New Mars Forums

Hubble is a white elephant. It was flawed from the start, and we keep throwing money at it. Lets get on with the big mission, and hopefully put a similarly sized telescope on the moon.

Hubble has operated successfully for many years, and has significantly advanced our understanding of the universe.  However, recent advance in optics are making the old Hubble design obsolete.  The James Webb Space Telescope utilizes these advance to create a much more powerful telescope that it also less massive (so it can be launched on a cheap expendable rocket.)  It is scheduled to be launched around 2010, and it will operate at L2.

The shuttle design is 20 years old too, it needs to go. think about it, it was designed before the 8086 processor. It has less RAM than my HP calculator. We should move on.

The shuttles have had many extensive upgrades.  Current shuttles have computers that are much more powerful than your calculator, probably much more powerful than your PC.  The reason that the shuttle needs to be replaced is because the design has been flawed from the start.  The size, complexity, and cost of the shuttle were greatly increased by Air Force requirements that were never used.  The space shuttle is not really designed for the tasks that it is being used for, which is why we need a new spacecraft that is designed for those tasks.

Hubble is a white elephant. It was flawed from the start, and we keep throwing money at it. Lets get on with the big mission, and hopefully put a similarly sized telescope on the moon.

The shuttle design is 20 years old too, it needs to go. think about it, it was designed before the 8086 processor. It has less RAM than my HP calculator. We should move on.

There's a new one going up in 2011 - 2012 range which I would cancel as well.  I say save the money for Bush's new space policy and let Hubble die.  Too many other uncertain things as it is.  We're looking at 20? 25? missions already to finish that flying piece of junk space station as it is.  Imagine another Space Shuttle loss, another year or two delay in resuming flights again, and now you're looking at having to do recertification on the shuttle just to finish the station.  Add it up in terms of reality and tack 5 more years on getting on with Bush's plan.  I'll be holding my breath enough as it is just praying we make it through the remaining flights without any more accidents.

postscript: don't take that last paragraph too seriously and start flaming me.

why would I need to flame you, I think your statement says everything about you, in fact you flame yourself by using it.

Anyway I can't flame your posts because they are so dull that I don't even bother to read them.

Well, it can be figured pretty roughly between Shuttle and EELV-HLV rockets...

Shuttle, with its human flight control system and the all-important reuseable payload faring, costs about $500M per flight. A little closer to $600M-700M is possible in the post-Columbia program... Shuttle can haul about 27.5 metric tons to equitorial LEO.

The 2nd contender in the American launch business, the "tripple-barrel" Delta-IV HLV can do about 25.8MT for $170-190M

#3 on the list, the 5-booster Atlas-V varies with upper stage and "who you ask" since this varient hasn't been needed yet, but I expect it to cost ~$150M for a similar payload as the Delta-IV HLV, since it has fewer liquid fuel engines/stages.

A Shuttle Derived Launcher is also a grayish area... it would cost probably half what Shuttle does to launch, and haul somewhere around 100-120MT, but this is speculative, and the vehicle is only a concept, and would require substantial development cost, but could probably be developed rapidly.

Shuttle: ~$20-25M per ton
Delta HLV: ~$7M per ton
Atlas HLV: ~$6M per ton (speculative)
SDV (Magnum): ~$3M per ton (speculative)
SDV (Ares/Shuttle-Z): ~$2-3M per ton (speculative)

Or some penny pinching Democrat will cancel it altogether for more handouts?

What ever happened to the JFKs in the Democrats; almost all of the 9 dwarfs running now think it is a bad idea....

*Chuckles quietly.* Very good point.

Hi,

Although, the news was marked as "official", there was nothing in offical Russian news regarding the matter, nothing in the major newspapers. Although, I found a Russian reprint of the news. The title was "Russian WILL be on Mars before Americans" (WILL wasn't highlighted) but the article said about looking for sponsorship. So it's not WILL but only MIGHT BE, IF. I sent my sarcastic comment to them.

Everybody knows that Russian economy is not as good as that of the USSR, Vir Stellae, you don't have to enlighten us on this. However, a lot of technology, hardware, years of experience is there, and importantly, the spirit is there.

I saw models of interpalnetary spacecrafts on Russian TV and an interview with scientists about their plans to go to Mars, but nothing was approved or sponsored.

I asked professor Lev Mukhin, a prominent scientist in the Russian Academy of Sciences a question about the participation of Russia in exploration of planets and this is waht he answered (it's a quick translation, hopefully it makes sense):

?As for the Russian participation in planet exploration, everything is determined by financing. With regret, I have to state the surprising short-sightedness of our [Russian] government, who don?t understand a simple fact that it is the development of science, and, thus its financing on a necessary level is the basis of the future potential of the country [Russia].

ecrasez_l_infame:

"And an unnamed official at Energia on Thursday suggested that the US and Russia should join forces in Mars exploration.

'It would be much more profitable to pool efforts in a manned flight to Mars and the planetary development instead of holding the project independently,' the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying."

I agree with that, Cindy.

The NASA web page on their [http://exploration.jsc.nasa.gov/marsref/contents.html]Design Reference Mission was last updated July, 1997. However, the addendum page isn't working today, and that's where I read about use of VASIMR. The entire Mars section of NASA's manned spaceflight web site has been taken down. Maybe they'll bring much of it back now.

Scientific American had an article about Mars a few years ago, and it listed all sorts of engines, including VASIMR. NASA does still have a web site about VASIMR [http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/sup … asimr.html]here, and another one [http://aerospacescholars.jsc.nasa.gov/H … /11/30.cfm]here.

If you want to read my correspondence with Russian companies, you can find it at the [http://chapters.marssociety.org/winnipeg/russian.html]Winnipeg Chapter web site. You can find out more about the Russian companies [http://www.kbkha.ru/eng/1.php]KBKhA, [http://www.energia.ru/english/index.html]Energia, or [http://www.buran.ru/htm/molniya.htm]Molniya (manufacturer of the Buran orbiter).

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3403581.stm]Yo, Uncle Sam:  Here's Mud in Your Eye!

*World press "pans" Dubya's plans.  (And it isn't pretty)

--Cindy

I'm sure that trillion-dollar price estimate is from the SEI directive from Bush Sr.  NASA came back with $500 billion for a price of a Mars mission, and so congress killed it.  Media 'pundits' (read gasbags) suggested 1 trillion on the assumption that a gov't agency ALWAYS underestimates.  (I guess they may have been justified in this in view of the ISS.)

So, now the media irresponsibly parrots this figure as the "high estimate"-- an estimate that is idiotically arrived at by extrapolating the already-maniacal $0.5 trillion dollar estimate put forth by the greedy, irresponsible (and pre-Mars Direct) NASA of that time.

The thing that pisses me off is that the media gives no reference to where they get this number, ever.  This is poor journalism and misleads the reading public.  I have sent a few emails in feedback when I see this number reported out of context like this.  I'd suggest that anybody interested in getting to Mars do the same.

Why'd you think you'd get flamed?

I heard they would scale back on operations not related to the proposal , in particular non-life science aboard the ISS, but thats just backing away from some research that just isn't panning out. For all its hype that space based manufacturing boon just never happened.

To scale back would be to kill it.  Nasa is largely a pork-barrel outlet for money right now, with so many diffuse and unrealated projects that it is not likely many of them will surrive budget cuts as they are already underfunded pork projects to begin with.  The upcoming vote will determine NASA's surrival, a vote on the validatity of the space program, and in some ways it might be better to terminate the NASA program and start fresh and new.