Space Program - Travel

[Small_Fryz]

First off my biggest question is.. when do you guys think we will have more quality travels into space and when will "space travel" be like flying in a jumbo?

Will it be 50 years away? 100? 200?.

To the untrained general person it feels like we have done very little since landing on the moon in the late 60's

I guess I'm curious to know what you guys think of a suitable time before we are travelling out into space and between planet settlements.

My issue is.. Over in Australia we have big talks about a carbon tax, which is essentially a tax to invest money back into green energy to reduce carbon emissions and find alternative power sources. Personally i would much prefer that kinda money to be put into a space program where research was put into future modes of transport and getting our civilization out into space and mining / collecting the resources outside of our own planet. To me this is much more important than green energy within our own planet.

My other question to you guys is, should we have a world wide space program where each nation puts aside some funds to explore such ideas for the greater good of our civilization?

 

[CMvan46]

Without us putting money into alternate fuel sources and cleaner energy there won't be any Earth left to live on.

Second of all many countries are in together on the International Space Station already.

One major issue with space is that because there is little to no gravity it's very hard to maintain muscle mass when in space for longer periods on time. Secondly is cost. I highly doubt anything in space is cost effective enough to train and send people out there just to collect resources.


http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/cooperation/index.html

 

[Crispy]

2525

In all seriousness, it would really be something like 50 years before space travel becomes like flying in an airplane, and maybe 75 years before it becomes cheap enough for the general public.

 

[Dotini]

With this rocketship, humans will arrive on Mars within 20 years or so. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14915725

NASA is the most qualified space agency on Earth, and the funding will come from the US taxpayer.

We are still in the age of costly exploration and risky voyages. So routine space travel for the public, or commercial mining ventures, can only be speculative. I'll speculate that civilization will have to endure through another time of troubles before it achieves the triumph of space colonization. Colonizing Earth is a job still undone.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

 

[TankAss95]

I always think people are a little too over ambitious when they discuss technology in the future. Just something to take note.

And really, what exactly is the point of the general public travelling into space anyway? Isn't there enough beautiful things that are actually in our world that we could visit instead of venturing out away from it?

 

[Lain]

Well, commercial space travel really isn't anything more than an expensive novelty. It's not likely to ever become cheap, and it's not really useful for anything.

So... it won't start to become commonplace until we have colonies of substantial size built on Mars. Which I have a feeling may be a long, long while. If we don't kill ourselves in the mean time.

 

[Danoff]

In all honesty we may be 1000 years away from using space travel to go from point-to-point on the same planet. It would take a breakthrough in technology that makes air travel look inefficient - which is hard to imagine but certainly possible.

Between now and then space travel could certainly become commonplace for going from planet to planet (or moon). But, again, it's hard to imagine it becoming as simple as getting on a jumbo jet without some sort of massive breakthrough in propulsion. The resources and energy required are just too large, and will continue to be so for a very long time. Try to imagine a trip to Mars being like the pilgrims getting on a rickety wooden ship to cross the atlantic. Many people had made it before you, and you had reason to think that you'd make it - but the trip will be hard, expensive, and you're probably not coming back. The airplane ride would be like getting in a horse and buggy to go from one town to the next compared to an interplanetary trip.

It's hard to predict when we'll have the next breakthrough in propulsion. In all honesty it may never happen (though that's not consistent with past experience). But we could be on the edge of a very big leap, and it may take a long time (centuries) before we cross it.... or it could be tomorrow.

 

[Dan_]

On the subject of propulsion technologies, what's your opinion on the VASIMR rocket?

 

[Danoff]

On the subject of propulsion technologies, what's your opinion on the VASIMR rocket?

VASIMR and other types of ion propulsion are absolutely fantastic. I'm loving the Dawn mission right now that's using ion propulsion to orbit two asteroids in the main belt.

But these are efficient ways to ferry things around in space slowly. Not really conducive to actually propelling people. Definitely not useful on the surface, where they don't generate anything like the force needed to lift off (they also generally rely on a vacuum to operate).

 

[Dapper]

I prefer objective fact over speculation.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Humans will be doing thing almost unimaginable in another 50 years, whether or not we put effort towards space travel is questionable though.

This is enlightening, also.
http://www.good.is/post/going-down-the-rabbit-hole/

 

[CodeRedR51]

Honestly I don't think that we will ever be able to travel through space as easily as the movies make it look. Colonies on Mars are cool and all, but that planet is a dead end. There's nothing there for the general public. Reality is, if something happens to Earth, we're screwed.

Edit: Although I was watching a space program on Netflix last week and some guy was talking about covering a space craft with something that would allow it to travel at the speed of light, or half the speed of light. Can't remember it specifically.

 

[Danoff]

I prefer objective fact over speculation.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Humans will be doing thing almost unimaginable in another 50 years, whether or not we put effort towards space travel is questionable though.

