches!”
DougJ
I kid you not one of them gave as a reason that we have to do a Mars mission is that if people like the Chinese or North Koreans did it first the future of freedom on Earth would be in question.
I’m not that surprised to hear that kind of reasoning.
georgia pig
I’m not against space exploration per se, but I fail to see why human exploration of space requires humans to actually get into spacecraft. All this “no guts, no glory” shit regarding manned flight is idiotic macho posturing. Per comments above, it eventually has to be economically viable to make any sense in the long run. Yeah, we went to the moon to prove that large scale aerospace engineering can be done. Been there, done that, doesn’t mean you want to do it that way in the future. Von Braun used astronauts because the on-board computers of his era were pathetically weak. They were horribly unreliable and couldn’t even do their own navigational computations, let alone any mission tasks. Most of the control systems on the spacecraft were still analog. That was a long damn time ago. To use von Braun’s approach for future exploration would be akin to having a horse pull your BMW.
If the long term goal is sustainability for humans, why not focus on trying to build a human-sustaining environment on Mars (or Titan or whatever) first? For example, rather than sending a couple of people to fuck around and hit golf balls on Mars to see how far they carry, try to create a robotic colony that mines materials, purifies and stores water, gathers and stores energy and builds other robots and other devices, with the ultimate goal being to have robots fabricate habitable structures and other facilities for humans before we ever think of going there. The spinoffs from that would be mind-boggling. Frankly, I don’t see how it will ever be useful to have humans in space if we can’t do that, as it takes billions of dollars, elaborate procedures and massive chemical rockets right now for a couple of guys fumbling around in space suits to replace a couple of modules in a satellite. Trying to haul all our crap from here to Mars is ludicrous.
But yuks like Krauthammer and Wolfe are not real engineers, and don’t have to deal with real technical issues. Rather, they get to bust a nut in public while making everyone else watch. Bottom line, this latest space exploration craze among neocons is yet another masturbatory fantasy, yet another reason not to do real things like fixing the healthcare delivery system or addressing climate change.
Brachiator
@malraux:
Good point. But again, the fuel for the voyage back is also carrying a payload, which includes the astronauts, their gear, etc., and food and water.
Even if you had to abort the mission at some point and turn around and come back prematurely, even though you might be able to jettison a lot of stuff, you got to be able to feed the ship (fuel) and feed the crew (food and water).
Actually, I wonder about this. We learned a lot about climate change by studying Venus. There may be much that we can learn about the Earth by studying the other planets and other bodies in our solar system. The question is whether this is best done with human explorers or with robots.
No, it’s that it may be prohibitively expensive and impractical compared to using robots.
Consider the challenge of maintaining a research station in Antarctica. During part of the year, the station is totally inaccessible from anywhere else on the planet. The problem of getting a human crew to Mars safely, maintaining them, and then safely getting them back to Earth is many orders of magnitude a greater problem.
Richard Bottoms
Peanuts as far as the overall budget is concerned.
If Obama can whack the economy and get unemployment down to 6 or 7% he’ll do Mars in his second term.
LD50
Dude, there are ways to capture the imagination that don’t cost a trillion dollars.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/log/
This is a log of all missions to Mars. Of 39 total, 24 have been partial or total failures. Limiting ourselves to just U.S. missions of the last twenty years, four out of eleven have been failures. Sending people to Mars is not only vastly more expensive than the Moon, it’s vastly more complicated and dangerous. In fact, certain problems, such as the radiation people would be exposed to on a mission to Mars, might be beyond our ability to solve no matter how much money is thrown at it.
LD50
North Korea will set up a base on the Moon or Mars right around the same time that Albania does it.
Besides, if China wanted to destroy America, they have a million financial ways they could do it that would be vastly easier.
LD50
It’s so cute when a wealthy writer with a PhD from an Ivy League university bashes liberals by posturing as Mister Common Man.
Obama won by a much bigger margin than Bush ever did — does this mean that Tom now attacks Republicans as being out of touch with Joe Six Pack?
Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question.
anonevent
“I’m sorry dear, I just don’t see any financial benefit in marrying you. I realize that the emotional rewards might be great, but I just can’t get by the long term costs and the possibility of failure. Here’s a vibrator instead.”
