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Reply to Grypd: How many people do you need to operate a giant mirror in space directing sunlight onto mars? I'm sure in a hundred years after we've sufficiently explored mars and we then decide to make the attempt at terraforming there will be automated nuclear power plants that will require very little maintenance. We have them now but I think their max output is only around 80kw.
The moon is not a better choice than going direct to mars.
I have no intention of having any crew on the soletta mirrors at all, We dont need them they are just satelites which I admit are bigger than normal but thats all. Automatic station keeping programs can run them just fine. If we decide that we want a terraformed Mars then we need to provide the support to do it and that the Moon can do. If we want to have Mass colonisation then again we need the Moon to ensure it will happen. Dook, I know you believe space should be left just for science then im sorry but the majority of this society want to actually live on Mars and this seems to be the best way to develop the means to do so. If we go to Mars just to do science I quarantee that the program will get cancelled after a few missions as politicians remove the funds to put the cash somewhere else. This is what happened to Apollo and this is what will happen to Mars direct. If we send people to live on Mars you can not abandon the colony without a strong public backlash.
So going to the Moon first is the best idea.
Who lives in these man made caves and never goes outside to hike a country trail? Who doesn't put their hand out the car window to feel the wind?
I guess you just never noticed those things. That's sad.
Once mars is terraformed I think there will be flocks of people heading there but not before simply because there is no reason for them to go there.
You see we dont have to have a terraformed planet just so we can make a beautiful place to live. In Britain we have a collection of domes called the Eden project, Each dome has a different climate zone and the plants that live within are visited by hundreds of thousands each year. This can easily be done in space and actually it is recomended that we do we need people who are happy and balanced working out there not factory automatons.
And how do you propose to terraform a planet without people there to do the job and when you do how do you get them there without a built up infrastructure. You may want to terraform and then colonise a planet but im sorry you have to do the work first. And that reguires we build machines and bases and large amounts of people working on the problems there are to fix. And if you think im going to live in a gray cave cell when I could build a base with plants and open spaces like a mall then sorry your wrong.
1) Yes solar arrays are a potential way to provide light to the Moon and keep the power flowing. This is technology that when pioneered on the Moon would be used where next, Mars.
Keep in mind that the Moon doesn't really have a luna-stationary orbit persay only Lagrange points, and I don't know if you can park a Lunar-orbit solar array over the dark side.
I dont really plan to have large reflective satelites on the Far side of the Moon it would not really be necassary if we have power supplies around the Moon. Especially if we can get superconductors to work on the Moon. And I think the first solettas will be reflective light with actual power generation and transmission to come later. Actually if we can do this we have a decent SPS and this can be used to power missions further out like Mars. Also I can hear the astronomers scream if they have large bright things over there brand new telescopes!
And for those who have not noticed we all live in Man made caves what are houses. We can go out and create homes that resemble what we want and go further turn planets into what we want, this is progress.
Please explain. Aerobraking is an excellent means of slowing a spacecraft upon reaching its destination. The Moon has no atmosphere, therefore no aerobraking.
We are trying to get to these asteroids and they have no atmosphere so aerobraking just is not an option. Also there is a whole class of asteroid this the NEO class which are close to Earth and the Moon in fact they can pose a threat to us so using them to increase our space industry capacity is doing some good. And returning the Asteroids to a closer orbit will be done by ejecting some of there mass by use of mass driving a technology which the moon will have pioneered. And returning do you think any country will let you aerobrake an asteroid near a settled planet you must be joking. The Lagrange points are close enough.
Or we could simply use solar arrays in space and not worry about the two-week cycle. The Moon is close, yes, but is this really an advantage? Who will be more independent, Luners or Martians? The Moon will always be a suburb of Earth.
