USA can't afford to go to Mars because of nepotism and greed

[Stormspellz]

what profit is there in going to mars?

One giant R&D boost, just like we got from going to the moon.

- - - Updated - - -

Welfare for illegals is why we are in so much debt. We were fine until they showed up.

Not even remotely true, but I'll play: I would rather have a high cost to social welfare safety net, then let people suffer because they are poor(you know basic christian thing), not to mention its better then giving military industrial complex more contracts for things the pentagon doesn't want.

[One-Eyed Jack]

One giant R&D boost, just like we got from going to the moon.

- - - Updated - - -



Not even remotely true, but I'll play: I would rather have a high cost to social welfare safety net, then let people suffer because they are poor(you know basic christian thing), not to mention its better then giving military industrial complex more contracts for things the pentagon doesn't want.

If is is a giant R&D boost and the cost is worth the benefit in that sense, then private companies should figure a way to get to Mars. Let the free market decide if it is worth it to go. It should not be a burden on the taxpayer.

[Daedius]

What is the benefit of going to Mars?

- - - Updated - - -



Is the cost of shipping the resources from Mars to Earth worth the benefit?

Resources on Earth is finite... it won't last us forever, might not be in your lifetime though so I doubt you'd care past that.

[Skroe]

This is another reason that I'm generally in favor of status quo policies. It might not be very exciting to say, "stay the course", but it should basically work for quite a few things.

Half the reason we are where we are now is because we've gone through about 25 years of the plan being "rebooted" every 5-7 years... as Presidential Administrations change usually. Not anymore.

Don't get me wrong. There are LOTS of people who deeply hate that the SLS exists. But frankly, at this point? Fuck them. It's happening and it's too damn bad. They're wrong as a matter of principle about how useful and necessary the SLS is, but aisde from that, starting over again? Their just the latest iteration of the minority report crowd that always has broken consensus with "whats next" for NASA, going back decades. There is always a group undermining the missions in planning because they have an agenda.

the anti-SLS crowd is arguably the worst of them all though. Why? Because if we go back about 8 years, many of the people in the anti-SLS crowd were also part of the anti-Constellation (CxP) crowd, and were pushing a vehicle called the Jupiter rocket, out of the Direct v3.0 proposal. Direct was a rocket, built from Shuttle components, designed by NASA engineers on their own time, as a cheaper, quicker alternative to the Constellation program. the last two Jupiter proposals (v3.0) are for all intents and purposes, the SLS with and 4 segement SRBs (as opposed to the 5 the SLS has, but that work was easy and done already). The SLS is very close to Jupiter.

http://www.directlauncher.org/media.htm


The Jupiter 246, Direct's official proposal to NASA, is essentially the SLS Block IB. It has 4 x SSME (Space Shuttle Main engines, RS-25) as the SLS. It has the same External tank as the SLS. It's upper stage is even the same RL-10 powered upper stage (with 6 engines instead of 4 for the SLS) that is now called the Exploration Upper Stage. The biggest difference is it uses 4 segment Solid Rocket Boosters instead of the 5 segment the SLS Block IB will use.

It's a fucking joke really, that the people who campaigned so stridently for this are so passionately against it now. They say of course, Commercial and Elon Musk changed the game. Except for the fact that the volume, diameter and capacity of the Falcon Heavy, which is years behind schedule, is no where near that of the SLS Block IB or Block II. Except for the fact that a Raptor-engined replacement for the Faclon line won't premier until years after the SLS flies. Except for the fact that the years development time these rockets need kind of require them to stick it out and not switch their vote every 3 years.

This, more than anything else, makes me so unsympathetic to switching to a new plan again, a thought reinforced by the fact that, despite that the anti-SLS crowd believes, even Elon Musk himself said the SLS and Falcon are complimentary and Falcon Heavy is no replacement.

I mean just look at this. The things you could do with the SLS. It's big enough to build infrastructure while the Falcon's handle logistics.



The most exciting development at NASA in the past 20 years is that, because of how terrible Obama's 2010 NASA plan was (I'll post it at the bottom of this so you see it if you don't know), Congress for the first time in 50 years has basically taken back control of the agency from the White House, which should make the agency FAR less susceptible to changes depending on who is elected President.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030902594.html

Obama's plans for NASA changes met with harsh criticism

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Harrison Schmitt's credentials as a space policy analyst include several days of walking on the moon. The Apollo 17 astronaut, who is also a former U.S. senator, is aghast at what President Obama is doing to the space program.

"It's bad for the country," Schmitt said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."

