The future of manned space travel.

[Dale]

I'll take a chance and start this in the Pub, as opposed to PROCT.

Like many of my generation, I've always been interested in manned space travel. But, the trajectory many of us thought it would take hasn't even come close to realization. We've been confined to orbit for 35 years. There's talk about a manned mars mission, but it still seems impossibly expensive and semi-suicidal and no plans are set. We haven't made any major technological breakthroughs that might make major leaps forward in space travel safer or cheaper. I'm less inclined than ever to think we're likely to see much progress in the next 100 years.

Discuss.

[djm]

What good would it do for us as a species? The more we learn about our universe, the clearer it becomes that the cost/benefit ratio of daytripping about our own solar system cannot bring back sufficient rewards to justify the costs and risks (near suicidal, as you suggest). If we are going to make an investment anywhere I think it should be in physics so that we can learn how to cope with gravity and the distances interstellar flight forces us to face.

djm

[missy]

I truly believe that the "romance" of space exploration - romance being that man or woman has to do it - has been the downfall of space exploration.

Look at all the incredible information the Mars Rover has broadcasted back. How about Voyager?

I recently went back and read 2001, 2010, etc. I know I've read reports that Arthur C. Clarke did NOT think he was projecting ideas that were not going to be obtainable, he really thought we would at least have a moon base by 2001.

I would love to see another "goal" such as man on the moon by the end of whatever. I really think "not using fossil fuel by when ever" would be as great a motivator as the moon project. But I fear that we are stuck on this lonely little planet for a very long time.

[Innocent Bystander]

The saying is that a man's reach should exceed his grasp. That seems to be the case with Space exploration. NASA reached the Moon, but seems to be a different organisation from the one that created the Apollo missions.

That may not be a bad thing. It was the Cold war which inspired Space Exploration. The motif was the rocket. The fear was the ICBM - the hope was the Moon. In what we hope are more peaceful times there are more organisations than the Americans and the Russians can foster. And the motif seems to be communications. That seems like a good thing.

From this viewpoint is seems as though the race is not given up, but continuing less desparately, and more logically - brick by brick, as it were. Maybe humankind as we know it will not conquer Space. Maybe robots will. Maybe genetically modified mankind will. It isn't over yet.

[Dale]

If we are going to make an investment anywhere I think it should be in physics so that we can learn how to cope with gravity and the distances interstellar flight forces us to face.

djm

I'm sympathetic to this point of view. We really need a breakthrough, it seems to me, and I wonder if the most likely avenue for that is basic physics.

[Martin Milner]

no plans are set...

My brother-in-Law Chris works for NASA, in Houston, so I feel I have a bit of an inside line on space stuff. I hope to learn more about developments when we visit in December.

I disagree that no plans are set, stuff is going on all the time, but as NASA require constant Government funding, it's very difficult to set fixed deadlines more than a year or two in advance. The plans are there, it's the timing that's uncertain.

The International Space Station (ISS) is constantly manned, and still being added to.

When that's ready, it'll act as a base for another moon trip, this time to build a permanent Moonbase.

The Moonbase will help with learning about survival in harsh environments, and help getb a man on Mars.

I think we''ll see a manned expedition to Mars in the next 30-50 years, and I hope to live long enough to see it.

One problem has already been touched on, space exploration is no longer headline news, the Romance is over. I think it will be headline news again when we start trying to put men on the moon again, but to do that safely and not have another Apollo 13 scenario, it's taking a lot longer.

As for what good it all does - a lot of developments have come through the space race, and wouldn't it be great to discover evidence of life on Mars? It might make the religious types squirm to explain things, but understanding the Universe and our place in it, not at the centre but as a tiny tiny part way off in the corner, is a valuable goal in itself.


http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html

[Dale]

no plans are set...

My brother-in-Law Chris works for NASA, in Houston, so I feel I have a bit of an inside line on space stuff. I hope to learn more about developments when we visit in December.

I disagree that no plans are set, stuff is going on all the time, but as NASA require constant Government funding, it's very difficult to set fixed deadlines more than a year or two in advance. The plans are there, it's the timing that's uncertain.

The International Space Station (ISS) is constantly manned, and still being added to.

When that's ready, it'll act as a base for another moon trip, this time to build a permanent Moonbase.

The Moonbase will help with learning about survival in harsh environments, and help getb a man on Mars.

I think we''ll see a manned expedition to Mars in the next 30-50 years, and I hope to live long enough to see it.

One problem has already been touched on, space exploration is no longer headline news, the Romance is over. I think it will be headline news again when we start trying to put men on the moon again, but to do that safely and not have another Apollo 13 scenario, it's taking a lot longer.

As for what good it all does - a lot of developments have come through the space race, and wouldn't it be great to discover evidence of life on Mars? It might make the religious types squirm to explain things, but understanding the Universe and our place in it, not at the centre but as a tiny tiny part way off in the corner, is a valuable goal in itself.


http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html

Yeah, I realize I overstated that. I know there are plans to go to Mars, but what I meant was -- here's the timeline, here are the basic kinds of crafts to be used. Maybe they're further along than I realize.

[Coffee]

What good would it do for us as a species? The more we learn about our universe, the clearer it becomes that the cost/benefit ratio of daytripping about our own solar system cannot bring back sufficient rewards to justify the costs and risks

djm

Science is like sex: there may be practical benefits from it, but that's not why we do it.

What good will it do us as a species? Assuming we don't drive ourselves to extinction beforehand our world will eventually become uninhabitable as the sun expands (burning mostly helium rather than hydrogen by then) and the earth's surface goes molten. I don't recall the figures or timeline, but a few billion years from now earth will be either too close to the sun or actually swallowed up by it. If we haven't established permanent human settlements elsewhere before then our species is toast. Literally.
And it won't just take us. It'll take Bach. We can't have that.

