Is Space flight worth it?

[tblaxland]

(you can't really pollute a airless, radiation blasted wasteland).

I beg to differ, its just that we might not care about it if we do.

 

[Zachstar]

An end state that not even "Star Trek" has gotten to yet.

Robots doing mineral extraction will do it via preset programs. There is simply too much that has to work exactly on time to do it with humans. Likely any asteroid mining will happen with a craft that lands on it and deploys a number of rovers with batteries charged on site. They would move around collecting materials for the craft to start to lightly refine. You only need to get the bulk of the undesired material out. 75 percent pure or so. The rest can be done at earth. and a craft to move semi refined materials to the delivery craft.

I dont like the idea of blasting material into "bags" for delivery. That sounds like a mess and an accident waiting to happen.

Again all that without human involvement except from earth to start the programs and view the results.

But to get to this point will require that for either environmental reasons or overmining (EXTREMELY difficult due to Ocean mining not even have been attempted) have made the economy even more in demand for raw materials than peaks we have seen over the years. Even with fusion and Vasimr the costs to get started will be extreme and it will take years to get the mission launched and years before the first results are delivered.

Joe does not care about asteroid mining. He wants to go work at a reopened mine. Working on the moon may pay a bit better. However he has about a billion competitors for that job. So Joe would even be less interested in a fully funded outpost.

 

[atuhalpa]

I'll bet "Joe" cares about that big rock that will eventually come down and smack into the earth at 250,000 kph. I for one believe that the real business of space research is to set up a program that can find any potential object that is going to intersect our orbit or the Moon's orbit and deflect it enough to avert catastrophe. I include the Moon for obvious reasons. That would be a real return on the money invested, survival of the race.

 

[Urwumpe]

Why do people always think, that Joe Sixpack really matters... he is just an excuse for elitists to hinder the plans of other elitists, but in cold dark reality, we all know, that this is because Joe does not care about his own future.

What did the lowest level people have from discovering America? Absolutely nothing. It had been already rich people, who attempted to become even richer. Unless Joe Sixpack has any useful skill for the new world, he will stay in poverty on Earth. And it will not be Joe who decides who is useful and not. Was always that way, and makes actually no sense to change. Unless you become a leader yourself and pave your own way to the new world, you will likely wait forever.

Unless you allow Joe Sixpack to interfere with the plans of elitists everyday, and not just when the next election is, politics would really have to care for him - and this won't happen by standing around in the landscape. Leading your leaders still means hard work, thinking and discipline, and if you would use such qualities for your fate, you are a leader yourself, no longer the typical Joe Sixpack, who has an opinion for every poll that comes around, but no will to be the one who asks the questions.

And this is not utopia. This is present reality.

 

[kevinvr]

Why do people always think, that Joe Sixpack really matters... he is just an excuse for elitists to hinder the plans of other elitists, but in cold dark reality, we all know, that this is because Joe does not care about his own future.

And this is not utopia. This is present reality.

Excellent point, so lets get the robots working here too so they can do the work Joe sixpack s too lazy to do. :rofl:

 

[Urwumpe]

Excellent point, so lets get the robots working here too so they can do the work Joe sixpack s too lazy to do. :rofl:

You are laughing? Just look at the reality... right-wing extremists complaining about immigrants that are welcome in their country for doing the work that the lazy right-wing extremists won't do themselves. For example harvesting, collecting waste or keeping roads in good shape. All jobs, that have no glory in them, but which are extremely important to be done.

If robots could do the tasks, people would use them instead of immigrants, and people would complain about robots stealing the jobs, that they actually don't want to do.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Unless you allow Joe Sixpack to interfere with the plans of elitists everyday, and not just when the next election is, politics would really have to care for him - and this won't happen by standing around in the landscape. Leading your leaders still means hard work, thinking and discipline, and if you would use such qualities for your fate, you are a leader yourself, no longer the typical Joe Sixpack, who has an opinion for every poll that comes around, but no will to be the one who asks the questions.

And this is not utopia. This is present reality.

So you are telling there's a real possibility for meritocracy to exist? In fact, I believe that what's commonly known a democratic society is a dynamic process of a bunch of people striving to infiltrate some elite. Some of those are socially active enough to care about the political elite's doings and be able to articulate why they would vote for their politician of choice or even run for the office themselves.

But still, such active people are minority. And this does not automatically imply that the rest are dumb and fall into the mentioned 'Joe Sixpack' category. They might have chosen (concisely or not, maybe out of being of introvert nature) a different way of self-actualization, like small business, art, science, benevolence, religion, excellence at some other work or any of thousands other human activities. They care about politics only at the highest level - just voting for a party they once found appealing.

Do you regard such people a backbone of a nation, or just a bunch of the unworthy of mentioning?

 

[Urwumpe]

Do you regard such people a backbone of a nation, or just a bunch of the unworthy of mentioning?

Actually, a mix of both. You have unmentionables, who are really not caring what happens and who are more busy complaining about their fate, than changing it, and you have the so-called "water carriers": People who decide that the second row is their place, who take pride in not leading, but in supporting. These people are not not leading. They are leading by supporting another leader, which influences things.

You can easily do without unmentionables, but you can't conquer the Gauls alone, you should at least bring a chef with you. In a negative example, you never have a tyrant coming out of nowhere. Every dictator, regardless how criminal he was, has a group of smaller criminals swimming around him, who don't want to get into the spotlight of being the dictator themselves, but try to catch as much as possible for them by being right behind the dictator.

If you willingly choose your place and work hard for shaping this place for your likings, you are not Joe Sixpack - but this also means that you will fight for keeping your place in second line. Maybe some sort of being Buzz Aldrin.

