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Public opinion surveys are a powerful tool for influencing politicians or potential investors. If a survey of the American (or any other) population were conducted to assess public attitudes and perceptions of space exploration, particularly relating to Mars, what questions would you want to ask?
Here are some of my initial ideas:
-How interested are you in space / space exploration?
-Is the funding of space exploration too much / about right / not enough?
-Would you support a manned mars mission?
-Should this be funded by NASA, or would you support a privately funded mission?
-How likely would you be to watch key mission events (eg Launch, Mars Orbit Insertion, Landing, Earth Return) on television coverage?
-What, in your opinion, is the purpose of space exploration?
Perhaps my "backyard" statement was not quite on the money... clearly the government's not about to hand out rocket plans to just anyone, but say SpaceX wanted to gain HLV capability, would they be allowed to try their hand at building a NASA design (their upcoming Falcon designs look remarkably similar to the larger classes of Delta)
Aren't the RS-68s actually more powerful than SSMEs? Or is this offset by their increased mass?
And the engine pod/avionics would be as all-new as the engines/avionics for Ares-V.
True, but it's a far cry from developing a completely new launch system. And additionally, it'd be a modular system, so if you only need to get, say, fifty tons to orbit rather than 130, just use smaller boosters or leave off the upper stage. It's got a lot of versatility without having to develop two completely new, completely different launchers (Ares 1 and Ares V).
But what about the Zubrin Ares? It's basically a space shuttle launch stack with an upper stage in an in-line configuration rather than piggy-backed. Shear stress on the ET would be much lower. That's got to cost less than the totally new Constellation systems to develop, the raw hardware costs are relatively low as detailed above, and (assuming Zubrin's calculations are correct) it can put 130mT into LEO. That's a big improvement on anything else currently on the table, and still the most viable for an actual Mars mission, IMO.
MIT researchers have been making great strides with spacesuit that pressurizes the body mechanically, not with air pressure: http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html
The problem, apparently, is the difficulty of putting on the suit since it must be so tight. One idea is to wait until we develop piezo-electric fibres which can contract once the suit is on...
But it doesn't have to be so high tech! Why not just manually tighten the suit's interior network of cabling after the suit is on? It could be done by having a few knobs on the arms, legs, etc which you tighten before heading EVA. This would also allow the suit to function for IVA simply by relaxing the pressure. It may be complex, but nowhere near as much as piezo-electrics, or for that matter the existing gas pressure suits.
Thoughts?
What is the law in the US regarding private use of NASA designs? If, for example, a private firm wanted to have a shot at Mars using Apollo technology, would they be allowed to reengineer the dies and start making Saturn Vs? What about components like the external tanks and SRBs? In short, how cool is NASA with private companies building stuff that they originally designed?
From another thread: Apparently the Russians are leaving this possibility open with their Energia program.
In February 2001 I received a response from the Director of the International Division of RSC Energia. He confirmed that Energia is available to anyone willing to pay for restoration of infrastructure and the per-launch cost
I was just wondering if anyone has any idea what Zubrin's Ares rocket would actually cost (I'm calling it the Ares-Z to distinguish from the NASA varieties). Since it's all shuttle-derived, development costs should be relatively low compared to a completely new system. I've done a quick-and-dirty calculation based on a few wildly differing sources for component prices, and come up with the following for the first stage:
1 X External Tank = $170m (based on dividing the cost of the contract to Lockeed Martin by the number of tanks provided - $2.94b for 17 ETs)
2 X Solid Rocket Booster = 2 X $30m = $60m (not sure if this is variable cost or total cost, since they are reusable)
4 X RS-68 = 4 X $14m = $56m (cheaper than SSMEs at $50m each)
Connecting hardware = no idea
Upper stage = no idea
Development costs = no idea
So.... total cost per launch vehicle probably in the range of a half-bil to a bil???
That's as much information as I could find with some low-effort trawling on the net. Why are accurate costs for these things so hard to come by? I would have thought it'd be there in the first paragraph of the External Tank's Wikipedia page! I'm sure there are plenty of people out there with better information than me...