[avanutria]

I'm pretty sure my brother told me a few years ago that they are planning to reach Mars by 2020.

[Tyler]

I'll take a chance and start this in the Pub, as opposed to PROCT.

Like many of my generation, I've always been interested in manned space travel. But, the trajectory many of us thought it would take hasn't even come close to realization. We've been confined to orbit for 35 years. There's talk about a manned mars mission, but it still seems impossibly expensive and semi-suicidal and no plans are set. We haven't made any major technological breakthroughs that might make major leaps forward in space travel safer or cheaper. I'm less inclined than ever to think we're likely to see much progress in the next 100 years.

Discuss.

This, IMHO, is putting the cart before the horse, opposite to what thinking got us from orbit to the Moon in the first place. The challenge , the goal, came first, then the technology emerged, not vice versa.

Very similar having a computer program accomplish a task that had previously not been attempted before, the goal, the stated purpose, must be laid out before the program is developed.

These technologies that we still use were developed as a result of the Apollo program.

Not to mention much of the impetus for computer development and miniaturization was a result of the early space program

[dubhlinn]

.... I'm less inclined than ever to think we're likely to see much progress in the next 100 years.

Discuss.

I agree.

The pinnacle of American achievment was putting men on the Moon - even better was getting them back home again- that was the tricky bit.

It was, and is, to this day the greatest technological feat ever , by a long way.

We, as a species, will never see it again.

Camelot was then..now we have War and Banks and a world firmly rooted on Earth..alas.

So much money wasted on now and nothing to spend on if

Slan,
D.

[Flyingcursor]

when we visit in December.

Feel free to drop by Michigan while your here. It's only a short hop from Texas. I can show you the entire city of Kalamazoo in half the time it took you to show me a fraction of London.

As for the human conquest of space, I'm glad this came up.
I say interstellar travel is a futile endeavor. It may not be impossible but it's ludicrous.
Either Einstein was right or he wasn't. If he was right than the world of Star Wars is a fantasy and will always be so.

I also maintain that until we pull our heads out of our butts and quit worrying about the origins of life, the universe, and everything, travel within our solar system is equally ridiculous.
Only when manned space travel provides economical and humanitarian returns to the species as a whole will it be worth the bother.

[djm]

I think a lot has been mistakenly extrapolated from what I said. I am not saying that we shouldn't still go into space. I have not stopped looking farther than what can be accomplished today. But where I look to is on the order of the Star Trek universe, and we have so much to learn about the physics, far beyond what is even dreamt of as possible by today's understanding, that the costs and risks of persisting with human space travel using current technology becomes obviously futile and too expensive to be plausable.

Learn more. Do things better. Reduce the risk through knowledge and understanding. Then return to space.

There will always be a degree of gee whiz neat-o about new space discoveries in the meantime, and it will always be wonderful to learn something new about the other planets in our solar system, but let's face it: there are no other worlds locally that can reasonably support us. We must cast our gaze much further, and to do that we need to discover a whole lot more about how our universe functions. We are still muddling with superstrings and stuff we don't know how to spell, much less prove the existence of.

If we survive our propensity for self-annihilation yada yada yada etc. I think we need to invest in that learning now.

djm

[Flyingcursor]

I think a lot has been mistakenly extrapolated from what I said. I am not saying that we shouldn't still go into space. I have not stopped looking farther than what can be accomplished today. But where I look to is on the order of the Star Trek universe, and we have so much to learn about the physics, far beyond what is even dreamt of as possible by today's understanding, that the costs and risks of persisting with human space travel using current technology becomes obviously futile and too expensive to be plausable.

Learn more. Do things better. Reduce the risk through knowledge and understanding. Then return to space.

There will always be a degree of gee whiz neat-o about new space discoveries in the meantime, and it will always be wonderful to learn something new about the other planets in our solar system, but let's face it: there are no other worlds locally that can reasonably support us. We must cast our gaze much further, and to do that we need to discover a whole lot more about how our universe functions. We are still muddling with superstrings and stuff we don't know how to spell, much less prove the existence of.

If we survive our propensity for self-annihilation yada yada yada etc. I think we need to invest in that learning now.

djm

I agree.

[BillChin]

Patience. I like to use the analogy of exploration of the New World. Using the 1492 Columbus date, it was many decades before economically viable colonies were established. Those early colonies were mostly gold mines or fur trapping or similar. If a person leaves those out, it was a very long time before real working farm colonies were established. Also keep in mind that the moon landings were more like getting to Sicily than sailing to Puerto Rico.

Technology can advance in leaps and bounds. Think of a person born in 1900 and all the advances that person saw in their lifetime. The Japanese have set a space elevator as a national science project.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 799369.ece

If and when the Japanese succeed in making a space elevator, that one innovation can catapult the entire planet ahead many decades towards space colonization. The estimated price tag is a modest $10 billion USD. Even at five times that price, it would likely pay for itself very quickly.

Think about all the people in India and China that are getting advanced educations. When the Apollo project was done, the Chinese were executing people with advanced degrees instead of encouraging them. That's thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of scientists that might invent the next great thing. If one uses the metaphor of monkeys on typewriters, there are a lot more monkeys typing away doing advanced research, than at any other time in human history.

Many other smaller firms are involved in getting launch costs down such as SpaceX.
http://www.spacex.com/
Here is an article about a company making a prototype for a new and improved Lunar Lander.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27368176/

A new Lunar Lander is a smallish project, but if the U. S. government did the same project it likely would have cost a hundred times as much as the $350,000 prize offered ($1 million for the next level of prize), with no guarantee of success.

As to why the overall goal of manned space exploration is important, moving viable populations off world greatly increases the odds of survival for the human species.