Manned Moon Mission axed/delayed/done in

[Correa Neto]

Because if you want to send people to space for a long time you need to provide them water, oxigen, food, waste disposal systems, not to mention medical facilities, heat/radiation shields, cooling/heating systems and quarters. This means a lot of weight and a lot of fuel. Bringing it all to Mars orbit and back to Earth is not easy.

Unless, of course, you want to operate the robot with the time lag required for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth and from Earth to Mars. This will cripple your reaction time. Its either bringing human controllers close to the remotely-operated robot or creating a really advanced AI.

 

[zerospeaks]

It's the "and back" part that I have an issue with.

Astronauts would easily sign up for a "one way ticket"

 

[Mark6]

Got to disagree with you. Unmanned rovers might be all cool and sexy, but Manned missions give WAY more bang overall. What the Mars' rovers have managed is incredible, but humans could have done it in a matter of weeks, not three plus years. Not only that, humans can interact better the enviroment, explore deeper and faster.

Not faster once you take development time into account.

Unmanned missions could never do what humans can, nor can they do it as fast. A year long mission on Mars would bring back data and information that machines will never be able to do.

How much would such mission cost, and how much can a flotilla of unmanned probes costing same amount could accomlpish? Keep in mind that said flotilla would start returning data long before manned mission gets off the ground (development time again).

 

[Mark6]

It's the "and back" part that I have an issue with.

Astronauts would easily sign up for a "one way ticket"

Sure, there is no shortage of people who would volunteer.

Absolutely no chance American public would go for it.

 

[Correa Neto]

It's the "and back" part that I have an issue with.

Astronauts would easily sign up for a "one way ticket"

Yes, its possible that some would. But you must view this from an ethical viewpoint. Unless there are some major, huge, humongous pressing issues, such a suicidal mission would never receive green lights or funding from anyone. A suicidal mission just to attempt to find some fossiled Martian microbes? Even back in the Moon race days, raising funds and obtaining the "go ahead" for a suicidal mission would be a hard job.

Not to mention that one could raise objections to the performance of a suicidal crew.

And if you are talking about a mission to establish a permanent colony, well, we are way behind the technology and knowledge of Mars which would be required for such a thing. Lots of more humble robotic and manned missions would be required.

 

[qayak]

NO! qayak I disagree completely. And I shall tell you why ..... ..... right..... about.... NOW!

I would love to send humans to mars to do one thing! Dig for fossils! Can the rovers do that? NOOOO PPPEE...... I mean sure you could design, build, and send a rover with the intent to do that. But c'mon. Wouldn't you rather have a human there to dig?

It isn't about what we want, it is about what is feasible and what is most cost effective. Humans cannot survive in space. Without the protections of this planet we are all dead so unless you can duplicate all the protective systems of Earth, you cannot go anywhere outside of low Earth orbit which is where the space shuttle is limited to.

Unmanned space exploration has proven itself to be immensely more valuable than manned exploration. What science has come from the experiments on the space shuttle? Those experiments are so unimportant that they often open up competitions to school children to design experiments for the astronauts to perform. The same goes for the ISS.

 

[jayh]

War is quite different from exploration. Althought Apollo was the result of a cold war. But such things not only drive development but sometime greast leaps in development. The manhattan project being just one such project that was on the same level as the Apollo program from an scientific and technological point of view.

You should note that I did agree that military demands provide techology, probably more so than the moon flights.

No doubt. But there are some developments in biology and life science that non-manned flight could not have produced.
Manned flight produces a different set of scientific discoveries than robotic exploration does.

Partially agree, certain info about behavior of organisms in zero G was obtained. Though a flight to the moon was hardly necessary for that (easily could be accomplished with orbital flights)

I have to disagree with you here. the first digital computer flight system was not installed or tested on an aircraft untill well after Apollo. And guess which Aeronautics research facility was the first to do it? Right NASA.
Apollo's AGC computer is recognized as the first embedded computer system to collect and provide flight information, and to automatically control all of the navigational functions in real time.



