ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: apollo_deception on April 14, 2013, 12:05:30 AM
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how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again? technology doesnt go in reverse. we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by. with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
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Simple. Politics and funding. Those who control the cash flow, control what the cash is used for.
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how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again? technology doesnt go in reverse. we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by. with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
Because rockets have much worse performance than aircraft making a rocket that can land and take off pointless for use on Earth and due to politics and cost we haven't gone back to the Moon where such would be needed.
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how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again? technology doesnt go in reverse. we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by. with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
Sigh...
(http://pingmag.jp/images/title/concorde.jpg)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
"The highest temperature that aluminium could sustain over the life of the aircraft was 127 °C (261 °F), which limited the top speed to Mach 2.02"
(http://deskarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mariana-trench.jpg)
http://deepseachallenge.com/the-expedition/mariana-trench/
"The first and only time humans descended into the Challenger Deep was more than 50 years ago. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached this goal in a U.S. Navy submersible, a bathyscaphe called the Trieste"
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G'day apollo_deception, and welcome to the Apollohoax forum.
how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again?
Depending on who you mean by we, we can. The DC-X is one which comes to mind:
If you mean the Lunar Module specifically, well, there was no more need for it once the Apollo program had finished.
This technology is highly specialised, and if there's no future need for it, it goes out of use. If long enough time passes, then the people who designed it die, and their personal knowledge dies with them.
technology doesnt go in reverse. we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by. with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
Actually technology does go in reverse on occasions. Concorde is a prime example.
To expand on what Allan F said, the US government gave NASA a shedload of money and a specific task - land a man on the Moon and safely return him to the Earth, and do it by the end of the 1960s. NASA and its contractors developed a heap of technology to achieve that task, and they achieved it.
What happened then?
Did Nixon and the Congress say, "Well done, here's some more money, now go and do the same thing with Mars"?
No. They said, "Well done, you've achieved the task you were set. Now here's a massive budget cut because we need the money and it won't cost us many votes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-budget-federal.jpg shows how the budget has shrunk over the years: around 1% of the US budget from President Ford to President Bush I, and declining to about 0.5% of the budget during the Clinton and Bush II presidencies.
Very simply, if you don't have the money, you can't maintain all the technology you previously developed.
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http://deepseachallenge.com/the-expedition/mariana-trench/
"The first and only time humans descended into the Challenger Deep was more than 50 years ago. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached this goal in a U.S. Navy submersible, a bathyscaphe called the Trieste"
Actually, only last year, someone (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deepest-returns-science-sub/) did return to Challenger Deep, though it is still a pretty good example as it was longer than since Apollo.
Another example is that no one besides NASA has ever flown, manned, a reusable orbital spaceplane. And when was the last time anyone built a really big rigid airship? The recent Zeppelin NT is actually a semi-rigid.
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In addition:
The SR-71 flew Mach 3; we have no Mach 3 capable aircraft today.
The X-15 reached Mach 6; we have no manned aircraft capable of reaching Mach 6 today.
Were the SR-71 and X-15 both faked?
(Hint: No, idiot!)
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Yes, of course we can.
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It's not that it can't be done. It's that there is no current product available because no-one will spring for it.
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Well your user name here 'Apollo_Deception' clearly states to all the you don't believe the moon landings ever happened, so regardless of the answers to a particularly ridiculous and naïve question, you probably still wont believe!
So what is the point of your question? surely you could have found a more technically challenging question (which have ALL been de-bunked anyhow!) to test the minds of the sheeple whom NASA/CIA have duped!
It is clear to anyone with an iota of common sense that the reason there hasn't been another moon landing is funding. I read somewhere that as much as 40% of the worlds population do not believe the moon landings happened#, I am sure that if all you HB's donated say between $1000-100,000 (Heiwa has a Million to donate* so I am sure there must be more like him with enough dosh for this worthy cause) to NASA they would probably love to do it again!
# cant find that info now, Wikipedia...the doyen of public knowledge.... has 20-25% but in certain age groups/countries
*According to Heiwa that is!
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how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again?
We can, but only if someone produces the funds needed to do it.
technology doesnt go in reverse.
No, but it does sometimes stagnate or disappear due to lack of funding or interest. We still have no aircraft that can beat the SR-71 for speed and altitude records, and that was built in the 60s, just like Apollo.
we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by.
