Those of you who aren’t convinced that the future is robotic space travel, take a look at this. And if you want a foam finger moment, here it is. We are the undisputed leaders of putting robots into space.
Reader Interactions
52Comments
Comments are closed.
rlrr
I, for one, welcome our robotic Martian overlords.
mellowjohn
well,we are – after all – also the undisputed leaders in using flying robots to kill people.
Thomas F
If anything calls for an “America, Fuck Yeah!”, it is this.
cmorenc
The future is robotic rather than manned space travel, simply because: 1) even within the solar system, the environments for sustained human presence are forbiddingly hostile and distant from home; 2) the distance to anything outside the solar system is impossible to reach on the time scale of even multiple generations of human life. The closest stars beyond our own solar system are just under 4 light-years, and would take on the order of a thousand to ten thousand years to reach, and don’t seem promising to possess any sort of life-supportive environment once there.
A manned mission to Mars someday, or a semi-permanent lunar base are about the extent of feasible manned space excursions, and either will come at a cost many times what unmanned robotic voyages cost.
Robotic voyages are the only feasible way to explore planets other than perhaps Mars and Luna.
MikeJ
Makes more sense than sending meatbags up.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Nope, just bummed out that we’ve decided that people don’t need to go into space. As the image text says in this xkcd:
General Stuck
We are going to fuck around with this shit and end up starting another land war on Mars, and this bizness will get all out of control and we will be lucky to live through it. We ought to be sending tax cuts to the Martians to create some jobs, but noooooo, we send robots instead. And everyone knows there are two kinds of those. The ones that crash, and the ones that are going to crash.
Vote Romney!!
eric
If people running certain corporations are willing to lie and cheat regarding the safety of their workers here on earth (see miners post from a few days ago), when the economics of mining other planetary objects makes it worthwhile, they will lie to the people the send to space about the dangers of space travel.
The new boss is the same as the old boss.
redshirt
I am nervously skeptical this “Sky-crane” idea is going to work. Never been tested really – how could it be until you try it. But it’s not like they’ll get another shot of it if it fails.
Also, if it fails, look for Repukes to use this as another sign that OBAMER has failed us. Sigh….
redshirt
Also, mankind’s future in space is on asteroids and space stations, not planets or moons. Planets or moons will not be feasible until we have Star Trek like technology.
soonergrunt
i agree with you to the point that it’s the near future of space exploration.
There are a lot of things that robots do better than humans, and where space travel is concerned, they certainly do everything cheaper, but the whole point of the exercise is to see what’s out there and find out if and how it can be used (exploited) to improve the human condition.
By necessity, that will require humans on the ground at some point. we won’t pick up resources on Mars to retun them to Earth for the growing population here to use. At least not for long. That’s not sustainable. But some humans will take up residence there permanently, and they will have families and build a society. It’s what humans do.
A couple of generations down the line they will think of themselves as Martians.
I wonder if we’re going to need a new species classification–Homo Sapiens Martialis, perhaps?
dr. bloor
Does that include presidential candidates?
cmorenc
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I write this as an avid amateur astronomer who goes out for at least a short while nearly every clear night with one of my telescopes to gaze at our planets and star clusters and other galaxies.
Earthlings have ventured into space. However, the scale of the universe and that of the sun and solar system relative to even the nearest stars makes it forbiddingly impossible to physically “venture” very far from the home planet, except by studying the light and other electromagnetic signals incoming from the cosmos from the vicinity of our life-supporting observatory that is earth. The evidence is so far overwhelming that other than Earth, the rest of the solar system is forbiddingly hostile at present to life, or at least anything other than the sort of exotic primitive lifeforms that might exist in liquid under the frozen hydrocarbon/water mixed icecaps on Titan. Or, the remote possibility that Mars once supported at least primitive life in the ancient epoch before it lost too much of its atmosphere due to insufficient gravity, and its remaining water froze or went underground.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
The irony is, the ‘sky crane’ design is derived from manned landing studies.
Mars is hard to land anything heavy on. More gravity than the moon makes it hard to just float down on puffs of jet like the LEM did. But there’s no substantial atmosphere, so chutes and airfoils can only do so much.
This culture won’t be colonizing the solar system. But someone will, eventually.
scav
I read this as meaning we were now living a probably post-death world, seemingly the circa 70s, where the fevered imaginings of politicos kept trying to get it right over dated soundtracks and there’s to be a leap off a tall building at the end. Only it’s actually cool robots doing actual things. Brilliant.
mistermix
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Voyager I just hit the edge of the solar system after a 35 year trip. It’s not just “economics” that makes it sensible to have robots do exploration — it’s physics.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Let’s save the celebration until we’ve made sure it worked. This is the first time the skycrane concept has been used, and it’s giving more than a few people the cold pricklies. Compared to previous systems it’s pretty complicated.
redshirt
@cmorenc: I have no illusions humanity is anywhere close to be extra-solar explorers (manned, that is. Go Voyager!), without some revolutionary breakthrough in tech (warp drive for example). That said, it’s well within our power now to be an extra-earth species, and it makes all the sense in the world to do so. Not just for the “getting all of our eggs out of this one basket” idea, but the resources. So many resources.
