New Mars Forums

I won't kick and scream TOO much about going to the moon.  Don't get me wrong, it's better than what we're currently doing. 

Clark's semantic parsing of Bush's (Rove's) words was certainly informative.  It did give me some hope that there is room to wriggle a bit within the guidelines of the plan and allow some sensibility to prevail.  (I too would like to see the shuttle phased out sooner than called for.)

It's true enough that politics & PR must always be considered...  Maybe this is one instance where political doublespeak will work in our favor.

Practical: 

-Electrical Eng., Computer Eng., maybe Comp. Sci (am thinking about grad school in this myself).

-Bioengineering or Envi. Sci. (for life support systems).

Science:

-Geology/Geophysics.  (I think this will be by far the most relevant science on Mars.)

But if I were you I'd never give up NZ for Mars, mate.  Heaven on Earth.  Have been thirsting for a Speight's for some time now...  or better yet a Monteith's.

Nitrogen.

what about a maser?  that way you keep the original microwave advantages but get a tighter focus

Here's my .02 worth.

Cindy, yet another reason for you to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.  The longevity issue is central to the plot in several ways.  (You will get no rest here at NM until you've read these books!   :;): )

Wow, tons of other SF tie-ins here.  Larry Niven used Cobra's merit-based idea to interesting effect in his "Known Space" series.  (It actually determined who got to reproduce, but the ideas are similar.)

Orson Scott Card explored the moral ramifications of the cryonics idea in his Worthing Saga.  I highly recommend these stories, as there is some pretty hard-hitting philosphy concerning human suffering there.  He also deals at great length with the social class issue Cindy mentioned.

But I wouldn't want to be a Mozart and die at 35 a legend.  If that had happened I wouldn't be seeing all these great pics from Spirit!  I want to live and see what path history takes.  I guess this is what drives a lot of the cryonics folks too.  (Count me out of that though.  I'll take my lumps and die naturally.  We get a certain amount of time to watch & participate in the Big Show but at some point I want to bow out to make room for other players.)  Niven had some fun with this idea too, in "World Out of Time."

Getting back to the genetic side of things.  I agree that we should not shy away from this technology just because it has potential pitfalls.  (What technology doesn't?)  But it should be kept under tight controls.  Parental greed for their kids' competitive edge would run rampant otherwise.  Cure real diseases such as cancer and cystic fibrosis, but not disadvantages like shortness or acne.  We would run the risk of losing genetic diversity (as already mentioned) otherwise (this may happen anyway, see below).  This is why I tend to take a socialist view toward things like this.  The Grover Norquists of the world would tell you to let everybody alone and let market forces make things work out peachy.  But without some kind of institutional & ethics-based control, unchecked genetic engineering would be disastrous.

Here's something to chew on:  How many "diseases" are actually evolution in progress, adaptation to some environmental condition?  An example that comes to mind is sickle cell anemia.  Apparently, this is a facet of evolutionary adaptation to malaria-- the deformed blood cells are less susceptible to the malaria parasite.  Unfortunately the adaptation has its own negative effects.  While it's certainly better to use biotech to cure BOTH of these diseases, you have to wonder what will happen to our adaptive ability once natural evolution has been pre-empted by our control of our genome.  Natural evolution will pretty much be over.

I will now rein in my speculative demons... 

I think the true acid test for this whole thing will be the upcoming election.  If Bush is elected, it will become obvious pretty quickly whether or not he was blowing smoke on moon/Mars.  If it was an election-year ploy I think we will see the project lose momentum over the next 2 or 3 years. 

If a Dem wins I have no idea what'll happen.  Their position on space has been vague at best.  One or more of them should take some initiative and propose a counter-plan.  There is a ton of room for improvement on Bush's plan and it would be easy for one of his opponents, with a little consultation w/ some space experts, to come up w/ something better.  (For that matter, Bush could do the same thing at some point in the future.)

Some good will come out of all this, it's just a matter of how much & if it'll be enough to get to Mars in our lifetimes.

BTW, MarsDirect would not cost a few hundred billion, even factoring in the inevitable waste.

Oh, one other thing.  Alexander mentions the 5-year time frame being suspiciously coincident with Bush's latest possible exit from office.  I hate to wax political here, but I think this is an astute observation.  If you look historically at where politicians go when they step down, you'll see that (esp. with Repubs) they go to well-paid positions in industry.  (ref. Bush sr. w/ Carlyle group, Cheney w/ Halliburton, etc.)  W. is doing himself a favor here any way you slice it.  (And Halliburton does benefit from the space program, they have at least one subsidiary that has an operations contract at JSC.)  While RobS makes a valid point about phaseouts, I don't think that is the sole reason for the delay.  W. will surely go into a position in Big Oil or Halliburton or Carlyle when he leaves office, and birthing a piglet now that will be an oinker in 5 years is a good investment-- for W. at least.

Expiry date is mostly to give the engineers who build it an idea of how to build.  It has a big impact on the quality of materials used.

HST will eventually fall victim to onboard malfunctions, of which it actually has a long history.  Without further servicing missions my bet is that it will lose enough gyros that it will no longer be able to point itself properly.  (The gyros have been the main source of trouble ever since it was launched.)  I think the thing will be crippled, if not useless, before its orbit degrades to where it burns up.

