smc, stop trolling.

11/15/2012 3:36:31 PM

11/15/2012 3:41:53 PM

The thing that EuroTitToss, although demoralizing, is the sad truth. Everything is too far away in the universe and very difficult to live on. We gotta start somewhere though. Look how fragile aviation was in 1903 -- we've pretty much mastered it as a race now. Space will likely take thousands of years before we have even mastered going to the moon and asteroids, but it's a start, and the amount of technology that is developed to do such a "small" endeavor will benefit mankind many times over.

Regardless, I'm not sure why smc is hating on private industry stuff. I can understand if he feels that his taxpayer dollars should be spent elsewhere but if a private company is using it's own money and it's own astronauts to explore space it isn't effecting him in anyway, so what's the problem?


V Good comment there actually. I have more to post on that topic but it's about time for me to head home so I'll wait until tomorrow.

[Edited on November 15, 2012 at 5:52 PM. Reason : ]

11/15/2012 5:42:15 PM

Quote :

"A pessimistic rant about space exploration: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html?"

This is so lame.

Quote :

"And remember, this is only what it takes to go to Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour. Gliese 581c is five times as far away. Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else — the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system. The question of how we might interact with alien biologies is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than the question of how we might get there — and the preliminary outlook is rather forbidding.) "

This is such a strawman. While I'm sure plenty of the public thinks that the steps are
1. build the ISS
2. explore exoplanets
no educated person has this perception.

If only there were some planet out there with Earth gravity, pressure, and temperature conditions. On wait, that's motherfucking Venus in its upper atmosphere.

That's even neglecting the fact that Venus blows hard in comparison to the other options. In the semiconductor era space has plenty to offer based on just it's lack of gravity and temperature. If space manufacturing got going at large scale, all this discussion about the difficulty of sustaining a human presence would be irrelevant.

11/15/2012 5:47:19 PM

^thank you. There are a tremendous amount of unexplored areas in our own solar system that will occupy our efforts for hundreds of years

11/16/2012 12:00:04 PM

If you had a manufacturing network throughout the asteroid belt and other small bodies, it's likely you could transport materials largely with space cannons, which would actually take less energy you spend to transport things on Earth.

But that's not the most important point either, economically, complexity is a real commodity. The ease with which you could build extremely large and complex things in space is pretty interesting.

You just have to develop the mass economy out there to start with. That's the hard part.

At some point we'll look down at planets like Mars and lol thinking "why would we ever want to go down there?"

11/16/2012 2:02:16 PM

https://twitter.com/NASAWatch/status/269511346649968641

Quote :

"Company named "Golden Spike" composed of Shuttle, Apollo & planetary science veterans apparently working on a commercial human Moon mission"

11/16/2012 2:33:02 PM

The recent set of images looks like NASA is putting together a pretty sweet panorama





These are the kinds of images I wanted to see from the mission.

11/25/2012 3:01:57 PM

ugh, I HATE the white-balanced pictures NASA makes. The idea is that they change the colors so you see what you would see if you looked at these scenes on Earth.

It looks like crap.

[image]http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20121126.html" target="_blank">http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20121126.html



Here is the original. You probably want to "save as" since it's 24.7 MB of face-melting Martian panorama.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/708550main_PIA16453-FigA_sol6_from_Rocknest_raw.jpg

Scaled down:



Isn't that better than the crappy white balanced junk?

[Edited on November 27, 2012 at 8:51 AM. Reason : ]

11/27/2012 8:50:16 AM

I think you've got that backwards. The first photo is a shot from Nevada that they forgot to tint orange.

Their latest "announcement" is further proof that NASA is run by PR men and marketers. Real scientists don't announce findings until they are sure. They're wagging the dog here, like always.

11/27/2012 1:24:18 PM

so now you are a conspiracy theorist troll too?

and if you were paying attention, it is the media who has jumped all over an admittedly poorly worded statement from the JPL scientist.

Quote :

"Real scientists don't announce findings until they are sure. "

you are right. They aren't sure what caused the big bang, therefore those scientist-frauds should have kept their holes shut about the whole thing.

11/27/2012 2:46:27 PM

Don't even get me started on those astrophysicist charlatans.

NASA knows that all they have are some photos that could have been taken in any desert, so they do these buildups and letdowns every so often to keep the sheeple hooked and the funds flowing.

