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Author	Topic: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
obi_wan_kanathan Registered: May '01	Date Posted: 12/14/03 11:26am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	60 days? It'll be interesting to see if these guys can actually do it. It sure looks like someone's going to win the prize by the end of next year. -----signature----- Dark Lord of the JC \|\| JC/DLC Ambassador ~~The NEW Dark Lords' Council~~ http://www.thedarklordscouncil.com/
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Iconic Registered: Aug '03	Date Posted: 12/14/03 9:14pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Some of you guys might find THIS interesting. -----signature----- Any Time I See Something Screech Across A Room And Latch Onto Someone's Neck, And The Guy Screams And Tries To Get It Off, I Have To Laugh, Because What Is That Thing?
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HawkNC Title: FanForce RSA Oceania Registered: Oct '01	Date Posted: 12/14/03 9:31pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Whoa, spooky. -----signature----- Use dp/dt -- Come now, do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while strapped to a centrifuge?
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 12/14/03 11:38pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	I don't know wether to complimet Rudolph on the brightness of his nose lighting up the solar system, or consider him stupid for getting lost and finding himself 93 million miles away. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer I am a sexy, shoeless GOD OF WAR!
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 12/15/03 12:25am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	The speed of Santa from FirstScience: Santa's Science Christmas may be a fun time for most of us...But for Santa it's all rather hard work... by Roger Highfield On the Christmas cards, it all looked so effortless. Apart from the occasional slip-up with drunken reindeer, narrow chimneys and blizzards, Santa manages to deliver millions of gifts on Christmas Eve, maintaining his smile and benevolence all the while. His support team: a few reindeer and a handful of diligent elves. Clearly, only an innocent child would swallow this propaganda, a fantasy peddled by generations of Christmas cards to divert attention away from what is undoubtedly the most spectacular research-and-development outfit this planet has ever seen. I like to think that somewhere under the North Pole there is a handful of scientists experimenting with the latest in high-temperature materials, genetic computing and technologies and warped geometries of time and space, all united by a single purpose: to make millions of children happy each and every Christmas. Put yourself in Santa's fur boots: how does he know where children live, and what gifts they want? How can he fly in any weather, circle the globe overnight, carry millions of pounds of cargo and make silent, rooftop landings with pinpoint accuracy? Some years ago, Spy Magazine examined these issues in an article that has since proliferated across the Internet. The magazine concluded that Santa would require 214,200 reindeer and, with the huge mass of presents would encounter 'enormous air resistance, heating the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.' In short, it continued, 'They will burst into flames almost instantaneously, creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subjected to forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity…In conclusion - if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.' The point is, Santa is not dead. He delivers presents every Christmas Eve, as reliably as Rudolph's nose is red. If he overcomes the kinds of problems outlined above, it can only be with the aid of out-of-this-world technology. SANTA'S CHALLENGE Santa has a huge market: there are 2,106 million children aged under eighteen in the world, according to the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF. Given the pagan origins of the festival and the emphasis on charity, we can assume that Santa will deliver presents to each and every child and not just Christian children or the 191 million who live in industrialised countries. It is Christmas after all. Assume there are 2.5 children per house. That means Santa has to make 842 million stops on Christmas Eve. Now let's say these homes are spread equally across the land masses of the planet. The Earth's surface area is, given a radius of 6,400km(3,986 miles), 510,000,000 sq km (196,600,000 sq miles), calculated as radius squared, multiplied by 4 pi. Only 29 per cent of the surface of the planet is land, so this narrows the populated area to 150,000,000 sq km (57,9000,000 sq miles). Each household therefore occupies an area of 0.178 sq km (0.069 sq miles). Let's assume that each home occupies the same sized plot, so the distance between each household is the square root of the area, which is 0.42 km (0.26 miles). Every Christmas Eve, Santa has to travel a distance equivalent to the number of chimneys - 842 million - multiplied by this average spacing between households, which works out to be 365 million km (221 million miles). This sounds daunting, particularly given that he must cover this distance in a single night. Fortunately, Santa has more than twenty-four hours in which to deliver the presents. Consider the first point on the planet to go through the International Date Line at midnight on 24 December. From this moment on, Santa can pop down chimneys. If he stays right there, he