Mini-boosters & space tugs will never be developed in time even if the money were there.  (Remember, each shuttle mission is half a billion bucks-- this is a large fraction of the total cost of the telescope itself.)

If Webb fails in some regard, we're screwed I guess.  Hopefully HST will last long enough to provide some overlap.  I agree that it's worth it to give HST one more servicing mission & boost.

Hate to make it even worse for you, but not only is NASA planning to let it burn up, it is thinking about spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do so.  See the "$300 million to destroy Hubble" thread in the Science & Technology section.

Hubble was not put in geosynchronous orbit because it would've been too high for the servicing missions to reach.  (Which turned out to be a good thing or they never could've fixed the mirror.)

The shuttle cannot go beyond LEO, it's maximum altitude is 300-400 miles.  Geosync is like 20,000 miles.

I agree that switching one of the ISS shuttle missions to service the Hubble would be a better return on the investment, but Hubble has exceeded its mission plan and is at the end of its design life.  Even without the extra servicing mission it will still probably last at least a few years beyond 2010.  I kind of agree with the others who say we need to look forward.  The James Webb Space Telescope is already under construction and is planned for launch in 2011.  (This isn't to say it still can't be nixed for arbitrary political reasons, but I think it's unlikely.)

I'm sure that trillion-dollar price estimate is from the SEI directive from Bush Sr.  NASA came back with $500 billion for a price of a Mars mission, and so congress killed it.  Media 'pundits' (read gasbags) suggested 1 trillion on the assumption that a gov't agency ALWAYS underestimates.  (I guess they may have been justified in this in view of the ISS.)

So, now the media irresponsibly parrots this figure as the "high estimate"-- an estimate that is idiotically arrived at by extrapolating the already-maniacal $0.5 trillion dollar estimate put forth by the greedy, irresponsible (and pre-Mars Direct) NASA of that time.

The thing that pisses me off is that the media gives no reference to where they get this number, ever.  This is poor journalism and misleads the reading public.  I have sent a few emails in feedback when I see this number reported out of context like this.  I'd suggest that anybody interested in getting to Mars do the same.

Why'd you think you'd get flamed?

Another thing about the moon.  I saw in some mainstream media nozzle a discussion of how the moon will be a better place from which to launch other space missions since it's gravity well isn't as deep as Earth's.  As if there were all kinds of infrastructure in place already on the moon to manufacture rockets, fuel & provisions out of vacuum.  What're these people thinking?  Most of any mission has to come from Earth anyway.  Why have it detour to the moon?

And the Helium-3 argument.  I think Bush himself brought this up.  A classic case of putting the cart before the horse.

So of course I add my voice to the chorus of those who are calling this plan what it seems mostly to be:  Election year rhetoric.  We'll at least get rid of the shuttle, which has been a huge albatross around NASA's neck.  But I'd like a little more silver lining and a lot less cloud here.

Maybe the political BS side of things will fade after the election but NASA will retain the momentum gained and experience a renaissance of sorts.  Maybe the moon will be seen for the distracting pitfall it is.

Dickbill is right to question the value of the moon as a testbed for Mars.  Ironically, any spacecraft designed to land on Mars cold just as easily land on the moon, but the converse is not necessarily true.  So Mars first.  We can do it.  THEN the moon if we want.

Thought I was done w/ NM for today but I found [http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymo … 1_562.html]this  just now.

This is, of course, what you'd expect in terms of liberal skepticism when it comes to space spending, but I thought it was reasonable (except that damned half-trillion price tag the media keeps parroting from Bush Sr.'s failed SEI-- I am going to have to give them some feedback on that).

I wanted to add this just as food for thought, not to be a wet blanket.  As a space enthusiast I find stuff like this a little discouraging but the issues raised by all sides need to be addressed.  And I think it serves to keep people from getting carried away.  IMO it doesn't hurt to evaluate Bush's motives from all possible angles, and the looming election can't be ignored as a motivation.

Here's a tidbit for the anti-moon folks among us:

Here's the crux of the article:

Well, my impression from reading the mainstream media IS that this is being driven by the search for possible ET life.  Every article leading up to Spirit's landing mentioned "searching for signs of past water... which may indicate the possibility of past life."  Or some such info-bit.  The thing is, none of the landers on Mars since Viking has explicitly searched for organic signatures-- life.  So there is a tendency on the part of scientists to maybe downplay the 'life' thing a little.  The MERs are not looking for life, but for geological indications that conditions were right for it in the past.  Explicit experiments for actual life will be in the future, depending on what MERs & other missions find.

But finding LIFE is certainly the holy grail of space exploration, and very few would deny it.  Some folks are just trying to be circumspect and avoid sensationalism.  Probably a good idea until there's something to get really excited about, like petroglyphs on the side of a Mars rock.

Finally, I would add that exploration is an end unto itself.  This stuff is worth doing just to see what's out there, whether life is found or not.  It's just a question as to how much such an abstract edification is worth in terms of dollars.  To me it's worth a lot, but I can speak only for myself.

Welcome to NM.