Focusing on the Future
I know right now there are a lot of problems that need to be solved. The economy is still plummeting, terrorists are still looking for an opportunity to attack, Israel and the Palestinians are still at each other’s throats, and then there is global climate change and all the other important problems that need solving. There is no time or money left to use toward space exploration. Yet I think that is something we should invest time and money in… especially now.
It is easy to be caught up in the problems of the day and to focus on the immediate monetary challenges that we have to deal with. But we also need to look ahead to the future. We also need to fire up our imaginations and explore the space. The scientific research that we fund today may help the world tomorrow.
I “hope” that President Obama has the “audacity” to reach for the stars and put more funding and effort into the space program… particularly now in the middle of this economic crisis. It would be an unpopular move, but it would get people thinking on a more global level and it would give people something to dream about and hope for. Obama said during the campaign that being President means that you need to handle multiple crises at the same time and America certainly has a lot of those right now. And that is why I think he should look to the future and focus our attention off of the problems and on to something more constructive. This is the 21st Century and I want my moon base and starships!
Filed under: Politics
Funding the space program is a great idea, but funding manned missions is not, at least, not any time soon. A lot of great science can be done with unmanned missions, if they’re not starved for money and resources. Sending men to the moon AGAIN (Bush’s plan, still in effect, as far as I know) is nothing but Cold War-style propaganda.
The government should also keep supporting high energy physics research. Not long ago, Fermilab was almost shut down for lack of federal funding. Even if it were to shut down for a short time, the talent it employs would disperse, and it would be hard to reassemble that kind of team.
I’m with ya! We should “…boldly go…”!
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Space travel has always been an interest of mine and I believe we need to act on advancing as a whole planet, not just as one country. We could get so much done. The more we advance in space, the more we advance as society as a whole. That being said, I think we need to invest money into stem cell and cloning research as well.
Couldn’t dissagree more…space doesn’t supply us with antibiotics…space is distracting and expensive. Plus, we haven’t even finished exploring our own planet. Space is not our savior…ya’ll look to it as Xians look to heaven for god.
Want to help solve big problems like climate change, then we need to study our oceans…
Actually, NASA is getting a nice handsome sum from the stimulus package as reported by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/02/08/stimulated-package/
I can see looking to space and the sun for scientific answers…however I think our funding could be better spent on things that focus on the Earth and our survival on it. It’s by far the best spaceship I’ve ever seen.
But that wouldn’t be as much fun. Besides, exploration has had a history of positive results. I think we should continue our trend toward curiosity and see what’s out there. I don’t look at space as a “savior,” and I do think we should continue to explore the oceans and other places on Earth, but I don’t think we have to choose. We shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket and we shouldn’t expect to find solutions to all our problems in space, but we should go out there and look and see what we find.
The Stimulus package has o er a billion for NaSa. Anyway, space travel is slowly becoming a private section thing anyway, which is better for everyone if you ask me.
The problem with private sector space exploration is that they are looking for immediate profit and not for the knowledge that comes from years of research at price tags in trillions. Private corporations are goal oriented and interested only in the bottom-line. That’s great for business, but not so great for human curiosity.
-Staks
Space exploration needs to be LAST on our list right now. I consider it a pointless money-pit, at least in terms of the short run, the near-future. Pouring money into “human curiosity” is a luxury we can’t afford right now, as a nation and as a planet – there’s too much unaddressed misery and unnecessary death that we need to take care of first.
As far as thinking about “the future” rather than focusing on “the present” – I understand that there’s a great need to generate an optimistic mindset, because that directly impacts economic trends. But Keynes said it best – “On a long enough timeline, we’re all dead.” I’m not trying to excuse a reactionary approach, devoid of long-term planning; but we need to deal with our immediate problems first and foremost. We all need to know where our next meal is coming from, before we worry about what we’ll be eating a year or two from now, or how much debt our grandchildren will be inheriting – those things are important, but we can sort them out later. So until further notice, everyone needs to FORGET about space exploration.
It’s all about having the right priorities.
o There are valuable technological spin-off benefits from the space program.
o The money spent keeps people with valuable skills employed. Those people are engineers who might eventually come up with great breakthroughs for people living on the Earth. It’s batter than having them work at Burger King. The money spent is stimulative to the economy, and supports subcontractors that are doing things that are valuable to our economy and society, but might otherwise go bankrupt now that times are tough. Their employees would be out in th street if that happened.
o The total amount of money spent on the space program is a small part of the budget, and won’t buy many meals. Our grandchildren will benefit from the long-term positive fallout of the investment.
o If we want to address misery and unnecessary death, we can do so, if we chose. Spending on the space program does not preclude it. Too bad we can’t go back in time and not invade Iraq. A small fraction of the money squandered on that misguided effort would pay for years of exploration with unmanned space probes.
o Your approach is reactionary.