will have twenty-four hours to deliver presents to everyone along the date line. But he can do better than this, by travelling backwards, against the direction of rotation of the Earth. That way he can deliver presents for almost twenty-four hours to everywhere else on Earth, making forty-eight hours in all, which is 2,880 minutes or 172,800 seconds. From this, one can calculate that Santa has little over two ten-thousandths of a second to get between each of the 842 million households. To cover the total distance of 356 million km (221 million miles) in this time means that his sleigh is moving at an average of 2,060 km (1,279 miles) per second. Ignoring quibbles about air temperature and humidity, the speed of sound is something like 1,200 km (750 miles) per hour, or 0.3 km (0.2 miles) per second, so Santa is achieving speeds of around 6,395 times the speed of sound, or Mach 6395. When a sleigh, or indeed any object, exceeds the speed of sound, there will be at least one sonic boom. This is a shock wave sent out when the sleigh catches up with pressure waves it generates while moving, explains Nigel Weatherill of the University of Wales, Swansea, who helped the Thrust Supersonic Car break the sound barrier in 1997. Santa, however, does not generate any sonic booms on Christmas Eve. In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins says he has used this fact to disprove the existence of Santa to a six-year-old child. To a biologist this may indeed seem persuasive but, to an aerodynamics engineer, it suggests that Santa has found a way to suppress sonic booms. For example, says Nigel Weatherill, perhaps Santa cancels the peaks and troughs in the shock wave with troughs and peaks of 'antisound' generated by a specialised speaker on his sleigh. The speed of light is absolute and cannot be exceeded, so we should check that Santa is not breaking cosmic law. The usual figure for the speed of light is 300 million meters per second (984 million feet) which, given that there are 1,000 metres per kilometre (5,280 feet per mile), works out to be 300,000 km (186,000 miles) per second. Santa is comfortably within this limit, travelling at around one-145th of the speed of light - too slow to worry about the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity. This assumes, however, that Santa throws the presents down the chimney while passing overhead. In fact, he stops at each house so that he has to achieve double the speed calculated above (form a standing start, he has to travel the distance between each house in two-10,000ths of a second). That means going from 0 to 4,116 km (2,558 miles) per second in two-10,000ths of a second, an acceleration of 20.5 million kilometres (12.79 million miles) per second per second, or 20.5 billion metres (67.3 billion feet) per second per second. The acceleration due to gravity is a mere 9.8 metres (32ft) per second per second, so the acceleration of Santa's sleigh is equivalent to about two billion times that caused by the gravitational tug of the Earth. Given that Santa is excessively overweight, say around 200kg (30 stone), the force he will feel is his mass times his acceleration: around 4,000 billion newtons. Even fighter pilots can't cope with accelerations more than a few times that of gravity: they have to use special breathing and so called g-suits to keep the blood in their head. Santa would have to cope with around 2 billion times this acceleration. As the physics professor Lawrence Krauss put it, that would reduce our fat friend to 'chunky salsa'. Krauss has considered similar problems in his work on the physics of Star Trek. The starship Enterprise gets by with devices called 'inertial dampers' to cushion the forces that Captain Kirk feels in the seat of his pants. Santa has to resort to similar tactics, creating an artificial world within his sleigh in which the reaction force that responds to the accelerating force is cancelled, perhaps by some kind of gravitational field. There is one other problem Santa has to contend with. His cargo of toys. Assuming that each of the 2,106 million children gets nothing more than a medium -sized construction set (900g or 2lb), he has a load of 1,895 million kg (4212 million lb) to convey. Then there is also his supply of fuel to achieve these huge speeds. Any way you look at it, Santa has some serious hurdles to overcome. The US Air Force 48th Fighter Wing claims to use satellite dishes to track Santa on Christmas Eve, with other Air Force Space Command squadrons around the world, to prevent the unnecessary scrambling of interceptor aircraft and ensure the safe arrival of 'the Jolly Old Elf' and all his presents. 'We have some of the most sophisticated equipment in the world. The deep space tracking system was constructed at a cost of over $600 million. Santa is in good hands,' said Tech. Sgt. Ray Duron, Crew Chief of the 5th Space Surveillance Squadron at RAF Feltwell, which coordinates the route of his sleigh with the 1st Command and Control Squadron in Colorado Springs. Given the extraordinary array of technology already used by Santa, much of which is beyond the capabilities of the US military, this annual 'Santa Track' - which dates back to 1957 - seems unnecessary. Indeed, some might say it is merely a publicity stunt engineered by defence scientists to draw attention away from the vast range of scientific and technological achievements pioneered by Santa to ensure children across the world are not disappointed on Christmas morning. Enjoy -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer I am a sexy, shoeless GOD OF WAR!
