New Mars Forums

i know that astronomers fought for the Hubble space telescope even though the James Webb was going up because they want to be able to compare data at the same time (i forgot the technical ways of saying these things)

As for optical interferometers, they've had plans for those on the dark side of the moon forever; but, that type of thing is going to take a full scale space activity to get up there.

It's looking more and more that space activities just are not going to happen till nanotech comes in; or in other words, molecular manufacturing will come long before anybody gets to mars the old fashion way.

well, I remember way back in like 98, that there were supernova observations that suggested that the universe has some sort of dark energy that accellerated the expansion of the universe a few billion years ago(i'm wondering if this has anything to do with the soapbubble structure of the current universe, where all the galaxies are dotted on bubbles).

There are some thieoretical ideas that could make for dark matter such as supersymmetry that is required for string theory, but dark energy has been a total surprise; in other words, nature has totally thrown us a curveball, and we haven't a clue!

nice link Mr White!

here's the link!

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/ru … 40510.html

well, i hope you can tell and get somebody into this that can do something now instead of waiting for me to get rich somehow . . . .

i thought the article said it all; this company plans on putting up an inflatable space station rocketed from an x-prizer group.

i did find your links very good reading; nice to know somebody is doing something; i wonder if he'd get into my network machine ideas for bootstrapping industrialism without having to spend any money . . . i suppose your going to want me to explain that one!

O.K. my idea is network of renewable energy powered machine tools that feedback on themselves to fix themselves and to make more of themselves or even variants, or to even improve themselves.  Because they are taking in energy and could use that energy and materials to make more of them, they grow and develop without money(unless you wanted to accellerate things by bringing in already processed materials.  This way, we can build our science and technology without asking for a public that has better things to worry about than our dreams of space.

I'm starting to spill these ideas out a lot more because i want to start accellerating things and I can't get into this anytime soon . . . .

the article said the space elevator can be up and running two years after they figure out how to make 650 tons of nanotube cable at the required strength; i recently read somewhere a lot of tons of nanotubes have been made recently; i forget how much and of what quality, but I've also been reading various researchers around the world have 'solved' the nanotube purity problem.  I'm sorry, but there are so many articles and i've read so many of them, that i never bothered to keep track of them all!

i can't wait till the mars express(the new european orbiter/imager) images olympus mons with that electric camera.

fuel cells are just one of the topics covered in the article

http://www.investorideas.com/Companies/ … eather.pdf

I see these guys eventually combining with the X-prizers in the near future to create stable communities in outer space.

What's curious is there is not much U.S. involvement in sustainable technologies; they even refused the Kyoto treaty(maybe it's just the name? cultural bias?)  I suppose one can just blame it on the U.S.'s oil dominance.

nice, I can't remember what i'd like to say at this moment  . . . .

this is most of what i've e-mailed a bunch of people.

It seems to me that you all are stuck in a mental block of space exploration and whether we need to use humans or robots to do it. But, this misses the point. The real issue is whether we should be exploring or settling space. If it is just exploring, then we don't need human space flight. But, what about the economic benefits? Yes, you mentioned commercialization but did not really get very detailed in it, but quite frankly, there is hugh economic benefits from just tapping the hugh amount of natural resources just sitting out there. But as Parks would have it, we would just bring it all down here on earth. No, we are not going to just bring first asteroids and then mars down here on earth; better to learn how to live out there and keep those resources out in space where there is plenty of space to fit it all.

About those economic benefits. How about practically infinit free energy just from the sun. By tapping the solar energy out there instead of only getting a little bit of it that isn't blocked from our atmosphere(we can find ways of protecting ourselves from the radiation). How about so much natural resources that we can cover not only the initial cost of settling the moon and then mars, but paying out our national debt? In the end, by just tapping the natural resources of space, we'll be able to have so much money around, we'll be able to fund all our health care, national debt, national security and every other national concern with ease.

About the cost. It was 500 billion plus back in early 1990's because they didn't think of the obvious way of getting there inexpensively. Enter Robert Zubrin. I can't believe nobody has mentioned Robert Zubrin and his "Case for Mars" book. He showed that by living off the land, as opposed to bringing all the food for a return trip to and from mars, we can slash that cost of a mars mission to 40 billion(after presenting his ideas to Nasa, they added double redundancy bringing up his 20 billion cost to 40 billion)

The fact is that by moving our base of operations to a planet with lower gravity and living off the land, we can perform economic and scientific exploration to the same cost as just sending out robots from the surface of the earth. Sending robots to the rest of the solar system from the surface of the earth is so expensive because our gravity field is so strong that we have to make such big powerfull boosters. Compare the launching of a saturn v rocket that launched our astronauts to the moon with the spidery moon lander that split in two to get those same astronauts back to the earth. That is the cost savings of moving our base of operations off this planet. Then add the reduction of cost by living off the land; of using those outer space resources for food and rocket fuel, and you reduce the cost of getting to the rest of the solar system to less than just sending robots to that same solar system from the surface of the earth. I hope you got all that.

The fact is that space offers astronomical economic benefits which benefits everything else, and Zubrin found a way getting us settled out there where once where settled out there, the rest of the solar system comes very inexpensivelly. All this for the price of a small war. I think we can't afford not to go.