And far from being an evolutionay dead end the Apollo AGC formed the basis of an experimental fly-by-wire (FBW) system installed into an F-8 Crusader. Which, by the way, was the first time this was done with an embedded digital system.

True but the apollo computer was the first to miniaturize the computer system. If you research the AGC you will find that the alot of the design concepts that are used in modern PCs were very similar to the AGC design.

Not stunted but some areas would have been severly delayed.

1) NASA did a lot that was NOT moon or even space flight related

2) Digital computers (FAR mor sophisticated than the lunar lander computer) existed on earth years before. In fact the HP and other desktop computers on the engineer's desks were more powerful.

3) Flight computers were becoming necessary for both military and civillian aircraft. There was plenty of incentive and money (intense multibillion dollar spending), there is NO reason to assume that the moon project was required to accomplish that. Or even that it sped it up.

 

[rwguinn]

You should note that I did agree that military demands provide techology, probably more so than the moon flights.



Partially agree, certain info about behavior of organisms in zero G was obtained. Though a flight to the moon was hardly necessary for that (easily could be accomplished with orbital flights)



1) NASA did a lot that was NOT moon or even space flight related

and they still do a lot that is not space related.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration

2) Digital computers existed on earth years before.

Yeah-we had an IBM 360 at college. Took up a whole building, and MTBF was about 30 minutes.
It was 4 years after the first man on the moon that the HP-35 hand-held scientific calculator made an appearance--at $450 per pop.
You have more computer capability on your desk than existed in the entire world at that time

3) Flight computers were becoming necessary for both military and civillian aircraft. There was plenty of incentive and money (intense multibillion dollar spending), there is NO reason to assume that the moon project was required to accomplish that. Or even that it sped it up.

And they all stole it ffrom the moon program.
I spent every other semester from 1970 through 1974 at NASA Flight Research Center (now Dryden). The DFBW F-8 started flying sometime during that period, don't remember when, the F-16 made its first flights, all of which relied on the results of the Space program to develop their flight controls. It was no coincidence that the burst of development occurred within 5 years AFTER the first successful lunar manned mission.
We had some computer aid, but the computers were pretty basic. We mostly reduced data from o-graphs. We did have a WANG calculator (Hmph!) that was too big and cumbersome to use.
When I started at GD in 1975, they had just switched over from reading pressure gages and manometers to digital data acquisition and control for testing. And the older engineers were PISSED about it.

 

[PhantomWolf]

They only give more bang in the sense that people who don't know the costs-benefit ratio get all giddy in their pants.

It has nothing to do with "get all giddy" it has to do with having people on the ground doing science where and when they find it, rather than having to rely on photos and very slow moving robots that have a limited view of things

Really. Well, we are still waiting. The idea of sending men to Mars has been around for many decades. In that time, many unmanned missions have reached Mars and not a single manned mission.

Yes, because people like you refuse to help show support for a manned program and so politicians refuse to fund it.

Ummmmm . . . no. Whatever made you think this? It seems to me that humans are very poorly equipped for anything more than a cursory look around.

That's why you send tools with them. The J-Mission Apollo Crews did far more than "have a cursory look around". They returned core samples that any machine would have failed to get, they were able to carefully and thoughtfully determine samples of rock, they were able to locate and investigate anomalies that robots would drive right past without seeing. No robot would have found the orange soil on the moon, yet a human did. Sure robots can have fancy filters and cameras fitted to them, but humans can use tools that do many of the same things and get far better results, far faster once on the ground.

A year long Mission to Mars? Do you understand the logistics involved? Look at the problem of safely landing a relatively small probe on Mars. How do you expect them to land a huge space craft with enough people and supplies for a year long mission?

Yes I do, people have been working on plans for this sort of duration mission for a very long time. You don't need to land a massive spacecraft for a mission this sort of length. You seem to forget that Mars is a planet and has most of the things we have here. Water and oxygen can be extracted from Mars itself as can many of the other things that a crew would require to remain long term. The idea had been to prove it was possible to do on the Moon, just a short trip if they needed help, before taking the longer one to Mars where help is far away.

