Manned Moon Mission axed/delayed/done in

[rwguinn]

There are reasons the moon missions were stopped. They cost a ****load of money and scientists pretty much agreed there was no value to it. Nothing has changed.

The ISS is a joke. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent and, as scientists knew before hand, nothing came from it. The only bonus is it kept unemployed Russian scientists from being tempted to build nuclear delivery systems for wackos.

The space shuttle is a joke. Low earth orbit . . . What's the point?

Mars . . . yeah, RIGHT!

Scrap all the idiotic ideas of previous administrations and put all the freed-up funding into unmanned space missions. Look at the money spent on the two Mars explorers. No way would you get that bang for your dollar from anything but unmanned missions.

And you can still keep Russian scientists employed by inviting every country in the world to participate.

Do stupid ideas run the politically fundamentalists? The ideas you expressed are silly.
Most of the time, attaining the goal (man on the moon/rovers on Mars/etc) is not where the big pay-off is. It's what we learn getting there that is important.
The R&D spent getting to the moon/man in space paid off big time-transistors, medical evaluations/techniques, materials science, miniaturization, AI, robotics and a whole slew of other stuff were the pay-offs, not a fist full of rocks

 

[jayh]

Do stupid ideas run the politically fundamentalists? The ideas you expressed are silly.
Most of the time, attaining the goal (man on the moon/rovers on Mars/etc) is not where the big pay-off is. It's what we learn getting there that is important.
The R&D spent getting to the moon/man in space paid off big time-transistors, medical evaluations/techniques, materials science, miniaturization, AI, robotics and a whole slew of other stuff were the pay-offs, not a fist full of rocks

This is trotted out all the time. It's just a milder variant of justifying war because of "all the technology: we got out of WWII and the cold war.

Much more materials science could have been reasonably done with non-manned flights... manned flights are just governmental stage shows (not that there faked, but that they're propaganda toys rather than necessary for science).

With the continuing development of aircraft, commercial and military hardware it is unquestionable that electronics and computer technology would have come from there instead. Actually they did. The first transisters and the first ICs long predated space flight and did their greatest explosions of technology quite divorced for the smallish manned space flight budget.

[Edited to add: actually the flight computer on the moon flights was much more primitive than the typical engineer's desktop computer of the era, but they had to go with very conservative design structure to validate it for space flight. Hence it's more of an evolutionary dead end than a link to the modern computer]


The moon flights had a primitive on board computer, but this was far from the first computer (thousands were in use on the ground before that) and computer techology took off much more as offspring from those commercial devices than any relation to the speciallized device used by the moon flights.

The the suggestion that human technology will somehow become stunted without spaceflight is handwaving at best.

 

[rwguinn]

Evidence?
Without the "Stage Shows", where does the support for the program come from?
Put your head back in the sand--nothing to see here...

 

[kuroyume0161]

Evidence?
Without the "Stage Shows", where does the support for the program come from?
Put your head back in the sand--nothing to see here...

The government using taxation to 'beat the Commies'?

 

[sts60]

There was no need to put in a Black as the head of NASA.

NASA go its start with primates.

Ya know, I had the privilege to work a little bit with then-Colonel (now Maj. Gen.) Bolden on a Shuttle mission. Speaking, if it matters, as your basic white male, I was vastly impressed. I can't say he's worth a hundred of you because there is no multiple of friggin' nazis like you that would ever add up to a Charlie Bolden.

Now back to the Ignore list you go, you useless horse's ass.

 

[rwguinn]

Ya know, I had the privilege to work a little bit with then-Colonel (now Maj. Gen.) Bolden on a Shuttle mission. Speaking, if it matters, as your basic white male, I was vastly impressed. I can't say he's worth a hundred of you because there is no multiple of friggin' nazis like you that would ever add up to a Charlie Bolden.

Now back to the Ignore list you go, you useless horse's ass.

YES!^^
I too, have met the man. Like him. Good man.

 

[Beerina]

I think there is a pattern developing in the post Apollo era for space flight. New administrations cancel projects from the previous administration when the commitment of real cash is required. Then they start brand new projects where the serious cash commitments won't show up until the next administration.

Just the impression I have and I cannot prove it. At least not yet.

After Bush left office, one of the first things Congress did was put his massive space exploration program on hold. I recall commenting at the time that this was probably to prevent the "Kennedy" effect, where, once the US landed on the moon, big kudos went to John Kennedy, even though Nixon was in office at the time. "They'll be damned if they let Bush take credit for it like that!"

