What do you think the medium term future of space exploration will be like?

[Kerbal7]

Just now, DAL59 said:

Actually, Robert Zubrin said it would only take 30 billion- 1% of the US budget.  And once a colony is set up, especially considering advances in robotics, no further investment by Earth would be needed.

Robert Zubrin is smoking dope if he seriously believes a colony could be put on Mars for 30 billion. Apollo cost more than that. The ISS in LEO is what, 130 billionish? And we are putting a colony on Mars for 30?? Not happening.

Everything you need to survive on Mars would have to come from earth. And after you did get setup, things break through normal wear and tear. And you'd need more things sent to you, forever. So you don't die.

[tater]

40 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Plenty of science to do on Mars.

Not really. Just martian planetary science.

 

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A Mars colony would probably have lots of backup food. Also, it would surely be a political priority not to let one's astronauts starve.

Colonists are not astronauts. The government will never pay for colonization. Astronauts will visit, and return safely to Earth, leaving footprints, and flags. Bringing home rocks, and videos.

Any colonization plan needs to survive with zero government input, aside from perhaps government programs buying some space to put their people for a science rotation, etc.

 

Quote

I would pay money to go to Mars.  It may not be luxurious, but you get to be out of the influence of Earth(once you get some greenhouses), be famous, not need any money, possibly start a new country, help search for extraterrestrial life, and have advanced technology.  

The problem is that the supposed cost (per Musk) is simply too low. Any such colony will require resupply, and that's at great cost. Even if Musk got $ to LEO to $75/kg, the cargo to Mars would be 150 tons at $450/kg (1 cargo craft, 5 tankers).

 

10 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Actually, Robert Zubrin said it would only take 30 billion- 1% of the US budget.  And once a colony is set up, especially considering advances in robotics, no further investment by Earth would be needed.

I know. It was a joke.

I could argue that an O'neill cylinder would be more useful than a Mars colony.  Especially since the environment can be Earthlike.  

He said that us what a minimum cost flags and footprints mission would cost, not what a COLONY would cost. 

[DAL59]

Just now, Kerbal7 said:

30 billion

Per mission.  Also, [spider descends from ceiling passing in front of computer screen], in the apollo era there weren't reusable rockets.

1 minute ago, tater said:

Not really. Just martian planetary science.

Mars has a lot of land area- almost as much as Earth(no seas).  We still aren't finished with Earth science, so there will be Mars science for a very long time.

[DAL59]

I agree with Gernard O'Neil that there will be millions of people living in orbital colonies by the end of the century.  

[tater]

40 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Mars has a lot of land area- almost as much as Earth(no seas).  We still aren't finished with Earth science, so there will be Mars science for a very long time.

Earth science matters because we live on Earth. Mars science matters less, minus living on Mars, and it's hardly a reason for sending many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Only a handful would do science, anyway.

 

24 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

I agree with Gernard O'Neil that there will be millions of people living in orbital colonies by the end of the century.  

Not the remotest chance this happens (millions) in that time frame. When the High Frontier was written, people were far more necessary to any particular goal in space. No one in the 70s really "got" computers, and what would happen. In O'Neill's mind, these people would be the many thousands of laborers required to build orbital solar power plants. If those were even cost effective (pretty sure they have been determined to not be), they would not be built by the space-faring equivalent of terrestrial construction workers---whistling at passers by, eating from their lunch boxes, and returning home to family on the torus. Maybe 4 people living in space for every "worker" heading to the factory each day. That's not realistic.

[tater]

48 minutes ago, Kerbal7 said:

Robert Zubrin is smoking dope if he seriously believes a colony could be put on Mars for 30 billion. Apollo cost more than that. The ISS in LEO is what, 130 billionish? And we are putting a colony on Mars for 30?? Not happening.

Everything you need to survive on Mars would have to come from earth. And after you did get setup, things break through normal wear and tear. And you'd need more things sent to you, forever. So you don't die.

