SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Buzz Aldrin has said that NASA should stop spending $3.5 billion per year on the International Space Station and relinquish low Earth orbit activities to private companies, such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, and Axiom Space. This would allow for the funding of "cyclers" to enable a base on the moon and eventually a permanent presence on Mars:
http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html
Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" — spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth. "The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."
Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said. Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.
[...] NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.
Is the ISS a key part of the "Journey to Mars" or a key roadblock?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12 2017, @02:48PM (2 children)
Or you send those 100 robotic missions to different places. Send flyby or orbital missions to Pallas, Uranus, Neptune, Eris, Sedna, and Planet Nine if it is located.
So we would learn massively less about Mars. Those other places aren't Mars.
Meanwhile, if the top Mars science goal is looking for life, Mars looks like a worse target than Europa or Enceladus. Not terrible, but not as good. Exoplanet atmosphere imaging may even find life first, albeit indirectly.
"If". I believe the top Mars science goal is helping to figure out how to colonize Mars.
We should go to Mars sometime. But we should do it after the costs decline (relative to using the stupidly expensive SLS, and propulsion methods that are not fast enough to get humans to Mars in 30 days).
I'm not advocating going to Mars right this minute. But we need to keep in mind that we can already do things in space for far cheaper than NASA does them. One of those many ways is by not doing science at the hobby level. Seriously, how would NASA's current efforts differ from some incredibly rich dude with a 3 trillion USD revenue stream, doing a little space science so that he'd have something to brag about at parties?
Similarly, we don't need SLS for anything. SpaceX already has Falcon Heavy which is more than adequate for any assembled Mars missions in Earth orbit. 180 days to Mars is more than adequate to get people to Mars. We don't need 30 day propulsion (particularly, if that gets entangled with Earth anti-nuke politics). And we don't need to stay on Mars for only 2 days as some other poster proposed.
I believe a variety of very large projects, including early stage colonization of Mars, are doable in the near future, say by 2050. But I don't believe the parties with the resources currently required to carry that out have either the interest in doing such big, long term stuff or the competence to carry it off.
A key observation here is simply that presently, space, particularly space science, is not important to us outside of some commercial activities in orbit. If it were, you would see more than a few government level projects. A key measure of what we find important, is what we're willing to spend our own money and personal time on, rather than somebody else's. It's easy to speak of using government money for whatever we feel like. For example, if finding extra-terrestrial life in the Solar System were important to us, then where are the private projects to do that?
You would also see people use some basic economics to improve the ROI of such space activities (such as building more than one or two probes of a particular design in order to take advantage of economies of scale or heavily using existing launch vehicles with better cost per mass rather than rolling your own launch vehicle as with SLS).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 12 2017, @04:52PM (1 child)
Tell that to NASA.
https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/science/goals/ [nasa.gov]
https://mars.nasa.gov/programmissions/science/ [nasa.gov]
Make no mistake, the top science goal for Mars is finding evidence of past or present microbial life, upgraded from the more conservative goal of finding water. Maybe you meant to say "should be" instead of "is".
The colonization goal is not really related to past habitability unless you want to see terraforming, something that will be incredibly hard even on small scales.
I would drop "in the Solar System" and point to Yuri Milner's Breakthrough [wikipedia.org] initiatives. Planetary Resources [wikipedia.org] launched a kickstarter for a telescope that would look at exoplanets as a "stretch goal".
Finding life inside the solar system (not on Earth, jokesters) is likely too
hardexpensive for private industry. Getting anything on Mars is a challenge and the rovers haven't found life. Getting a drill to pierce miles through the icy crust of Europa or Enceladus is going to cost billions, or maybe $10 billion, and even the lite mission that would just land on the surface and dig a little to find frozen microbes will be costly. Governments can step in and foot the bill. Ideally, the U.S., EU, China, Russia, Japan, and others could work together for certain big missions.[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12 2017, @05:30PM
Tell that to NASA.
So what? They aren't serious about space science. They just have more money to play with than me.
Make no mistake, the top science goal for Mars is finding evidence of past or present microbial life, upgraded from the more conservative goal of finding water. Maybe you meant to say "should be" instead of "is".
No, I used the right word here. After all, the whole point of space exploration is that someone, someday will need that information in more than a vague "any knowledge is good" way. For example, a key justification of the Apollo program was that people would live in space, particularly on the Moon. A big step in that process was showing that people can travel to the Moon.
Finding life inside the solar system (not on Earth, jokesters) is likely too hard expensive for private industry.
Sure, it is. What would be the point of trying when NASA can outspend you by a couple orders of magnitude.
Getting a drill to pierce miles through the icy crust of Europa or Enceladus is going to cost billions, or maybe $10 billion
Or maybe only a few tens of millions USD. Who knows when nobody, including NASA, is trying?
Governments can step in and foot the bill.
And in the process make the bill a few orders of magnitude larger, often without actually accomplishing anything.
My bet is that when we actually start doing serious space exploration and development, initiated by private enterprise rather than some huge, uncritical check from Uncle Sam, we'll find that it's a lot cheaper than you portray above.