Space Adventures
Written by Nick Carraway —
“The first several days of the Biden administration has seen a number of Trump era policies go down in flames. The furious pace of executive orders has obviously been necessary and a number of things will have to go on the back burner for now. One of those is space exploration.
Ms. Carraway works in the space industry. I took a few college courses in science, so my explanation of what she does would be crude at best. She also doesn’t like blabbing her business in public as NASA is officially a defense department initiative. Suffice it to say, she is one of the many people that supports the astronauts on the Space station..
That brings us to the whole idea of Space Force. The notion seemed hilarious at first and the Steve Carrell Netfiix series certainly doesn’t help. Weaponizing space is just stupid. Yet, when you create a bureaucracy it is incredibly difficult to uncreate it. So, if you keep it around then what does it do exactly?
The other great question is what NASA and the space exploration industry will put their energy behind. We have heard about landing on the moon again, landing on an asteroid, and landing on Mars. This is one area where our last several presidents have failed. There has been no cohesive vision for space. I firmly believe if you give them a common goal and the means to obtain they can accomplish anything. If you give them no direction they will accomplish nothing.”
I’d suggest starting with robotics- if we can have self-driving cars on Earth, we should be able to have them on the Moon. Less worry about life support…
1SpaceX, as primarily a private enterprise, isn’t waiting for government funding or focus. Elon says Mars by 2022 with people by 2024 but Gwynne Shotwell says Mars by 2024 and people on Mars by 2026. I just hope I am around to see it.
2I agree Nick. We need coordination and a common goal for the next steps in space exploration. I friend of mine is an attorney, and he knows of law offices working on legal details with mining companies for mineral procurement from asteroids. I don’t think they’d bother if it wasn’t a relative certainty for the future.
The US Army proposed Project Horizon in 1959 for a 12 man lunar outpost.
NASA considered a manned Venus flyby for 1973 in a converted Apollo spacecraft, as well as a Mars flyby in the ‘70’s or ‘80’s.
Manned missions to the moon, Mars, and asteroids are all within the realm of possibly and have been for some time. But as you say Nick, you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is to pick a mission and allocate our resources there.
Personally I’d choose a moon base. It’s three days from Earth so we can respond to emergencies. I don’t care if “we’ve already been there.” That’s what easily bored people say, and why the networks didn’t carry astronaut broadcasts from Apollo 13, because they’d already watched Apollo 11 & 12. Until Apollo 13 had an explosion. That’s what it took to rekindle people’s interest. The moon is a logical stepping stone. It will provide preparation and training for Mars and beyond, as well as those intangible benefits the space program always brings us.
3Good points.
In some ways, we are in need of hope and a uniting aspect of that hope.
I remember the first shuttle mission and the buzz on campus when they landed. Complete strangers bursting with joy hugged because it was a success and they were home and safe.
I can definitely get behind that kind of joy in our day.
4I support our space program and NASA.
We have an abundance of problems right here on earth that must be addressed and eradicated. I say let’s focus our energies and billions on our planet first and repairing the damage, removing systems that destroy our social fabric; for pete’s sake, fix our schools, make housing affordable, fund health care, support our teachers, unions, and tax the capitalist bastards.
Capitalism does not work with Democracy. It must be reigned in. They are the antitheses of each other. Let’s fix these things first since unfettered capitalism is what brought us here.
5Well, I would like to see a certain former president be the first to land on the surface of the sun.
6slipstream @ #6
I bet we could talk him into volunteering if we show the giant crowds that gathered for the moon mission launches. Tell him he can give a speech before blastoff. If he worries whether it will get too hot, reassure him that he’ll be landing at night.
7I’m in the crowd that thinks we need more robotic missions, taking priority over sending humans to Mars (“canned primate shipping”). The amount of science that has been done by Curiosity, the Voyager expeditions, and the Huygens and other probes is vastly greater, and less expensive, than packing up all the food, water, and oxygen humans need. Plus, if the robot missions fail or crash, we don’t have to lower flags to half-mast.
James Van Allen gave a talk at an Ivy League institution in the 50s and was asked, is there anything a human can do in space that we can’t task to machines. He apparently got a far away look, thought for a few seconds, then with a puzzled look replied “Yes. But I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go to space for that.” And he never clarified the answer further.
8Eliminate the Space Force as it provides no meaningful benefit. The USAF has been active in the space business for a number of decades (both as part of and exclusive to, NASA). Let that work continue.
[Independent of the above, I’d still like space to be declared a demilitarized zone in terms of weapons. Let folks put up all the spy stuff they want though.]
AlanInAustin
9(former space shuttle engineer)
Surly Prof: “I’m in the crowd that thinks we need more robotic missions, taking priority over sending humans to Mars…”
That will undoubtedly be the future. Manned missions are more costly and complex, while also being more limited in scope and duration. On the other hand, robots have become increasingly more complex, adept, and adaptable to hostile environments.