Zubrin was talking about an Apollo style mission, not colonialism.

For any short time frame, you are exactly correct regarding supplies. Any truly critical hardware for a colony would have to be sent ahead in quantity, and indeed, the capacity for manufacturing it right there would be a huge priority. Life support, obviously is in this category. Every single part must be made at the colony at will. This requires the ability to make all antecedent parts...

 

[PB666]

21 minutes ago, tater said:

Every single part must be made at the colony at will. This requires the ability to make all antecedent parts...

Again if we use that logic the colony is necessarily dependent on Earth. Without cedar trees, rubber trees or graphite mines there are no pencils. It would be cheaper to import these items assembled than to attempt to grow them.

After the first manned mission and at least for decades thereafter the only manned missions will be land, gather, some manipulation and leave. Robots will have to build the infrastructure.

Where on earth are circumstances comparable to Mars, Antarctica has lots of land, but in the interior of the continent only a handful of people stay the entire Antarctic winter. Obviously people could build greenhouses and whatnots for extended human survival in Antarctica, but they don't. I can pick an infinite number of cheaper places on earth to buy land and develop. The country of western Sahara has a long beach you can use solar panels to desalinate water that can be used to grow plants and animals where it is 100 times easier to do than Antarctica, and yet people still aren't doing it there, either. Either in Sahara or in Antarctica or on the coast of Namibia, someone needs to make the initial expensive investment to turn minimal outposts into places suitable for colonization. Mars is the same but the transportation costs are 100s of times more expensive, and if you decide to build X at t=0 then finding a rocket, building X, getting it into LEO and then a 9 month mission followed by landing on Mars, disassembly of the shipping fairing, reassembly, etc. Maybe 5 years for building an 18th century outhouse.

[tater]

Just now, PB666 said:

Again if we use that logic the colony is necessarily dependent on Earth.

That's pretty much my point. To be successful, any such space colony will need to be able to build at the very least, it's own critical infrastructure. When people use the Americas as an analog to colonization, they seem to forget that people could build houses, heat them, and eat by "living off the land," and that they could do so from day one (obviously, since stone age peoples were already doing just that). We could ignore disease in the Americas, but that could play a role on Mars as well. A novel flu could easily ravage a closed colony, and hence they will need the ability to make their own vaccines, etc.

Anyway, they either gain the ability to make all replacement parts for life support, or those things get brought from Earth for a long, long time. In colonial America, steel was imported, for example. While certainly important (muskets, tools, etc), it was not as life-critical as life support would be to Martians.

I don't get the whole Mars colonialism thing, it makes little sense to me.

[DDE]

20 hours ago, Urses said:

He will call you some help for sure

That’s only assuming the elites remain as pathologically obsessed with virtue signalling as they are today. In the apocalyptic scenario you’ve set up, the help would be a burst of machine gun fire, because the bloody pleb got uppity enough to demand something of their betters.

It costs less to run an oppressive rentier state on Earth than to escape the planet.

7 hours ago, DAL59 said:

I would pay money to go to Mars.  It may not be luxurious, but you get to be out of the influence of Earth(once you get some greenhouses), be famous, not need any money, possibly start a new country, help search for extraterrestrial life, and have advanced technology.  

Problem 1 is, your money will be the only revenue stream in that operation. You’d have to pay for a lifetime set-up.

And Problem 2 is that people that are as willing as you to go there lack the money – while those that have the money aren’t exactly spending them on spaceflight. When the Rotschilds and the Soroses start to invest into manned spaceflight, let me know. Right now the US private space industry ultimately is controlled by the defense and intelligence establishment, who have a vested interest in cheap payloads to orbit, but not beyond.

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, PB666 said:

I would rather have a grass hut in a mosqutio infested jungle in Central America with a mangy dog, a lice infested wife and precocious drug dealing kids .........than spend 14 months in a tin can watching my already bad vision go to pot, taking more blood pressure medication, eating unfresh food, cleaning up poop scatter, breathing stale air, wearing sweat saturated clothes, then landing on a dusty planet my only real function is to clean solar panels after every dust storm.