Comparing consumer technology with the highly specialised technology of lunar landings is not valid. We have laptops and ipads today because there has been massive consumer demand for smaller, lighter, faster computers that can do ever more stuff to make life easier for the man on the street. There's as much funding there as the average joe is willing to spend on something cool that makes his life easier. That turns out to be a lot of cash. For NASA there is as much funding there as the US congress is willing to offer, and that largely depends on how much of his tax money the average joe wants to see spent on things like exploring the Moon or setting up bases on Mars. That turns out to be not an awful lot.
with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
They haven't gone in reverse, they simply have not advanced as quickly and as far as some might have hoped. There is also the consideration that the basics of rocket design haven't changed. Whatever else you do you essentially need to have a huge fuel tank with a rocket engine on the bottom. The basic design of the car hasn't changed over a century because whatever other improvements are made you still need an engine, wheels and a place for people to sit.
In short, we could do it again, but no-one wants to put forward the cash to get it going properly any more.
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They haven't gone in reverse, they simply have not advanced as quickly and as far as some might have hoped. There is also the consideration that the basics of rocket design haven't changed. Whatever else you do you essentially need to have a huge fuel tank with a rocket engine on the bottom. The basic design of the car hasn't changed over a century because whatever other improvements are made you still need an engine, wheels and a place for people to sit.
And that, as you have stated, is because they haven't the unlimited funding that would allow them to advance in leaps and bounds!
If NASA did get the funding, why couldn't they just replicate the Saturn V/Apollo set-up again? it worked the first time around so with the new computing/guidance system/materials technology of the last 40 odd years it is bound to work again.
It reminds me of the Harrier jump-jet, scrapped by the British Government for a hugely expensive and very, very, late new VTOL design! I have heard people, who worked on the technical side of keeping the Harriers flying in recent combat missions, say that the airframes were knackered! But the technology wasn't knackered! Why not just build brand new (but upgraded)airframes?....why not build a brand new (but upgraded) Saturn/Apollo?
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how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again? technology doesnt go in reverse. we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by. with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
The Saturn V cost about a billion a launch in the late 1960-72 era. Go figure how much that will cost now and then how it will benefit America. Then explain how it is going to be paid for.
That technology has allowed NASA to explore the whole solar system and reach every planet, a far more purposeful goal in terms of space exploration and objectives for advancement.
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If NASA did get the funding, why couldn't they just replicate the Saturn V/Apollo set-up again? it worked the first time around so with the new computing/guidance system/materials technology of the last 40 odd years it is bound to work again.
Firstly you can't simultaneously replicate a 40 year old setup and incorporate the advances. Different systems will have different assembly requirements that will impact other areas.
But the main reason would be that no-one wants to replicate Apollo, they want to advance and do things like stay on the Moon for months. The Apollo setup won't allow that.
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Not only can technology go into reverse, it can go down the wrong path. Witness the VHS vs. Betamax debate. Betamax was superior in a lot of ways, yet VHS won.
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Not only can technology go into reverse, it can go down the wrong path. Witness the VHS vs. Betamax debate. Betamax was superior in a lot of ways, yet VHS won.
Just shows that technological superiority is not the only thing.
I personally think our phobia of all things nuclear is really stagnating our space exploration potential.
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If NASA did get the funding, why couldn't they just replicate the Saturn V/Apollo set-up again? it worked the first time around so with the new computing/guidance system/materials technology of the last 40 odd years it is bound to work again.
Firstly you can't simultaneously replicate a 40 year old setup and incorporate the advances. Different systems will have different assembly requirements that will impact other areas.
But the main reason would be that no-one wants to replicate Apollo, they want to advance and do things like stay on the Moon for months. The Apollo setup won't allow that.
This is all purely hypothetical (obviously), I know that there would never be a mandate to replicate previous missions exactly as they occurred the first time around!
But say Congress said "OK here's the funding for one more mission, just one, to get up there and bring artefacts back from the previous missions just to prove we went in the first place", (not going to happen obviously but humour me!) Why can you not replicate the Apollo set-up with todays technology?
Obviously I don't mean replicate exactly 100% (in which case perhaps replicate is the wrong word to use) but the basic design doesn't need to change does it?.....maybe it does I am not a metallurgist, rocket designer, or technology specialist in any way shape or form!