Anne Laurie
Bingo. In our devoutly capitalist system, we can and do put a price on everything — freedom, motherhood, apple pie, human organs. Anybody who uses the phrase “you can’t put a price on… “ is lying. They’ve calculated (or at least estimated) the price of their shiny new trophy, and it’s higher than they think you’re willing to pay, so they’re spewing ‘magic totem’ words to cloud the issue.
I am in favor of further space exploration. I am NOT, at present, in favor of further “manned” space exploration — and one reason I’m solidly anti-astronaut is that the pro-astronaut people keep using dishonesty-indicators like “you can’t put a price on”. Tell me the price is worth paying, tell me you’ve found ways to cut the price, tell me you’ve found the money to do it without destroying programs (lives) that are more important to me. But anybody who pulls out the “you can’t put a price on” mantra has just announced that he’s gonna start lying to me — and why would I trust someone who starts his pitch by announcing he’s lying to me?
LD50
The problem with this analogy is that few marriages have ‘longterm costs’ of over a trillion dollars with the ‘possibility of failure’ in the form of dying in an explosion or cancer in a few years.
Then imagine if before you even tried to *pay* this trillion dollars, you’d already taken out a thousand credit cards and maxed out all of them.
Nazgul35
As a very strong supporter of the space program, I have been alarmed by the calls of people like Buzz Aldrin and Wolfe to go to Mars for some stupid ass flag waving ceremony.
I actually think that space exploration and exploitation is important for the survival of the species. The pursuit of single nation penis measuring contests should be over and a united world space agency should be developed.
Also, why, once you escape one gravity hole would you want to put yourself down another? Most of the costs asscoiated with the space program deal with escaping Earth’s gravity well. Once we escape it, why in the universe would we want to drop down another onto Mars?
It makes sense to go to the Moon…it makes sense to build orbiting habitats…it makes sense to develop the technology to extract resources from the asteroid belts and prevent collisions with objects hurtling towards Earth…
Use robots for exploration of the outer solar system, use people to help us build the infrastructure in Earth’s orbit to slowly expand outward as technology and budgets allow.
kth
Let’s just go to Mars–because it’s there? Hard to believe I’m reading this here (albeit in the comments, not the OP), sounds more like something you’d hear from Jonah Goldberg, or maybe a war-machine libertarian like Glenn Reynolds.
Mike in NC
Read today where poor old Buzz has a history of alcoholism and depression, plus a new book out (surprise!), so he needs a pet cause to plug…
anonevent
@Anne Laurie: I fight with people all the time whose tolerance of risk is lower than mine, including family members. My first job out of the Navy was deemed riskier by my wife and father. Instead of taking a job with Motorola in San Marcos, where I would have worked as a technician – which they thought was less risky – I took a job with a small programming firm in Dallas. Since then, my programming skills have allowed me to find jobs where a lot of manufacturing plants, including the one in San Marcos, are closed.
I would also say that, no, you can’t always put a price on risk. That’s partially the purpose of Wall Street, to try to put a price on risk, and allow people to make a profit for taking a risk. But you can’t price everything. If you could, then there wouldn’t be any point to trying to provide health care for everyone. We would provide cancer treatment based on what you possible future value to society would be, which by definition would be the rich. I’m a liberal, not a capitalist.
I generally hate going back through history, but if I remember correctly, a lot of colonists made the same risk arguments when a few of them wanted to rebel against England. Once the Stamp Act was repealed, we could have gone back to just being colonies. Just think of how much safer that would have been.
But lets play the game. Is it worth spending a lot of money and risking human lives to send people into space, to colonize the Moon and Mars? As for the money, I say yes, for the following reasons: It puts money in peoples hands for learning things like engineering, science, and medicine. Those fields will be expanded, although probably at the expense of MBAs. As for peoples lives, going to Mars or testing the next skin cream product seems like an obvious choice to me, and, ultimately
Do we put someone on top of a rocket tomorrow? No. But we can set goals to achieve that would make it possible, and would make this place better. New power supplies used to operate elsewhere would be useful here. New materials would be developed that would find their use on earth.
Ultimately, I see it as worth the risk and the effort. What I do realize is that major progress on this will take some up front investment that a single company cannot make. It will take a nation.