Would be interesting to ask a person living somewhere in Central America jungle with "mosquitoes, a mangy dog, a lice infested wife and precocious drug dealing kids" _{(not my words)}, and already "wearing sweat saturated clothes" (because it's hot, and water is unclean),
wouldn't he take a vacation and spend 14 months in a locked clean habitat with all comforts, eating high quality tinned food (including meat, fruits and juices) just doing routine chores:

• keep the rooms and air filters clean
• from time to time clean solar panels (only after dust storms, even not weekly)
• from time to time get a filled poop container with a loader, empty it into a trash incinerator or a trash pit and put a new plastic liner inside

, and get some money for it?

Bonus: no insects, air conditioning.

[Kerbal7]

8 hours ago, DAL59 said:

in the apollo era there weren't reusable rockets.

 

There are no reusable rockets for a Mars program either. There are no reusable rockets in serious developement for a Mars program. Because there is no real Mars program. Because the price for such a program would be gargantuan.

7 hours ago, tater said:

Zubrin was talking about an Apollo style mission, not colonialism.

Zubrin, and no one else, is putting flags and footprints on Mars for 30 billion. If these people want to put an earnest program together they are going to need 10 times that. They talk about going to Mars, show us the 300 billion-ish. Somewhere around that number. Then we'll know they're going somewhere beyond pipe dreams.  

Edited October 27, 2017 by Kerbal7

[Kerbal7]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

 

 

Right now the US private space industry ultimately is controlled by the defense and intelligence establishment, who have a vested interest in cheap payloads to orbit, but not beyond.

Couldn't agree more. The truth be told, The US space program is mostly about spy satellites, other national defense projects like missile defense, and aerospace  industry subsidies. Pork. Manned Mars missions is nowhere to be seen.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

While all alpha-countries will be rejecting the Mars colony due to costs and dangers, small DPRK will upgrade their ICBM, send there a hundred of her citizens and found a colony, declaring the Mars her territory.

 

Edited October 27, 2017 by kerbiloid

[PB666]

Well NK is right no at about 1956 space technology, moving about 1/2 the speed of the US space program. Its the equivalent of bankrupt . . . . . .

They could send people to Mars against their will.

[KSK]

22 minutes ago, Kerbal7 said:

Couldn't agree more. The truth be told, The US space program is mostly about spy satellites, other national defense projects like missile defense, and aerospace  industry subsidies. Pork. Manned Mars missions is nowhere to be seen.

The spy satellites they sent to Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto were pretty cool though. That's some serious long range capability planning there.  Not to mention the prototype Autonomous Defence Vehicle (free rock blasting laser with every unit!) that they put on Mars. And the SIE (Single Ion Engine) Scout that they sent to Ceres.

@DDE might have a point about US private space industry - I don't really have any comments on that. But conflating "private space industry' with the "US space program" is a bit unfair to my mind.

 

 

[tater]

2 hours ago, Kerbal7 said:

Zubrin, and no one else, is putting flags and footprints on Mars for 30 billion. If these people want to put an earnest program together they are going to need 10 times that. They talk about going to Mars, show us the 300 billion-ish. Somewhere around that number. Then we'll know they're going somewhere beyond pipe dreams.  

The 30 billion figure I think is from a few years ago (during shuttle), and is in fact not unrealistic if money was spent effectively towards a goal, and not as the jobs program that NASA is. Think of it this way, 30 B$ is the Shuttle era NASA budget for over 10 years, and Zubrin was/is pushing a least cost solution. The NASA DRMs based upon the Mars Direct concept NASAfied it to include many redundancies, etc, such that the cost ballooned.