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obi_wan_kanathan Registered: May '01	Date Posted: 12/15/03 4:30pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Wow, someone was bored when they figured out all those numbers. Neat article. -----signature----- Dark Lord of the JC \|\| JC/DLC Ambassador ~~The NEW Dark Lords' Council~~ http://www.thedarklordscouncil.com/
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 12/16/03 2:59pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD - Date Edited: 12/16/03 3:04pm (1 edits total) Edited By: VadersLaMent
	A Yahoo article through Orion22.com: Sunday December 14, 05:27 PM Future of flight -- you ain't seen nothin' yet By Jim Loney MIAMI (Reuters) - In the second century of flight, private companies will ferry tourists into space, personal flying machines will roam digital skyways and executive jets will make supersonic speed around the globe, aviation experts and scientists say. The next generation of airborne adventurers will carry colonists to the moon and to Mars, double-decker jetliners on Earth will load 1,000 passengers and small aircraft will depart and arrive on neighbourhood runways with little or no help from their pilot-passengers. An explosion of aviation and space technology may also bring weaponry and war to Earth orbit as the military powers scramble for control of the heavens in a way Orville and Wilbur Wright likely never imagined when they launched human flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, 100 years ago. So much of aviation's promise is unfulfilled -- routine space travel, globe-girdling flight at supersonic speed, a flying machine in every garage. As America celebrates the centennial of the Wrights' historic flight on December 17, 1903, aeronautic engineers are looking to the future and a move away from the cattle-herding of passengers through crowded airports to cramped aircraft. "Aeronautics is not mature. We barely take advantage of it in our daily lives," said Mark Moore, one of NASA's top thinkers on future flight. "We haven't achieved the Wright brothers' dream." Space tourism is around the corner, says Peter Diamandis, an aviation visionary who created the X-Prize, a $10 million (5.7 million pound) bounty offered in 1996 for the first people to privately build and launch a spaceship capable of carrying three people to a 60 mile (100 km) altitude, bring them back safely and repeat the launch, with the same craft, within two weeks. Two dozen teams are competing for the X-Prize and Diamandis believes it will be won next year, bringing a "paradigm shift" in the way people view space flight, now the exclusive domain of governments with multibillion-dollar budgets. He sees regular sub-orbital commercial flights by 2013. "We're on the verge of what you might call the golden age of space flight, where it will be possible for the general public to fly into space on a routine basis," he said. While the first space tourists, Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, paid Russia some $20 million for their taxi ride to space, Diamandis believes private enterprise will bring the price tag down quickly to under $1 million. Adventurous, wealthy, ageing baby boomers will clamour for seats. "There's a market for thousands of launches a year," said Diamandis, who sees a private colony on the moon by 2025. "I believe the first trillionaires will be made in space." On Earth, Airbus hopes to have a double-decker airplane carrying nearly 600 passengers in flight by 2006. Futurists see 1,000-passenger airliners and supersonic business jets capable of spanning the globe in a few hours within a decade or less. As commercial aircraft get bigger, "personal air vehicles" get smaller, more computerised, and closer to home, ready to relieve gridlocked concrete highways. At NASA's Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia, leading aviation thinkers with the Personal Air Vehicle Exploration program are mapping strategy for next-generation small aircraft and the digital air highways they will fly. Moore, a vehicle sector manager with the program, envisions a world of personal aircraft as easy to use as a car -- quiet, with room for four, costing less than a top-end luxury car. Computer control would allow a pilot to be licensed in five days, and handle a plane that virtually flies itself. By 2014, Moore sees experimental short-takeoff-and-landing craft that need only 100 feet (32 metres) of runway, bringing flying to your neighbourhood landing strip. "The whole core of this is to make it so this is not just for the macho, elite rich," Moore said. "Normal people can use this for normal, on-demand travel." The next century of flight, some scientists believe, will see governments plant Star Wars weaponry in space. "There is a drive to weaponize space. There's a tremendous drive to get America to the moon, in a military sense," said Jim Dator, a University of Hawaii professor who helped found the Institute for Alternative Futures. Eventually, Dator says, earthlings will step off the planet for good. "We may go to Mars in 30 to 50 years. Because Mars is so far it's difficult to imagine regular two-way transport. People will just live there and evolve into different life forms." I think a manned shot to Mars will occur with 20 years. Settlers and explorers may indeed have to evolve and adapt there but NASA, as talked about in previous posts, have nuclear designs on the boards that could take people to Mars in a couple of weeks. That is still a long journey and you have to make it comfortable, but I can see a day where it is viewed like taking a long cruise. I remember talk of everyone having a flying car, Moller.com has been trying to make one. I do not see every person having one in their garage within the next 60 years at least. Instead you might go to a local landing area where air-taxis await to take you where ever you want to go beyond a certain distance. Such ATs have a helicoptor-ish apperance but would be much smaller and be able to carry a few passengers. One day there may be a virtual air highway. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer I am a sexy, shoeless GOD OF WAR!
