JCC The American Space Program and its Future...

Okay, I was just watching a report on NASA and its recent budget cuts. While watching it I became angry. I was once again reminded that we literally can't go to space without freaking Russians taking us on a $60 million dollar taxi ride (nothing against Russia. Its a pretty cool country and would like to visit one day). I think it should be the opposite. We should be the country ferrying people to space.

Also don't tell me its costs too much. Going to space could be one of the most profitable endeavors in American history. One shuttle full of hydrogen-3 moon dust could be worth up to a trillion USD (highest estimate) and be use to fuel any future nuclear fusion reactors and theoretically there is enough gold on a average asteroid to double our current reserves.

The sad thing was that before Obama (oh how much I hate that man) sent budget cut NASA's way we were already prepping our return to the moon and our future trips to Mars and beyond by 2020.

Our space program was our countries biggest achievement but if we don't we soon won't even be in Low Earth Orbit and have to be ashamed when foreign space programs past our own in innovation. We should take back the lead while we still have it.

Have a nice day everyone...

 

Um, doubling the US's current gold reserves (not that it likely has any because the US has been off the gold standard since Nixon) would in all likelihood make gold cheaper, not make whoever's got it richer. Law of supply and demand and all. See also: printing money.

 

Err, well that's assuming we have a way to extract hydrogen from the moon even after we get there. As for gold, or platinum, or whatever, that stuff is valuable because it's rare. If we start mining the stuff from asteroids and start bringing back truckloads of precious metals (assuming we could do it), it won't be rare anymore, and therefore less valuable.

 

I believe space exploration is important for the survival of our species. I am thoroughly convinced that one day a giant rock will come crashing into us again. It probably won't be for many generations to come, but you gotta learn how to crawl before you learn how to walk. It'll probably take that much time just to get some colonies up and running across the solar system. Perhaps on a moon or two of Jupiter.

But try convincing a bunch of people who believe we're living in the end times that they should pay for nerd wet dreams. When the final battle is set to take place at Megiddo, who needs Terraforming?

 

Large scale helium-3 mining will drive the cost of helium-3 down due to supply and demand, and that's presumptuously assuming there even is a large demand considering it's a hypothetical second generation fuel for a technology we don't even have the first generation incarnation of despite near-constant work for the last sixty years.

 

Don't have much to contribute myself, but this is beautiful and I wanted to share:



Cassini spacecraft composite image

 

We have 147.3 million ounces in Fort Knox alone. I know the price would go down but the profit could possible cover the costs of the space program (which is the point I was trying to make in the first place).

1) This is in the case that the Constellation program wasn't cancelled. Plus I am not saying it cheaper but it is better than have to rely on another country.

2) But it cancelled the Constellation program and stop Pres.Bush's program.

 

Eh, I happen to be a space pessimist. I don't see how faster-than-light travel will ever become a reality, and as long as that remains the case, we aren't going anywhere. Sure there's potentially habitable planets out there somewhere, but in order to live there we'd probably have to transplant a good portion of our ecosystem there...and if there already is an existing native ecosystem, then that raises even more issues. Whether we believe we evolved on Earth, or God created us, or whatever, our species is suited to life on Earth...there is literally nowhere in the universe besides our homeworld that would make for a better environment for us. Our priority really ought to be fixing the problems here on the planet we already have. And if a giant rock comes our way in the next few decades...well there's only so much we can do to accelerate our technological development

 

We don't want future species to find our technology and think that we were so dumb that we had the tech to escape our doom but just simply did not do anything about it. Even if we never achieve FTL travel we should still strive to escape our star system and leave our mark on the universe.

 

The government says there are 147.3 million ounces in Fort Knox. Unfortunately, nobody has audited Fort Knox for about 60 years, and the government routinely refuses to let anyone verify that figure independently. Nobody has ever seen more than a fraction of the amount the US government says it has in there. That's getting off the point, though.

The more important thing is that you're assuming nobody would do anything economically while NASA was off looking for oil on Uranus. Say the US commissioned a notional USS Codfish, NCC-170-FAIL, and announced it was going gold hunting. During the several months or more of travel to and from the asteroid bringing that gold back, I think you would most likely see a fall in gold prices, mainly because the perception would be that a massive sum of gold was about to enter the world economy and consequently its value would be lessened. People would be trying to ditch gold because its value would be perceived as heading for a fall anyway. That fall would then be exacerbated when the Codfish got back to Earth, deposited its wares, and at a stroke doubled the US's gold supply. What you are proposing in essence is similar to debasement of the currency: pay your debts off with currency that isn't actually worth as much as the note (or coin) says it to be.

Although the economic implications for mining or resource markets within human civilisation stretched out over a solar system is an interesting field for speculation...no pun intended.

 

Surprised Jabbadabbado hasn't come in here yet to preach to us that we're doomed to never escape Earth (much less build another space shuttle) and that we're all fated to die a horrible horrible death in the near future.

 

1) If you remember from my last science news thread, we are no where close to achieving fusion power, much less a fusion engine that can power a spacecraft.
2) I'm not seeing how space mining is anywhere near feasible, much less profitable.

 

As far as getting stuff from space and bringing it here to make money which is what the OP sounds like, the largest profit comes from platinum since as pointed out there is no fusion to make helium3 a fuel. Platinum has a value of approx $24,000 per pound. So, if your launch, travel, and retrieval, shipping, and marketing costs can be done for less than that you might turn a profit. That is of course if you wish to be the platinum seller. If you are just the supplier you are not going to get $24,000 per pound. Perhaps you'll get...what...$6,000 per pound?