As for unmanned missions not being able to do what humans can, how about sending a human down into the atmosphere of Venus? Was that something a human could do better?

I don't remember the probes doing all that well either, even the ones that actually survived to land didn't last more then a few hours. You seem to think that I am advocating for humans to be sent to Mars naked and with no protections, that would be dumb. Yiou also don't seem to think that I can separate jobs that robots would be better for, like orbiting Saturn and taking images. Jobs requiring intition, geology skills, the ability to go nearly anywhere to dig up and find out things, and do it all quickly and in real time does require a human, robots simply can't do it now, or in the forseeable future.

 

[PhantomWolf]

Well, something like this:
http://www.universetoday.com/2010/02/05/will-nasa-send-robots-to-the-moon-with-project-m/
remotely operated from Mars' orbit surely could. And IMHO is the best way to explore the Moon in the nearby future.

If you put people in orbit about Mars, why not land them?

Note that you would get rid of everything needed to bring to the surface of Mars the material related to human life support as well as to bringing the humans back from the surface to orbit. A sample return veihcle is all that would be needed.

But you don't have to take "the material related to human life support" much of what is needed is already there. You can also send a lot of the equipment that is required ahead of time and have it waiting for the crews' arrival, ready to unpack and set up. There are already many plans that have been considered as viable if someone is just willing to support them.

But we would still have the huge challenge of bringing everything needed to support the crew to Mars' orbit and back to Earth.[/QUOTE]

Rubbish, the hard part is getting it into Earth Orbit, after that we could send it to Alpha Centuri without much more effort. (though it might take a while to get there.)

 

[PhantomWolf]

Because if you want to send people to space for a long time you need to provide them water, oxigen, food, waste disposal systems, not to mention medical facilities, heat/radiation shields, cooling/heating systems and quarters. This means a lot of weight and a lot of fuel. Bringing it all to Mars orbit and back to Earth is not easy.

All things already solved on the ISS. You seem to be missing that a tank of water can act as radiation shielding, washing/drinking water, coolant, and a source of oxygen. Wow, one thing just solved four of your main issues. Waste issues are easily dealt with, solid matter can be dump, liquid proccessed and reused as is already done on the ISS. As for sleeping quarters, living quarters, and medical, we already know that a series of hollow tubes works perfectly for that. You seem to think that no engineer or space scientist has consider all of this before and that solutions are impossibly hard.

 

[PhantomWolf]

Not faster once you take development time into account.

Depends, once the development costs for manned missions are completed there is little more that needs to be spent, all you need to spend is the cost of the launch and mission itself, plus corrections and improvements based on previous missions. Unmanned rovers need to be developped near enough from scratch each time you want to send a new one, reusing some parts, but having to be developed from the drawing board and tested before being sent. In the long run, development costs for manned missions spread out over each mission comes in cheaper. Consider the Shuttle for example. The 5 shuttles cost about $8.5 billion to build and have flown 129 missions, thats about $66 million a mission. When all the costs are added in (buildings, crew, etc), it comes to about $1.3 billion per launch. Compare that to the Galileo mission which cost a total of $1.35 billion and took 30 years to develop.

How much would such mission cost, and how much can a flotilla of unmanned probes costing same amount could accomlpish? Keep in mind that said flotilla would start returning data long before manned mission gets off the ground (development time again).

As you can see above, manned and unmanned aren't that different in costing over the life of the programme. Now, you could say, but we are only going to Mars, not Saturn. Well the Rover programme has cost $940 million so far, just $360 million short of a shuttle launch. On those figures, you might get four rovers for one manned mission, hardly a huge bump in favour of robots. As to how many you'd get before a manned mission.... If the resources were given to a manned mission we could be on Mars in ten years. How many umanned probes? Well in the past ten years.... there have been three, Spirit, Oppy, and Phoenix. (By the way all up Phoenix cost about $900 million when you add in the first failed mission).

 

[PhantomWolf]

It isn't about what we want, it is about what is feasible and what is most cost effective. Humans cannot survive in space. Without the protections of this planet we are all dead so unless you can duplicate all the protective systems of Earth, you cannot go anywhere outside of low Earth orbit which is where the space shuttle is limited to.

