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There are many people who would love to have a go at the minerals in the sea. Ancient blck smokers long since dead are ridiculous when it comes to mineral content.
Heres a recent article about one mans hope from australia.
Using telerobotic controlled mining craft it is easily doable and affordable.
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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More resource Value from Ocean Floor = more World GDP Value thus humans could expand into space permanently at a reduced overall cost. Everytime you say we can not go permanently into space because we can not provide the reources you are wrong !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Without the resources of the moon, Mars & moons, Asteroid Belt (hundreds of objects), Saturn + 60 and more moons , Jupiter and hundreds of moons without the outer planets, then the keiper belt of thousands in objects, then to the orc cloud of millions in objects, before going out to the galaxy, I think we have enough resources to build into space, it comes to technologies and the willingness to achieve it.
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Somehow the posts always exclude accidents as if we have everything figured out and nothing ever goes wrong. What about those colonists who change their mind and want to be sent home? Engines not firing. Dome leaks. Crop failures. Mysterious oxides in the regolith. Power outages. CO2 toxicity.
And I still haven’t read anything convincing as to why we should do this?
No doubt there will be errors, delays and accidents that almost cause costs to spiral out of control
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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.
NASA is not in the business of colonisation, and even if they were the cost of sending large groups and family to Mars would be gigantic, even for NASA. -think about the cost of the original SEI program and then multiply it a few times
NASA is in the business of exploration, but I'm still not sure about how dedicated they are to manned exploration of Mars.
'first steps are not for cheap, think about it...
did China build a great Wall in a day ?' ( Y L R newmars forum member )
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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.
NASA is not in the business of colonisation, and even if they were the cost of sending large groups and family to Mars would be gigantic, even for NASA. -think about the cost of the original SEI program and then multiply it a few times
NASA is in the business of exploration, but I'm still not sure about how dedicated they are to manned exploration of Mars.
What is the relevance of the exploration of Mars if no one goes there?
Its all part of a continum as I see it, Exploration is just preparation for colonization.
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What about the cost NOT to go to Mars?
Let me explain.
There is nothing that would stop India (As an example) to reaching Mars first, colonizing it and telling everyone on Earth that it’s their planet. They will restrict access and the rest of Earth will lose out.
Now imagine that after 50 years Mars goes to war with Earth?
It’s not that far fetched.
If Osama was planning a Mars mission how fast do you think the US would jump on bored?
And on a different topic, as for factories, some people have said that it would be not feasible to use them in the beginning. The model you are basing this on is an earth model. If everything you are making is modular and multi purpose, it will cut down significantly on construction times and complication. Also, Worker will be working far more efficiently on a Martian factory, because if it doesn’t get done, you die.
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They wont go with Solar Sails. It will be with Reusable Nulear Propulsion Tugs (Fully Automated) They will dock with what is essentialy a space station of Mars Habitat landers every two years and push the two hundred thousand passengers out to Mars for their colonization wave.
It leaves in Mars orbit a torus of nodes (a kind of spacewheel) which are then anchored to a Martian Moon for Use as a Framework of Industrialization.
Lander Habs descend to Mars en mass.
The Tug returns for the next two hundred thousand passengers and does the same to them.
John Glenn has already said the Moon is not the place to stay and remarked that direct-to-Mars is the way to go. NASA may be already doing a little gamble with outsourcing - ask for private help from the Falcon or alt.spacers or outsource some exploration to nations like India and such. VSE estimates vary from source to source, I've seen numbers that range from $190-320 billion, we must also consider NASA's other future missions like JWST is a more ambitious and expensive project then it was billed as which should cost several billion. Other space groups aren't moving so fast, ESA has a slower pace than NASA, Russia's Angara will be awhile in coming. The VSE may be the priority but I've also seen alarming 900 billion or 1$ Trillion dollar figures
'first steps are not for cheap, think about it...
did China build a great Wall in a day ?' ( Y L R newmars forum member )
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NASA may be already doing a little gamble with outsourcing - ask for private help from the Falcon or alt.spacers or outsource some exploration to nations like India and such.