1) Yes solar arrays are a potential way to provide light to the Moon and keep the power flowing. This is technology that when pioneered on the Moon would be used where next, Mars. Mars is a distant cold world and to help terraforming more solar light is needed. 2) And the Moon being close not an advantage, All space facilities we put up will be closely linked to Earth, Earth is where your settlers will come from. It will be centuries before there is enough atmosphere and people on Mars to mean they can consider a limited independence. But in the Short term it is getting up there that we need to do and the Moon has more advantages than Mars at the moment and for the near term too. We use the Moon for what it is our space station that drives the expansion of man to space.
We will not be colonizing Mars from the Moon, what we will be doing is making and supplying the Cycler spaceships that will allow the colonisation of Mars not the flags and footprints that mars semi direct will cause. And it is easier to get access to the asteroids from the Moon than it is to get there from Mars so consider the Moon as our best way to industrialise space.
We will be getting people from Earth to do the colonisation but they need something of reasonable size to fly in to get there. If you want colonisation of Mars that is our only choice. Cyclers are the desired means to do this but they are large spacecraft and frankly too expensive to make on Earth and launch in parts. This is not the case for a mature Moonbase with a Mass driver which can lob parts anywhere in the earth system like the lagrange points where we would build these vehicles.
The advantage the Moon has with Mars is that it is close. Our communication and control of devices working on the Moon is exponentially easier that Telerobotics controlled from Earth can be done on the Moon where it is impossible with our current technology for Mars. Solar power is so much easier to get on the Moon than on Mars the problem of the 14 day cycle of night/day is easily sorted by use of a grid of solar panels around the Moon.
The problem with the ISS is it is falling apart. GCNRevenger is right in this. Even now occasionly large screeches similar to tortured metal has been heard to the crews aboard the station. The plans for the ISS have been changed and changed and each time cost went up. The ISS wont be up forever we will be lucky to get 5 years of use out of it left. We cant expand on the ISS as its frame will not take the stress given and it becomes dificult to move the ISS when altitude changes need to be done.
Quote ecrasez-i-infame Aug. 26 2004 17;06
When I hear incidents like these, I cant help wondering"How can there be a god"(Who doesnt step in to stop these horrible things occurring)?
Well god gave us free will. If you had a son who did go out get drunk and kill someone while driving a car, Do you stop loving that son. If your son was to murder someone is he still not your son.Do you then shoot your son for doing wrong? We have free will this allows us to do great things and every generation there lifes get better. But we are not perfect for good to exist so must evil.
Sorry Cindy that question you poised has been at the heart of human affairs for thousands of years. We are no way near answering it. What we can do is destoy those who do wrong. Treat them like the sick people they are and treat them as best we can. If we cannot cure them then keep them away from the rest of the people so as to ensure there mistakes are never repeated. We must always be aware that evil exists it is within the power of each person to fight it, some embrace it so as to gain power in there eyes. But evil feeds of itself and they always suffer for there actions.
unfortunatly like the Earth the moon is not a constant terrain. We have boulder fields and plains of broken volcanic glass. Only when we choose spots to land and have deeply surveyed them by use of satelites do we send the rovers in to really have a good look and set up the landing zones.
We already know the Moon isn't made of cheese.
Of course we do we knew it then too
There is no good reason to send humans back to the Moon just to rediscover that fact.
There are many reasons we should go back and why just send people we send machines first people have better duties to do.
Send humans to build a permanent base? Yes.
No we dont send people to do this we send robots. People are expensive. We send machines to prepare the ground work.
Send humans to build an automated telescope on the farside. Yes.
Why send men to do what a machine can do plant a piece of automated machinery. You do know that if we put a telescope at both the north and south poles and at equal spaces between we then get a telescope if they all focus at the same spot with the diameter of the whole Moon. This would allow us to see continents on Earth type planets around nearby stars. That is how good lunar telescopes will be.
Send humans to play golf, plant a flag, and come home. No.
No flags and footprints was done by apollo, we can agree it was only to show the prestige of the USA. As it was one apollo did more science than all the rest, Why, it had a geoligist on it.
