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NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

arstechnica.com

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Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#51

Post by seanalltogether »

maze-le wrote: post #37
sametmax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now Mars doesn't have any resource with crave enough to justify this enormous cost. If suddenly we discover that there is something we can get money from, and not just knowledge, you'll get investers.

Martian soil contains non-neglible amounts of phosphates[0]. Phosphorus is highly important for the production of fertilizers and gets increasingly rare here on earth[1]. It wouldn't suprise me if 150 years from now, phosphates are imported from martian soil. [0]: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html [1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full

Surely it must be more economical to recover/recycle it from waste?

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#52

Post by maxerickson »

maze-le wrote: post #37
sametmax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now Mars doesn't have any resource with crave enough to justify this enormous cost. If suddenly we discover that there is something we can get money from, and not just knowledge, you'll get investers.

Martian soil contains non-neglible amounts of phosphates[0]. Phosphorus is highly important for the production of fertilizers and gets increasingly rare here on earth[1]. It wouldn't suprise me if 150 years from now, phosphates are imported from martian soil. [0]: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-phosphate-soluble-mars.html [1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4650/full

The easily available deposits on Earth are expected to last longer than 150 years. It's unlikely to be worth the delta-v to bring it here from Mars before known deposits are exhausted.

Even after that I expect deep sea mining or direct extraction from seawater to be more viable than interplanetary shipping.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#53

Post by maze-le »

Tepix wrote: post #22
Thaxll wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

Seriously! "The U.S. military budget is higher than the nine other biggest military budgets in the world combined." It's insane. Btw for 2017 it's 773.5 billion USD.

To get an idea of whan a mind-bogling number that is: Its about the amount of the GDP of the Netherlands. The whole economic output of a 1. World country with 17M inhabitants is slightly smaller than this budget.

[0]: http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#54

Post by maxxxxx »

Nanite wrote: post #4
maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I have been watching this since 2000. New president comes in, scraps old programs, declares new "vision". NASA does a few incoherent things and the whole thing restarts after a few years. It's pretty sad. I wish they would commit to something and actually finish it.

NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years, every new administration is looking for ways to cut down taxes. It's amazing they get anything done imho.

The area where they get things done is unmanned spaceflight. Politicians don't care for that so the people at NASA can just do their work without meddling.

I don't think they have got anything interesting done in manned spaceflight lately.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#55

Post by honestoHeminway »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #11

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…

A coldwar - creating the ilusion that the other side wants to get there first.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#56

Post by LeifCarrotson »

carsongross wrote: post #46
FiatLuxDave wrote: post #11

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…

If you'd like to know why NASA is getting less and less funding and can expect this trend to continue, see this chart from Five38/NYT: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fi...

Here's the article from which that graphic is sourced:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-i...

I'm shocked that they are so brazen as to frame one of the categories as "entitlement spending". The neutral terms for the contents of this category are Medicare and Medicaid, pensions, retirement benefits, Social Security, welfare, and unemployment. You can also call them health insurance, retirement insurance, and unemployment insurance.

Technically, retirement benefits are things to which retirees are entitled to. Workers took lower-paying government jobs after weighing the value of the salary now against the value of the promised pensions later, or contributed to Social Security (not so much a choice by individuals, but a choice by the government of the past) which allows them to take the benefits of the program now. This is the literal meaning of the word "entitle", not the pejorative that it's become.

As far as health care and welfare go, I would argue that simply being human in a wealthy, modern society ought to entitle people to the right not die on the streets of preventable causes. I don't regret my tax dollars going to those causes, except insofar as they exceed actually providing health care and instead enrich the bureaucracy and megacorporations that are paid to provide it.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#57

Post by ncallaway »

indigo0086 wrote: post #34

And it should never have the funding. Let the private sector invest in that venture.

The private sector can only make significant moves in this area (at the moment) with investments and funding from NASA.

NASA has been a massive customer / subsidizer for entrants in the new space arena.

I'm a huge fan of private sector space innovation, but having a large and well-funded public entity helps make that innovation possible. Advocating blanket defunding of NASA would put the private space sector into jeopardy.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#58

Post by honestoHeminway »

sametmax wrote: post #30
FiatLuxDave wrote: post #11

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…

Right now Mars doesn't have any resource with crave enough to justify this enormous cost. If suddenly we discover that there is something we can get money from, and not just knowledge, you'll get investers.

Its because mars has twice the gravity-well lifting costs against it. Asteroid/ Moonmining does not have that against it.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#59

Post by indigo0086 »

ncallaway wrote: post #57
indigo0086 wrote: post #34

And it should never have the funding. Let the private sector invest in that venture.

The private sector can only make significant moves in this area (at the moment) with investments and funding from NASA. NASA has been a massive customer / subsidizer for entrants in the new space arena. I'm a huge fan of private sector space innovation, but having a large and well-funded public entity helps make that innovation possible. Advocating blanket defunding of NASA would put the private space sector into jeo…

NASA is made up of people, they can move freely. I just don't beleive in blind forced investment in a stagnant organization.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#60

Post by theseatoms »

giobox wrote: post #25
snappyTertle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There's more important things to spend public money on at the moment (like servicing the $20T in debt). Let private companies, like SpaceX, voluntarily spend R&D on it.

Given the huge investments NASA has made in SpaceX to date, I'm not entirely convinced that the split between public and private money in this space is as black and white as you suggest. SpaceX arguably wouldn't be here today without NASA's cash. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-w...

Oh wow. That's disappointing.
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