Denial or Ignorance Amongst NASA Scientists?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The 35 billion dollar price tag for a manned mission to Mars sounds very high to me,... <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A round trip to the Moon is half a million miles; a round trip to Mars is half billion miles. As I recall, it cost 20 Gigabucks in 1969 dollars to go to the Moon. Now, we cannot build a copy of the Saturn V, because everybody who knew the old programming languages is retired and the few specs that exist are recorded on obsolete media. So we'd be starting again from scratch and spending 21st Century dollars. $35Gig sounds too low, if you ask me.

Besides, we have yet to develop the tech for a mission of such a long-duration---in terms of keeping the crew safe and healty. Our success rate for unmanned missions to Mars still sucks; we can't even be 50% certain of landing a balloon-padded rover safely. Some nations might be happy to send people to Mars with a ghost of a chance to return alive, but WE don't do that.

I think we'd be better off establishing a mining & manufacturing facility on the Moon first. The energy required to move massive structural elements from the Moon to L5 is roughly 3% as much as from Earth. A magnetic catapult, using Solar-generated electricity, could launch heavy materials for a small fraction of the cost of rockets. At L5, the parts could be assembled into a large planetary exploration base with centrifugal "gravity" and a permanent colony of workers and families---maybe even a hotel for rich tourists to help pay the bill. Only complex light-weight items, like computers, engines and people, would have to be blasted out of Earth's gravity. An L5 base would initially cost more than a single Mars mission; but once the base is there, many Mars missions could be launched for a fraction of the cost of one mission from a base on Earth.

This has been a very interesting thread. TVF's sociological comments are consistent with my own experience of Science, Science-related organisations.

Yes, organisational problems bedevil the grand human enterprise of robotic space exploration . . . much as geology is similarly bedevilled, see 5.4 at my www.nodrift.com .

Kuhn has explained how Science is not immune to sociology: Underlying ideologies (either subconcious or hidden); oligarchy (see Michels); playing up to funding bodies (a la TVF) and so on.

Robotic explorers are not only cheaper than manned missions, as MetaMars indicated, but also much more cost effective, as Mars Rovers and Orbiters proved recently. Robotic explorers have shown us many interesting things about the Moon, Mars, Europa, Iapetus, Titan, suggest many more . . .

As this thread, indeed this MessageBoard shows, those observing through these robotic prostheses only start with specialised life researchers. In my own case, features revealed by robots at Iapetus and Europa are explained in Volume 2 of my ebook.

Peter Nielsen

Email: uusi@hotkey.net.au
Post: 12 View St, Sandy Bay 7005, Australia

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by PhilJ</i>
The energy required to move massive structural elements from the Moon to L5 is roughly 3% as much as from Earth.
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I had read some interesting stuff about running massive tethers into low gravity altitude, which would be kept taught via centrifugal force. Anybody know their status? Effect on cost? My <i>guess </i> is that operational "cost of travel" of a rocket ship itself ito fuel and booster structure would be cut by roughly 80% (assuming 90% of fuel is to escape orbit, and 90% of the cost of the flight is simply to move matter from here to there and back again - vs. 10% for life support).

Of course, there is the cost of R&D, cost of the tether, cost of earth-based mission support, the fact that there will be no tether on Mars ....

Can anybody give firmer estimates? Mine aren't worth too much...

Metamars;
Search the net for "space elevator". Optimists expect to have a non-human cargo elevator operational in 2018. They hope to put cargo into space for a about $100/kg.

I'm a skeptic. I think they're going to have a hell of a time with vibration. The micro-thin carbon-namotube ribbon will vibrate like a blade of grass between your lips when the wind blows; and you better believe the wind will blow.

I wanted to get back to Tom's comments about the relationship and division of responsibilities between JPL and NASA:

"JPL controls robotic missions, NASA controls manned missions. So JPL wants to keep the space program robotic. They only hire and contract with people who support their philosophy, that manned missions are too expensive and too dangerous. They have scheduled missions to Mars, two per launch window every 2.2 years from now through 2016. The justifications for these missions has already been approved, although funding for the lab is approved on a 5-year basis. According to that schedule, the present landers were supposed to find evidence for past water on Mars. They carried no instrument that could find present water because that would undercut the purpose of future missions. And you see JPL scientists aggressively disputing ESA's claims to have found a frozen lake on Mars.