11/27/2012 3:05:41 PM

stop

11/27/2012 3:17:51 PM

What Earth pretending to be Mars looks like:



http://mdrs.marssociety.org/

Look for the blue sky poking out

11/27/2012 3:35:00 PM

LOL at that project. It's like spacecamp for grown people. Only sillier.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdrsphotos/7994198720/in/photostream

[Edited on November 27, 2012 at 3:44 PM. Reason : fixed photo link, i think]

11/27/2012 3:43:45 PM

or, you know, a tool for training for missions (robotic and otherwise) on mars?

11/27/2012 4:35:16 PM

All those people will be too old to attempt a mars trip when the time comes. It is fun to play dress-up though.

11/27/2012 4:36:43 PM

a lot of it is about learning techniques and designing wheels for rovers that won't get stuck, and a host of other things.


although... lets say there is a 30 year old astronaut, and there is a mars trip in 2032 (nice even number). That would make him 50... There is a lot of talk about sending older, but still fit astronauts so that the larger than normal doses of radiation are less likely to significantly impact their lifespans... a 50 year old astronaut would be ideal in age for such a mission.

11/27/2012 4:43:24 PM

Awwwww, but that's not as fun as shitting on the space program as a whole.

Did smc get raped by an astronaut or something?

11/27/2012 4:47:49 PM

Quote :

"He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants."

http://www.space.com/18596-mars-colony-spacex-elon-musk.html

I don't doubt the estimates of willing participants, even if they can't return to Earth. What I doubt is our technical ability to set this up at a reasonable price. Costs to launch to the moon are quoted by many to be on the order of $1 M per kg.

11/27/2012 5:29:11 PM

I do doubt the estimates of willing volunteers. This isn't the great American west, filled with milk and honey. It's a place where you'll die in minutes without outside help and technology. For Mars to be a viable immigrant destination, Earth has to be in a horrible state. Imagine a cross between Mad Max and Indian slums...over every square inch of arable land. If Earth becomes that horrible, I doubt we'll have the luxury of spaceflight anyway. It's hard to have a successful launch when the masses are stealing rocket parts to build their cooking fires. Crabs in the bucket.

[Edited on November 28, 2012 at 8:51 AM. Reason : .]

11/28/2012 8:49:48 AM

Arable land on Mars?

11/28/2012 10:53:59 AM

11/28/2012 10:56:58 AM

You are a sad, sad excuse for a person.

11/28/2012 10:59:08 AM

I wonder why they chose such small diameter wheels for the rovers. Or wheels instead of tracks, for that matter. Isn't one of the old ones stuck in the sand right now?

11/28/2012 11:10:07 AM

Quote :

"Arable land on Mars?"

The pressure is too low, so some people have proposed this as a minimal-effort approach:

Bring greenhouse balloons that can hold pressure. Install a pump. Pump Martian atmosphere into balloon. Line the bottom with Martian soil. Throw seeds in. Add water.

As I understand it, plants kind of need Oxygen, but you can also kind of get around it. Plus, since the plants themselves make Oxygen, it's really not a problem once the project is off the ground. Apparently the plants never needed the Nitrogen.

Even given this, the plants would benefit from a large amount of selective breeding. The agriculture part of Mars exploration would be huge, and you would need it for even the first missions. Once we have the right plants though, progress would go pretty fast with scaling up.

11/28/2012 11:17:08 AM

Yes, I'm picturing hundreds of acres of enclosed, pressurized space to even begin to be viable. You would literally need tractors to plow the existing soil.

There is some discussion of tank bogies here.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SeattleRobotics/message/45640


It seems to me that all the really interesting things will be deep in pits and craters, rather than just laying out in the open on a flat plane that the existing rovers can traverse with their max 30 degree tilt.

11/28/2012 11:21:07 AM

there has been a good amount of talk about remotely exploring caves on mars. I can only imagine the technical challenges of such a mission.

11/28/2012 12:12:44 PM

They would need to be almost completely autonomous, with plenty of smaller relay stations to maintain communication to the surface.

How viable are flying vehicles in the Martian atmosphere?

[Edited on November 28, 2012 at 12:22 PM. Reason : .]

