To the Moon

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Winnow
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Winnow »

RIP Neil Armstrong

Walking on the Moon, the entire mass effort in the 1960's, has got to be one of the greatest accomplishments ever considering we're nowhere near being able to do it again 40+ years later.
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Re: To the Moon

Post by masteen »

The sad part is that we're not there by choice. Still got oil here to squabble over, why bother going anywhere else?
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Winnow »

No human to walk on the moon, or to even leave low earth orbit, has been born after 1935. A female has never left earth. Most likely in less than 20 years we'll be talking about the death of the last human to leave low earth orbit. Not enough people really care, and neither political party is particularly motivated to sacrifice or motivate the country to ramp up for such a challenge.

What we need is a break through of something on the order of the discovery of the Alderson Drive in Mote in God's Eye by Niven/Pournelle. Watching The Prophets of Science Fiction series on the Science Channel demonstrates humanity has some great visionaries and nothing is impossible given time. We'll all be dead but as Carl Sagan and others have commented, if we break free and become a true star faring race, we have a chance to survive, if that matters.

When I see NASA budget cut, I think of these quotes from Carl Sagan. Sagan was a big advocate of robotic exploration but still thought human exploration was necessary.
Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.
I've seen Sagan use "winnow" in several of his quotes. (to separate the good from the bad). He was a good man!

Anyway, barring another cold war which is the only reason we were given the opportunity to put a man on the Moon in the first place, our future discoveries will most likely come from the private sector.
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Jice Virago »

I am amazed he at least died of natural causes and not cancer, like the vast bulk of astronaughts (usually pancreatic or something like it, too) who have been in space.
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
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Winnow
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Winnow »

Cool 3D galaxy exploration from google:

http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/s ... d=noscript

take the tour
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Siji »

Jice Virago wrote:I am amazed he at least died of natural causes and not cancer, like the vast bulk of astronaughts (usually pancreatic or something like it, too) who have been in space.
You don't catch cancer from a sound stage!
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Winnow »

Screw the Moon. To Tau Ceti!
An international team of astronomers has discovered that Tau Ceti, the closest single star like our Sun, has planets just like our solar system. But more importantly, one of these planets orbits in the habitable zone around the star.

Tau Ceti is very close to Earth. It's only 12 light-years away, which in cosmic terms is just around the corner. It's so close that we can see it with the naked eye at night.

The most exciting news is about the Earth-ish planet found in this solar system's goldilocks region, the circumstellar zone in which, theoretically, life could develop.

The artist's impression above shows its five planets with masses that range between two to six times the mass of Earth. The astronomers, who used more than six-thousand observations and three different instruments to gather the results, say that this is "the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected."

This is an important discovery, as it shows once again that almost every star has planets. According to UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysicist Steve Vogt—one of the authors of the study that is going to be published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics—"this discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets."

The sightly bad news is that the universe seems to give rise to systems that have planets with orbits less than 100 days. According to Vogt, "this is quite unlike our own solar system, where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury. So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up."

Still, the evidence seems pretty overwhelming. With an estimated 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone, and millions and millions and galaxies in the universe, the statistical probability of planets full of life just like ours is overwhelming. We now just need to visit. And 12 light years away is a perfect place to start—just in our own neighborhood.
That was Gizmodo article. Original source:

http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/12/tau-ceti.html
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Asheran Mojomaster
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Asheran Mojomaster »

We have the technology today to build a ship that would reach close to 10% the speed of light. 120 year trip, but if we ended up in a true doomsday scenario, with a long enough warning, it could be a decent place to go :p

Or, if we can get to even 50% the speed of light, we could potentially send an expedition group.
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Funkmasterr »

At 50% of the speed of light it would be totally doable. That bring said, without working out the math to say for sure, I don't think anyone involved back here on earth would be around for their return.
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Funkmasterr »

Never mind. With time dilation at half the speed of light, only 3.6 more years would pass by on earth compared to on the ship. This is just for one way, so double that round trip.
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Re: To the Moon

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Add this possibility from another thread:
Back in September, plans for a NASA-built warp drive were revealed, bringing with them the possibility of exploring parts of the universe previously deemed unreachable. In an extensive interview with io9, Harold White, the physicist behind the project, explains how "faster-than-light" travel might be possible. Instead of propelling the ship forward at faster-than-light speeds, the warp drive moves space time around the object. The catch? It'll need a whole heap of energy to move an actual spacecraft — more than is available with current technology. The potential for space travel is huge, though: we could reach Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light years away, in just two weeks. For now, White's team is only focused on small-scale research inside the lab, but we'll be keeping a close eye on its progress.
and you have at least some hope. Moving time around the object instead of the object moving. If the above actually worked, then it would only take about six weeks to move Tau Ceti to the FTL "ship".
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Aslanna »

Winnow wrote:NASA Budget: 1.2 Billion and declining
Bump!

Sorry to burst your bubble but you might want to check your numbers. The NASA budget in 2012 was $17.7 billion not $1.2.

Calendar Year - NASA budget Nominal Dollars (Millions) - % of Fed Budget
.2009 17,782 0.57%
.2010 18,724 0.52%
FY2011 18,448 0.51%
FY2012 17,770 0.50%
FY2013 16,865 0.49%
FY2014 17,647 0.50%
FY2015 18,010 0.49%
FY2016 19,300 0.50%
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Winnow
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Winnow »

Aslanna wrote:
Winnow wrote:NASA Budget: 1.2 Billion and declining
Bump!

Sorry to burst your bubble but you might want to check your numbers. The NASA budget in 2012 was $17.7 billion not $1.2.

Calendar Year - NASA budget Nominal Dollars (Millions) - % of Fed Budget
.2009 17,782 0.57%
.2010 18,724 0.52%
FY2011 18,448 0.51%
FY2012 17,770 0.50%
FY2013 16,865 0.49%
FY2014 17,647 0.50%
FY2015 18,010 0.49%
FY2016 19,300 0.50%
Pretty sure the 1.2 Billion budget was just for the Planetary Science part of NASA not it's entire budget.
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Re: To the Moon

Post by Winnow »

Long article but on point:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/07/22/pence-delivers-a-promise-and-a-warning-to-nasa-and-its-contractors/
The SLS “is behind schedule, and it’s over budget,” Pence said in an interview Saturday with CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett. “But the truth is that since the start of the Space Launch System program, many administrations have underfunded it, have (not given) it the attention that it deserves.

“This administration will not make that mistake. We’re committed to the work being done in Huntsville with the Space Launch System.”

But, he added, “if we can’t get there on the platforms that we’re building today, the rockets we’re building today, we’re going to get there by any means necessary. Because the president really does believe that American leadership in human space exploration is essential.”

He singled out SpaceX, the California rocket company founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
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