It is similar for biology. By 2016, we are supposed to have the answer to the question of whether Mars could have ever supported life in the distant past. If we found artifacts today, the entire schedule would have to be scrapped. Worse yet for JPL, there would be increased support for manned missions. Once the Moon changed from a robotic spacecraft target to a manned spacecraft target in 1969, no further robotic lunar missions were approved for JPL. They fear the same will happen for Mars, which is their primary mission for the coming decade.

No JPL scientist would be willing to participate in the survey you propose, and anyone who did would quickly find him/herself unemployed. JPL does not even want such topics discussed in any serious public venue, and any scientist or media person who did so would be ridiculed and his organization boycotted. I worked as an independent contractor at the lab in 1971, and saw how quickly the ax can fall on people inside or outside the lab who do not tow the company line. Remember, JPL is not part of NASA and is not government. It is a private, independent lab owned and operated for profit by Caltech. JPL is an independent contractor that runs the robotic space program for NASA."

It is my understanding that not only does JPL have control of robotic missions, they also have oversight over the images taken by the Orbiters and Rovers. I recall reading that when the first Orbiter images were received, JPL was holding onto them for approx six months for review before releasing them to the public.

Considering the vested interest JPL has to keep the robotic missions going it seems to me that the control they have over the images is improper and is clearly a conflict of interests.

Is JPL going to release Mars images that clearly show artifacts of civilization and surface water if it means the loss of lucrative contracts for further robotic missions?

Does JPL still exercise the same degree of control over the Mars images that they did 5-6 years ago? How closely is NASA involved in the release of these images to the public?

It never occurred to me until I read Tom’s statement that JPL would be sabotaging themselves financially by releasing images showing surface water or artifacts of civilization.

I am not accusing JPL of misbehavior but I think it is very unwise to leave control of the images in the hands of a company whose financial fortunes are tied to what might be found in those images.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by PhilJ</i>
<br />Metamars;
Search the net for "space elevator". Optimists expect to have a non-human cargo elevator operational in 2018. They hope to put cargo into space for a about $100/kg.
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At $100/kg, they could probably make a fortune from an amusement glider type ride. That would be one way to fund it.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
"I'm looking at a business plan that shows some investor could triple his or her money in about 6 years, and the initial investment could be as low as $5 billion," Edwards said.
[url] www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol...evator_020327-1.html [/url]
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Regarding vibration: I'm not an engineer, but I have to believe that computer simulations will allow you to know from <i>now</i> how different structural designs will deal with vibrations. It seems to me they must have a very good idea of what the physical characteristics of their carbon nanotube material are, which, I presume, would make simulations under dynamic conditions relatively easy to do.

One design idea that pops into my non-engineering mind is to buld a "ladder" into space, where the two sides of the ladder contain the elevators. If you also had rigid spanners every X miles that could be selectively affixed or allowed to slide in a damped fashion, you'd be able to affect the natural harmonics. Perhaps if they stiffened/relaxed these spanners in a semi-random fashion every 3 seconds, say, there would not be sufficient time for any natural harmonic that only existed for such a short time scale to have a cumulative effect. My guess is that 3 second stiffen/relax manipulations are achievable, and that this is much shorter than the predominant periods of such a large "string". On the downside, the amount of work necessary to move the sides of the ladder to exactly where you want them might be tremendous. Perhaps they could capture the work done by wind and elasticity during relax phases? Carbon nanotube flywheels, anybody?

Come to think of it, having only a two sided ladder would not give you protection from vibration in the plane perpendicular to that defined by the sides of the latter. So, it looks like you would need at least a 3 - sided ladder.

Hmmmm. I'll run this by a friend who got a Ph.D. in civil engineering not too long ago. Maybe he can at least tell me why it's a goofy idea.