Montysano
@Persia:
Or universal healthcare? I’ve never heard such negativity and defeatism.
Comrade Kevin
@anonevent:
So you’re one of the ones I mentioned earlier, who wants to do it so he can sit in front of the TV and chant “USA! USA!”.
anonevent
@LD50: At the same time, a difference between a marriage and the government is that a large part of the money spent by the government ultimately feeds back into the government coffers via taxes.
Bob Munck
If he manages that, I’ll expect him to build a space elevator in his second term.
Rockets are wrong.
srv
“first Shuttle catastrophe was caused by failure of one of the solid rocket boosters. ”
No. The Challenger disaster was caused by arrogance bordering on negligent homicide. And that’s how many at JSC would put it kindly. An SRB is not flawed because it is flown outside of its operating limitations.
The Ares-1 design is stupid, because it is a works program designed to reuse an existing skill and production base. But there isn’t reason to believe a properly designed SRB first stage is inherently much more dangerous than a chemical first stage with the same requirements.
El Cid
What if we just sent Republicans to Mars? Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the cost of protecting humans.
srv
@WMass: “Keep in mind that with solid rockets “fuck up” means massive explosion.”
Challenger’s SRBs did not explode. In fact, both SRBs remained intact even after being subjected to the 1+ Kt explosion of the shuttle tank and having various O-ring leaks.
tcolberg
@malraux: I’ve heard various proposals about sending a return vehicle ahead of the astronauts to plop down on Mars and start making fuel for the return trip.
@Nazgul35: I’m very interested in sending people on a mission to intercept an asteroid. It would be more productive than a return trip to the moon. I don’t subscribe to flag-waiving, golf-ball hitting missions; I support human exploration because it’s part of expanding the future possibilities of the species, just like preventing global warming and expanding education.
Orbiting habitats would also be o.k., but I think they present larger issues for long-term habitation.
@Anne Laurie: But there is value in refining our ability to support life in space and other planetary bodies. It’s not going to get cheaper if we don’t keep developing our skills and technology. Also, why would this exploration be at the expense of programs that are important to you?
We’re spending nearly a trillion dollars each year on discretionary defense spending and only $18 billion a year on NASA — surely it’s not NASA that’s keeping the US government from addressing other major problems facing us?
@LD50: We might fail at preventing global warming, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anyway. Except with rockets and astronauts, you just learn from your mistakes, build another one, train another crew and try again. Space is a dangerous place, we can’t be afraid to get our noses a little bloody.
@DBrown: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/98xx/doc9886/NASA_Letter.3.1.shtml Look under the heading : “Risks to the Timely Completion of Ares 1 and Orion”.
@georgia pig: You’re right, we should be looking at a long-term plan for further exploration. Mars should be done with significant robotic preparation, e.g. fuel production and habitat building (such as digging tunnels.
As for chemical rockets, we’re not going to get better methods of propulsion as long as we’re hamstrung by low budgets and anti-nuclear groups. Someone mentioned mass drivers, which hold potential in the future, but at the moment they would be extremely costly (afaik they need to be several hundred miles long in order to keep the g-forces within a reasonable range).
@Badtux: I would prefer a launch system based on the EELV series or the DIRECT proposal. Or even better, try developing a nuclear lightbulb. But at least, the SSRBs have so far been fairly reliable.
@Fencedude: Single stage to orbit has some advantages, and has been tried, but presents very high technical problems.
AhabTRuler
Hey, if we are trying to be accurate:
The Space Shuttle did not “blow-up,” the Shuttle Main Tank disintegrated after the SRB, leaking exhaust through one of it’s field joint o-rings, burned through the lower strut holding the SRB to the Main Tank. The SRB then proceeded to rotate around the upper strut, penetrating the intertank area and causing the failure of the LH2 and LOX tanks. This caused the propellents to expand in a vapor cloud which did combust (along with hypergolic fuels stored on the orbiter, providing the orange tint to the cloud), but did not detonate .
This in turn exposed the OV to extreme aerodynamic forces, as it was ejected into the airstream in an unstable orientation. The orbiter itself eventually failed due to the extreme aerodynamic loading, and broke up into several large pieces, including the crew compartment, SSME’s, and wing/fuselage pieces.
