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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: 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.