NASA have always relied on external manufacturers such as Boeing, Lockheed or Orbital for launchers. This is not asking for private help, this is using contractors. NASA have had agreements with other agencies to fly instruments on their spacecraft and fly their instruments on NASA spacecraft for decades. This is not outsourcing, this is international cooperation.
VSE estimates vary from source to source, I've seen numbers that range from $190-320 billion,
Perhaps you missed Griffin saying that RTTM would cost $104 billion. NASA have not put a cost on the Mars mission within VSE, numbers from any other source are pure guesswork.
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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Perhaps you missed Griffin saying that RTTM would cost $104 billion.
Do you honestly believe those numbers to be hard fact and gospel truths ? Griffin is a good leader but he isn't going to be totally honest with budgets and politics and in events like this he is trying to put a good spin on things, the last thing Administrator Michael Griffin wants to do is approach congress with some hard fact figure like the ultra-expensive SEI to Mars as proposed by Bush-Snr. Groundbreaking NASA projects are known to go way over budget, JWST budgets had to be adjusted as the project saw cost over-runs and the Space Shuttle program was supposed to provide cheaper/safer access to space for 30 billion until it retired, instead the program never lived up to its objectives and has been running costs of over $150 billion dollars.
Even if your Lunar flag planting mission is pulled off and gets done well, we as members of the human race are still no closer to Mars than we were in during the 1970s. Why go back to the Moon (RTTM) when the real goal should be Mars ? The heroic Buzz Aldrin has said that going back to the Moon is not a great place and he said that Mars is a much more habitable place for people....so why waste time and dollar on RTTM ?
'first steps are not for cheap, think about it...
did China build a great Wall in a day ?' ( Y L R newmars forum member )
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Do you honestly believe those numbers to be hard fact and gospel truths ? Griffin is a good leader but he isn't going to be totally honest with budgets and politics and in events like this he is trying to put a good spin on things, the last thing Administrator Michael Griffin wants to do is approach congress with some hard fact figure like the ultra-expensive SEI to Mars as proposed by Bush-Snr. Groundbreaking NASA projects are known to go way over budget, JWST budgets had to be adjusted as the project saw cost over-runs and the Space Shuttle program was supposed to provide cheaper/safer access to space for 30 billion until it retired, instead the program never lived up to its objectives and has been running costs of over $150 billion dollars.
Even if your Lunar flag planting mission is pulled off and gets done well, we as members of the human race are still no closer to Mars than we were in during the 1970s. Why go back to the Moon (RTTM) when the real goal should be Mars ? The heroic Buzz Aldrin has said that going back to the Moon is not a great place and he said that Mars is a much more habitable place for people....so why waste time and dollar on RTTM ?
Who else has better estimates of the cost of NASA's program? It's not a question of belief, it's simply what the head of the largest space agency on the planet says. To ignore Griffin's estimate and only quote madeup numbers is misleading to say the least. NASA is the only agency to send people to the Moon. They have also managed dozens of highly successful spacecraft projects (yes some are way over budget but these are high risk, highly advanced spacecraft), developed several manned spacecraft and they are the only organization building a human lunar capability today.
RTTM is not a "lunar flag planting mission" it's the creation of a Lunar transportation capability and a systematic program of lunar exploration. Furthermore it's designed to develop the basic elements necessary for general exploration, including Mars. It's an extremely comprehensive architecture. There are many reasons to return to the Moon, least of all is to continue exploration there, but the best reason is to develop the tools and technology needed for NEO and Mars exploration. It's been a long time since anyone voyaged beyond LEO, a lot of lessons have to be learned and a lot of old ones relearned.
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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I think that one of the biggest stumbling blocks with idea of colonising Mars as an individual project, is that there simply isn't a viable reason for any nation/individual to go to so much effort or cost.