There had been an observable pattern of erosion and burning of O-rings on previous shuttle launches, although NASA experience with cold weather launches was few. However, the conclusion that the o-rings would behave poorly in low temperatures was not a difficult one to reach and conformed with existing data; some engineers did try to raise concerns. The air temp was expected to be within the safe operating range for the shuttle system and the o-rings, however this did not take into account the lag in heating inside the booster and that parts of the shuttle shielded from the sun would warm at a slower rate. This meant that the o-rings were colder than managers expected, and when the stack (shuttle, tank, and SRB’s) flexed (due to asymmetric thrust caused by the ignition sequence of the engines and boosters), the o-rings were unable to expand fast enough to prevent the blow-by of hot exhaust gases and began the fatal process.
Both Charles Perrow and Diane Vaughn take different views as to the organizational reasons as to why warnings were ignored (even long prior to the fateful launch), and I am sure that others have their own ideas. What is generally agreed, however, is that the failure of the o-rings was merely a symptom of the flaws in the STS and NASA’s organization.
LD50
@El Cid: I’m disappointed that no one has suggested landing on the Sun at night.
Fax Paladin
Fighting the very strong urge to type fervent all-caps imprecations here…
First off: If Bush really wanted to send people to the moon and Mars, he would have offered enough funding to do it. It’s fairly plain that his actual intention was to kill NASA with kindness, starving Earth sciences to fund something well after his time that he was quite confident would never actually become reality.
Second: Ares is a horrible vehicle, designed by politicians instead of engineers in order to keep the current shuttle contractors employed — and it’s not even the best way to do that. A far better, and cheaper, approach would be Jupiter/DIRECT, which actually lets us use existing hardware (as Ares was originally supposed to do) and doesn’t have the pogoing problem Ares does (which will require an ever more expensive fix). Another much cheaper approach would be to human-rate Atlas or Delta.
Third: As a lifelong procrastinator, I can tell you — if you keep putting something off to a better time, it’ll never get done. The long-term survival of humanity depends on on our getting our eggs into more than one basket, and we won’t be up for that marathon unless we start taking the baby steps now. Ideally it will be an international effort. This shouldn’t be about dickwaving or shouting “USA! USA!” This should be about our future as a species.
And if it is about getting eggs into more than one basket, it doesn’t make sense to burn the original one. We need to take care of this world as well; even once we start colonizing, for a long while the vast majority of humanity will still be here.
Delia
You know where a lot of the emotional drive to go to Mars comes from? It comes from Star Trek. All these people who are secretly hoping we will finally grow up and become the wise, wonderful Federation of Planets led by Earth once we discover the Vulcans, the Klingons, and the whole rest of the gang. As well as warpspeed, of course. And we have to go to Mars first or none of this lovely future will ever happen and we’ll all just be left to live with our own stupid selves, same as always, and we’ll never figure out how to grow up.
Viva BrisVegas
NASA is never going to have enough money to do what is being required of it. There is a desperate need to internationalise the space program along the lines of the IMF.
After all what is the point of the Japanese, European or even the Russian space programs? Lots of third tier nations with space inclinations, such as Australia and Brazil, currently have no real prospect of a space program outside of such an organisation.
This of course requires the US to share, something it has never been very good at. There are of course bureaucratic downsides, just as there currently are with NASA, but is going it alone into space in the 21st Century really an option for the US?
Badtux
Range safety is the major issue if you’re launching near heavily populated areas, which is why the solid booster first stage would need a detonation charge to blow it up if e.g. a section sprung a leak and started pushing the whole assembly sideways in an unpredictable manner — possibly towards a populated area. You’d need explosive charges on the casing to split it open so that you no longer have a jet effect pushing the assembly in a direction you don’t want it to go, which in turn would fragment and ignite the fuel. Nobody hypothesizes that a solid booster is going to blow up all by itself, but you have to be able to blow it up if you’re going to launch near a populated area, because remember, unlike a liquid-fueled rocket, you can’t turn off a solid-fueled rocket once you start it burning.
