Road to Mars

[ciphergoth]

"As someone who takes incredible pride in the achievement we made both as a country and as a species on July 20, 1969, I can say without reservation that I am in favor of a manned mission to Mars. [...] That is why the Bush administration's recent announcement of a mission to the moon and then to Mars enrages me."



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Comments

[babysimon]

One of the comments on the blog you link to says:

What NASA needs more than anything is a firm budget commitment with a 10-year horizon

What NASA needs more than anything else is cheap nanotube ribbon with a >100GPa tensile strength. I don't believe manned space flight is remotely worth the time and effort with chemical-fueled rockets. Until we have elevator technology (which may not be long) we should stick to lobbing up commercial satellites with disposable rockets.

[My map, FWIW]

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yes, TBH I'm pretty sure I'm not in favour of sending people to Mars at the moment, cynical electioneering or otherwise. I think that space elevators are also way too hard right now, but if huge amounts of funds were going to be diverted to space I'd find that a far more inspiring project.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yes, but big rockets going WOOOSH! into the sky impresses the peasantry no end.

[babysimon]

Some people is NASA are saying that space elevators could be practical in twenty years, if the current rate of progress in C₆₀ technology can be kept up.

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I just dont think space is a good target. It has some attractive properties of targets (impressive, diffiult, verifiable) and also many bad ones (competitive, wasteful, irrelevant, etc.). I think space travel would be a wonderful by-product of a technologically and politically advanced society, i.e. not ours.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yay! Skyhooks!

[conflux.livejournal.com]

I agree. The nanotube ribbon is only one way of doing this though. Other alternatives to standard rocket technology have been mooted. In the short term my guess in that the horizontal take off and landing form of space travel might be the best bet to reduce the cost of space travel.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I quite like space guns like SHARP too...

[babysimon]

They'll never get me up in one of those things.

[babysimon]

In the short term my guess in that the horizontal take off and landing form of space travel might be the best bet to reduce the cost of space travel.

Why? The shuttle didn't exactly carry out its promise to make space flight cheap. Yeah, I know it was a horrible mess compared to what it should have been, but the fact is reusable spaceplanes are expensive and disposable rockets aren't (anywhere near as much). The fact that cost-per-launch is higher on the shuttle than Arianne is pretty damning IMHO.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

The problem with the shuttle is that it is just an expensive rocket with a re-usable payload. The solid fuel side rockets are not reusable, the main fuel tank needs to be recovered and the whole thing needs a lot of servicing before it can fly again. Oh, and Arianne is only cheaper because the total payload is so much smaller. The shuttle is primarily about getting men into space with satellite launch coming second. A horizontal take off space craft could potentially use the same amount of fuel as a similar sized aircraft to get close to the edge of space and only then switch to rocket propulsion, for example. This would mean a lot less fuel would be needed for a launch and single use rockets could be avoided. The most expensive part of this solution would be designing hybrid jet/rocket engines that do not need to use liquid oxygen until they are at the edge of space.