I bet it can be made a lot lighter now than back then. Get rid of all those interior Aluminium panels in the Command module/Lunar module and replace with Carbon fibre, get rid of all the analogue instruments and replace with a 'glass cockpit'. Surely the computing 'brain' is smaller and lighter (and far more powerful) now. I don't know much about telecommunications but there must a lighter system now than back then? Perhaps there are better ablative materials than were originally used.... the list can go on!
Obviously I know it is not as simple as I make it sound, I am not so daft as to believe it is. But I beleive it could be done...given the funding...which as we know isn't going to happen!
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how, if we landed on the moon 40 some odd yrs ago, can we not build a rocket to land and take off again? technology doesnt go in reverse. we have laptops and ipads today because technology improves as time goes by. with nasa however, they managed to go in reverse...how can that be?
The assignment of a direction to technological change is largely arbitrary. Despite the propaganda we were fed as kids, there is no unidirectional "march of progress." The assignment of direction can be valid in describing progress in reaching a specific goal. However there are many goals in life and technology may progress toward one goal while it undermining other goals.
Currently there is no goal of going to the moon, in the sense there was for the Apollo program so you are invoking a measure of progress that does not exist. You are simply begging the question that such a goal exists. That is logically invalid.
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Not only can technology go into reverse, it can go down the wrong path. Witness the VHS vs. Betamax debate. Betamax was superior in a lot of ways, yet VHS won.
Just shows that technological superiority is not the only thing.
No, it shows that choosing the technology that will be commercially successful is difficult. The fact is that VHS was a better technology because in the trade off between image quality and run time, people prefered longer run times. Better meeting the needs of the customer made VHS the "superior" technology.
I also suspect that there was a strong industrial component as well because Betamax was a Sony invention, and the rest of the consumer electronics industry did not want to be beholden to Sony for their future. A focus on expensive proprietary technologies is among the reasons Sony is an also ran in the consumer electronics business today.
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
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I bet it can be made a lot lighter now than back then. Get rid of all those interior Aluminium panels in the Command module/Lunar module and replace with Carbon fibre, get rid of all the analogue instruments and replace with a 'glass cockpit'. Surely the computing 'brain' is smaller and lighter (and far more powerful) now. I don't know much about telecommunications but there must a lighter system now than back then? Perhaps there are better ablative materials than were originally used.... the list can go on!
The problem is that those changes result in the need to make more changes, and then those changes need still more changes to accommodate them, and so on. This very quickly reaches the point where you end up with vehicles that bear no more than a vague resemblance to those used in Apollo and because of all the needed redesigns cost more and take longer than starting fresh would have. And if you decide not to update the design you then run into the problem that the tools to make a Saturn V no longer exist and the engineers who know all the ins and outs of the technology needed to build it have either retired or are dead making it extremely impractical to do.
In your scenario of "one last Moon mission" unless NASA was forced to replicate Apollo they would make use of modern rockets and vehicles from the start rather than trying to update 40+ year old designs. Either using the SLS to launch an Apollo style mission (and actually give the SLS a reason to exist other than political pork), using Space-X Falcon Heavys to launch a mission that is assembled in LEO before going to the Moon, or using some other modern design.
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
Is this the same as the Apollo initiative? If so, how? Or were there political goals being met that took priority?
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
Really grasping for straws , aren't we? What is "counter intuitive" about not repeating test flights that have accomplished their missions? What purpose do you propose that a crewed orbital trip to the moon would serve that a probe could not? Please provide the costs for each and the relative advantage of the higher costs of sending a crewed mission.
Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
Yes and no. First the no. There is no dispute about the authenticity of the Apollo missions except in the minds of a few know nothings. The yes, human space flight is currently restricted to low earth orbit by choice, But the exploration of space beyond low earth orbit continues with non-crewed spacecraft. We have chosen one course over another for various reasons.
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ya i can see now what you mean by "funding"
thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?
what do you guys feel about the Musk Dynasty & SpaceX?
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
Some money but not enough and without the long term support that Lunar missions require.
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
And which vehicle would be used for those? The Space Shuttle doesn't the boost required and would have its wings ripped off re-entering at Luna return speeds and the Americans didn't have anything else up to the development of the Space-X Dragon (which has a heat shield able to take a high speed re-entry). The Soviets could have, and arguably did as the Zond missions used unmanned versions of the Soyuz vehicle, but after being beaten by the US decided that manned flybys wouldn't be worth it as their rocket needed for actual landings kept blowing up (trying to launch something with 30+ engines on the first stage and no static testing is just asking for trouble) so swept the whole thing under the proverbial rug and claimed that never wanted to in the first place.
Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
Space-X is certainly looking at plans to go to the moon, including actual landings, if they can get the money to do so (or decide that the PR value is worth it) IMO they have a better chance of pulling it than NASA as they don't have to deal with the US government screwing with (where "screwing with" means consistently cutting) their funding on a regular basis.
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ya i can see now what you mean by "funding"
thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?
what do you guys feel about the Musk Dynasty & SpaceX?
I wish they'd just get on with it.
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ya i can see now what you mean by "funding"
thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?
what do you guys feel about the Musk Dynasty & SpaceX?
All lunar exploration is beholden to government funding because there is no commercially viable rationale for going to the moon. Until one exists, all companies like SpaceX can hope is to be in a position to be a lower cost and equally well connected supplier of products and services for lunar exploration, should the government ever decide to go to the moon again.
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
There's a world of difference between saying and doing. Firstly, he can say he'll do it then fail to actually do so. Secondly, given that any such project is bound to last longer than any US President's time in office, his successor can easily undo any work that was done. That is just what nixon did with Apollo, quietly dimsntling it by cutting its funding even as he was lauding the astronauts as heroes.
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
Why? Those were test flights.They achieved their objectives. Why would they be repeated? What would be the motivation for going all that way and not landing now?
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seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol
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seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol
Are you saying that politicians pander to the voter? I'm shocked, shocked at such a revelation.
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If you mean the Lunar Module specifically, well, there was no more need for it once the Apollo program had finished.
This technology is highly specialised, and if there's no future need for it, it goes out of use. If long enough time passes, then the people who designed it die, and their personal knowledge dies with them.
This.
In 2007, I was at the president's dinner at EAA's AirVenture, the big air show held at Oshkosh each year. I found myself sitting with a gentleman who, after talking a bit about his Beechcraft Baron, I found out had been called out of retirement to consult with Northrup-Grumman. Seems he was a senior employee of Tom Kelly's during Apollo and the company was tapping him and other retirees to provide the background as to how they built and made the LM work to illuminate their then current project. Basically, he said, "Yes, we have the drawings, the specs, and the data, but we're trying to remember how we did it."
My frustration is that I can't remember his name!
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seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol
And yet, when you ask the average citizen if they want to increase NASA's budget to make space exploration possible, they'll generally say no. We like the idea of space travel, but we don't like the idea of spending money on it. (Well, I like the idea of spending money on it, but no one asks me!) To get Apollo, or a modern equivalent, back up and running, we'd either have to cut budgets somewhere else or raise taxes, and neither notion is particularly popular.
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
Yes, he made the announcement in January 2004. I remember it well because I happened to be doing a tour of the Johnson Space Center that day, and we watched it on a TV somewhere near the old Mission Control room. IIRC it was the first anniversary of the "Columbia" accident.
After that came the scramble to design a system to go to the Moon, using as much Shuttle-design hardware as possible.
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
It's a long way to go to not land...
But having said that, there are a couple of space tourism companies which reckon they'll be sending people around the Moon in a couple of years - price tag around $100 million a seat.
Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
I think you'll find there are few people more frustrated by humanity's restriction to low earth orbit than space nerds. NASA's post-Apollo dreams involved a space shuttle, a permanent space station, long term missions to the Moon leading to a Moon base, and manned missions to Mars. Had it happened it would have been spectacular. But the problem was that the cost was going to be enormous and they didn't make any serious attempts to lobby the US Congress or the various Presidents until about 1969. By then it was already too late, and they were lucky to salvage the Shuttle out of the budgetary wreckage. As I said earlier, cutting NASA's budget wasn't going to cost anyone too many votes in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
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ya i can see now what you mean by "funding"
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?
what do you guys feel about the Musk Dynasty & SpaceX?
Dynasty? What's dynastic about Elon Musk?
Anyway, as far as SpaceX is concerned, they've berthed two supply missions with the International Space Station, so in my opinion they have the runs on the board.
I'm now looking forward to seeing Falcon Heavy launches and manned flights using the Dragon capsule. FH launches should be awesome, and not much less impressive than Saturn V flights. As for the Dragons, it'll be good to see something other than Soyuz spacecraft carrying people aloft.
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
Yes, he did. And that's the politics of it. One President will make a promise, the next President will undo it. It has been going on for decades. The technology is not the obstacle, the problem is getting the government to follow through on things. Apollo was different because of the cold war. Both parties wanted to follow through because they both agreed that beating the Soviets was an important goal.