So basically, the only place safe to launch the thing, if you can’t blow up the first stage because the fragments would melt the parachute of the escape module as it’s wafting downwards, would be the middle of the ocean. Then it would go whatever direction it wanted to go and eventually burn out and splash down, and your crew module would be nice and safe. But launching from Cape Canaveral is definitely a no-go if you can’t have a destruct on the solid booster…
El Cid
@LD50: I was thinking winter would be better.
El Cid
This is a completely subjective aspect, but I’m not sure that I’d find a Mars mission so much more dramatic — isn’t it basically a much, much longer, more difficult version of the Moon landing?
I think I’d find a Moon base more inspiring. Or a complex multi-robot mission to look for life on the various Jupiter / Saturn moons which may have it.
tcolberg
@El Cid: I don’t know what a moon base would offer above a Mars base, especially since there seems to be very little in terms of immediately usable resources there (e.g. water ice). Off the top of my head, the usefulness of a moon base is contained to solar power, astronomy, helium-3, deep space communications, and minerals. The big problem with the moon is that the regolith dust is extremely abrasive and could cause unexpectedly high maintenance issues.
I don’t quite understand why a Moon base would be more inspiring than a Mars base. We could be going to another planet! Though, as I’ve said before, I’m open to other alternatives.
forked tongue
Tom Wolfe gave a blurb to the Pantload. Why anyone would take him seriously after that escapes me.
malraux
No, there’s no coming back early. Travel between the earth and mars depends on a specific arrangement of the planets. IIRC, after the launch from earth, its a 6 month travel time to mars, then a year and a half before mars is in the position to launch toward earth again, taking 6 months to return.* So even if something goes wrong, you must continue to fly to mars, wait there for a long time, then have the long flight back.
*: This assumes you are going for minimal energy expenditure. But even varying that to a large degree is really really expensive in terms of energy, requiring rockets that we just don’t have right now; unless Obama wants to go for an orion drive.
El Cid
@tcolberg:
It’s a great deal more accessible, and NASA right now is following up on earlier detections of polar water ice with the LCROSS satellite, currently in action.
tcolberg
@El Cid: Ah, I just went to find some more recent data since the information you linked to from the Clementine mission was a bit old. I had been operating under the impression that recent satellites had scanned those shadowed craters and found no evidence of ice. If there were water ice on the Moon, you would definitely be right that a Moon base would be valuable and possible. But it does hinge heavily on the presence of that ice. Hopefully LCROSS will give us conclusive results.
It certainly would be easier to get to the Moon if there were ice, but take a look at the regolith abrasion issue.
rachel
@anonevent:
I wish my brother had said to his shortly-to-be-former wife before they married; it would have spared him a great deal of money and heartache to have realized that they were fundamentally incompatable from the beginning (him being a saver and her being a squanderer).
Justin
How about putting a tether into orbit, connected to a ground station by a massive cable? Send it up, send the cable down, and run supplies up the tether on an attached lift.
** Atanarjuat **
DougJ, it looks like you’ve discovered your niche on BJ with your series of anti-manned space exploration posts. There certainly are a lot of people in agreement with your stance, if the comments are anything to go by.
Perhaps you could write a short essay on why the Amish lifestyle is the ideal humanity should aspire to, because, you know, wanting to send human beings to Mars is just waving our gargantuan Space Monolith Penis — or something.
Earth First!
-A
Paul MacDonald
@malraux
Well that and the payoffs aren’t necessarily all that great. We aren’t going to find anything there that could possibly justify mineral extraction. Sure we will learn a bunch about the development of mars, and practical engineering about how to fly people to mars, but nothing that will teach us about how to address global warming, water wars, health care, etc.
You know all these things because? This irritates me moreso than most of the naysaying seen here.
As far as I’m concerned, the point is to eventually colonize Mars. The information garnered will more than adequately address Global Warming, Water Shortages and Health Care. There will be people forced to live within their means in a hostile environment. What new things will come from it?
You would have volunteers for a Mars mission like nothing seen before. It wouldn’t matter if 25% of the missions were abject failures. The adventure is what it’s all about.
MBunge
A facinating undercurrent of this debate is people’s view of our planet and our society. The folks arguing FOR manned space flight and colonies on other planets seem to be wishing for a new and different way of life. The folks arguing AGAINST those things seem to be content with the way things basically are. Oh, they might want better health care or better environmental policy, but they’re happy with the idea of Man never being anything more than ants crawling around a single ball of dirt.