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 12/17/03 1:03pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	I agree with the Moller flying car statement..it'll be operational for awhile before he's allowed to use it the way he wants. I'd love to have one. Several good updates over at Nasawatch coughcough* I have seen the future of OSP and its going to be " cap-tivating.... -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 12/17/03 3:35pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Source: Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne Breaks the Sound Barrier Today, a significant milestone was achieved by Scaled Composites: The first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company's private, non-government effort. In 1947, fifty-six years ago, history's first supersonic flight was flown by Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 rocket under a U.S. Government research program. Since then, many supersonic aircraft have been developed for research, military and, in the case of the recently retired Concorde, commercial applications. All these efforts were developed by large aerospace prime companies, using extensive government resources. Our flight this morning by SpaceShipOne demonstrated that supersonic flight is now the domain of a small company doing privately-funded research, without government help. The flight also represents an important milestone in our efforts to demonstrate that truly low-cost space access is feasible. Our White Knight turbojet launch aircraft, flown by Test Pilot Peter Siebold, carried research rocket plane SpaceShipOne to 48,000 feet altitude, near the desert town of California City. At 8:15 a.m. PDT, Cory Bird, the White Knight Flight Engineer, pulled a handle to release SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne Test Pilot, Brian Binnie then flew the ship to a stable, 0.55 mach gliding flight condition, started a pull-up, and fired its hybrid rocket motor. Nine seconds later, SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier and continued its steep powered ascent. The climb was very aggressive, accelerating forward at more than 3-g while pulling upward at more than 2.5-g. At motor shutdown, 15 seconds after ignition, SpaceShipOne was climbing at a 60-degree angle and flying near 1.2 Mach (930 mph). Brian then continued the maneuver to a vertical climb, achieving zero speed at an altitude of 68,000 feet. He then configured the ship in its high-drag feathered shape to simulate the condition it will experience when it enters the atmosphere after a space flight. At apogee, SpaceShipOne was in near-weightless conditions, emulating the characteristics it will later encounter during the planned space flights in which it will be at zero-g for more than three minutes. After descending in feathered flight for about a minute, Brian reconfigured the ship to its conventional glider shape and flew a 12-minute glide to landing at Scaled's home airport of Mojave. The landing was not without incident as the left landing gear retracted at touchdown causing the ship to veer to the left and leave the runway with its left wing down. Damage from the landing incident was minor and will easily be repaired. There were no injuries. The milestone of private supersonic flight was not an easy task. It involved the development of a new propulsion system, the first rocket motor developed for manned space flights in several decades. The new hybrid motor was developed in-house at Scaled with first firings in November 2002. The motor uses an ablative nozzle supplied by AAE and operating components supplied by SpaceDev. FunTech teamed with Scaled to develop a new Inertial Navigation flight director. The first flight of the White Knight launch aircraft was in August 2002 and SpaceShipOne began its glide tests in August 2003. Scaled does not pre-announce the specific flight test plans for its manned space program, however completed accomplishments are updated as they happen at our website: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/index.htm. The website also provides downloadable photos and technical descriptions of the rocket motor system and motor test hardware. This was right out of the NASAwatch headlines. No Moon announcement from Bush, but we get the first private breaking of the sound barrier as a 100th anniversary present. 2004 the year we see SpaceShipOne go into space? I think so, easily. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer I am a sexy, shoeless GOD OF WAR!