We shouldn't even be considering sending people back to the Moon if we aren't going to do one of those first two things. Any information we need about the Moon can be achieved by sending 2 orbiters and a telerobotic science lab to the surface. Anything else is just more waste and misdirection.
This is just plane wrong. You do know that for the last 4000 million years the Sun has been shining on the Moon but unlike the earth these particles have been stored in the Lunar regolith. This means we can see what the sun was doing when the earth had life first forming. Like the Antartic drilling into the Lunar dust could tell us all these things. All the sciences will benefit by having a base on the Moon but then the moon gives us more than this. It will give us a chance to look up and give us hope. We can control our destiny we are not locked to this planet.
Everything in space is horribly expensive its the cost of getting someone out to repair a problem. If your toilet breaks down on the ISS it will cost about 500 million $ just to call out a plumber. So when we go to the Moon which is further it becomes necassary to either have a means to repair the working machinery or attempt to have it so well made it never breaks down. The never breaks down method results in large costs in initial design but also in the mindset of one vehicle is enough to do the job. The unexpected does happen and we must be prepared to sort these problems. So having the ability to repair and customise your robots is a sensible and very desirable option to have.
If we go to the Moon and Mars with the intention of repairing the vehicles and to modify them when we need a new design then we get the ability to do more and do it for longer. One ability that shoud be put in is to make them modular in that components of one robot can be fit in another and to make them as simple as possible. Another desirable trait is to allow us to have the ability to make components at this robot repair shop.
The best thing about making repairable vehicles is that we can try the techniques out on Earth before launching. And if we send them up and then discover something that goes wrong an example being highly charged dust interfering in an important component we can sort this problem. If we send the highly overengineered rover and this problem occurs then we will not have the ability to solve the problem.
And for going slow, there is the parable of the tortoise and the hare.
The only thing that can be done is to defeat those responsible and destroy there works, destroy there regimes remove them from power. When they are running hunt them down and drag them before courts as the criminals they are. There citizens of there country must know what sort of scum that they where and at all times we must remember for those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
There is an arquement in the science community, a rather vocal section hate manned space flight and point to the hubble and the mars rovers as being the best that man can get. This is not progress. The Hubble has done an amazing job but it is failing it has reached its age limit but do we really wish to keep it going knowing that this would stop us having the funds to send the Hubble 2 up. As long as there is a Hubble limping along then there will be no way that we can send a replacement into orbit. This is the way the political process works if we have something that works even if very poorly but can be maintained then no replacement will be given funds. Only if we can say the hubble is finished lets get a replacement will it happen. Of course using Skylab as a reference Skylab was to be put into a higher orbit by the new super duper SHUTTLE it turned up years too late and sucked up the funds to do the basic rescue. That is reality and no getting round it we are likely to spend all this money on the robot to fix the Hubble only to be delayed and delayed, till a solar flare causes the Earths atmosphere to draw the Hubble down, and there is no funds for its replacement.
We then have to design an automated means to create solar cells this will increase power and with power and a supply of oxygen and if possible water we then have the basics for furthering Mans domain to the Moon.
Mankind has much real science to do on the Moon and a lot more things to create. But it will be the work of generations to get all the answers we seek so a permanent facility is needed.
Since the USSR used protons to launch there lunkhod rovers and they where effective it would make sense to use the updated protons to do the job for us. And since ESA has plans to have its own launch facility for protons at guyana and with the extra boost being at the equator gives this indicates more can be sent to the Moon. This could make for a decent operation.
So again we have the chicken and the egg, which comes first
We cant do anything big in space without a reasonably decent heavy launcher, and we wont make plans for anything that big in space as we dont have a large enough launcher.
A little thing to consider the expensive part of the SeaDragon development will be the new rocket engine. We will use the same sort of tanks that the space shuttle uses for its large external tank and we can make those.