Mike
itsbenj
The idea of a manned mission to Mars is beyond useless. It would be a stupid, massive waste of money, and achieve nothing useful. We’ve got rovers there already. I’m with whoever suggested more and better telescopes. More and better space exploration vehicles.
But a manned mission to Mars is something we should only do if we want to spend a TON of money watching a handful of people die in outer-space.
Martian Buddy
“Pay no attention to the fact that I’m citing the opinion of a man who’s been dead for 32 years to dismiss the current state of the art in computers and robotics. And ignore those pesky Mars rovers that have been sending us data for the last 5 years. Also.”
DanF
If we were in good economic times, I’d be all for the manned exploration option if for no other reason than the research dollars and technological off-shoots that would result from that type of problem solving. As it is, we need health care and jobs.
Paul MacDonald
It depends where your priorities are. It’s odd that a self professed fiscal conservative (me) would be for spending vast sums of money on what may well be a pipe dream. There is long term gain to be had, should this be successful. Whilst, what I assume are progressives, are demanding that the status-quo be upheld.
Oh, here’s one that I still hear all the time when there’s some spiffy new initiative that requires money be spent: It’s the price of a cup of coffee a day (for everyone, in the world, but hey). A cup of coffee? Surely, people can go without for a greater purpose.
Odd, isn’t it, that people have no problem finding money for their pet projects.
4jkb4ia
Thank you for noting fabulous article.
4jkb4ia
That Darwin crack was the worst thing about the article. But Wolfe has a point that people merrily accept and stretch the idea of evolution who have no scientific training and have not thought about the evidence for evolution. Scientific concepts that get out into the general public have the power of metaphor, which point was enhanced by the cover story about “The Age Of Wonder” in the Book Review that day. So the idea would be that you need the metaphor which would take the idea of going to Mars out of the SF ghetto where it has lived for 80 years.
4jkb4ia
@georgia pig:
But as I said to my husband last night, the idea of sending even one person to Mars, not to mention terraforming Mars the way you are talking about, is such a long-term idea that it could very well be a liberal project, i.e. the innovative jobs program which Obama may have to introduce in the near future.
Dr. Morpheus
I completely agree with Paul MacDonald MBunge. The Flatearther arguments are the same old series of fallacies that always pop up whenever space exploration (manned or not) is discussed:
1. False dilemmas; e.g., “we shouldn’t/can’t spend money on space exploration until the whole world is a Utopia” or it’s weaker corollary, “spending the money on space exploration means we won’t have health care!”
2. Mind Reading; e.g., “you just want to wave your big dicks around and shout ‘USA!’, ‘USA!”
3. Nirvana Fallacy; “Human beings can’t withstand long space flight!” The current record for extended flight is 437.7 days days which is more than the estimated 6 to 9 months for a Mars mission. Of course, when this argument gets shot down by reality then another argument about some other technical detail gets brought up as “proof” that space exploration is impossible/too expensive, etc.
I could go on and on but it’s like arguing with a wingnut about universal healthcare or that the WMD never existed.
Mayur
double post
Mayur
@Paul MacDonald: That’s an ass-backwards argument. You’re defining yourself as a “self-professed fiscal conservative” when you support something that has absurdly pie-in-the-sky-speculative benefits and will cost a fortune. Most of us self-professed “progressives” understand that stuff costs money; it’s just that we want that money spent on immediate priorities: Health care, education, and environmental protection. All three of those, BTW, have measurable and predictable benefits AND often carry a net fiscal benefit as well in the form of controlling costs in related areas and opening up new sectors of economic expansion.
Look, the two problems we have right now with renewable energy/energy efficiency (my “pet project,” since it’s the field in which my firm does most of its investing) is that solar is too expensive ($7/watt installed instead of $1/watt, which would be a low enough price to justify a complete conversion of our electricity infrastructure) and energy efficiency (which is the lowest-hanging fruit) is often hard to finance. Give me a trillion dollars and I’ll solve both of those problems overnight. In all likelihood, the same research apparatus that propagates under a NASA-style approach would yield analogous unanticipated benefits when applied to funding R&D into energy technology. I’m not going to call myself a “fiscal conservative,” but I think that use of proceeds is substantially more verifiable in its costs and consequences than the manned space travel program you seem to be advocating.