 

[PB666]

Nasa's primary mission has not been flags and footprints since the 70s. I dont know what Zubrins intentions are, but any manned NASA mission to Mars is going to have a justifyably large science and engineering science component to it. The curiosity rover and other ongoing experiments have already set a very high standard for Mars science, along with missions like the New Horizons. People really dont care about footprints anymore, they want to see dazzling pictures and hypey science.

And in particular, if the machines do not do it first, men will be gathering samples to return to earth. There is one other thing, the mission has to be planned in such a way that earth microbes are not brought to Mars. This is substantially different than the lunar missions.

Mars is hard. As I said in the previous post when you have a spacecraft that can produce 150MW and has an ISP of 10,000 to 100,000 (In essense an fuel thrifty tow-boat) you can begin shipping resources into Mars orbit and finally onto Mars surface that you need. Particularly the case is proper targeting and small size packages may reduce retrograde dV close.

The RL10b-2 has the ability to land and return to orbit the base of a 10t surface to LMO transfer ship, it can produce 6500 dV sufficing only to take 1 or 2 (very cramped) persons from Mars to 50km Orbit (3525 orbital velocity) plus fuel for final landing (when the crane fly's away) lifting and turning. This minimal craft would weight 10t. You would have to have a 50t crane to set it onto mars. This is the return vehicle only, because its H2/O2 rocket it can only remain stable for a few hours, so it has to land, crew crawl on board.

This is only one aspect of the difficult, there are many equally challenging problems. I don't say that it cannot be done for 30 billion but I would argue that the spectrum of technology required is not present, you need a liars bench to properly estimate the cost at present.

This is what I don't like, excluding Elon Musk, who appears to be making a real parallel effort to tackle the most basic problems, the rest of the proselytizing Professor Marvels putting themselves as potent Mars explorers are doing nothing more than selling snake-oil.  Elon, OTOH, convincingly knows how to sell a ride.

 

[DDE]

5 hours ago, KSK said:

The spy satellites they sent to Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto were pretty cool though. That's some serious long range capability planning there.  Not to mention the prototype Autonomous Defence Vehicle (free rock blasting laser with every unit!) that they put on Mars. And the SIE (Single Ion Engine) Scout that they sent to Ceres.

@DDE might have a point about US private space industry - I don't really have any comments on that. But conflating "private space industry' with the "US space program" is a bit unfair to my mind.

@Kerbal7 I'm primarily talking about the alphabet soup having ties to the big names in the private space industry. They're quick to get their fingers into all of Silicon Valley's pies, which includes Google, a stakeholder in SpaceX; and the $600 million contract that went to Jeff Bezos is probably excessive to be just the compensation for buying the Washington Post for $200 million.

[tater]

16 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Nasa's primary mission has not been flags and footprints since the 70s. I dont know what Zubrins intentions are, but any manned NASA mission to Mars is going to have a justifyably large science and engineering science component to it. The curiosity rover and other ongoing experiments have already set a very high standard for Mars science, along with missions like the New Horizons. People really dont care about footprints anymore, they want to see dazzling pictures and hypey science.

While you are technically right about flags and footprints (which require a world on which to plant a flag, and leave footprints), I think that NASA has indeed been about the analog of flags and footprints---which is all manned spaceflight is.

The only science in space that requires humans is the science of human biology in the space environment. All other science is best, and most cost-effectively done without humans at all. 

So I would argue that the budget of the Shuttle program, and the following budgets for Constellation and Orion/SLS are nothing if not the analog of "flags and footprints."

I would also disagree about dazzling pictures. People for the most part don't care about space at all (we all do here, but we are a vanishingly small subset of the population at large). To the extent they do, adding people to the mix in the right circumstance (say on a world) would certainly increase interest above the very low baseline. How long it would sustain, I have no idea (even Apollo became "boring" to many people pretty fast).

Planetary safety is another huge can of worms, you are right. Any crew mission has that as a failure mode, as well (a hole in a spacesuit is all it would take). As for the 30 billion, I was merely pointing out what the Mars Direct argument was, I wasn't agreeing with the number. Anything done by NASA is going to be more expensive for a number of reasons (some good, some less good).