I’m rooting for the Google guys and Cameron and their asteroid mining endeavour. I read that one smallish metallic asteroid contains more metal (easily accessible at that) than all the metals mined on Earth in our entire history.
It would change everything. And it’s in our reach right now, if we have the will.
quannlace
Robots in space? What about Pigs in Space?
lacp
@dr. bloor: “If we can put a robot on Mars, we can put one in the White House! Romney 2012!”
NotMax
Just name the next extraterrestrial mission vehicle Ronald Reagan and the Republicans will fall over one another to throw unlimited funds at it.
redshirt
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: I learned the other night that Mons Olympus is so big that it nearly reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere. Got me thinking of how future spacey societies could build some big blimp like docking tower on top of the volcano, extending into low Martian orbit, and there space craft could dock then transfer crew/supplies down the tower to a SPACETRAIN that could then transport the material further down the mountain.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@redshirt:
The water in an average asteroid or comet would be worth $20,000-80,000 per kg (because that’s what it currently costs to launch a kg of the wet stuff into orbit).
Metal’s nice too, though…
JimF
heh hard to be simpler then bouncing of the surface with airbags.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tma2pt0k6UQ
redshirt
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Indeed. So it seems clear our future path – find one of these smaller asteroids, secure it at a Lagrange point, start mining and with the metals begin constructing structures on the asteroid. Use the water for fuel/air. Start hollowing out the asteroid and then constructing facilities within it. It’s win/win as you’re getting materials for construction and using the source of those materials as your future habitat. Well shielded too – better than anything we could come up with.
scav
The universe is probably also littered with small space-debris graves of civilizations that assumed what they saw on dat liddle TV-box trumped the scale of the universe. Do what you will, graves are the general destination.common
Jason
Mistermix:
Physics do restrict us. Voyager is 35 years old, and humans are meat bags that are tough to keep alive in space…
But, that’s only because we don’t have enough mass in space! If we could build Arthur C. Clark’s “Rama”, or an O’Neill colony, these would be generational ships that have potentially unlimited space for the human race to expand into (since one ship could conceivably bring enough tools to make another ship out of raw materials from asteroids).
I’m not saying that NASA should start trying to fund an O’Neill colony–it would take multiple times the world’s GDP to construct one, after all–but I’m saying that it is possible for humans to do what Voyager has done, and safely. Two meters of dirt plus a poly shield under that would stop GCR. Rotation of the ship would prevent all the negative results of not having gravity. With enough space, growing enough food to support a population would be possible. Finally, if you could lift enough people to the ship (not an easy challenge to meet, I admit) you could have enough of a population to have the specialists that are necessary to keep the ship running and keep the humans healthy (engineers, fabrication experts, doctors, etc.)
AND, finally, there are no new technologies needed for such a ship. We could conceivably have built one of these in the 1970s.
So, yeah, not gonna happen … at least not for generations. But possible. I can dream, yes?
dmsilev
@JimF: That approach doesn’t scale well. Anything much bigger than Spirit or Opportunity would just go ‘splat’ rather than ‘boing’. The new rover is much bigger and heavier than the previous generation; if NASA could have gone with an airbag approach, they would have.
srv
I like the hipper NVO cover
http://youtu.be/Zmcv2_SH2Q0
Lee
I remember awhile back they asked a bunch of former military(?) if they would go on a one way trip to Mars.
There was a surprising number that responded yes.
Honestly once my kids get older, I’d do it.
Villago Delenda Est
So, obviously, what we need to do is send the Rmoneytron TO THE MOON, ALICE!
Rennie
Who’s “we”? Americans? If so, it irritates me that something as all-encompassing for human progress as space exploration should be considered a rah-rah rallying cry for one country.
I can remember when the first grainy video images showing Neil Armstrong on the moon were shown on TV. Fantastic, I thought. Then the screen was split, and there was tricky Dick Nixon on half of the screen. Almost made me sick.
kindness
Why not use a glider? Is the Martian atmosphere so thin a glider won’t work? Yea, I don’t mean use a glider for the initial atmosphere entry, but after it’s slowed some.
soonergrunt
@Rennie: You are correct. Let us not forget the contributions of Somalia, Mongolia, Norway, New Guinea, and Nicaragua to the science and labor of spaceflight.
redshirt
@kindness: Gliders certainly can work on Mars, but not for an atmospheric entry/landing of a payload of this size.
I’ve seen prototypes of robotic gliders that would launch from the surface and then could cruise at low altitudes for days, taking pictures. Cool stuff.
jheartney
@Jason: This is my we need a space elevator. Once you have one, lifting material and people into orbit is much cheaper, and you could even use the tail of the elevator to fling spacecraft out of Earth orbit.