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
Why go back to the Moon (with astronauts) if you aren't going to land? If you are committed to the Space Shuttle (which wouldn't be capable of a trip to the Moon) then even a flight to lunar orbit would involve developing another spacecraft. Now that the Space Shuttle is retired, development of a spacecraft that is capable of lunar missions can (and has) continue.
Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
There isn't much dispute about Apollo... not among people who actually understand it. As for the foreseeable future, I agree that NASA might not be going to the Moon any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if a private corporation like SpaceX did.
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seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol
Actually, I'm not sure about that. Kennedy's challenge was part of a special address to Congress and Bush II's announcement was at a public event at (IIRC) Cape Canaveral. I really don't think space has been part of a Presidential election campaign ever, except for Kennedy twitting the Eisenhower Administration (and thus, by extension, Nixon) about the missile gap in 1960. However I'm not a student of American history, so I could easily be wrong about that.
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Hillary Clinton had an increased NASA budget as one of her campaign promises in 2008. Of course, she didn't even get her party's nomination . . . .
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Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?
I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.
Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
What would an orbital manned lunar mission prove, exactly? What scientific value would it have?
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thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?
Space exploration by the US (and by every western country) has always been a joint effort of government and industry. And I think it will be for the forseeable future.
We establish governments, among other reasons, to do or at least fund the things that we all agree are important but don't have the inherent profit motive that motivates private corporations. Basic scientific research (with no obvious short-term payoff) and space exploration are among those things. Despite a lot of hype in recent years about space tourism, aside from communications and possibly earth imagery there simply hasn't been a viable commercial market in space travel. And unless there is a revolutionary breakthrough in propulsion, I don't expect this to change.
So why doesn't the government do it all? Because western private industry has often proven much more capable than formal governmental bodies at efficiently managing large numbers of people in highly complex projects. But don't forget for one moment that most of the western space industry exists to serve one class of customer -- government -- for both military and scientific purposes.
So the government provides the funding for space exploration and industry provides the goods. And it will be this way for the forseeable future. The only real question is where exactly to draw the line between those functions performed by the government (i.e., NASA) and by their private contractors. Although most of Apollo was done by the contractors, a substantial amount was done within NASA. Many people questioned this, and still do.
So SpaceX represents one of several contemporary experiments in moving the line to put much more of the work on the contractor side. The idea is that the government should say only that they'll pay Y dollars if and only if a particular service or goal is performed, e.g., delivering X tonnes of cargo to the ISS. Instead of micro-managing all the design details, they only specify what has to be done (and some safety rules) and leave all the details of how to perform it to the private companies.
I had doubts about this approach at first, but SpaceX is starting to change my mind. Maybe this approach isn't such a bad way to do space exploration after all. But don't think for a moment that companies like SpaceX would do it out of the goodness of their hearts if the government weren't paying.
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A point to consider here is that companies like SpaceX are making big losses at the moment. To a large extent they're vanity projects funded by people who literally have billions of dollars to spend. Why not indulge a childhood interest?
An interesting comparison is with the Portuguese explorers who sailed along the coast of Africa in the 15th century. They knew that if they could sail around to China, and outflank the Ottomans who controlled the land route, they could make a huge amount of money. Initially, these voyages had no way of making money. They then got lucky when it turned out Africa itself could be a source of income, and that no doubt helped maintain the momentum which allowed them at the end of the century to finally round the Cape of Good Hope and reach India.
So to apply the same example to companies like SpaceX, they're likely to cover some of their costs from government contracts and private satellite launches, and this will allow them to develop ever larger rockets and engines. With any luck, they'll have enough money that in a century or so asteroid mining will be financially viable. If that happens, the Earth's economy may expand massively.
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I simply can't see how asteroid mining will ever be financially viable for supplying users on earth. The costs of lifting the necessary equipment out of the earth's gravity field are just too great until we find some radically new means of propulsion. I like to remind people that the costs of launching something into low earth orbit are roughly comparable to replacing it with solid gold.
For the same reason, mining space resources to supply users who are already in space will be highly desirable for precisely the same reason. So far, the only in-situ space resource to be widely exploited is solar power. Planetary gravity, too, considering use of gravitational slingshots.
