Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost?

January 18, 2004

volantus4 wrote:

I understand that the moon has a great deal of an element called
"Helium 3" which is essential to atomic fusion.

Actually, no there are several different fusion pathways.

If this is the case,
from what I've heard, one space shuttle load of "helium 3" would
provide enough "helium 3" fuel for atomic fusion reactors to generate
all of the electricity that the USA would need for one year.

I just hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but there are no
electricity producing atomic fusion reactors. Sorry. However, there is
one that produces photons nearby.

If the
aforementioned is true,

Unfortunately, it's not.

establishing a permanent space station of the
moon would not only be cost effective but extremely profitable.

Controlled nuclear fusion is neither cost effective nor profitable. But
don't despair, we have a free uncontrolled fusion reactor right in our
backyard. It's a star called the sun. That's really wild, isn't it? Now,
if we could just tame those photons ...

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net

"Ool" wrote in message
...

It's like trying to end all family disputes at home by not going out
to work any more. They're two overlapping but mostly unrelated
prob-
lems, and neglecting the one doesn't mean you'll solve the
other--ra-
ther on the contrary, I guess.


Since most family disputes are about money, not "going out and work"
(developing space) makes the resource competition worse. For some of
us, thanks to this "world economy" or lack thereof (what economy) it
isn't yet an option.

See Frontier Theory by Larry Winn
http://www.suite101.com/articles.cfm/1112/

quibbler wrote:

We'd have enough money for both if Dubya hadn't given away $2 trillion in
tax cuts to some of the wealthiest Americans.

Well, that's an outright lie. Tax cuts do not give away money, anymore
than a thief taking your wallet and leaving you a nickle is giving you a
nickle.


And Howard Dean agreed that "space exploration is
terrific", but went on to ask - "Where is the tax increase to pay for
it? It is not worth bankrupting the country ."

You can bet that if a democrat proposed increasing the space program
without specifying where the money would come from to pay for it that he
would be roundly excoriated by conservative talking heads.

Perhaps, but that's not relevant, since Bush has already said where the
vast bulk of the program money is to come from: money NASA was already
going to get anyway.


Dubya is hardly an "informed" guy himself, but the fact is that the
hundreds of billions it will cost to go to the moon or the trillion
dollars it will cost to go to Mars

Wow! Where'd you get those figures? Bazooka Joe?

would make a large difference to
improving the economic quality of life.

Well, let's just see. A trillion dollar Mars mission that takes 25 years
to happen: that's $40 billion per year. That's about two weeks worth of
social spending in this country. How much impact would that *really*
have?

That is a fact that no serious
economist would dispute and there is nothing "uninformed" about it.

Except that your numbers are insane and your conclusion wrong.


--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

Take a look at the cost of just one issue.....lack of prescription drug
coverage in Medicare. Estimated cost for the partial solution to this which
Congress passed last year is $400bn over 10 years, or about $40bn a year.Many
people suspect that the true cost of this program will be far higher.
Compare
that to the ?$17bn? a year that NASA gets. Killing the whole space
program.....no Apollo, no Shuttle, no ISS, no Hubble, no Voyager, no Mars
rovers, no Cassini....would pay less than half of the cost the prescription
drug benefit.


The liberals would like nothing better than to turn this country into a welfare
state. Its possible for us to spend every penny we have on healthcare and still
not get the results we want, but we will make that money unavailable for space
exploration. Do we really want 100% of revenue to go into healthcare? Heathcare
is one of those irretractible problems that yeild few results in the face of
enormous expenditures. It is easier to build a starship than it is to solve the
problem of human mortality.

Tom

Cosmetics directly affect issues of interpersonal relationships
that are vastly more important to most people than space.

Paul


Imagine you are in a history class, and you ask the Professor about the Great
Pyramids, but he continues to digress to the subject of Egyptian cosmetics and
grooming habits without getting to what ancient Egypt is most known for, i.e.
the Great Pyramids.

Now what do you suppose would be the most important accomplishments of the
United States from the point of view of a future history class? Would it be our
missions to the Moon and Mars, or would it be daily welfare transfers, how much
we spent on Coca Cola every given year. What programs are historically
important, and what are just background noise. It seems to me that the
Democrats mostly want to make background noise rather than history. They'd
rather be managers than leaders. Who's going to remember Jimmy Carter 1,000
years from now?