And now it's completely gone. BTW, the ESA and the Rooskies both have new automated lift vehicles that are servicing the space station, so the huge Atlas isn't needed so much for the space station, anyway, as a shuttle replacement. And the US has plenty of mid-sized rockets, it's just this new heavy one that's mothballed.


I'm firmly in the camp of robotic exploration. With no fear of some hideous disaster where 15 people on a Mars mission have to suffocate or bite a pill, or worst of all, are trapped with no way to return (or careening off into deep space), you can spend several magnitudes less per mission, and get a lot more bang for the buck.

Whether going to the Moon to stay, or to Mars, we should use robots and set up fully functioning, long(ish)-term bases before we even send the first humans on their way.

Then the need to have so damned much carried along evaporates, making the populated mission at least somewhat easier.

 

[Correa Neto]

Yes, like many people I stick to and I am really eager to see humans in space- orbit, Moon, Mars, asteroids, you name it! I want to see people there I want to g there. However, I do realize that sending robots has a better cost/benefit ratio. Mind you, when it comes down to the Moon, one can imagine that remotely controlled robots using some sort of virtual reality environment/link/whatever are feasible, due to the small time delay. I think its not far-fetched to say one could controll a robot sampling rocks in the Moon using a notebook from some uni or even from a toilet room...

Much cheaper (no need for all the life support systems) and much safer than sending humans to do the job. And possibly with the same flexibility- actually quite possibly with a greater flexibility and endurance. If operator 1 is tired, operator 2 starts to work, no cumbersome and bulky spacesuits, no breaks for lunch, etc. And its a tech we my develop and use later while exploring other planets. Just send orbital craft and remotely-controlled probes.

My U$2cents.

 

[Random]

Actually I think it makes more sense to go to the moon and test the equipment and techniques we will need to developed for the trip to Mars.

It is going to take weeks to get there and the astronauts will have to stay on Mars for extended periods time. (depending on the path we choose to get there) Alot of logistics and technologies has to be developed and tested before the big trip.

The moon is only acouple of days away if anything goes wrong. Plus we will be establishing a permanent human presesnce on another planet (planetoid) to boot.

That's more bang for your buck if you ask me.

Mars is really unlike the Earth, and the Moon is really unlike Earth, but that doesn’t mean Mars is like the Moon. The techniques and issues with living on the Moon and living on Mars are very different. It would be easier, cheaper, and safer to set up your test Mars base on Antarctica if that’s what you are looking for.

 

[PhantomWolf]

I'm firmly in the camp of robotic exploration. With no fear of some hideous disaster where 15 people on a Mars mission have to suffocate or bite a pill, or worst of all, are trapped with no way to return (or careening off into deep space), you can spend several magnitudes less per mission, and get a lot more bang for the buck.

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. 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.

As to people dying... if we followed that we'd have never explored anywhere. How many people died trying to climb Everest? Scott and his entire team died exploring the Southern Polar regions, Magellen died exploring, as did Cook and many, many others.

Gus Grissom said "If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

Explorers and pioneers have always risked themselves, some have died, some have made it, if we only continue exploration today based on "no one gets killed" then we might as well not get out of bed in the morning because just going and having a shower can get you killed, not to mention driving to work.

 

[zerospeaks]

Personally I think we are in good hands with SpaceX

Elon musk wants to go to mars as well. It will be interesting to see who makes it first.

 

[uruk]

Mars is really unlike the Earth, and the Moon is really unlike Earth, but that doesn’t mean Mars is like the Moon. The techniques and issues with living on the Moon and living on Mars are very different. It would be easier, cheaper, and safer to set up your test Mars base on Antarctica if that’s what you are looking for.

To truly test the systems and equipment there is nothing like the "real" thing. Simulated environments are only aproximations with known factors. You can build a boat on land. You can test it in giant pools of water, you can run computer simulations till transistors wear out. But you can only really know how the boat will do is when you put it on the ocean.

NASA test all the equipment and vehicles in earth orbit, translunar and lunar orbit and even a low altitude "touch and go" before finally landing the eagle on the lunar surface.

The moon is a necessary step on the way to Mars.

And besides, they already are testing equipment on earth environs. Time to start going to the next step.

 

[Ambrosia]

I was born in 1975 and missed the Apollo Moon landings.

I really *really* want to see a manned mission to Mars before I die.