Well the lunakhods where a very primative design we certainly can do better and if done right make them sample returns, compared to the USSRs robots we have that much mass to spare. Actually we may have enough mass to spare that they be powered by something better than solar and a limited fuel cell. This would allow a rover to be driven into those places we think there might be water or hydrogen deposits to see for sure.
Actually it makes sense to do it this way and since the possibility of those deposits of hydrogen in the permanently dark areas is of paramount importance to the future of the moon it should be done soon.
Cellular phones in Europe operate by being in a triangle of phone masts this gives a possible location and multiple channels of communication delivery. This method can give you a means to communicate with a large number of Robots. The emergency services in Britain use something similar and up in the highlands it has been modified to provide for location finding.
If a large numbers of Robots are used you can use the cluster type of Robot where a large number of robots can follow one leader type. The commands can be given to the leader but if it was to be put out of communication it would then be passed to another robot in the chain. This way a large number can be used and a lot done without the use of too many hard to get channels. If we manage to get a half decent AI or command computer then it can be the one in charge of these swarm bots.
Then we design the robots to be able to function and repair the new telescope. But when the original hubble went up crucial errors where made and repairs had to be done to get it to work. We now know what we did wrong so hopefully it can be sorted but if we design a robot that can do the job anyway we can use it for other things. But we should make a new telescope not the constant juryrigging of an old one waiting for the power down and eventual drag to earth.
My mower was/is using a rotating blade and for power it is connected to the grid by cable. The legs where a 3 blade rotating method. But it looks more and more like im going back to wheels. Easier to operate. Oh and I tried to use Nitrinol wires so as to make Elecric muscles but again not really too strong on the budget I had.
We could easily send to the Moon a rover using a Russian proton rocket. It has been done before the USSR was doing this for its lunkhod missions. They tended to be a bit unsucessful but I think this was due to the rather poor electronics available at the time, Even the apollo 11 had 2 computer failures as it was landing. We can useing modern electronics certainly make a more useful and flexible mission and rover.
We already have international police the interpol being a prime example so to create a police force to enforce laws in space is a good idea. But tied to a more powerful UN hmmm.
The United Nations is a good idea but as an organisation it is weak, It is the individual member states that decide the policy that the United Nations follow. We are at the crossroads, what will we become large country, treaty organisations type of world or a true world goverment. Certainly the idea of small countries going it on their own seems to be dieing. It is Ironic that it seems to be the actions of the United States and its allies which has shown this. If a country is going off on its own and has for some reason been doing things that other countries dislike this country is sanctioned. If it continues it becomes legal to use Military force to force that country into line. I agree with the use this power has been used before but I tend to be cautious about the future. What happens if my own country Britain decides that it would be happy to leave the EU or has its own fishing policy that protects the fish around our coasts, Would it mean that we get sanctioned as we where not toeing the line. Things will be getting interesting I think
Two stage to orbit is a dificult thing to do especially as they do not have much experience in the design and development of supersonic aircraft. Problems are that the actual seperation must be accomplished at speeds of at least mach 4 and above. This is dangerous. Also the rocket plane going to orbit must have some superior heat shielding. But can they do it the answer is a definite Yes if they really want to do it the answer is a very definite yes.
But a better more modern HST 2 would do so much more especially as what it would cost to rescue the Hubble would pay for its replacement. The Hubble has been a great facility for science but it is falling apart, soon we will have to power it down just to keep the gyros working. And in all probability what happened to skylab will happen to the Hubble it will fall to earth before its "rescuer" is able to fly. And since we have been trying to build a super "rescuer" it means no HST 2 as the political process only allows one way or another either "rescuer" or HST 2.
Interesting it would be able to legislate licences for the actual use of off earth resources so providing security. It will also be able to deliver funds from its bank and supply investment.
Of course it will also allow the creation of United Nations Space Police I can see some forum members exploding right now......
It may that the actual modules that will do the real science are still sitting on the ground waiting there ride up. Certainly the ESA columbus and the japanese module are still waiting