New Mars Forums

I was and I think so was DARPA surprised though at the quality of some of the amateur entries. And the competition had a very team orientated fair play to it, Was it not team firestorm who where helping out a schools entry with debugging. And there where fan bases around a few entries like the team that had a motorbike entry.

It was an amateur entry which DARPA was most interested in as the way its robot thought was vastly more efficient than the Million dollar entries from the big UNIs. And it seemed to be programming that backfired on most of the robots as they had too little time to debug programs. One of the favourites Firestorm due to a very slight  computational change had there robot wrecked when it flipped two weeks before the challenge.

It could be a turning point but not necassarily what we would want. Currently based in France, Britain and the USA are Chechen independence groups and there web sites. It may be that the Russians will have a serious backlash against all the chechens and there tactic supporters.

China is suffering from growing pains!

With the construction of the three gorges dam it got a lot of cleaner hydro power but at the expense of some towns and a lot of good farm land, Not to mention some serious political and focus group backlash. It was almost certain that China was going to have to go to a nuclear solution to solve all the electrical shortage it would be facing. It like all countries cannot use Gas and Oil as the costs of this are going up. It really only left Coal and Nuclear, and coal was too heavy a polluter so nuclear it had to be.

What you are talking about is a manipulator arm it is a tool, not the true telerobotics that are needed. A true telerobotic robot will be self powered and will have its own manouvering system. We cannot use solar cells as a powersource as they would restrict the places this robot could go. The NASA robotic astronaut is for use as a short term crew member, but the need is for heavier construction capable devices almost miniature space tugs. But saying that there will not be a need for anything like this until a really major space project is envisaged and we are decades at least from this.

The NASA robot as developed was intended to be moved to its construction or work area by way of the shuttles robot arm. For a construction Bot to be effective it will need a means to pilot itself ie it will need an MMU. To develop one in which fuel and duration is increased will cost a lot of money. To then pair it with a telerobotic robot which has to last an extended length of time in orbit, so it has to have duration and all with a weight limit begins to get very very hard. This is getting to the point where we are sending one of these robots up on there own so your talking a single delta or shuttle to deliver one.

We are now talking about a robot which in effect weighs about 10 to 15 tonnes and is using ion thrust to move about and has a nuclear power source. All these will have to be developed. I am now changing my view it will cost 5 to 6 Billion us$ to develop. If you want an effective construction droid that is what has to be done.

I have just thought differently than I usually do, I usually will drop a project when it gets too big or the weight problems prove to be impossible to fix. Comstar we can create a construction droid but it will be heavy. It needs a real construction project to build the problem is not software for the construction droid it is hardware the ability to move and maneuver in space means that the robot will have to be of a realistically larger size to be of use.

Dook it would be the highest rated television show at least for that week, then the second week it would be still doing ok, but by the third week the latest version of Sex in the city would be back on top.

This is fact the population of the western world have a really poor interest factor, ask anybody who works in television.

We know the Moon has all that we need to create a full industrial center for Man to get major access to space. And it has when necessary got reasonably easier access to the NEO class of asteroid and there materials.

We cannot colonize mars when all we are sending is 6 people at a cost of 2 Billion $us for each 6 man crew. How many crews will we be able to send before the plug is pulled. We must reduce the cost of sending people or the mainstay of colonisation families will never be sent. This is the idea behind cyclers, which once constructed only need resupply and all the expensive costs have been dealt with. Cyclers will certainly have a nuclear power source and use solar as backup. They will probably spin to provide a limited gravity and the colonists will take along there own food and supplies.

It was not Moral rotteness that made the American Colonies break away from great Britain, nor was it that Britain was fading. At that time Britain was a young state and no where near the pinnacle of its power. Inventions and Ideas flowed from Britain as Britain went through the Industrial revolution a state that occured mostly after the Colonies had broken away.

You must remember that our ideas of what is classed as Morality is different now than then. The majority of the Founding fathers where slave owners and slavery existed in the USA long after Great Britain had banned it. But what we call morality really came about in the 19th century in the age we call the Victorian age. But what really matters is that the USA is now the Empire and most of your arquement can now be thrown at the USA. It is now the turn of the USA to either take on the challenges or to begin to fade.

The first thing I would do is send an orbiting mirror this would begin to reflect more light onto Mars, But until we really decide we want to go full tilt for terraforming what it would do is provide more light for power use at the main Mars base.

But yes go for Mars as soon as we can then we change it to what we want, But there is no reason not to go for colonisation as soon as we have resources to do so.

What you seem to be saying is that at the beginning when Your empire was young it had little resources and it was a challenge to do anything and people who where motivated went for it and solved those challenges. Now your Empire has aged and though it has more resources it does not have the motivation to do what was once possible, people now look at these challenges and say too hard why risk my comfortable life to try.

This seems to happen to all empires they stop expanding not wanting to risk the trouble and cost. It happened to the greeks, the Romans and to the British. So will it happen to or is it happening to the USA, probably. When an empire decides that it will not keep expanding it will eventually fail, through internal troubles or due to the incapability to deal with other external factors.

But sometimes when it seems things are going to go dark there is that last gasp of expansion and that could be enough to get a breath of fresh air into the Empire as there is that new generation of people in the frontiers with so much to do that they become your new class of motivated people. Of course then these frontier provinces become independent and even with the original Empire collapsing they will push the Empires ideals forward but with the slant of local conditions.

My hope in using a lawn mower beam bot was to see if

a) it could be done but in this I had real trouble

B) One of the most effective mining technigues in space is to use a rotating brush to collect surface material up from the ground. Standard digging technigues used on Earth are a lot less effective on the Moon and Mars and objects that have a reduced gravity. Also the surface of these objects are covered in slightly compressed rubble or regolith caused by asteroid impact and we must dig through this to find if we want to non fractured strata. Using a beambot meant I could use legs as stabilisation.

It was my intention to use them like an ant colony would but I had too much trouble with weight issues/movement.

Unfortunatly I have now come to the Idea that until a form of stonger way to make muscles for robot legs and arms appears with a decent lightweight power source . Robots using wheels will have the advantage when being used. (it is what I now plan to turn my lawn mower robot into but with the advantage that we can use a petrol engine to provide power source). Also the reduced complexity of a Wheel based robot reduces maintenance problems.

At first cargoes sent to the Moon and Mars will be sent directly to there respective destinations. But when we manage to get a lot more efficient means to LEO then it becomes cheaper to have a shuttle service between a station and the Moon etc. The required technology to be developed is a reusable space plane, with a lot more reduced costs then the current shuttle. This LEO to Moon shuttle service can use indigenous lunar fuel to reduce costs.

Of course the space dock in LEO will not be the ISS its in the wrong orbit and designed wrong. A replacement built in a better orbit could use inflatable structures and be made large enough to provide a modicum of gravity by spinning.

All these where to be introduced as part of the original space station freedom. But as costs overun and Nasa's budget got slashed. The original plan was to have the Spacedock and Lunar transfer vehicles plus orbital tugs and construction pods. All this was dropped after review after review. When international partners came on board the designs where changed again and again. But the most cutting was done when it was only NASA planning to build it. It was NASA that got rid of the Tug, the Lunar transfer vehicle, the construction pod and the spaceport function.

The ISS as it is now is in the wrong orbit and does not have the design and capacity space to provide what is needed for a spaceport. It is doubtful that the ISS can actually handle all the stress we are putting on it now as some worried NASA engineers can tell you. It is putting out the signals of becoming another MIR with multiple fixes having to be done by the crew just to keep it working. Oh and there is that rather ominous noise that comes occasionly hinting at some other real trouble, Metal fatique maybe?