Mayur
Dr. Morpheus:
Why, exactly, are these arguments “fallacies”?
1. It’s not a false dilemma. Do we have enough resources to do both? If so, go for it!
2. I haven’t seen any “mind-reading” going on here. I have seen people voice emotional arguments in favor of manned space travel and then get rebutted. It’s not mind-reading if it’s a response to something that’s been openly stated.
3. Who made that argument?
Strikes me that you’re using a single blanket fallacy here. I believe it bears some morphological resemblance to a scarecrow…
Paul MacDonald
Mayur:
That’s an ass-backwards argument. You’re defining yourself as a “self-professed fiscal conservative” when you support something that has absurdly pie-in-the-sky-speculative benefits and will cost a fortune.
Yes, pie in the sky like “Solar Panels that work” and “large scale zero waste environments”.
Most of us self-professed “progressives” understand that stuff costs money; it’s just that we want that money spent on immediate priorities: Health care, education, and environmental protection.
Yeah, short term and never long term. What are we going to do with all these highly educated, super healthy green warriors, anyway? Of course, if one were to have the ability to cut military spending in half and then split the savings between space exploration and your items, then everyone wins. NASA is barely a blip on the radar.
All NASA is, as far as I have been able to discern, is the progressives’ favorite whipping boy. I’ve heard these arguments since the late 70’s.
All three of those, BTW, have measurable and predictable benefits AND often carry a net fiscal benefit as well in the form of controlling costs in related areas and opening up new sectors of economic expansion.
Predictable benefits like “college graduates serving me coffee” and “Old people who seem to live forever and stopped being net contributors to the general good 20 years ago.”
tcolberg
@DanF: You don’t think that the current $18 billion outlay per year creates jobs? Mounting a Mars mission would create many jobs, and high-tech ones at that. Also, there would be incentives and inspiration for students to study science and engineering. And on top of all those benefits to our own country, a Mars mission should foster international cooperation and co-effort.
@Dr. Morpheus: Thanks for pointing out the many logical fallacies that I’ve been trying to argue against.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Paul MacDonald:
And you know all these things because?
When you envision a Mars colony, what exactly do you see? What are the colonists there for? Traditionally, colonization has been about making money; establish settlements to extract some raw material that’s valuable back home. What’s on Mars that’s worth the trouble?
Do you envision fully terraforming the Martian surface? Limited terraforming within enclosed habitats? Wholly artificial, tin-can environments?
What are the colonists going to do? What would their primary job be?
LD50
I am DYING to hear how having these bitchin cities on Mars is going to “adequately address Heath Care”.
It better be a fucking awesome payoff, if we’re supposed to wait a hundred years for decent funding for health care.
So…. your suggestion is to let people in the latter category die, once they stop being ‘net contributors to the general good’? Cool. I hope people like you get to be in charge of your fate when you’re old.
LD50
Actually, the American economy being what it is, it probably *would* mean that.
Sorry to harsh your mellow.
Paul MacDonald
LD50,
An awesome payoff is that we, as humans, need to survive. We need to get off this rock because extinction level events have happened more than once and will happen again. I would like it if we, as a species, survived.
There’s also the cool thing where we adapt to a new world, and all the intangibles that come along with that.
So…. your suggestion is to let people in the latter category die, once they stop being ‘net contributors to the general good’? Cool. I hope people like you get to be in charge of your fate when you’re old.
No, I’m not the one interested in saving a buck to advance my little fetishes, that would be you. Oh, I hope you aren’t in charge. You’ll find a way to make Soylent Green a reality so we don’t harm the pretty cows or plow mother Gaia’s fertile soil for our nefarious ends.
You base your dislike of a manned mission to Mars because it is expensive with little chance of a financial return. So, because of that, why do you not apply it to other things that have little (or no) chance of a net return? Because you are a hypocrite.
I think we can educate people, give them health care, protect the environment and go to Mars. If you are too nervous, or have a case of the vapours, you can stay home and mind the habitat of the spotted owl, or whatever. I hope that my children one day walk on the surface of another planet.
