Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 342 posts

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

#251

Post by dfox »

bluGill wrote: post #194
dfox wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've seen this quote: "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC And exactly this thing seems to be the major problem with essentially every space-related weapons platform other than ICBMs. Simply almost every such proposed system uses some expendable ammunition that is significantly more expensive to deploy or even just manufacture than what it is suppose…

part of logistics is the ability to do something. It doesn't have to be practical for me to drop a heavy thing on you, I just need the ability to do it if you push me hard enough. If I'm governor of a space station I'm better off not turning half my space station into a bomb on your capital, but if you push my hard enough I might feel compelled to do that so you will treat me and my needs with respect.

Problem with this is that it has to be credible threat. Even when you would fill ISS with conventional explosives and somehow arrange for it to land on reasonably precise spot and explode on impact the damage caused will be many orders of magnitude smaller than what you would expedite to do all that (and this holds even when you take the expense as a fraction of relevant defense budgets instead of absolute values)

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

#252

Post by ethbro »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #232
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!

Shortest sci-fi book ever!

Back cover: Picking up where the last novel concluded, Grogdar continues negotiations to amass the requisite votes for an invasion. Plutar, still with a majority in the Dkystfit's upper chamber, seeks to block her.

Spoiler: Not much happens in this book. But maybe in the next!

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

#253

Post by sitharus »

ianai wrote: post #223
badloginagain wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to mention The Expanse, which definitely has hard limits on going over (or even reaching) the speed of light, and touches on many of the tropes you mentioned. It's also probably one of the best examples I've seen of a truly alien encounter- no bipedal humaniods with spoken language. The book series is excellent, and it has two seasons released from SyFy, which does a pretty good job capturing the feeling…

How do they zip around the solar system so quickly? It seems like at various points they go from earth to where ever almost instantaneously (in the show, that is). Not a troll - I'm genuinely wondering what I missed from the episodes.

Same as in most tv shows, they skip the boring bits.

Travel times are mentioned occasionally and they are consistent with ships that can do a brachistochrone orbit at a constant 0.3 or 1f acceleration. This would be a few days between most locations mentioned iirc.

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

#254

Post by abecedarius »

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…

I can see both sides of that conversation. Yes, pessimism is realistic, but also that judgement contributes to that reality. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The equilibrium can flip quickly after some unforeseen development shakes us out of it. Aldrin lived through such a flip -- I think it's hard to appreciate now how amazing aerospace developments were in the 50s/60s when the work was a societal priority.

Kickstarter solved a kind of similar problem for entrepreneurs, where it used to be too hard to surface the hidden demand for a product. There must be something we could do about testing/exposing the support a political idea might have past the "activation energy" needed to roll into a different equilibrium. A simple poll isn't enough.

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

#255

Post by amorphid »

ianai wrote: post #223
badloginagain wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to mention The Expanse, which definitely has hard limits on going over (or even reaching) the speed of light, and touches on many of the tropes you mentioned. It's also probably one of the best examples I've seen of a truly alien encounter- no bipedal humaniods with spoken language. The book series is excellent, and it has two seasons released from SyFy, which does a pretty good job capturing the feeling…

How do they zip around the solar system so quickly? It seems like at various points they go from earth to where ever almost instantaneously (in the show, that is). Not a troll - I'm genuinely wondering what I missed from the episodes.

Ships get around the solar system using a propulsion system called an Epstein Drive. I just watched the following video yesterday. The narrator talks about travel times to different planets using a flip and burn technique (accelerating at a constant rate to half way point flipping direction, and decelerating at the same rate to the destination).

https://youtu.be/hz7jETrejCQ

P.S. I love the Expanse :) I'm glad it was renewed for Season 3. Best sci-fi I've seen on TV since Battlestar Galactica.

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

#256

Post by liberte82 »

wanderingjew wrote: post #212
datr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity No, no, no. That was only in the Voyager episode Threshold . It is widely regarded as one of the worst Voyager episodes, and the entire plot of that episode doesn't make any sense. There are questions of if this episode is even canon. In any event, there are other Star Trek episodes where warp 10 is not a hard limit. All Good Things has ships trav…

repeats Threshold was all a dream, Threshold was all a dream

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

#257

Post by liberte82 »

summadat wrote: post #203
datr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha good point. Should have said hyperbolic growth.

If memory serves me right, Warp speeds are x^3 faster for each step. Warp 1 is 3x faster than light, Warp 2 is 27x faster, etc

Warp speeds in Star Trek are as fast as the plot of that particular episode demands.

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

#258

Post by ethbro »

keenerd wrote: post #243
svachalek wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spoilers It sounds like you may not have read all the books yet.

Everyone says that after book 3 or 4 they go downhill anyway. I like to believe there was only one Matrix movie ever made and only one Dune novel. I will probably prefer to believe that there were actually 9-N books in The Expanse series, where N has yet to be determined.

I'm rereading the Dune series right now and on Children of Dune. Actually REALLY enjoying the 2+ books more than the first. What would one do if one had become a human god but didn't like the future he saw?

Like the post-Ender's books (before Card sold out), I find mulling over the consequences of upsetting an applecart far more interesting than the upsetting.

The first books in both series feel a bit too "Mission Accomplished!", pat-on-the-back in hindsight.

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

#259

Post by codys »

tynpeddler wrote: post #96
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…

Space probes may be cheap but they are slooooowwww. Most of the research done by spirit, opportunity and curiosity could have been done by a trained astronaut in an afternoon. As an example, in its 2623 day mission, spirit traveled less than 5 miles. Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans. Some of you may be thinking, 'Hol…

> Space probes may be cheap but they are slooooowwww

If we spent as much on a space probe (or probes) as on a manned mission, I imagine there would be enough weight capacity to make the unmanned rover (or rovers) faster, if that was considered worthwhile.

Also consider that the total distance traveled by a unmanned rover over the course of the mission already exceeds that of manned missions. Wikipedia links to a nice chart from NASA [1].

Distance traveled and speed to travel that distance isn't necessarily connected to the value of a rover.

As to "all that new technology [we gain from manned exploration] would probably make it easier to later send rovers all over the solar system", frankly, we could just develop the new tech for unmanned exploration directly. Manned missions primarily serve as PR, except when we actually need careful manipulation, like repairing the Hubble, something that has almost continuously been pushed off to the point where it likely makes sense just to replace it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#/media/Fi...

Post reply on HN