The Shuttle went up for $10,000 per pound. Most other launchers go for around $3,500 per pound. Space-X is something under that but above $1,000 per pound. In order to get cheaper launchers will have to become reusable, and used in greater numbers. Then you can get hundreds per pound, a maybe in a few decades you could get to orbit for airline prices.

When you look at such and such numbers for how much asteroids are worth you are not getting a number that will be used. The asteroid Eros might be worth many trillions of dollars. But you'll never see that even if you had the asteroid all to yourself and a cheap means of getting materials back and forth. The main belt of asteroids beyond Mars has a value equal to making every human on the planet worth one hundred billion dollars a piece. Is that going to happen? No.

When space folks give you these numbers it's more of a measuring stick for how much stuff is out there. With a cheap but reliable launch system stuff out there could be used in part to make money here but all that stuff out there is going to get used out there. You would have a wole separate market out there that is if you brought capitalism with you. I imagine we'll have to, people tend not to work for free though with that much stuff out there it has the potential for an age of abundance.

As far as why launch costs are so high right now it has to due with the entire history of r&d on the matter. Blame nuclear weapons. When JFK said we were going to the Moon a whole bunch of folks stood around wondering how the hell that was gonna happen. There are all kinds of designs from that time concerning getting to space with reusable launchers. But they would have taken a decade just to get a test vehicle. But with throwaway rockets already developed to launch atomic weapons, all they had to do was make them man-rated and BLAMMO! They won a race to the Moon.

Unfortunately, NASA being the cash cow that it is, the corporations decided they liked those big profits and would not develope cheaper rockets because the government would just pay for them. The Shuttle was a perfect example of selling to the gov. "Hey, we can make this thingy, it'll fly a lot and be cheap!" Then it costs ten times as much and the team of CEOs and politicians just went with it.

The Shuttle could have been worth it but lobbyists for corporations could not make profits from using the External Tank for space stations and spaceships so those get thrown away in favor of the 140 billion dollar ISS which was promised for 40 billion. An External Tank station might have cost something under 12 billion. 135 flights times the length of the External tank = 3.9 miles of real estate just thrown away.

Here's another example. Venturestar. Single stage to orbit reusable vertical launch horizontal landing. $1,000 per pound to orbit. Instead of me typing this all out you can Read it here

So, hope? Space-X, Virgin Galactic. They want cheaper launchers. And are apparently getting them. The launch industry will be forced to compete.

I wonder how many times I have typed these words on these forums?

 

I am not concerned about the American space program, for several reasons.

1. NASA is currently in the midst of developing the Orion spacecraft as part of the Space Launch System. The first unmanned Orion test flight is planned for approximately a little less than a year from now.
2. Space X has already flown the unmanned Dragon capsule twice and is developing a manned variant called DragonRider which is supposed to fly within the next two or three years.
3. Boeing and Bigelow are developing the CST-100, which has an on orbit life of seven months and will be reuseable for up to ten missions.
4.Sierra Nevada is developing the Dream Chaser, which is a winged lifting body spacecraft that will launch vertically and land horizontally.
5. There also number of longer term projects being bandied about such as Nautilus X and the proposed Deep Space Habitat. There's also a company called Liftport that plans to build a lunar tether within eight years.

So, you see there are not one, but four American spacecraft under active development, one of which has already flown unmanned missions. There also a number of proposals being circulated as possible ISS follow-on projects.

 

But those are mostly being developed by private industry.

 

Under direct NASA supervision, with NASA funding and with the use of NASA facilities and personnel. Don'y forget that the Saturn-Apollo spacecraft stack was built by North American, Rocketdyne and Grumman. By your logic,it could be argued that the Apollo missions were a private endeavour, except that the hardware was built by NASA contractors and flown by NASA personnel from NASA facilities. If a Lockheed-built Orion spacecraft is launched from a NASA launch pad and flown by a NASA trained crew, that makes it a NASA mission. All Lockhheed did was build the vehicle.

 

Yeah, that *all* Lockheed did. Nothing major. In fact it's like they weren't even involved.

...

 

I am not concerned about the American space program for several reasons:

1. It is just one of many competing research priorities, and truthfully it gets more funding dedicated to basic research than do most other fields, particularly those that have less charismatic appeal.

2. Its budget has actually increased considerably in contrast to years previous, so the actual substance of this complaint is that you don't like the specific priorities that the agency is pursuing, not that the whole thing is somehow being abandoned. Perhaps things are shifting away from manned space flight because that's not relatively a very productive or important area of research.

3. These threads are usually about transhumanists whining that their favorite B-quality science fiction/fantasy franchise hasn't happened in real life.

 

SLS/Orion is not gonna be much cheaper, if at all

To be fair, the author cannot get any actual launch estimates other than half a billion per launch from an "unofficial" NASA document. NASA needs its own launcher, I suppose we have to settle. After Venturestar came OSP, after that came Constelation, that was cancelled, now we have Orion. At this point, just make something stick.

 

Isn't Mars a roughly 3 year journey? Why not focus on a manned flight there first?

 

A manned Mars trip is 6 to 9 months to get there. Staying there and getting back might add up to 2 years depending on how long they wish to stay.

 

So what's the problem with getting to Mars first? Money again?

 

Going to Mars "first" as opposed to what else? What are you even objecting to?