NASA Rushing To Mars As Per Bush's Policy

"Steven L." wrote in
ink.net:

NASA rushes plan to send humans to moon, Mars, despite doubts

By ROBERT S. BOYD
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - NASA is racing to carry out President Bush's costly
vision of sending humans back to the moon and then on to Mars -
despite the federal budget squeeze and doubts in Congress and the
scientific community about the plan's wisdom.

Typical press hysteria. NASA plans to return to the moon sometime between
2015 and 2020, and Mars at some ill-defined date "after 2020". That's no
rush.
--
JRF

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On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:49:48 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Bob
Eldred" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:


Pie in the sky crapola! There is no way in hell humans are going to mars in
anything less that 50 to 100 years, if then. The technology does not exist
to send and support humans on that length of trip and to safely get them
back to earth from that distance. But, one would not expect the
scientifically challenged bozo to understand that. Secondly, it will take
trillions of dollars to develop the necessary technology to accomplish the
feat and that ain't likely given the massive deficits and raging war
mongering that defines the present administration. Any mars trip is going to
require nuclear rocket technology and that's not likely to come into being
any time soon. NASA is doing a masturbation exercise, a circle jerk, to
dream the big dream but it ain't going to happen. Bush will come and go and
the whole thing will die like so many other grandiose space dreams because
we really don't have the collective will or desire to spend what would be
necessary to make it happen. Even if we did, it would be a total waste of
money because humans are so hapless and inefficient in space. As the Rovers
and other robots are showing, unmanned space exploration provides "bang for
the buck" that is not possible when humans are involved.

Boy, this thread has certainly brought out the marching morons.

In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 23:31:02 GMT, in a place far, far away, Roedy
Green made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit. Mars is somewhat the same
distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures
where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that
means there is oxygen. If oxygen that means we can breathe."
~ George W. Bush
Imagine an imbecile who would post a fake quote, supposedly by George
Bush, originally attributed to Dan Quayle (probably falsely, though I
don't have time to look it up right now), for which he is unable to
provide an attribution, to a knowledgeable newsgroup about space.

No, Quayle really said it. He said it in an August 11, 1989, interview
on CNN. Bob Park mentioned it two weeks later in the September 1 issue
of What's New; see http://www.aps.org/WN/WN89/wn090189.cfm .

For that matter, it is entirely unnecessary to falsely attribute this
quote to George W. Bush, given that Bush made the following similar
statements:

Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is
expensive. Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the moon could
escape its far lower gravity using far less energy, and thus, far
less cost. Also, the moon is home to abundant resources. Its soil
contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into
rocket fuel or breathable air.

Bush did not merely toss out these strange comments in an interview as
Quayle did his. Rather, they are official national space policy!

--
/\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
/ \ Home page: http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/
\ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
\/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *

Bob Eldred wrote:
"Steven L." wrote in message
ink.net...

What technology are you referring to?


Chemical rockets. It is not possible or at best very marginal to send manned
chemical rockets to mars with sufficient fuel and oxidizer to lift off from
the earth and then lift off again from mars for a return. The gravity
"wells" are just too great. It was just barely possible to do it from the
moon. Chemicals do not possess sufficient energy or specific impulse to
perform this feet with any kind of safety margin.

How about solar sails?


--
Steven D. Litvintchouk
Email:

Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:12:32 -0600, Joe Strout wrote:

Bush doesn't have any scientific vision.
That's certainly true, but the Vision for Space Exploration is not about
science (nor should it be).

Let's not forget that science will have a part... I just don't want
to see it as the ONLY part. :-)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:02:58 GMT, "Chance Hopkins"
wrote:

anything less that 50 to 100 years, if then. The technology does not
exist
to send and support humans on that length of trip and to safely get them
back to earth from that distance.
What technology are you referring to?
I think the problem is bone loss. We can't get there and back and exist in
this gravity afterwards.

And the solution to that problem is actually quite simple and
straightforward.

Provide the crew with artificial gravity, by using tethers and
imparting a spin on the vehicle. The *only* question that needs to be
answered is - just how much gravity is needed, to prevent
decalcification?

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 16:08:48 -0800, "Bob Eldred"
wrote:

What technology are you referring to?
Chemical rockets. It is not possible or at best very marginal to send manned
chemical rockets to mars with sufficient fuel and oxidizer to lift off from
the earth and then lift off again from mars for a return. The gravity

So don't lift off from Earth. Assemble your Mars ship in Earth
orbit, and you've cut the Delta-V to reach Mars in *half*.

For a return trip, use a 'Mars-Direct' type vehicle that's been
fuelled by catalyzing the Martian atmosphere.

If neither of those options appeals to you - nuclear rockets, with
Isps three times that of chemical rockets, were under development in
the 1960s.

Rand Simberg wrote:

And other than the first sentence, which is questionable, there's
nothing unreasonable about them. Isn't that amazing?!!

Given how much has been spent overall in *developing* the ability to
"lift heavy spacecraft and fuel out of Earth's gravity" over the past 50
years or so, not even the first sentence is terribly unreasonable.

Just because you can buy a radio for $7.99 doesn't mean that someone
didn't have to buy several factories costing a whole lot more...

--
Reed Snellenberger
GPG KeyID: 5A978843
rsnellenberger-at-houston.rr.com

Roedy Green wrote:


"Never in human history have such genocide and cruelty been witnessed.
Such a genocide was never seen in the time of the pharaohs nor
of Hitler nor of Mussolini."
~ Mehmet Elkatmi, head of Turkish parliament's human rights commission
on Bush's genocide in the Iraq war. 2004-11-28

A Turk complaining about a supposed genocide -- just what the world
needs, yet another definition of chutzpah.

--
Reed Snellenberger
GPG KeyID: 5A978843
rsnellenberger-at-houston.rr.com

"Bob Eldred" wrote in
ervers.com:


"Steven L." wrote in message
ink.net...

What technology are you referring to?

Chemical rockets. It is not possible or at best very marginal to send
manned chemical rockets to mars with sufficient fuel and oxidizer to
lift off from the earth and then lift off again from mars for a
return. The gravity "wells" are just too great. It was just barely
possible to do it from the moon.

Incorrect. The fact that it was just barely possible to do it from the moon
was not a result of inherent limitations of chemical rockets, but of the
methods that NASA chose to get there in order to meet JFK's arbitrary 1970
deadline.

Absent those deadlines, other methods could have been made possible then,
and are possible now. Earth-Orbit Rendezvous, to alleviate the Earth-to-
Orbit problem, and In-Situ Resource Utilization to generate propellant for
the return trip.

These are technologies that need some development work to get operational
experience, but few engineers doubt they will work. And there is plenty of
time to get that experience; even the most optimistic plans call for a
manned lunar return no earlier than 2015, and Mars missions long after
2020.

Calling this a "rush" is hysteria at its worst.

It is rocket science folks, specific impulse in particular.

Be mindful that this thread is crossposted beyond alt.*. Lecturing
sci.space.policy on specific impulse (or rocket science in general) is
pretty ludicrous.

--
JRF

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