New Mars Forums

Why bother when we can use lamps?

Thats not the goal at all. The goal is to recreate all the wonderful things on Earth someplace else, because they can not be infinately sustained here.

Long term colonization of the solar system is depenant on the mining of heavy metals on the moon.

Why wait?

The mullahs barely have a leg to stand on in there own country, and that leg is the army, and if they use it, the shiite will really hit the fan.

If we get the Iraqi army and burocracy trained, we can leave with the faith that the vast majority of the Iraqi "insurgents" have what they want, an Iraq free of foriegn occupiers.

The hard core terrorists will find that their funding, support and fighters will dry up, and the situation will be little different than, say, Turkey.

Creating a semi-self-sufficient environment, at least in terms of food production, air quality, and water recycling should be tested first on earth, then in orbit.

Couple that with varitable gravity research, and nuclear power system testing, thats more than enough to justify a Space Station Beta.

Aren’t the F-119s used to power either the F-22 or F-35?

Point being, if it takes two to power each of those, its going to take a lot more than 4 to propel this monster.

I honestly can't see a need for "shuttle"-like craft for some time.

In the short term satellites can be launched relatively economically on rockets. In the medium to long term they'll be either be partially or fully assembled and launched from the moon.

Likewise, people in the short term can be cheaply launched via the CEV (assuming its a reusable capsule supporting 6-8 people). There’s also no reason a pair of CEVs can't be launched in tandem if the rocket can support it, and there’s a will at NASA to put all their eggs (and sperm ) in one basket.

In the long term, a passenger shuttle will be needed, but only when we need to send up 30+ people at once. At that point scramjets will probably make that realitively simple.

That’s what I think were going to have to do to get any more than flag planting missions off the ground, mass production. Of rockets, of habs, ect.

I think what we need to do is get contractors and governments together to develop a "kit" consisting of the surface, orbital, and transit habs, surface operations equipment(rovers, mini-refineries, ect) and the transit craft with the LEO facilities to support it, and all the launchers to send it up. In other words, everything needed to send 12-18 people to the surface (be it Luna or Mars) and once there use local resources to build a permanent, self-sufficient base, and then swap out the crews every couple years (for a Mars mission anyways).

Now that first mission might cost $50b to develop, and another $50b to build and launch, but when the mission is accomplished, you've got a proven "system of systems" that can then be mass produced, with interchangeable parts that can operate from mission to mission and support one and other. And as more of these kits are built, construction methods will be refined and cost will go down because of both that, and simple volume. The first kit might cost $50b, but the third might cost $30b, the sixth $20b, and so on, until even the smaller countries of Europe might be able to swing it. To the point were a group of large companies could get together and buy one.

By that time hundreds of launchers, rovers, and habs will have been constructed, and the cost of each one individually will plummet, making missions outside of main effort, missions as mundane as simple communications satellite launch, very cheap. Relatively speaking.

We could capture it no matter what its made of.

But we just lost any chance to fund such operation.

Immigration is a whole nother problem that Europe will have to deal with. A lot of them don't come out of love for there new home.

Internal security costs will skyrocket.

I think that "capital" should be measured by the things we no longer have to send. If they have some extra iron that they've shiffed out of the soil, and melt it down and decide they can mill out key components, such as the frame, out of next bulldozer due to be launched. That will save tons off the next launch leaving room for other stuff.

The idea is that the combination of whatever we send will be able to produce bigger and better copies of them themselves out of local materials.

So basically once we send up a core kit of bus-sized single purpose plants, there first goal after production of maintainance and replacement parts will be reproduction. Granted some things won't be possible for a good long while, like a chip fab plant, stuff like that can be set in kit from earth.

Would the astronomy community be happier if we had a Hubble 2 program in the works?

Its not like they don't still have piles of data from Hubble they haven't worked through yet. So even if there is a couple years between Hubbles death and Hubble 2s launch, there will still be things to do. If you ask me thats a fair trade when theres a new, far more advanced platform waiting in the wings.