11/28/2012 12:20:16 PM

Quote :

"How viable are flying vehicles in the Martian atmosphere?"

http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/



It's completely seriously considered. I have questions about how worth it it is though. Apparently they were looking to launch this 2011 to 2013 but a Mars orbiter got chosen over it.

The thing about the ARES proposal is that it would be powered by a rocket... while moving in the atmosphere. If it's not air-breathing then obviously it won't be able to stay up long, it could only go for two days or so. It feels like a buzz-kill when Curiosity may well last a decade.

11/28/2012 1:31:24 PM

I was thinking more along the lines of a quadcopter powered by a nuclear battery that could land and take samples. Maybe even with some sort of inflatable component for long cruises. With less gravity and a thinner atmosphere I don't know how feasible that would be though.

11/28/2012 1:34:01 PM

You have two big things working against you:
- the atmosphere sucks for this
- nuclear power sources are really heavy

The lower gravity helps you a lot.

Consider that Curiosity is only running on something like 100 W of electric power, which is practically a starvation budget for something as huge as it is. There are so many orders of magnitude penalty it would be amazing to design something that gets off the ground in the first place. Even on Earth the flight times for quadcopters are really bad. Our approach is usually "slow and steady", which doesn't work out for flight.

I would, however, like to see some flying drones on Venus, even if it's not exploring the surface.

11/28/2012 1:46:44 PM

That was the argument against using tank tracks as well; they waste too much energy turning.

11/28/2012 2:09:59 PM

another idea would be a probe that could "hop" from place to place with rockets.

I'd like to see a balloon type vehicle on mars... it could stay aloft for a lot longer than a fixed wing vehicle with the advantage of moving at a nice slow pace.

11/28/2012 2:17:58 PM

The problem with hopping is how you turn soil into propellant, or else the distance you can travel is miniscule.

I would use balloon type vehicles for places with heavy atmospheres.

11/28/2012 4:19:51 PM

If we found something warranting it, I could see them sticking a quad copter that docked with the rover for recon.

That would be pretty awesome...

11/28/2012 4:32:57 PM

I envision exploration of the surface of Venus being done by robots that look like stingrays.

11/28/2012 4:39:12 PM

Quote :

"The problem with hopping is how you turn soil into propellant, or else the distance you can travel is miniscule."

What I envision is a craft capable of reaching a precise location on mars... all of the past probes have landed in a several square km window. That window has gotten smaller and smaller, to the point where once it landed on mars in the window, it would just need a small hop (with it's retrorockets and leftover landing fuel) to reach a precise location. Very important ability to have if we are ever going to colonize mars as it would require multiple landings at the same location.

11/29/2012 8:34:21 AM

Oh, with all the precision landing stuff going on now I just kind of assumed they would figure it out by that time.

11/29/2012 9:12:23 AM

http://www.space.com/18687-water-ice-mercury-messager-discovery.html

Ice on Mercury.

11/29/2012 4:59:58 PM

ice & organic stuff

11/29/2012 5:17:12 PM

I believe...that this nation...should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Mercury and returning his ashes safely to the earth.

11/29/2012 5:54:55 PM

I laughed.

11/29/2012 9:19:29 PM

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/03/us/space-voyager-solar-system/index.html

12/3/2012 6:14:06 PM

The sounds of space:

http://vanallenprobes.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/intheloop/2012_0912.php

12/4/2012 5:35:42 PM

So there is supposed to be an official announcement of a private venture to land commercial astronauts (and i'm assuming paying customers of some sort) on the moon by 2020 tomorrow. Interested to see the details.

[Edited on December 5, 2012 at 11:24 PM. Reason : ]

12/5/2012 11:23:52 PM

A new mars rover in 2020 announced today as well.

Whatever happened to that history shattering mars announcement, actually?

12/5/2012 11:32:15 PM

the one the media hyped up? possible organic material detected on mars, but not yet confirmed basically.

[Edited on December 5, 2012 at 11:43 PM. Reason : ]

12/5/2012 11:42:34 PM

I read something about perchlorate as well; that it could be a sign of organic activity or also an explanation for false positive readings sent back by Viking.

12/5/2012 11:50:25 PM

[Edited on December 6, 2012 at 2:21 PM. Reason : triple post]

12/6/2012 2:19:01 PM