Tom

Nice idea, but until those fusion reactors actually exist, then you
would just have an extremely costly Shuttle full of junk.


They can exist now, they just wouldn't produce a net power surplus, but if they
produce some power, they still can be useful. Suppose a fusion reactor produces
only 75% of the power needed to maintain its fusion reaction, that means you
can generate a very hot plasma with only 25% of the energy it takes to heat a
non-fusing substance. You could use a fission reactor to plug in this 25% gap
and get 4 times the power output normally available to the fission reactor. It
seems to me that Helium-3 can help fission fuel to go further.

Tom

TKalbfus wrote:

They can exist now, they just wouldn't produce a net power
surplus, but if they produce some power, they still can be
useful. Suppose a fusion reactor produces only 75% of the
power needed to maintain its fusion reaction, that means you
can generate a very hot plasma with only 25% of the energy it
takes to heat a non-fusing substance. You could use a fission
reactor to plug in this 25% gap and get 4 times the power
output normally available to the fission reactor. It seems to
me that Helium-3 can help fission fuel to go further.

Tom, thanks for posting this. It made my morning.

Jim Davis

"TKalbfus" wrote in message ...

Take a look at the cost of just one issue.....lack of prescription drug
coverage in Medicare. Estimated cost for the partial solution to this which
Congress passed last year is $400bn over 10 years, or about $40bn a year.Many
people suspect that the true cost of this program will be far higher.
Compare
that to the ?$17bn? a year that NASA gets. Killing the whole space
program.....no Apollo, no Shuttle, no ISS, no Hubble, no Voyager, no Mars
rovers, no Cassini....would pay less than half of the cost the prescription
drug benefit.

The liberals would like nothing better than to turn this country into a welfare
state. Its possible for us to spend every penny we have on healthcare and still
not get the results we want, but we will make that money unavailable for space
exploration. Do we really want 100% of revenue to go into healthcare? Heathcare
is one of those irretractible problems that yeild few results in the face of
enormous expenditures. It is easier to build a starship than it is to solve the
problem of human mortality.

I know first-hand how healthcare can run amuck in other countries and
cause lots of problems, but I still have to say the American health
care, social security, and, in many parts, the educational system just
plain suck! You're the other extreme in the civilized world.

But those are problems of logistics and a different code of ethics,
not money! Throwing NASAs budget after the problem wouldn't solve it.
I think it was Henry Ford who once said that if he gave his millions
to his workers then each of them would be five dollars richer and out
of a job.

Same here. You'd turn from a space-faring nation with a poverty prob-
lem to a grounded nation with poverty.


--
__ “A good leader knows when it’s best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture.� '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiii :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

"TKalbfus" wrote in message ...

Imagine you are in a history class, and you ask the Professor about the Great
Pyramids, but he continues to digress to the subject of Egyptian cosmetics and
grooming habits without getting to what ancient Egypt is most known for, i.e.
the Great Pyramids.

Now what do you suppose would be the most important accomplishments of the
United States from the point of view of a future history class? Would it be our
missions to the Moon and Mars, or would it be daily welfare transfers, how much
we spent on Coca Cola every given year. What programs are historically
important, and what are just background noise. It seems to me that the
Democrats mostly want to make background noise rather than history. They'd
rather be managers than leaders. Who's going to remember Jimmy Carter 1,000
years from now?


Depends on how well he's mummified...



--
__ “A good leader knows when it’s best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture.� '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiii :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

In article ,
TKalbfus wrote:

The liberals would like nothing better than to turn this country into a welfare
state. Its possible for us to spend every penny we have on healthcare and still
not get the results we want, but we will make that money unavailable for space
exploration. Do we really want 100% of revenue to go into healthcare? Heathcare
is one of those irretractible problems that yeild few results in the face of
enormous expenditures.

Aside from nearly eliminating child mortality in the First World,
doubling average lifespans in the West over the last century and a half,
putting a large portion of human reprodution under human control, making
operations nearly painless and with a greatly reduced chance of infection,
various advances in controlling defective brain chemistry, improving
dentistry from a form of torture and other trivia too minor to mention.

--
"Precepts of religion. Every victory is a defeat. Every cut made is a wound
received. Every strength is a weakness. Every time you kill, you die."
In which case, he thought, clawing briars from in front of his face, the
enemy must be taking a right pounding, the poor buggers. [Memory, K.J. Parker]