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Until we have something more powerful and cheaper than the shuttle's "steam engines," our economic activity will be earth based. Much less a safer way to get people back to earth than in the middle of a plasma fireball.
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I simply can't see how asteroid mining will ever be financially viable for supplying users on earth. The costs of lifting the necessary equipment out of the earth's gravity field are just too great until we find some radically new means of propulsion. I like to remind people that the costs of launching something into low earth orbit are roughly comparable to replacing it with solid gold.
If you continue the current approach of building everything on Earth and launching it for a single-use mission, it's certainly not viable. You don't need radically new means of propulsion, you need to build up off-planet manufacturing and spread the launch costs over a long operational lifetime. In the long run, it's operational costs that determine how profitable it might be, not launch costs.
However, asteroid mining can start much sooner than that if we find some good targets with large amounts of volatiles. Even with minimal orbital industry, launch costs of mining and processing equipment, robotic servicing/assembly tugs, etc can be amortized over many missions, launch costs of propellant can't be. Selling orbital services made possible by orbital propellant sources could be much more immediately profitable.
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Fifteen years ago, I claim that I went to Germany for a conference. I've never been back.
So, how has modern air technology "gone backwards," so that I've never returned? Surely, if I went 15 years ago, I'I should be able to go back, right? The fact that my employer has found no reason to send me back, and it's expensive for me to travel on my own has nothing to do with it. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO AIR TRANSPORT TO EUROPE, I SAY?!?!
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That's a pretty bad analogy I would say. Even if you and your boss can't afford it, others can, enough to make keeping up the infrastructure required to get there economically feasible. If everyone had to build their own plane and fly it themselves, flights would be far less common.
In short, Europe is a destination, the moon is not, just a place whose major appeal is how hard it is to get to.
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seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol
Are you saying that politicians pander to the voter? I'm shocked, shocked at such a revelation.
WHAT? NO!
LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA NOT LISTENING LALALALALALALA
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However, asteroid mining can start much sooner than that if we find some good targets with large amounts of volatiles.
Won't there be somewhat of a problem with next to no gravity? I've seen numerous articles on this but they don't seem to mention this in any context of holding station to actually drill and collect the stuff. Or was there another way they were going to mine it?
eta: yay - I made it to Earth (far longer than some of these 50 post a day trolls as well!).
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Won't there be somewhat of a problem with next to no gravity? I've seen numerous articles on this but they don't seem to mention this in any context of holding station to actually drill and collect the stuff. Or was there another way they were going to mine it?
Generally the idea with small asteroids seems to be to bag or otherwise enclose it and use tethers and such to anchor equipment. With large, solid asteroids, you might do things like drilling shafts and inserting heaters to drive off volatiles without having to break the asteroid up into manageable chunks. It's a very different environment, but lack of gravity is hardly an insurmountable obstacle, or even a hindrance in general. It means a machine can't simply use its weight to bear down on a work area, but it also means machines and materials are a lot easier to move around.
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That's a pretty bad analogy I would say. Even if you and your boss can't afford it, others can, enough to make keeping up the infrastructure required to get there economically feasible. If everyone had to build their own plane and fly it themselves, flights would be far less common.
In short, Europe is a destination, the moon is not, just a place whose major appeal is how hard it is to get to.
Ha, those other people who claim to be flying to Germany are just another part of the conspiracy, just like, say, the Japanese or Europeans who say they're doing (makes bunny ear motion with fingers) independent exploration of the Moon, but they're really not.
The point is, I would likely have gone back to Germany *if* I had a compelling reason to override the expense. The fact that it's an interesting place to visit has not counterbalanced the expense. This has nothing to do with whether I *could* get to Germany if I wanted, just as people *could* get to the Moon if they were willing to spend the money to do so. Its strictly a financial decision, with nothing to do with the technology.
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Part of the expense though is the rarity of the event makes keeping the infrastructure to be non-viable. Imagine if the only time anyone flew was when someone built a plane themselves.
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Well, I imagine that if there were a compelling-enough reason to return to the Moon, there'd be an infrastructure in existence, just as there is for travel between North America and Europe.
However, there is not a lot of current economic benefit from visiting the Moon. It's not a resource of gold, or diamonds, or unobtainium. The advances to pure science are not currently considered important enough to make people want to spend the money to get there. If there were suddenly a Lunar gold rush, a technology sufficient to get us there would be rapidly created or, to be precise, recreated.
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Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.
More correctly, I'd say that man has restricted himself to LEO...