What utter hogwash. If this were true, Apollo could not have happened. You really seem to have no idea what is needed, real engineers and space scientists who have studied the issue do, and they disagree with you.

Unmanned space exploration has proven itself to be immensely more valuable than manned exploration. What science has come from the experiments on the space shuttle? Those experiments are so unimportant that they often open up competitions to school children to design experiments for the astronauts to perform. The same goes for the ISS.

Again total hogwash. The Apollo missions returned far more data and science that the entire unmanned lunar program of both the US and the USSR up to that point had. Unmanned probes have only been useful elsewhere because they can be sent places that we haven't been able or willing to send people. You however bias your scales by placing a barrel of oranges against a bag a aples. How about comparing apples and apples, the Lunar missions, manned vs unmanned, then come back and show how "Unmanned space exploration has proven itself to be immensely more valuable than manned exploration." The only reason that unmanned is ahead currently is no-one is willing to give manned the chance to prove itself.

 

[PhantomWolf]

1) NASA did a lot that was NOT moon or even space flight related

Agreed, however a lot of what they did from 1958-1972 was for the moon programme

2) Digital computers (FAR mor sophisticated than the lunar lander computer) existed on earth years before. In fact the HP and other desktop computers on the engineer's desks were more powerful.

Say what? The desktop computer wasn't even invented before the Apollo Missions, the first one that could have been called a "desktop" was built in 1971, and none of the NASA Engineers would have had one. Even Mission Control didn't have computers, they used TV Screens with cardboard templates over them. Other than the mainframes for huge number crunching, NASA's engineers use that wonderful thing called a slide rule for all their computations.

3) Flight computers were becoming necessary for both military and civillian aircraft. There was plenty of incentive and money (intense multibillion dollar spending), there is NO reason to assume that the moon project was required to accomplish that. Or even that it sped it up.

Again false. Flight computers were an off-shoot of the space industry and allowed engineers to start building aircraft that disobeyed aerodynamic rules. NASA proved the technology and defence contractors started to pick it up in the mid to late 70's. The Passanger industry didn't look at it till the 80's.

 

[rwguinn]

Agreed, however a lot of what they did from 1958-1972 was for the moon programme



Say what? The desktop computer wasn't even invented before the Apollo Missions, the first one that could have been called a "desktop" was built in 1971, and none of the NASA Engineers would have had one. Even Mission Control didn't have computers, they used TV Screens with cardboard templates over them. Other than the mainframes for huge number crunching, NASA's engineers use that wonderful thing called a slide rule for all their computations.



Again false. Flight computers were an off-shoot of the space industry and allowed engineers to start building aircraft that disobeyed aerodynamic rules. NASA proved the technology and defence contractors started to pick it up in the mid to late 70's. The Passanger industry didn't look at it till the 80's.

Don't cha just love folks who keep saying "We would have done that stuff anyway", as though they have a pipeline to the alternative universe where we didn't go to the moon?
Clueless folks, they are.
As I said before--the major jumps in FBW, stability control, and computers, just coincidentally (couldn't be any cause and effect link, there) started appearing commercially 3 or 4 years after the successes of Apollo and NASA.
Graphite-epoxy fishing rods, tennis racquets and golf clubs started appearing in the '80's, after successes in STS and other programs.
Just coinkidinks, I am sure...

 

[uruk]

You should note that I did agree that military demands provide techology, probably more so than the moon flights.

Well, war has been around alot longer than spaceflight. But the types of technologies that are pushed by the demands of war are different then those that are pushed by the demands of exploration. Some are parallel.

Partially agree, certain info about behavior of organisms in zero G was obtained. Though a flight to the moon was hardly necessary for that (easily could be accomplished with orbital flights)

You can't learn how to live on the moon or mars in earth orbit.

1) NASA did a lot that was NOT moon or even space flight related.

But the manned space program was the impetus and initiation for NASA.

