NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by scythe » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:50 PM UTC

zatkin wrote: post #78

Quarrelsome wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because space is more than us and it isn't us. It gives us a non-nation based activity to pursue that is greater than the whole of earth. It represents new frontier, new resources and ways of thinking that transcend this planet. It is a form of evolution and of freedom that isn't shackled so much by our self-made problems of earth. There are new mistakes to make and that's super appealing.

We can't even cope with the environmental issues that we have on our own planet, so we avoid that and instead look to plaguing the rest of the solar system and beyond? Good grief.

Yeah, we're going to plague a bunch of inanimate objects, and defile the sanctity of the asteroid belt. It amuses me that "atheists" have decided life itself is a plague threatening some great holy Natural-Universe. Your distaste for the people around you is showing.

Dunno if you've heard, but this Universe is condemned. In about a hundred trillion years it'll run out of hydrogen and burn out. Might as well enjoy it while we can.

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

#182

Post by Spellman » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

coss wrote: post #171

I like to imagine a world where tax payers can choose where they wish to allocate their taxes.

In theory that's why you vote for representatives that align with your interests.

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

#183

Post by criddell » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

coss wrote: post #171

I like to imagine a world where tax payers can choose where they wish to allocate their taxes.

Would one of the options be return to sender? If so, I can tell you the box most people would check.

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

#184

Post by datr » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #166

habosa wrote: post #103

In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!

Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit. At this time we have every reason to believe that it is a limit. Our theories also say that if you were to go faster than light (which you cannot) it implies time dilation and time travel - again science fiction just assumes a loop hole so that doesn't happen. Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that i…

Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity.

Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

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

#185

Post by bluGill » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

HarkMamilton wrote: post #144

mannigfaltig wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble understanding the enthusiasm about space. Space hostile and empty. Why not simply send space probes and rovers at a fraction of the cost and spend the money more wisely, for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming. Why do we need to make the exception for space and get drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration, when…

Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright. We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one. If we don't get to space now , we will probably never get…

Insurance against what? Lets assume a self supporting mars colony today, and that the asteroid hits earth tomorrow making humans extinct. Will the mars colony get off mars in time to avoid their asteroid? It seems to me that we need to get to a few earth like planets before we can assume survival.

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

#186

Post by lfowles » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

chha wrote: post #43

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…

But hasn't this generally been an issue since Apollo? Great Ideas(TM) emerge and people get enthusiastic about them, but fail to realize that the cost makes them difficult to carry out as intended. The Great Idea is then either watered down (Skylab, Space Shuttle) or comes to an abrupt halt due to lack of funding or for political reasons (Space Station Freedom, Constellation). I'm getting more and more convinced that…

Speaking of Great Space Ideas(TM) that I was incredibly excited about in highschool, whatever happened to space elevator research?

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

#187

Post by bluGill » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #52

maze-le wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I expect that sewage treatment to fertilizer will solve the problem before we reach that. Our current time where we are not putting manure on all fields is an anomaly in time.

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

#188

Post by tgb » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

datr wrote: post #184

bluGill wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit. At this time we have every reason to believe that it is a limit. Our theories also say that if you were to go faster than light (which you cannot) it implies time dilation and time travel - again science fiction just assumes a loop hole so that doesn't happen. Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that i…

Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity. Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

Doesn't sound exponential to me!

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

#189

Post by thearn4 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

computerex wrote: post #49

thearn4 wrote: post #42

I'm a bigger fan of putting a semi-permanent ISS 2.0 on the surface of the moon vs. boots on Mars. I don't work directly in exploration systems, but I'm not the only one at NASA who feels this way. But more than anything I think we and the other executive agencies would take any strong commitment on an exploration and human spaceflight direction from congress that survives across presidential administrations over any…

I am a fan of that too, but I don't know how practical it is. What would we get out of having a manned station around the moon? It's a desolate piece of rock with little to no activity in the core. It's dead by all means, and the probes we have in orbit + instrumentation that was left by Apollo and the tons of moon rock we brought back I think already gave us an abundant amount of data to work with. But alas, I am a…

I think that it would be a good place to develop ISRU capability, to enable us to do further exploration targets in the future.

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

#190

Post by squarefoot » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

If the bean counters at NASA read "Buy Jupiter!" by Isaac Asimov they'd already have the solution at hand. Ok, building flying billboards is still a bit hard, but advertising is the point. What about sending probes and ships named after the highest bidder name/company? Of course they would have also a name for the scientific community and those of us who would never ever accept saying "Coca Cola has landed on Mars".