Schmitt's harsh words are part of a furious blowback to the administration's new strategy for NASA. The administration has decided to kill NASA's Constellation program, crafted during the Bush administration with an ambitious goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020. Obama's 2011 budget request would nix Constellation's rocket and crew capsule, funnel billions of dollars to new spaceflight technologies, and outsource to commercial firms the task of ferrying astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

The new strategy, however, has been met with outrage from many in the aerospace community. The entire congressional delegation from Florida, Democrats and Republicans alike, has sent a letter of protest to the president. Doubters fill op-ed pages and space blogs.
The administration apparently senses that it is losing the public-relations battle. On Sunday, the White House announced that the president, who has said almost nothing in public about his NASA strategy, will headline a conference on NASA policy April 15 in Central Florida. Obama will be heading into what has become hostile territory.

"They made a mistake when they rolled out their space program, because they gave the perception that they had killed the manned space program," said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who disagrees with that perception but wants the Obama plan modified. Nelson said the president should declare during the Florida conference that NASA's goal is to send humans to Mars. Nelson noted that the Interstate 4 corridor through Central Florida is critical for national candidates. "I think it has a lot of repercussions for the president. If a national candidate does not carry the I-4 corridor, they don't win Florida," Nelson said.

Congress must approve NASA's strategic change. Lawmakers in Florida, Alabama and Texas, states rich in space jobs, have sharply criticized the Obama plan as a job-killer. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) says that under Obama's strategy "America's decades-long dominance of space will finally come to an end."
In fact, Obama's budget boosts NASA's funding by $6 billion over the next five years. The extra money is less than the $3 billion-a-year hike that a presidential advisory panel said would be necessary for a robust human space flight, but it's still an increase when many agencies are being squeezed.

Change doesn't come easily in the aerospace industry, with its long timelines and abundance of customized technology. Thousands of aerospace contract workers were already going to lose their jobs with the retirement of the aging fleet of space shuttles. Constellation, conceived after the space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, was designed with architecture that would let some shuttle jobs migrate to the new program. NASA has already poured $9 billion into the development of a new rocket, Ares 1, and a new spacecraft, Orion. Terminating the program and closing out contracts will cost $2.5 billion more, the administration estimates.
After the last shuttle flies -- the final mission is scheduled for September -- the United States will rely entirely on Russian spacecraft to carry astronauts to the international space station. It is likely to take several years, at least, for the commercial firms to produce a safe spacecraft for putting people in orbit.

Nelson wants to continue the testing of solid rocket boosters as part of a fallback plan if the commercial firms can't deliver. Such a move would, in effect, continue Constellation in part, even if under a different name. But, barring an unlikely increase in the NASA budget, any such move would require cuts in other NASA programs. NASA's science directorate, for example, might see trims to the $512 million increase it would receive under Obama's 2011 budget.
"Should science people be nervous if they continue Constellation? Absolutely," a senior NASA official said Tuesday.

The strategic change has been dictated by budgetary realities, the administration has said. An advisory committee appointed by Obama, and headed by former Lockheed chief executive Norman Augustine, determined that under a realistic budget NASA probably wouldn't have a moon rocket until 2028, and still wouldn't have the hardware to land. Ares 1 had little chance of ever having a "useful role," Augustine said in a recent interview.

"The problem with Constellation was that success was not one of the possible outcomes," said Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, a start-up rocket firm that would be in the running for one of the new NASA commercial contracts.

Musk plans to conduct the first test launch of his Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the coming weeks. He puts the odds of success on the first try at 70 to 80 percent.
"It's trivial to build a rocket. It's incredibly difficult to build a rocket that goes to orbit," Musk said.
The timetable could put the launch very close to Obama's April 15 space conference. That makes Musk nervous.
"It is looking oddly close to the middle of next month. Which is a little scary," Musk said. "I'd hate for any decision here to be informed by some unfortunate situation on our first launch."

Frankly I do think Obama was trying to backdoor-kill Human Space Flight. Not Obama per se, but John P Holdren, who argued (years before he took the Chief Science Advisor to the President job) that NASA should cancel the Space Shuttle and ISS program after the Columbia accident in 2003. When Columbia happened, the Space and Earth Science communities got out their knives, claiming Human Space Flight was an expensive, unscientific waste of money, and that anything people could do in space, robots could do better.

I think Obama, like most Presidents, has no real opinion of space, besides it being way down the list of priorities and that social spending and medical research should come first. But Bush decided to retire the Space Shuttle and replace it with Constellation, and I think Holdren saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cancel the follow up that Obama went along with.

This is the nonsense congress put an end to.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Resources on Earth is finite... it won't last us forever, might not be in your lifetime though so I doubt you'd care past that.

Finite, yes. But how is shipping resources from Mars to Earth efficient by any means? Mars is uninhabitable and terraforming the planet is a matter of theory.