Was listening to a deGrasse Tyson lecture last week where he said that while the costs of putting a man on the moon were staggering, the payoff from inspiring a generation or two of people to want to become astronauts, astrophysicists, astronomers, engineers etc etc was incalculable.

If there had been anything like a space program in the UK when I was growing up I might well have chosen space based science as a career path instead of cooking.

The politicians we have these days are way too short sighted imo.

 

[uruk]

This is trotted out all the time. It's just a milder variant of justifying war because of "all the technology: we got out of WWII and the cold war.

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.

Much more materials science could have been reasonably done with non-manned flights... manned flights are just governmental stage shows (not that there faked, but that they're propaganda toys rather than necessary for science).

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.

With the continuing development of aircraft, commercial and military hardware it is unquestionable that electronics and computer technology would have come from there instead. Actually they did. The first transisters and the first ICs long predated space flight and did their greatest explosions of technology quite divorced for the smallish manned space flight budget.

[Edited to add: actually the flight computer on the moon flights was much more primitive than the typical engineer's desktop computer of the era, but they had to go with very conservative design structure to validate it for space flight. Hence it's more of an evolutionary dead end than a link to the modern computer]

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.

The moon flights had a primitive on board computer, but this was far from the first computer (thousands were in use on the ground before that) and computer techology took off much more as offspring from those commercial devices than any relation to the speciallized device used by the moon flights.

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.

The the suggestion that human technology will somehow become stunted without spaceflight is handwaving at best.

Not stunted but some areas would have been severly delayed.

 

[Lensman]

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. 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.

As to people dying... if we followed that we'd have never explored anywhere. How many people died trying to climb Everest? Scott and his entire team died exploring the Southern Polar regions, Magellen died exploring, as did Cook and many, many others.

Gus Grissom said "If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

Explorers and pioneers have always risked themselves, some have died, some have made it, if we only continue exploration today based on "no one gets killed" then we might as well not get out of bed in the morning because just going and having a shower can get you killed, not to mention driving to work.

Totally agree with you Phantom.

How many people died opening up the West?
How many of Magellans crewmen lived to return home?
Cook?
What happened at Roanoke?

Exploration & colonization are inherently hazardous, does that mean that it should never be attempted?
What would've happened to the world if The Americas had never been discovered by Europeans?
What would've happened if Columbus had turned around & said, "Well lads, we've seen it, now lets go home & never come back."?

What would we be now if the earliest humans had never explored beyond Africa?

 

[uruk]

After Bush left office, one of the first things Congress did was put his massive space exploration program on hold. I recall commenting at the time that this was probably to prevent the "Kennedy" effect, where, once the US landed on the moon, big kudos went to John Kennedy, even though Nixon was in office at the time. "They'll be damned if they let Bush take credit for it like that!"

Politics always screws up stuff

[quoteAnd now it's completely gone. BTW, the ESA and the Rooskies both have new automated lift vehicles that are servicing the space station, so the huge Atlas isn't needed so much for the space station, anyway, as a shuttle replacement. And the US has plenty of mid-sized rockets, it's just this new heavy one that's mothballed.[/quote] Don't you think there is an inherent danger to continually outsourcing our endevours? Yet more more and more we are they are doing and less and less we are.

I'm firmly in the camp of robotic exploration. With no fear of some hideous disaster where 15 people on a Mars mission have to suffocate or bite a pill, or worst of all, are trapped with no way to return (or careening off into deep space), you can spend several magnitudes less per mission, and get a lot more bang for the buck.

Fear of the unknown and danger has never stopped us from doing something. Heck we risk our lives doing extreme sports for littel else than entertainment.

Whether going to the Moon to stay, or to Mars, we should use robots and set up fully functioning, long(ish)-term bases before we even send the first humans on their way.
Then the need to have so damned much carried along evaporates, making the populated mission at least somewhat easier.

We have been sending robots. Robots found water on the moon. India's space program made the discovery. BTW We provided technical support for them in an example of delicious irony.

It's been more than 40 years since we last made a visit to the moon. Timefor us to go back there and set up our "back yard".

 

[qayak]

Got to disagree with you. Unmanned rovers might be all cool and sexy, but Manned missions give WAY more bang overall.

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

What the Mars' rovers have managed is incredible, but humans could have done it in a matter of weeks, not three plus years.

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.

Not only that, humans can interact better the enviroment, explore deeper and faster.

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.

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.

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?

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?

 

[zerospeaks]

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?

 

[Correa Neto]

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.

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

 

[zerospeaks]

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

WHY?!?!?