Very little of that progress has been in propulsion. In terms of propulsion that can actually be used to lift humans off the surface of the Earth and propel them quickly through space, we're where we were over 50 years ago. Kinda like the internal combustion engine. We've been refining it. It's more reliable. Rockets blow up less often. But it's still the same fundamental technology.

 

[CodeRedR51]

^^^ Exactly.

 

[Lain]

Honestly I don't think that we will ever be able to travel through space as easily as the movies make it look. Colonies on Mars are cool and all, but that planet is a dead end. There's nothing there for the general public. Reality is, if something happens to Earth, we're screwed.

I agree with you, except for the part where you write Mars off as a dead end.

There's a good amount of ice on Mars. Melt some of it to grow some plants there, who knows what could happen?

 

[CodeRedR51]

I agree with you, except for the part where you write Mars off as a dead end.

There's a good amount of ice on Mars. Melt some of it, start growing plants there, who knows what could happen?

The main problem with Mars is the lack of oxygen and it's really cold. Sure we can grow things indoors with man-made oxygen, but doing that on a large scale would be quite hard/expensive.

 

[Danoff]

I agree with you, except for the part where you write Mars off as a dead end.

There's a good amount of ice on Mars. Melt some of it to grow some plants there, who knows what could happen?

We're SO far away from that. For one thing, it's hard to find plants that might grow at those temperatures, in that soil, with that little sunlight. Secondly, how are we keeping the water melted?

We could create greenhouses to do this, but I think your notion is to terraform - which means finding liquid water naturally occurring on the planet - which apparently happens, but not much on the surface.

But more than that, Mars is still a carefully guarded science lab where we hope to find evidence of life. There is no way planetary protection will let you introduce any kind of biology on Mars until we've scoured the whole planet inside and out to make sure that it is dead and has always been dead.

 

[Dapper]

Very little of that progress has been in propulsion.

Your concerns are answered here:

A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

This holds true for propulsion, also.

 

[Lain]

We're SO far away from that. For one thing, it's hard to find plants that might grow at those temperatures, in that soil, with that little sunlight. Secondly, how are we keeping the water melted?

We could create greenhouses to do this, but I think your notion is to terraform - which means finding liquid water naturally occurring on the planet - which apparently happens, but not much on the surface.

But more than that, Mars is still a carefully guarded science lab where we hope to find evidence of life. There is no way planetary protection will let you introduce any kind of biology on Mars until we've scoured the whole planet inside and out to make sure that it is dead and has always been dead.

We could perhaps engineer the plants that we'd grow on Mars. Presumably you'd melt the water on an as-needed basis with heaters.

Obviously we would probably have to start with greenhouses, but perhaps eventually we could grow out of the need for them.

Indeed certain people might want to keep Mars untouched from Earth biology in hopes of finding Martian life. But between the fact that it's almost guaranteed that there's life somewhere beyond Earth and the certainty that any potential life on Mars would just be simple microorganisms, I don't think it's that important to discover pre-existing life on Mars. We should obviously try, as it would be a significant discovery, but I think scouring every inch of the entire planet is a bit much.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/mars_plants.html

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/25feb_greenhouses/

 

[Spagetti69]

I don't think the American government is all that concerned with space travel at the moment.

The sky at night, a popular UK show even mentioned the fact that the US astronauts will be hitching a lift with the Russians in the near future.

They seem to think that China will begin the next big push into space travel.

Hard to give a time frame really. In the sixties people thought that by the end of the century we would all be holidaying on the moon lol.

 

[Dapper]

I don't think the American government is all that concerned with space travel at the moment.

I'll let someone smart(compared to me) explain why there is no need to be concerned right now:

Twenty years from now we will be able to get all of the energy we need from very inexpensive nanoengineered solar panels and store the energy in small, decentralized nanoengineered fuel cells. Solar power is, in fact, doubling every two years and has been for 20 years, and we are only eight doublings away from it meeting 100 percent of the world's energy needs.

We will continue to explore space as an engineering challenge and as a way of exploring our part of the universe. But space travel will be of strategic importance to our human-machine civilization in the 22nd century. At that point, we will have exhausted the resources on Earth and will move out into the rest of the universe. For the most part, we won't be sending out missions of squishy creatures but rather swarms of nanobots.

http://www.good.is/post/going-down-the-rabbit-hole/

 

[CodeRedR51]

Hard to give a time frame really. In the sixties people thought that by the end of the century we would all be holidaying on the moon lol.

Don't forget the flying cars.

 

[Dapper]

Don't forget the flying cars.

That is about 20 years away. But most things we will want to do will be in done in virtual reality, so travel won't be as important.
(ok, I'll stop the futuristic propaganda albeit very likely)

 

[Robin]

Well we went from no plane to global air travel in under a century and I could see mass space travel being achieved in the next 100 years.