Gerard O'Neill's plans for colonising near Earth space offered the appearance of being viable for the simple reason that his plan was centred upon something economically useful that could be sold to nations on Earth: Solar Power Satellites. This provided a tangible economic benefit with the potential to justify the initial cost. Hence, space colonisation would take place as a consequence of economic development of a useful resource. This is why the US was rapidly colonised on Earth, despite being a generally harsh and hostile place: Britain, Spain and France were able to sink massive amounts of capital into their colonies on the American continent in anticipation that the colonies would be able to provide a return. They did, in the form of timbre, tobacco, gold and sugar.
The fatal flaw of Mars colonisation plans is that they cannot offer any similar return that could not be more easily provided by other, more easily accessible locations. Why bother shipping volatiles and metals out of the (relatively) heavy and distant Martian gravity well, when the same things can be provided much more cheaply from the moon and asteroids?
Plans for colonising Mars generally rely upon vague analogies between Mars and the Wild West and the simple idea that it is somehow our colonial destiny to go there and turn it into a space age version of the United States. But the analogy is a poor one, for the simple reason that the embyronic US had lots of accessible resources and advantages that Mars simply does not have. Those that believe that colonising Mars is in some way analogous to colonising the US, must therefore justify why it is likley to be cheaper to produce food, manufactured goods and other comodities on Mars and ship them to near earth space, when compared to producing the same thing in Near Earth space from lunar/asteroid resources. I have never seen a convincing analysis that shows this to be the case.
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I think that one of the biggest stumbling blocks with idea of colonising Mars as an individual project, is that there simply isn't a viable reason for any nation/individual to go to so much effort or cost.
Gerard O'Neill's plans for colonising near Earth space offered the appearance of being viable for the simple reason that his plan was centred upon something economically useful that could be sold to nations on Earth: Solar Power Satellites. This provided a tangible economic benefit with the potential to justify the initial cost. Hence, space colonisation would take place as a consequence of economic development of a useful resource. This is why the US was rapidly colonised on Earth, despite being a generally harsh and hostile place: Britain, Spain and France were able to sink massive amounts of capital into their colonies on the American continent in anticipation that the colonies would be able to provide a return. They did, in the form of timbre, tobacco, gold and sugar.
The fatal flaw of Mars colonisation plans is that they cannot offer any similar return that could not be more easily provided by other, more easily accessible locations. Why bother shipping volatiles and metals out of the (relatively) heavy and distant Martian gravity well, when the same things can be provided much more cheaply from the moon and asteroids?
The ability to go to Mars also brings most of the asteroids within reach, that is main belt asteroids, if you can do one, you can also do the other. Mars also has more sunlight intensity than the asteroids, and some elements such as water that the Moon is lacking in. Going to Mars is chiefly about real estate, as is going to the Moon and the asteroids, until some profit can be demostrated from going to either the Moon or the asteroids, the Moon, Mars, and Asteroids are basically on equal footing, although the Moon requires only a short journey and would play a role in proving technologies to get to Mars, both Mars and the Asteroids require interplanetary journeys of many months. At first it is a matter of choice and popular preference in how we want to spend taxpayer's money to get to any of these places. The Moon offers some economic viability once we get their, but investors aren't going to spend their own money until the governments push the state of the art a bit more, Mars however is a more interesting place, and taxpayers may choose instead to spend money to get there, afterwards if technologies are pushed by governments to get there, investors may find opportunities on the Moon, Mars, or the asteroids.
Plans for colonising Mars generally rely upon vague analogies between Mars and the Wild West and the simple idea that it is somehow our colonial destiny to go there and turn it into a space age version of the United States. But the analogy is a poor one, for the simple reason that the embyronic US had lots of accessible resources and advantages that Mars simply does not have. Those that believe that colonising Mars is in some way analogous to colonising the US, must therefore justify why it is likley to be cheaper to produce food, manufactured goods and other comodities on Mars and ship them to near earth space, when compared to producing the same thing in Near Earth space from lunar/asteroid resources. I have never seen a convincing analysis that shows this to be the case.
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According to a US Auditor, Each Launch of the Space Launch System Will Cost an “Unsustainable” $4.1 Billion
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