[Daedius]

Finite, yes. But how is shipping resources from Mars to Earth efficient by any means? Mars is uninhabitable and terraforming the planet is a matter of theory.

Stop being so short sighted and only thinking of our current possibilities... technology ALWAYS progresses, in the future space travel will inevitably be more efficient compared to today's rather archaic travel by rockets. We'll eventually be at the stage of treating Mars like an off-shore oil rig extracting resources.

Maybe not now, maybe not in the next 50 years, maybe not in the next 250+ years. But it will happen eventually.



Many things today were fantasy 50 years ago.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Stop being so short sighted and only thinking of our current possibilities... technology ALWAYS progresses, in the future space travel will inevitably be more efficient compared to today's rather archaic travel by rockets. We'll eventually be at the stage of treating Mars like an off-shore oil rig extracting resources.

Maybe not now, maybe not in the next 50 years, maybe not in the next 250+ years. But it will happen eventually.

The future isn't certain by any means. Hopes and dreams is not a rational investment.

What makes you think that in 50 or 250+ years we will achieve such a feat? We don't live in a science fiction universe.

[Daedius]

We don't live in a science fiction universe.

You've got to be joking...

A lot of things TODAY were completely science fiction 60+ years ago...

[INVASMANIXOXOXO]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WtgmT5CYU8

Long video but worth a watch. A more realistic view of what the far future might look like if we do escape out solar system. 99.999% chance no human born on earth will ever live on a planet outside of our solar system. As far as mars is concerned, I support going there for all the obvious reasons + it would be really fucking bad ass. But people should not delude themselves over what sending humans to mars would mean for our future. It would likely not be a stepping stone to colonizing the solar system or whatever. Human life, the overwhelming majority of all life that we know of cannot survive anywhere else in the solar system. Unless we reach like 20 billion people colonizing mars makes little sense. The 20 billion people thing seems unlikely too, as population growth has slowed down quite a bit in the past decade or so (took us longer to go from 6->7 billion than 5->6 billion).

- - - Updated - - -

Are you joking...?

A lot of things TODAY were completely science fiction 60+ years ago...

That may be so, but even if we can live on Mars, why wouldn't we just build the biodomes in the sahara desert or whatever where we still have healthy gravity and protection from radiation. You might say oh the resources, but all you would need is water sun light and relatively small amounts of other elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, gold, iron etc. (But yeah maybe the breakthroughs to make these domes would be made preparing to go to mars, but we aren't going to have people living there unless things get really crowded here on Earth).

[Stormspellz]

If is is a giant R&D boost and the cost is worth the benefit in that sense, then private companies should figure a way to get to Mars. Let the free market decide if it is worth it to go. It should not be a burden on the taxpayer.

If we took that approach we wouldn't have many of the things we have today, including cell phone sized cameras, long distance communication, cordless tools, medical scanners and a host of more things all exist because of NASA, not "free market"

[drivec]

I am all for the research of faster space flight and exploration. but I think physically going to mars and trying to colonize it right now is more expensive then its worth. but this is my own personal opinion and most people like me are not rocket scientist and have very little knowledge of the benefits and cost regarding these endeavors.

it could be very likely that more money into these specific projects isn't needed and is being wasted. from reading the article it seemed like the funding wasn't being removed from NASA but reallocated to other projects or am I not correct in that?

[Theodarzna]

The US won't go to Mars because there is nobody on Mars who wants to buy the newest Iphone.

- - - Updated - - -

A whole world of untapped resources?

On a deadly barren wasteland for which we are unsure humans could even colonize long term due to bone deterioration in lower gravity, at the very least those humans could never return.

The most critical resource for our civilization today is Petroleum and there likely isn't any on any other planet.

[Pterodactylus]

what profit is there in going to mars?

Lots, likely some most have not considered. Tech like what we would need to go to Mars could be used for things like asteroid mining and the like.

- - - Updated - - -

The most critical resource for our civilization today is Petroleum and there likely isn't any on any other planet.

Titan (obviously not a Planet, but a large body in the solar system)? But, we won't be burning fossil fuels much longer.

[Jakisuaki]

Maybe americans should spend some money on teaching its population how not to waste the very limited resources we have.

I smell irony...... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

- - - Updated - - -

More people on the planet is gonna drain our resources? Yeah, nowhere near as much as people living on Mars would drain them, who'd need absolutely everything sent to them from Earth.

No, they wouldn't, do your research before posting.

At first things go slow, and yes, some things will need to be sent from Earth. However, the inhabitans will grow their own food and eventually gather their own resources, until a point where they're able to expand on their own. Which could take as little as 30 years.

[Deleted]

Bless people thinking we'll actually colonise Mars