We have the ability to do so much now but as long as their are financial constants we are going to move really slowly. Given a limitless budget man could go to Mars within a decade.

 

[Spagetti69]

To get back they would have to mine fuel from Mars I believe.

 

[Robin]

To get back they would have to mine fuel from Mars I believe.

Couldn't they just use solar power? Once you get moving the propulsion requirement is minimal.

 

[Dapper]

Well we went from no plane to global air travel in under a century and I could see mass space travel being achieved in the next 100 years.

We have the ability to do so much now but as long as their are financial constants we are going to move really slowly. Given a limitless budget man could go to Mars within a decade.

Yet another manifestation of the law of accelerating returns as it rushes toward the Singularity can be found in the world of economics, a world vital to both the genesis of the law of accelerating returns, and to its implications. It is the economic imperative of a competitive marketplace that is driving technology forward and fueling the law of accelerating returns. In turn, the law of accelerating returns, particularly as it approaches the Singularity, is transforming economic relationships.

Virtually all of the economic models taught in economics classes, used by the Federal Reserve Board to set monetary policy, by Government agencies to set economic policy, and by economic forecasters of all kinds are fundamentally flawed because they are based on the intuitive linear view of history rather than the historically based exponential view. The reason that these linear models appear to work for a while is for the same reason that most people adopt the intuitive linear view in the first place: exponential trends appear to be linear when viewed (and experienced) for a brief period of time, particularly in the early stages of an exponential trend when not much is happening. But once the “knee of the curve” is achieved and the exponential growth explodes, the linear models break down. The exponential trends underlying productivity growth are just beginning this explosive phase.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
There are graphs that show this exponential growth on this link.

 

[Spagetti69]

Couldn't they just use solar power? Once you get moving the propulsion requirement is minimal.

The program I watched mentioned the fact that mars being a similar sized planet would have a pretty substantial gravity.

Retro rickets would be needed to land as well as take off.

Considering the amount of fuel needed to get out of our planet and the size it takes up.
Creating fuel on mars was considered the best choice at the moment.

Not my info. Patrick Moore sky at night.

 

[Solo]

I would like to see where Richard Branson takes space travel. He and his company virgin have talked extensively about the 'virgin galactic' programme. What do you all think to this? Could this be the space travel of the near future?

On an not so unrelated note the band muse have announced that they are going to perform in space, although they aren't sure when but if they do I think it will be through a scheme such as the virgin galactic one.

(sorry I don't have any useful links, on my phone at the moment. I may post some up tomorrow)

 

[Dan_]

VASIMR and other types of ion propulsion are absolutely fantastic. I'm loving the Dawn mission right now that's using ion propulsion to orbit two asteroids in the main belt.

But these are efficient ways to ferry things around in space slowly. Not really conducive to actually propelling people. Definitely not useful on the surface, where they don't generate anything like the force needed to lift off (they also generally rely on a vacuum to operate).

Oh, I understand. The thrust provided by ion engines is small but constant and therefore inapt in providing sufficient thrust in order to achieve escape velocity from spacial bodies ( like Mars ) where gravity is present, or even to ferry humans in space in a limited time frame. I've been following VASIMR's progress throughout the last months too. I'm excited about the prospects so far, but there are some concerns over the energy source needed in order to keep it working, a potent spacial nuclear reactor would be needed and I'm not sure if there is any of these in existence today. ( correct me if needed, please ).

However, there is a small possibility that In-Situ resource exploration (ISRU) might provide the propellant necessary to lift off from a distant planetary body. That could be methane ( abundant in Titan, for example ) or even oxygen and hydrogen, which would also be crucial supporting elements for planetary exploration.

If I'm honest, I think that space travel is at least a century away, the first human footprint on Mars will take at least 20 years, a small colony alone shall take at least 50.... We didn't even set an outpost on the Moon yet, which would be crucial in order to give the life-supporting systems a leap.

EDIT: The Dawn mission shall prove the worthiness and reliability of ion propulsion, it's paving the way for ion thrusters, although I don't see hydrazine being deused in the near future. It has been realiable and effective for the last decades, it will still be used for future missions.

 

[Exorcet]

Couldn't they just use solar power? Once you get moving the propulsion requirement is minimal.

Despite there being no need to use energy to sustain speed, the amount of energy needed to accelerate is enormous. You wouldn't be able to get enough energy from the Sun unless you were using a solar sail, which wouldn't allow you to carry much.

You also can't travel in straight lines in space. You basically jump from one orbit to another, and the acceleration needed to do this consumes lots of energy, just like trying to escape the gravity of the planet you start from. High efficiency orbit transfers (Hohmann transfers) also aren't always possible.