carrots and rabbit holes
A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
51–60 of 237 posts
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#52'"I am more interested in maximizing the odds of success for this bold undertaking and making it as safe as any human journey into the deep space can be, than I am in having NASA meet arbitrary deadlines," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson — a Democrat from Texas and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — said at a recent hearing.' Waiting to make a journey until it is "as safe as can be"…
"...a Democrat..."
lol.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#53what a sad little life you live.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here we go again... Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back. I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today. “ Someone dying is dev…
Someone dying is devastating if you have a connection to that person. People die every second and if everyone was devastated by every death then the world would grind to a halt. The first people going into deep space dying would be devastating to billions because billions of people will feel a personal connection to the person dying. This is a grave thing causing so much pain, but hopefully space travel can become a…
Yes, that was covered six years ago too. The Alaskan fishery example is a modern comparison.
We retired the Space Shuttle because it was too dangerous. One accident every hundred flights.
We live in a different world than we did hundreds of years ago. One accident will require a review board and many expensive changes. Flights will be grounded.
The point that I really want you to get is this:
“In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now”
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#55We/our government is completely unwilling to invest the multi-trillion dollar expense of creating a permanent moon colony. In light of that, I believe arguments to the effect of "a moon base would make Mars easier" are baseless since creating that type of installation on the moon would dwarf the cost of a single shot to Mars and back. In light of that, our current moon efforts are nothing but make-work doing things w…
Why would a permanent Moon base make Mars easier? Would the idea to build a space elevator or manufacture rockets and fuel there?
In the (probably very) long term, a permanent Moon base capable of manufacturing and of growing food could be the key to human bases throughout the solar system.
Suppose you need to get from planet or moon X to planet or moon Y, using a rocket.
The usual way is to start at X and use the rocket to put yourself in an elliptical orbit that intersects both the orbits of X and Y. Then you coast in that orbit until it intersects Y's orbit, and use the rocket to put yourself in Y's orbit.
The nice thing about this approach is that it is speedy. If you only can carry enough fuel for limited use of the rocket, I think that this is the fastest way to go.
For a manned round trip mission, you have to take the speedy way, at least for much of the interesting parts of the solar system. Round trip to Jupiter, for example, would be several years at least.
If you do not care about speed there is a much cheaper way to get from X to Y. Interesting thing happen around various Lagrange points giving unstable orbits around them that can extend for vast distances away from the Lagrange point, and which take almost no energy to transfer to from an orbit that is close to the Lagrange point.
So you start in orbit around X, then move to an appropriately chosen X/Sun Lagrange point. This is not very expensive. At that Lagrange point, you nudge into one of those big unstable orbits. Eventually that orbit intersects and unstable orbit for a Y/Sun Lagrange point. A little nudge switches you to that, which eventually takes you to near a Y/Sun Lagrange point. There you can nudge again to get into a stable orbit, and from there it is cheap to get to Y.
But this is not fast. We're not talking nice straightforward elliptical orbits. The unstable orbit phase looks more like the path of one of those desktop tops where you have several magnets on a plate with another magnet on a rigid pendulum switching above it, and it looks like its motion is random. It can take a long time for it to get to one of the points where you can do the transfer to the other unstable orbit, and then that can meander a very long time before getting to the Y Lagrange point.
Depending on the particular X and Y, this can be anything from a few years to a few centuries.
This would be useless for transporting humans, but for long term transport of goods to support humans, it has a lot of potential.
Suppose you want to do a big base on Titan, say, and suppose it's 50 years to send things from around Earth to Titan via cheap unstable orbits. (I don't know how long it actually is...this is just for illustration).
What you can do is start sending regular supply packages to Titan this way. Send, say, one a month. It takes 50 years for the first one to actually arrive at Titan, and then after that you have one arriving per month.
When the supplies start arriving at Titan, then you send the manned mission via the normal fast orbits. Note that since you've got supplies at Titan already the manned mission only has to carry enough food and oxygen and water to last for the outbound trip itself. It does not need to carry anything for the stay on Titan, or for any return trip.
Ideally, what you want to do is as soon as you are technologically capable start using the slow but cheap unstable orbit system to start sending regular supplies to all of the places you think you might want to establish manned bases later. Over the next decades and centuries, as supplies start arriving at those places you can then send the manned missions to explore them, followed by the base building missions if you decide you do want bases there.
You could send them all from Earth, but doing this right would involve sending a whole lot of them over a very long time, and doing so from Earth would take a lot more energy than doing so from the Moon so it probably becomes a lot more feasible if you can make and launch the supply packages from the Moon.
Probably won't ever happen, though, because it requires long term planning on a scale that we no longer seem capable of.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#56Put me in the No Way! column. NASA budget for exploration including SLS is about $3.5 billion. The Apollo mission cost $145 billion. Just not going to happen. Best guess: double budget to $7 billion and spend that much every year for 20 years and we will be back on the Moon.
You mean the entire Apollo program cost $145 billion. This is one mission to the moon with much better technology and lower costs. You just can not compare costs like this.
According to the per-year costing in [0], about 80% of the entire Apollo program cost was accrued before the first moon landing. That suggests that even just one mission will come with a substantial price ticket, even if no hardware is built for subsequent missions.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#57'"I am more interested in maximizing the odds of success for this bold undertaking and making it as safe as any human journey into the deep space can be, than I am in having NASA meet arbitrary deadlines," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson — a Democrat from Texas and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — said at a recent hearing.' Waiting to make a journey until it is "as safe as can be"…
Here we go again... Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back. I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today. “ Someone dying is dev…
I wouldnt worry about those who dont understand why we must immediately become spacefaring. They're obviously on the "wrong side" of history as environmental pressure will make unarguable.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be easier to undertake a massive industrial operation on an unfamiliar celestial body when there is a human around to oversee things first-hand and troubleshoot issues when (not if) they arise. First Lunar habitats are going to be mostly underground anyway, and nuclear-powered. Not much is needed to terraform.
I'm constantly "impressed" (not in a good way) at how good some people are at saying completely unfounded statements as fact. There is literally no reason to believe either premise of most bases being underground, nor is there to believe nuclear power will be the dominant power source. We have a hard time getting RTGs inside steel boxes capable of surviving disasters into orbit.
You don't need the reactor working, or assembled, on the way to the destination. Consider a pebble-bed design.
Digging underground is a reasonable way to get a massive layer of radiation protection without carrying it with you. This is important when you are just starting a long-term habitat. Later designs can of course be different.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#59NASA wants to go to moon in about 4 years (!) but today they can't even lift a human into earth orbit since they discontinued their last spacecraft capable of such a task. Dream on.
They can always hire a commercial rocket SpaceX used to be their long-time partner.
It needs more than just the rocket. You also need a lunar lander, and all we have right now are paper sketches of designs that would take more than four years to finish and build, on conventional timelines. (One wild card is the SpaceX Starship, which Elon is talking about having some lunar capability for, on extremely aggressive timelines. But Starship is a risky project in all sorts of ways -- besides which, before trying to take Elon's timelines to the bank, you might want to look at the years of delays before they finally launched Falcon Heavy.)
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#60No chance. This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024. Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to…
Also, combine ”NASA says contracts to build a lunar lander could be awarded in late February or March.” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#History . For the LM, the contract was awarded in September 1962, and first flight (unmanned) was in January, 1968. So, even Apollo’s aggressive schedule needed more time to first flight than what NASA would have now between awarding the contract and landing hu…
Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.