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 12/17/03 5:20pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Cool about Rutan. I predict they will make at least 3 more test flights. One to at least Mach 3. The 2nd to Mach 5 or 6. And a final checkout out flight. These could happen fairly quickly. I agree it will happen in 04 barring any accident. I'm pretty positive I'm not sharing any competition sensitive info but the OSP will most certainly be a ballistic capsule design. The old Lockheed lifting body capsule is gone and Boeing has gone with something similar a while back. I'm sure the specs will be in the paper before the end of the week. -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 12/18/03 10:38am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	I get a feeling that not too many rocket companies browse the JC anyway, so I wouldn't worry about exposing anything. Capsule design, fine, we'll take it. It seems as if lifting bodies are on the backburner for awhile until full carbon bodies can be made for serious weight reduction. Paul Allen is indeed "The Customer", Space.com: Paul Allen Revealed as SpaceShipOne Investor By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 11:44 am ET 18 December 2003 As SpaceShipOne shot through the sound barrier December 17 it was also confirmed that investor Paul Allen is the sponsor behind the project. Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates in 1975 and served as the company's executive vice president of research and new product development. He owns and invests in a suite of companies exploring the potential of digital communications. SpaceShipOne and its White Knight turbojet launch aircraft represent the first private non-government effort to demonstrate a low-cost manned space effort. SpaceShipOne is a contender for the coveted X Prize - a $10 million purse to help stimulate sub-orbital as well as orbital passenger space travel. In a statement released at the December 17th flight, Allen said: "Being able to watch today's successful test flight in person was really an overwhelming and awe-inspiring experience. I'm so proud to be able to support the work of Burt Rutan and his pioneering team at Scaled Composites." Allen has funded the effort since he and Rutan joined forces in March of 2001. "Today's milestone and the SpaceShipOne project would never have been possible without Paul's tremendous support," said Burt Rutan, leader of the SpaceShipOne project along with his research and development team at Scaled Composites, the aerospace company that Rutan founded. "Paul shares our energy and passion for not only supporting one-of-a-kind research, but also a vision of how this kind of space program can shape the future and inspire people around the world," Rutan said in a press statement. In a previous post the amount specified was around 30 million that he had invested. Right now there are two more American rich guys who have paid 20 million to go to the space station via a Russian boost, and two more seats are up for sale. SpaceShipOne may go for under $100,000 a seat for its sub-orbital jaunts. There is definately a market waiting and Paul Allen should make his money back quickly. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer I am a sexy, shoeless GOD OF WAR!
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 12/18/03 11:14am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD - Date Edited: 12/18/03 11:22am (1 edits total) Edited By: MasterAero
	Yeahh..they might learn something as well as everyone else who doesn't come here on the JCC. I think this is the most informative thread on the JC. Thanks for your hard work VadersLaMent. I saw on CNN they had a landing gear failure when Spaceship One landed. No major damage. I think its interesting they announced Allen's backing. Sounds like money well spent to me. -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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obi_wan_kanathan Registered: May '01	Date Posted: 12/18/03 8:37pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Yep, one of the wheels retracted once it landed and the ship veered off the runway with a wing dragging against the ground. Here's an article with a few pictures of the minor crash. -----signature----- Dark Lord of the JC \|\| JC/DLC Ambassador ~~The NEW Dark Lords' Council~~ http://www.thedarklordscouncil.com/
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 12/19/03 6:14am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Thanks, obi_wan_kanathan Cool pics Here's a story with a cool pic (click then enlarge). Its about an engine test here. PAD test -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 12/19/03 7:20am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Yeahh..they might learn something as well as everyone else who doesn't come here on the JCC. I think this is the most informative thread on the JC. Thanks for your hard work VadersLaMent. Aw, go on. No really, go on, I like hearing it. here is another "NASA needs direction article": NASA Needs New Vision, No Agreement on Specifics By Jason Bates Space News Staff Writer posted: 05:49 pm ET 18 December 2003 NASA needs a vision that includes a specific destination. That much a panel of space advocates who gathered in Washington today to celebrate the 100th anniversary of powered flight could agree on. There is less consensus about what that destination