What a grey and empty life you must lead. Everything is a problem and none of it can be fixed so it is just better to wearily trudge along through life. Every problem has a solution. It’s fortunate small minded people generally fall by the wayside when history calls.
Mayur
@Paul MacDonald: Solar panels do work, you nitwit. Are you not aware of the fact that we have a massive installed capacity worldwide already, and that those panels provide power?
As I pointed out, the issue is cost, period. Guess what a nine-figure subsidy (or better still, a nine-figure R&D budget) would do to that?
The issues with environmental protection, education, and healthcare aren’t even about achieving some sort of mythical utopia (thanks for the multiple strawmen, BTW): They’re about SURVIVAL. Unless you can tell me that funding trips to Mars reliably gets us to a new, unspoiled planet with enough resources to support 2-3 billion people by 2050, a basic analysis of current environmental and economic trends suggests that we NEED radical action down here on Earth or we’re screwed.
Really, why don’t you actually start by, say, pointing out exactly HOW we’re vaguely on the path to dealing with environmental and social crises on the ground here before you suggest that we can have it all and a bag of chips? Without any evidence on that front, your argument in support of funding space travel just sounds idiotic.
Mayur
Sorry, that’s THIRTEEN-figure subsidy/R&D budget.
Oh, and congrats for making my second f–ing comment on this site be a response to a completely moronic set of propositions. I seem to have already become victimized by this phenomenon:
http://www.xkcd.com/386/
I love how you make a bunch of obviously disprovable contentions (solar panels don’t work; better education FOR POOR PEOPLE [sorry, shoulda specified] means 25-year-old PhD candidates serving me lattes, old people living too long will destroy us, etc.), and somehow think that said flimsy bits of distraction provide cover for a bunch of magical thinking. Oh yes, we progressives live a sad, dull, unimaginative life groaning under the burden of our consideration of such trivial issues as the planet’s continued ability to support human life and all. Sorry to horn in on your Promethean ambitions, you demigod you.
tcolberg
@Paul MacDonald: Funny that you mention the Gaia theory. James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory has this to say about space travel:
Ugh, these quote tags are such a pain in the ass.
Wile E. Quixote
@Paul McDonald
No kidding. I wish that progressives could work themselves into the same kind of froth and fury over agricultural subsidies as they do over NASA. It never seems to happen though, despite the fact that farm subsidies are not only expensive and market distorting they’re also bad for the environment and increase third world poverty. Of course all you have to do to distract a progressive on the issue of ag subsidies is blather some bullshit about “the family farm” and they stupidly fall in line and keep the subsidies rolling to Monsanto, ADM and huge factory farms.
Morat20
A few thoughts:
NASA’s entire budget is, effectively, nothing. They’re a drop in the bucket of federal spending. Eliminate NASA — everything from the manned space program to the robots to all the various pure science stuff they do — and you’d save about 13 billion a year. That’s it. 13 billion. We spent, what, 450 billion last year on defense?
ARES and escape modes — frankly, solid rocket boosters are more reliable than the liquid fueled rockets we used in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I’m almost certain that the Saturn V’s — in fact, all of the rocket models we used for manned launches — were entirely fire-and-forget. Once lit, they were burning until the fuel was out. No “off” switches.
As such, an SRB is actually safer (the nature of solid rocket fuel means it’s a lot more difficult for the bloody thing to explode. Ignition proceeds at a steady pace up the rocket — you can’t really short-circuit that without putting a ton of explosive material around it. Like, you know, surrounding it with a bunch of liquid hyrdogen and oxygen.
I’m not entirely supportive of the SRB approach to ARES ( I am very happy with the unmanned heavy lift setup, though) because there are some real engineering worries regarding stability that I don’t think have been fully addressed.
And I’m be much happier if we were building a space elevator, but there’s a few more hurdles to go. All told, NASA took Bush’s ridiculous “Hey, don’t pay attention to Iraq! Let’s talk Mars!” concept and rather pragmatically said “Well, let’s build a new manned and unmanned lift vehicle. Because we need a new one, and we’d need one whether we went to Mars or not. And this way, when it’s canceled for one reason or another, we’ll have a new launch vehicle which we desperatelyl need”.