[Kerbal7]

6 hours ago, KSK said:

The spy satellites they sent to Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto were pretty cool though. That's some serious long range capability planning there.  Not to mention the prototype Autonomous Defence Vehicle (free rock blasting laser with every unit!) that they put on Mars. And the SIE (Single Ion Engine) Scout that they sent to Ceres.

The US space program does not have the capability to put people into space. It hasn't for years. Americans pay Russians to take them into space. If space missions of a military nature required manned capable spacecraft, the US space program would have one. That says what the US program's priorities are and it isn't exploration and science for humanity's sake. 

[tater]

24 minutes ago, Kerbal7 said:

The US space program does not have the capability to put people into space. It hasn't for years. Americans pay Russians to take them into space. If space missions of a military nature required manned capable spacecraft, the US space program would have one. That says what the US program's priorities are and it isn't exploration and science for humanity's sake. 

You are contradicting yourself.

We have no manned spaceflight right now---but we none the less send space probes out. That says that manned space isn't the priority you think it is, since we are demonstrably willing to let it slide for the better part of a decade.

[DAL59]

15 hours ago, tater said:

For any short time frame, you are exactly correct regarding supplies. Any truly critical hardware for a colony would have to be sent ahead in quantity, and indeed, the capacity for manufacturing it right there would be a huge priority. Life support, obviously is in this category. Every single part must be made at the colony at will. This requires the ability to make all antecedent parts...

 

Just because a massive network of millions of people are required to make something in this system, doesn't mean it is the most efficient.  You could also 3-d print a pen, with the materials mined by robots.   

1 hour ago, tater said:

done by NASA

We aren't just talking about NASA though.  Spacex has 15 billion, just a bit less than NASA's 19 billion.  Elon Musk also has 19 billion dollars of personal wealth.  

[tater]

21 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Just because a massive network of millions of people are required to make something in this system, doesn't mean it is the most efficient.  You could also 3-d print a pen, with the materials mined by robots.   

You can 3d print a pen? By all means, do so. You need stock for the pen, so you first need hydrocarbons in the right form. Assuming it's just a Bic, no spring required. How do you make the ink, what needs to be mined/extracted for that? The point is that for a colony, you need to be able to make everything from scratch, because any failure can have you 2+ years from rescue via part delivery. It's not impossible, just very difficult. 

 

21 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

We aren't just talking about NASA though.  Spacex has 15 billion, just a bit less than NASA's 19 billion.  Elon Musk also has 19 billion dollars of personal wealth.  

SpaceX doesn't have 15 B$. What they are valued at is not what they have in the bank. NASA gets 19 B$, each year. Regardless, you quoted out part of a conversation specifically about NASA programs WRT human spaceflight.

[Kerbal7]

1 hour ago, tater said:

You are contradicting yourself.

We have no manned spaceflight right now---but we none the less send space probes out. That says that manned space isn't the priority you think it is, since we are demonstrably willing to let it slide for the better part of a decade.

I said "most" of the US space program is about items of a military purpose and aerospace subsidies. Pork. I did not say "all." Crumbs will fall from the table. Even the  pinnacle of the US space program, Apollo, was for the Cold War. It was running up the hill and planting the flag as a rallying symbol and demonstration of power. It was dominoes falling in South East Asia. It was the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis. It was the fear of looking weak against the Soviet Union in front of the world. So when it boils down to it, the Apollo program was a military program as well. Sure, a little science, poetry, and nice symbology came out of it too, but that wasn't its mission. It's easy for us to dismiss the volatile political context of Apollo 50 years later.  

Everyone talking about Moon bases, Mars bases, space stations, exploring space, etc., during and after Apollo, forgot why all this space business took/takes place.      

[tater]

Agreed that NASA is a pork farm, mostly for rocket (read: "defense") contractors.

Regardless, they do significant basic science.