2) Digital computers (FAR mor sophisticated than the lunar lander computer) existed on earth years before. In fact the HP and other desktop computers on the engineer's desks were more powerful.

These computers were also huge. the desktop units back in the 60,s were dumb terminals. The actual processing power were in those huge cabinets that took up a whole room. Computational power was not paramount in the AGC. compactness and reliability was.
The Apollo AGC was special purpose embedded computer system with all the processing, programing and memory integrated together in a small modular cabinet about the size of a large travel suitcase. This was an inovation. A first. If you look at the block diagrams and cpu layouts of the AGC you will find alot of similarities to modern desktop computers.

3) Flight computers were becoming necessary for both military and civillian aircraft. There was plenty of incentive and money (intense multibillion dollar spending), there is NO reason to assume that the moon project was required to accomplish that. Or even that it sped it up.

Possibly, but that is how history transpired. Up untill Apollo flight computers on aircraft were simple, limited, analog computing and control devices. After the Apollo the flight computer, aircraft flight computers became more powerful and digital.

And we can argue could-a, should-a, would-a all day long.

 

[Corsair 115]

Other than the mainframes for huge number crunching, NASA's engineers use that wonderful thing called a slide rule for all their computations.

There's a scene in Apollo 13 which shows that—Lovell has called down to Mission Control for them to doublecheck his calcuations, and then it cuts to a the controllers furiously using slide rules to perform the doublechecking calcuations.

I think it's easy to forget just how much things have changed in some ways. Youngsters today are going to look at older movies showing folks playing vinyl record albums or using rotary telephones and wonder what the hell those things are...

 

[Random]

Ummmmm . . . no. Whatever made you think this? It seems to me that humans are very poorly equipped for anything more than a cursory look around.

Don’t underestimate humans compared to robots. Humans have all terrain mobility, independent real-time problem solving capability, built-in repair functions, and an all-around adaptability that scientists have been trying and failing to give robots for decades.

A year long Mission to Mars? Do you understand the logistics involved? Look at the problem of safely landing a relatively small probe on Mars. How do you expect them to land a huge space craft with enough people and supplies for a year long mission?

Not that big a space ship at all. Mars has a very thin CO2 atmosphere. All you need is an air pump and a gaslight-era chemical plant onboard and you have all the oxygen you need. Since you don’t have to bring all your own oxygen for the stay there and the trip back, you can use a lot less fuel and equipment to get to Mars. Hydrogen may be more difficult to acquire if we can’t find water ice, but it is pretty light in the first place so just bring a ton or two and you are fine on that to. Make the rocket fuel for the return trip on site. Water recycling technology is already pretty good, and a years supply of food doesn’t take up as much space as you might think.

In the mid-90’s, Robert Zubrin wrote The Case for Mars and laid out a straightforward program using off the shelf technology that would land a four man team on Mars, keep them there for over a year with a pressurized habitat, pressurized return vehicle, two pressurized rovers with an operational range of over two hundred miles, and then return them safely to Earth. And he did it with just two Atlas launches.

 

[zerospeaks]

Im a fan of the mars direct plan. Has that been brought up yet?

 

[qayak]

What utter hogwash. If this were true, Apollo could not have happened. You really seem to have no idea what is needed, real engineers and space scientists who have studied the issue do, and they disagree with you.



Again total hogwash. The Apollo missions returned far more data and science that the entire unmanned lunar program of both the US and the USSR up to that point had. Unmanned probes have only been useful elsewhere because they can be sent places that we haven't been able or willing to send people. You however bias your scales by placing a barrel of oranges against a bag a aples. How about comparing apples and apples, the Lunar missions, manned vs unmanned, then come back and show how "Unmanned space exploration has proven itself to be immensely more valuable than manned exploration." The only reason that unmanned is ahead currently is no-one is willing to give manned the chance to prove itself.

Yeah, right! People have been talking about a trip to Mars since before the Apollo missions. It was those missions that demonstrated the problems such a mission would have and which haven't been solved yet.

Real space exploration doesn't work like a Star Trek movie. You can't write BS science into the script and have it work out in the last couple of minutes of the show.