New Mars Forums

Of course Tholzel,

Send ten million people to Mars, let them have children and reach the billion humans capacity of a Terraformed Mars in their own time. Considering population quotas representative of the many earth nations, 1/24 colonists will be from the USA, 4/24 from China, 4/24 from India...Less than five hundred thousand US citizens will ever get to be Mars Colonists. Its going to be unpopular, but it gets an equal spread of earthlings.

How much for a moon base?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16126918/
Don’t ask

Iraq is a breeding ground for suicide bombers
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/AlQ … 99773.html
Suspicion has to rest with al-Qaeda over the Iraqi parliament suicide bombing that killed up to eight people, Prime Minister John Howard says.

Mr Howard said the attack - inside Baghdad's most secure area - was no real surprise and showed the terrorists were desperate to derail the ongoing security surge.

A man blew himself up in the Iraqi parliament canteen in Baghdad's Green Zone late on Thursday, killing up to eight people in a staggering breach of security

Any particular reason you don't see anarcho-syndicalism working, Yang Liwei Rocket?  It would be interesting to see what your objections are.

FDR ran up higher Debts during his administration, it was this massive deficit spending during World War II which brought us out of the Great Depression.

Martian Republic, and others:  Actually, communism does work, but only on a small scale, say 450 people or less.  This is the way the kibbutzim were run in Israel in the early days (some of them still are), and how the early Baptist communities were run (based, of course, on the descriptions of early Christian communities in Acts).

For a system that would be able to administer an entire planet, we would have to look elsewhere.

Anarcho-syndicalism is one possibility - it may seem a contradiction in terms, but this is organised anarchism.  Again, it may only work on a small scale (my brother-in-law lives in an anarcho-syndicalist community in Germany), but it's never been tried on a large scale.  It may be instructive to read The Dispossessed, by Ursula le Guin; she imagines anarcho-syndicalism as a planet-wide system (well, a moon-wide system, actually), in opposition to capitalism on the main planet.

Martian Republic said:

"the CEV might be twice as big as Apollo, but it still not going to be big enough to even put together a large colonization colony even on the moon."

Well no kidding, Sherlock! The CEV isn't a colony ship, obviously. Again! NASA isn't in the colonization business, that is going to be left to somebody else unless Congress orders NASA to change its mission. Colonization isn't exploration, which is NASA's cheif purpose.

"Any idea that private enterprise is going to step in and save the day after NASA get there, that will not happen either, because it will be too expensive for them too."

It doesn't have to be private, but I bet it probobly will need some private involvement, besides that though the point is that exploration isn't colonization, which is outside of NASA's jurisdiction.

After we have our Mars bases, it will then probobly make sense to build (or hopefully buy) a real live honest to goodness "no really, we're not kidding this time!" Shuttle-II to reduce the cost of operating bases and to enable the SEI-sized missions beyond Mars. Then we can talk about colonization, and not a single hour of a single day before.

As far as building Shuttle-II now instead of CEV, hush and listen for a minute: NASA is balencing on the edge of a knife, if it can't get VSE started in earnest it is very probable that what little credibility the agency has will evaporate, and manned spaceflight will die with the ISS. It is absolutely imperitive, life or death, that NASA accomplish VSE in a timely fasion. Any Shuttle-II vehicle is going to be expensive, and there is just no way that NASA is going to get that kind of money while doing Shuttle/ISS simultainiously. Just to explore and set up bases doesn't need a super RLV either, and can be done just fine with a heavy lifter and the CEV, they are the obvious choice.

Lunar mining is a little different, in that there is never going to be a large presence on the Moon. Ever. Not even with PGM mining... in such a case, you don't need ultra-cheap launch quite so badly, and Elon's Falcon-IX or Pioneers' newly aquired KH-1 would perhaps be sufficient.

Yang Leiwi said:

"Very true, the mission isn't about setting up a lunar settlement its about marking the flag planting anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin."

You are apparently having trouble understanding, NASA is going to explore this time unlike Apollo, which was just a mad dash to show up to Communists on television and newspapers, and not about science. One of new Moon landings will gather more data about the Moon then all the Apollo missions put together.

If you had been paying attention, you would also have noticed that one of the items in the VSE technology development list is a liquid oxygen generator for the Moon. Now, if all we were going to do was land for a day, plant flags and take pictures, why would we be doing that? NASA is still putting money into its nuclear reactor program, which would serve no purpose at all if we were just going to visit for a week. One of the cheif tenants of VSE is to return to the Moon, but this time its to stay.

Infact, NASA has already started to think about such a base, and seems to point to about half a dozen heavy lifter launches would be enough to build it. In the Shuttle heyday, eight launches of a much more complicated vehicle were accomplished, so six heavy lifters should be practical to do over a short time frame. Again, its not a "settlement," its a manned research & prospecting camp, with the potential to be a "beach head" for mining ventures.

There isn't ever going to be any colony on the Moon, ever, and teams of temporary miners can be fed & supported from Earth just fine if there is LOX available on the surface. There aren't going to be big hydroponic farms. There probobly isn't going to be big fields of solar arrays either. Just a camp, powerd by a nuclear reactor, with supplies regularly deliverd from Earth via medium rocket.

EuroLauncher said:

"Yet some Mars-fans and Moon-fans think Moon bases need to be bigger and plans like Mars-Direct has minor flaws, then others say Zubrin's HAB and the ERV are too small."

Now THERES an understatement... every single one of the major componets of MarsDirect - the HAB, the ERV, the rover, the nuclear reactor, the science package - basically all of them, are all assumed to work with much too small of a mass budget.

I honestly think that the currently proposed MarsDirect is infact a fraud, and Zubrin knows full well it can't possibly work, unless... Unless the Ares launch vehicle were fitted with a nuclear rocket upper stage. Zubrin, being a nuclear engineer by trade, would likly be biased tward such an option to make is plan doable.

He just didn't feel it prudent to tell the rest of the world... the basic non-nuclear Ares MarsDirect is a lie, just like Bob lied about O'Keefe and distorted Griffins Lunar plans. He did this so the project, with its deceptively small price tag and launch mass, would be adopted by the pricetag-sensitive congress, who would believe NASA's argument that it isn't big enough wouldn't be credible after the SEI red herring. Also, being chemically powerd, MarsDirect would be much more palatable to the environmentalists.

So a few years into the MarsDirect program, it is "determined" that MarsDirect will not be big enough, and it will be blamed on regular old aerospace weight and requirement creep. Since so much has been invested already in the arcitecture, some means of fixing it rather then disguarding it will be sought, and viola', Bob will show up with his glossy for a nuclear upper stage to solve all the problems.

There are just a few problems with this...
1: It still won't be big enough to get much done, four people and a tiny science package is a waste of time.

2: A nuclear upper stage will be fired before reaching orbit, and hence presents a risk that it will reenter and kill tens of thousands. Even me, the nuclear fan boy, hates this idea.

3: It will have to be a big engine with lots of thrust probobly to hold down reactor mass, which will be expensive. We have the facilities to build and test small RL-10 class engines, but brand new ones would be needed for a J-2/SSME class engine.

David Obey is the big stumbling block.