10Whenever Trump talked about the “Space Force” the image of “Duck Dodgers in the 24th And A Half Century” flashed into my mind,
11I had a friend who was tasked by the Air Force with working out the orbits of the early space program (and, no, he was not a black woman and, no, that movie you saw was not accurate).
He, unlike me, was a space dreamer but even he admitted that there was no reason to put a man in space other than to beat the Rooskies to it.
I cannot think of anything we need to do by putting a person in space; and the farther out you go, the less possible it becomes anyhow.
12Of course, the whole thing started as a massive chest thump.
Russia had put sputnik up there and the US couldn’t have THAT! We were compelled to show those commies that democracy was better than communism and the race to the moon was on.
Still, it being in the middle of the Cold War, that was the best option available. Better to be a bunch of chest-thumping chimpanzees than a bunch of war-mongering baboons, after all.
That said, we do have one mission in space that I think might be worth doing:
If we set up a base on either the moon [1/6 earth gravity] or Mars [1/3] we could shepherd asteroids into orbit around whichever one we picked. Then we could mine them for the minerals we absolutely WILL NOT lose our hunger for — and accomplish two goals simultaneously:
1] We can stop befouling the Earth where the minerals we’re going after are becoming less and less available anyway.
and 2] After we’ve pulled everything we want out of an asteroid we can point it toward the sun and give it a shove, thereby taking out one more missile which could get jostled out of orbit and head toward the Earth at some future date.
Yes, it would take more technology than we have at the moment —- but the moon shot was WAY our of our reach when JFK proposed it and we got there in the 10 years he allotted.
13Meanwhile, the goal benefits the entire planet —- which sure beats chest thumping [though the US being what it is, we’d probably get a dollop of that thrown into the mix anyhow.]
twocrows, I doubt that would work for a couple of reasons.
1. Except for rare earths, we don’t need to dig up much. The US made 100 million tons of steel for 100 years and that stuff doesn’t go away. That’s 10 billion tons, most of it available for recycling.
It’s cheaper (sometimes) to make new bit we could recover much of what we want
2. I suspect you would need many, many asteroids to get a useful amount of rare earth minerals.
3. There is a lot of high value ore just waiting to be picked up — deep sea nodules. So far, it is too expensive but eventually, maybe, that will change. I think a robotic, autonomous harvester might do it.
But engineering to work at those pressures is difficult.
When I was a young reporter, a population of lobsters was found at depth off the North Carolina coast. They were just as good as Maine lobsters (same temperature down there) and for a while in Norfolk we had a glut of lobsters.
On payday I would walk down to the pier and buy culls for $2/pound. Then the oil embatgo put the lobster boats out of business.
So I came up with a formula concerning nodules: If you cannot make money bringing up something worth $2 a pound from 1,000 feet, you cannot make money bringing up something worth 1 cent/pound from 15,000 feet.
I am with you on environmental consequences (I grew up not too far from Ducktown, Tennessee, which if you don’t know about you should look up).
14There have been many improvements to all our lives from the space program. Teflon springs to my OLD mind first. But…how many homeless veterans could be treated and housed for even a day’s spending on the space program? How about a weeks worth? OK then go for a month’s worth.
15Slipstream #6,
I had a student once that told me that the reason why we have night and day is that the sun was half fire and half rock. Night occurred when we were on the rock side of the sun. The sad thing was that this student made all A’s. Well, I immediately went home and demanded to know why we hadn’t done man space flight to the sun. She simply said it would be too hot. I said, but no, you go at night. I think she started twitching for some reason…
Incidentally, in his effort to kiss the president’s butt, Ted Cruz acknowkledged that there were space pirates. Now, this brought up more questions. For instance, do they wear the eye patch and fedora over the helmet or under the helmet? Also, who makes the space suit for the parrot?
16Our good buddy Ted Cruz said there were space pirates. So, do they wear the eye patch and fedora under the helmet or on top of the helmet. Who makes the space suit for the parrot? These are some of the burning question my wife will never answer. It must be top secret stuff.
17Harry: your friend might like to see that NASA recently (30 June 2020) filed a patent for a new method of orbital transfer from geosynchronous to lunar orbits. I won’t bore folks here with the details, but it allows out-of-plane end orbits significantly cheaper than previous methods. And it assumes no pesky humans that have to be taken care of, so multiple gravity assists can be used.
It’s amazing that almost 400 years after Newton came up with the governing equations, and 200 years after Laplace created modern methods of modeling them, we’re still making major advances like this … OK, if you’re as geeky as I am about it.
It’s patent number 10,696,423
18Regrettably, my friend died a couple of years ago. I tried to get him to write memoirs but he was too busy working on projects to look to the past.
As an AF lieutenant right out of Cal Tech, he hired what he called computresses, gave each the biggest Remington-Rand calculator and set them to work.
This was years before what happened in the movie.
19So, didnt we also get velcro from early space exploration efforts? However if we want to really talk about the greatest threats we face from space, I think we need to clean up all of the debris and junkers that are in orbit. Sooner or later an old communications satellite will take out half of the space station.
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