So long as we are constrained to chemical rockets to get out of Earth’s gravity well, we’re best off sticking to robots for space exploration.
jheartney
@kindness: Earth surface air pressure is about 1500 millibars. Mars surface air pressure is about 7 millibars. You need a VERY big airfoil to get lift on Mars.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@kindness:
The mean surface-level atmospheric pressure on Mars is 0.087 psi, compared to just under 14.69 psi for Earth. Just not enough atmosphere for wings to be of much use for entry and descent.
Mars has probably the worst possible conditions for landing on, with just enough atmosphere to screw things up, but not enough to use to your advantage.
redshirt
@jheartney: I’m all for space elevators as well. I just can’t see them happening anytime soon. Beyond our tech for the time being.
More realistic for today: Use rail guns on mountain tops to shoot payloads into orbit. Use conventional rockets to send any people to those waiting payloads. Then assemble in space and go.
Brachiator
@mistermix: Glad to see this front paged. I linked it a couple of times previously.
Sometimes on my commute home I ride the bus with engineers and scientists coming from JPL going home or to Cal Tech. An amazing bunch of men and women. I am in awe of them.
I think that there may be some public programs when the touchdown happens. It’s so damn complicated, but if it succeeds, nothing but wows.
@soonergrunt:
Colonization presents huge challenges. And because of the gravity difference, I wonder after a time whether generations of humans born on Mars could ever come to Earth. I also wonder whether evolutionary forces might lead future Mars born humans to adapt to that planet (taller, longer limbed, less bone density perhaps).
So, yeah, if long term colonization happens, a new species.
Short term, getting a large rover onto the planet is so freaking daunting that a human voyage and landing has got to be a hell of a challenge.
Brachiator
BTW, you can download standard and high def versions of the Seven Minutes of Terror video from the JPL site.
You can also find a nice video memorial to the Martian Chronicles man himself, Ray Bradbury.
Cris (without an H)
What does a mountain top gain you? Lower air pressure?
My wife has been begging me to read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress for years. I’m only a few chapters into it, but Heinlein addresses exactly that.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@redshirt:
Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book 2312 has sections that go into detail about how one would go about hollowing out an asteroid to create a ‘terrarium’. Written in a not-too-technical, almost tongue-in-cheek style, and none of it really requires future technology.
The limits aren’t really technical. The limits are cultural and financial (and therefore, well, imaginary).
Someday. At earth orbit, solar panels give you 100 Watts/sq-ft of free energy, 24/7. That alone is enough to eventually lure somebody up there.
Stuck In 60s
Silly me — from the title, I thought you were writing about a Romney campaign trip.
redshirt
@Cris (without an H): I’m thinking somewhere in the Andes, so you have a 3-fer effect – close to the Equator, lower air pressure, less distance to orbit.
trollhattan
I know the rules disallow such musings, but imagine had we diverted the money for the F-35 program to a reinvigorated space program. But that’s not how we roll.
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/05/10/the-f-35-shows-why-the-pentagon-deserves-a-smaller-budget
rdale
Somewhere a job creator just shed a tear; think of all the tax breaks he could have gotten with what this cost! He could have upgraded his yacht, bought a mansion for his dancing horse, even put in an elevator for his cars! Why are you people so selfish?
valdemar
This is great, thanks for posting it! Sending robots does make more sense, giving existing technology. Shielding people against solar flares means a lot more mass, and that’s costly – you’d need a nuclear thermal rocket to get the thing moving at all, and that’s politically unacceptable. Building some kid of fancy electromagnetic ‘bubble’ would be nice, but again generating a powerful enough field needs a lot of mass and energy. Fancy nanomaterials might provide wonderful ways of keeping those bad particles out – in the second half of this century.
Gromit
Do you mean those of us who aren’t convinced that the entirety of the future is robotic space travel? Because some of us were at Kennedy Space Center last November cheering Curiosity on as it blasted off (despite somewhat lousy viewing conditions).
low-tech cyclist
@cmorenc:
I was composing a comment in my head to say something like this, but you’ve said pretty much everything I was going to.
Something like 99% of the cost of a manned mission into space is the cost of protecting our fragile bags of flesh from vacuum, temperature extremes, cosmic radiation, and starvation/thirst.
And no matter how much we spend, we’ll only be able to lift a handful of people into space anyway. The only question is whether 99.9999% of humanity, or 100.0000% of humanity, will be seeing space through pictures and video transmitted back here that someone/something else took.
So I’m all for letting the robots see the universe on our behalf, as long as they send back pretty pictures.
mclaren
Well, yeah, America is now the undisputed champion of putting robots into space…but up until 1989, the USSR whipped America’s ass like a red-headed stepchild as far as putting robots on other planets is concerned.
Did you know that Soviet engineers put a remote-controlled robot on the moon in 1970? And controlled it with a joystick from earth in real time? And got video from it in real time?
IN NINETEEN FREAKIN’ SEVENTY???!??!???
It was called Lunakhod, and it was orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any robotics in space America would do for 25 years.
Triassic Sands
What a great video. Thanks!