should be. NASA needs to determine where it wants to send humans next and commit to that goal, the advocates agreed, though there was a difference of opinion on what the next target should be. According to the participants in the "Symposium on the Future Human Space Flight" sponsored Dec. 18 by Aviation Week and Space Technology, the two most likely destinations for a future manned space mission are Mars and a return to the moon. One panelist even suggested the creation of a base on the Martian moon Deimos. "The problem with NASA is there is no coherent vision or purpose," said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore. "… For the first time in the agency’s history there is no new human spaceflight mission in the pipeline. There is nothing beyond" the international space station." It is hard to have vision when Congress keeps cancelling research projects. Spudis is a proponent of returning humans to the moon and setting up a permanent outpost that will be used to study the universe and to learn more about surviving in space as humans look to move beyond the moon. "The moon has value," he said. "It is close and accessible." Yes, the Moon is NOT a stepping stone, it is a world unto itself. While the cost of any major space undertaking seems daunting, a return to the moon could be accomplished with existing expendable rockets and the space shuttle or shuttle-derived systems, Spudis said. We don’t have the money to do a manned mission to Mars," he said. "I don’t think that is in the cards, but the agency is looking for a challenge." Actually we can afford it, recent money went to a space station we did not need. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, disagreed and argued that Mars is the next logical goal for human spaceflight. "It has been staring us in the face since 1973," he said. "… It is a critical test to determine whether man can become planetary travelers." Rob, the Moon first, it's right there, 235,000 miles away along with a number of Trojan and near Earth asteroids to be exploited. The Earth/Moon system first, although, if a Mars shot were announced today I would not argue. Mars can be reached within the next 10 years, Zubrin said, but the United States will need to develop a heavy booster with capability similar to the Saturn 5 rockets that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon or a derivative of the space shuttle booster rockets that will be capable of carrying 40-ton to 50-ton payloads. Fred Singer, a former director of the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, agreed that reaching Mars within the next 10 to 15 years should be the goal but that a base should be set up on its moon Deimos rather than on the surface of the planet. From that, astronauts would control robotic probes that would travel to the red planet and collect and return samples to Deimos for analysis, he said. If you send people to Mars please land them and create a cycle of return missions as decribed by Mars Direct. The Martian moon base could be accomplished for about $30 billion, money that could be found within the existing NASA budget once major space station expenditures begin to tail off, Singer said. "The whole project builds on the [space station] experience," he said. "We can show that we have not thrown away $100 billion." Too late, you threw away 100 billion. 30 billion fits the mars Direct plan quite well, so, land on mars not just one of its moons. This idea is not without merit, using the Earth/Moon recourses small cheap spacecraft and probes could be built and launched without the need for heavy lift vehicles. The effort will prepare humans for more ambitious missions in the future, Singer said. "We need an overarching goal," he said. "We need something with unique science content, not a publicity stunt." NASA officials disagreed that the agency’s current operations are not part of a long-term vision for future human spaceflight. Gary Martin, NASA’s space architect, said the agency is redefining its approach to space exploration and is developing a method that mixes human and robotic missions to move science research forward. "We’re looking for building blocks to lay out a long-term vision," he said. I agree with this, NASA knows more about going to Mars than they did about going to the Moon when Armstrong landed. I hope long-term plans don't take too long though, I wanted to step foot on another world sometime this century NASA’s new strategy would use Mars, for example, as the first step to future missions rather than as a destination in itself, Martin said. Robotic explorers will be trailblazers that can lay the groundwork for deeper space exploration, he said. "We have changed NASA," Martin said. "We put it on a new course with a stepping stone strategy for increasing exploration, both human and robotic." Jim Garvin, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars Exploration Science, said current robotic missions are doing science not even thought of during the Apollo era, but ultimately humans will need to be inserted in the process. "If the answer is to understand the cosmos, we need to be in the cosmos ourselves," he said. Yes, and for no better reason that we would like to go, a grand adventure into the grandest destination. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer I am a sexy, shoeless GOD OF WAR!
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