 

[Artlav]

I guess the question here is - how many people actually have their own position?
Many will just follow whatever position was written into their memories first - from watching the TV, browsing the internet, or listening to the government/commercials in some other way, staying completely clueless about what this position means.
So, the world is actually piloted by a rather small amount of people who care.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Well, the "world" is too large a thing to be possibly "piloted" yet. At least, to be piloted in a way not making it move at random trajectory when different factions fight each other at the steering wheels and when it has ten or more steering wheels, big and small, whose motions are loosely synchronized with each others' steering gears (that's unless you believe in certain conspiracy theories).

What Urwumpe describes works at county or district level at best, where problems are such that most people can comprehend all the implications of them and have their own well-founded opinion on how to resolve them. And where the amounts of money and power the power takers acquire don't make them crazy yet. At this scale, it's really possible to elect the best and control their performace. And perhaps, this is the best reason why we should still keep countries.

I strongly doubt that something like this is possible when dealing with global scale problems and global scale projects. Space exploration / colonization certainly falls in this category, along with others. An early 20th-century's public incentive would be to put trust in what the most respected scientists say, but do they have a solid opinion on such problems today, and how much respect does science recieve today at all?

Adding a bad experience with most power elites, this is what drives masses' nihilism towards anything farther that someone's own nose tip.

 

[Urwumpe]

Space Exploration is definitely not global scale. It is not even country scale. It is "interest group" scale.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Space Exploration is definitely not global scale. It is not even country scale. It is "interest group" scale.

Purely exploration - yes. The problem with space exploration is that it's more costly than most of other scientific activities. So this is why it conflicts with many others' interests. Science community has yet to learn to use a sort of soft power to push their projects through. And honestly, I can't see how can this be done without outright hoaxing about asteroid danger, or profitability of He3 digging, and such...

 

[Andy44]

As my real name is Joe Sixpack 44, I am offended by all this slanderous gab.

 

[atuhalpa]

Siberian Tiger, what do you mean hoaxing asteroid danger?
The October 8th asteroid in Indonesia was real, and you as well as anybody knows it's big brothers and sisters are out there right on schedule to intersect our orbit.

 

[Zachstar]

Its amazing how people who are not citizens of the US are saying what congress or NASA will do. In my opinion you have little idea what goes on in the mind of congress. While I admit the lack of attention paid to the recontact will help this jobs program farce. It will do absolutely nothing for Ares V which stands about a 1 percent chance of being funded at this rate.

Do you think Ares V stands over healthcare or education?

 

[SiberianTiger]

So the idea of hoaxing on He3 isn't even objectionable?

 

[The 2-Belo]

Not that I'm specifically implying this forum or anything, but the lack of appreciation by many in the general public for exactly what is involved in building a 100-meter-tall rocket and launching it is often surprising to me.

I suppose I should take any politically-leaning internet argument with several shovelfuls of salt, but look: Any test flight of a spacecraft that leaves the pad, from the Mercury-Redstone 1 "Four-Inch Flight" all the way up to the Ares test, is a learning experience and should be valued as such, and thus is worth every last penny of the US$450 million it took to develop it.

So what if the separation timing was off and the dummy payload entered a spin? That's why it's a dummy payload. That's why it was a test flight, to find potential problems so they can iron them out before they put real humans on board. If the payload spin was indeed due to a separation maneuver fault, then it looks like NASA found one of the problems it was looking for. Didn't Thomas Edison say something like "The test was not a failure; I successfully found a way it shouldn't be done"?

I am encouraged, 100% successful test or not, that NASA is doing something tangible. It hasn't launched a stack of this size since the mid-1970s. The men who built the Saturns are retired or dead; this is now an entirely new era of rocketry theory, an entirely new generation of engineers, techs, and scientists. There are bound to be problems -- lots of them.

If the goal in exploring space is to help solve problems on Earth -- energy and food shortages, global warming, medical and scientific advances, cooperation amongst nations -- then every single government dollar spent in the development of space vehicles is worth it, and I mean it, whether it's NASA, JAXA, the ESA, any of them.

Of course I believe in the potential of private industry to assist in space exploration, and it should be encouraged, but not as a replacement for NASA-driven development. And I don't think that such funding should be stripped away using "bad economy" as an excuse -- who's going to lose their jobs building the rocket motors and guidance systems and modules and fuel pumps and air compressors and helium tanks if this program is scrapped? Huh?

Whatever the outcome of the test, we should rejoice that it was performed at all, and can only pray it continues. To paraphrase [FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Francis Pharcellus Church: [/FONT]No Ares? No NASA? Thank God! it lives, and it lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, it will continue to make glad the heart of space geeks.

 

[simonpro]

I like this bit:

No Ares? No NASA? Thank God!

We can live in hope

 

[The 2-Belo]

I like this bit:


We can live in hope

LAUGHS NOT AT YOUR INSOLENCE!

(That's the punctuation that was used in the original newspaper article, sue me.)

 

[Zachstar]

LAUGHS NOT AT YOUR INSOLENCE!

(That's the punctuation that was used in the original newspaper article, sue me.)

Probe is Russian BTW.. It could care less about NASA or Congress.

Ah the jobs argument I guess it ought to be no surprise that even some here are willing to use a biased congressional excuse for Ares 1. Guess what? They are losing their jobs anyway. Massive layoffs are expected starting early next year even with the jucy funding additions over the years. Where did that money go? More parties at ATK for solving minor issues every time?

Sad thing is Ares 1 will eventually fly. Then they can conveniently say "Keep ISS, Stay the course, etc..." And never give the tens of billions needed to even start bending metal for Ares V.