The private sector is charged with building the rockets only. NASA is still in charge of the science. I think handing off rocket building to the private sector is the best decision NASA ever made. I actually have very close ties to NASA. My friend is in charge of overseeing the private rocket companies, and he is amazed at how much more efficient these companies are. They do it much faster and much cheaper.
Secondly, I think you may be unfairly characterizing these companies. Most of them were founded by people who have a lot of interest in, and are very enthusiastic about space flight. To say they only care about money is disingenuous. These people already have boat loads of money. They truly care about being in space and learning about the universe. Hence why they decided to get into space flight in the first place.
I don’t quite understand why you have such disdain for all business. Some businesses are “good”, some are “bad”. Don’t forget that businesses are ultimately run by people, many of which are very passionate about what they do, and genuinely want to see the human race progress.
Don’t forget that we desperately need a human race “plan b”, i.e. figuring out how to get humans to another planet to maintain the survival of the species. Climate change or asteroid impact could easily make us extinct, so it’s highly important we begin to colonize other planets.
I don’t have such disdain for all business. I am not sure where that is coming from. My point private sector take over of space exploration was about a total take over, not a take over of rocketry or some obviously profitable component of space exploration. I don’t think a company would spend trillions of dollars unless they had some goal in mind which they thought would be profitable in the near future. NASA on the other hand isn’t as concerned with profit and so they can afford to be more open ended. They aren’t accountable to stock holders. I don’t think it is a bad thing for companies to be accountable to stock holders, but I don’t think that is always the same as serving the public good. Some people (Republicans) want to privatize EVERYTHING 100% and that is a problem. But I am definitely for privatization of some things and privatization of rockets and shuttle components is definitely a great move. No argument from me on that.
-Staks
I agree with space exploration being a high priority.
What are the benefits for doing so? There is an isotope called Helium 3 on the moon and in several other areas of space. This could be our answer to the energy crisis. What we need to do is a make moon base. The moon base is made to be very sustainable only needing a few restocks from Earth every so often. The moon base would collect helium 3 and send it to Earth. It doesn’t require alot of fuel to escape the moon in comparison to escaping Earth. We then can give up fossil fuels for a new fuel source. It’ll take awhile to get this operation to be cost efficient enough to justify giving up fossil fuels but as fossil fuels get rarer, we need to do this.
Using Ethanol fuel requires us to turn food into fuel and works towards habitat destruction.
The moon has low gravity conditions though and would be detrimental to human health and cause much bone loss. Unless the human wants to spend his entire life on the moon base in which the bone loss might not matter.
The moon base would require alot of functions to make it run. It needs a dome for a farm to feed the people that will be on it. They also need a way to produce the parachute cloth for the capsules of Helium 3 we send back to Earth. The moon needs to support it’s own mining to expand the base. The moon base is going to have to eventually become a large city of many operations to operate properly.
Perhaps if we ever get a damn space plane we could reduce the cost of escaping Earth’s atmosphere.
Not to mention that the moon probably has other minerals to exploit.
The moon can also serve as a major launchpad hub. We would want to launch our deep space missions from the moon because it would require less force to get it moving and we could probably get those probes to travel faster because of less resistance to break free from the moon.
Then we have other places in space to utilize. Helium 3 is all over the outer planet’s moons as well.
Also, we can colonize other places thru the use of sky cities. Basically, we make a bunch of blimps that stay stable in the atmosphere and connect them together so if one fails the others hold it up. Eventually a city gets made out of this. This can be done on Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter’s radiation would kill us, even if we were as far away as Europa unless we had a heavily armored ship with radiation shields. Besides, on Jupiter we weigh like 2-3 times as much and would probably be very unhealthy. The other places I mentioned actually only change our weight by very little. The low density of the other gas planets allows this to happen while Venus is close to Earth in it’s gravity.
There is a place in Venus’s atmosphere where the temperate is like Earths and the air pressure is similar. Meaning you could go outside and only need a breathing device and sulfuric acid protection.
The sky city on Venus could play a role in terraforming Venus. Meaning we could eventually use our sky bases farms to eat up its carbon atmosphere to kill off the greenhouse effect slowly and replace it with oxygen. We then need to thin Venus’s atmosphere to kill off the air pressure. Perhaps we can somehow take the extra atmosphere from Venus and get it to Mars since it needs more atmosphere to be warmed up and to support liquid water. On Earth, plate tectonics allows the carbon cycle to happen and our planet turns alot of extra carbon dioxide thru some chemical reaction with the oceans and traps it in rocks until they find their way back out thru volcanic vent many millions of years later.
So why make a sky city? I don’t know yet, but there has to be a reason other than just having a pit stop on the way to Mercury which would also have a moon base type operation.
Mars I didn’t say much about because it is clearly among one of the easiest places to colonize. What are the economical reason colonize Mars? I don’t know, I need an answer for this.
Then we have the concept terraforming. This stuff is very very long term orientated. Mars and Venus could be turned into Earth like planets with some major expensive work done to them. Why have one Earth-type planet when we can have three? We can then transfer many Earth organisms to them and develop the biospheres of the planet. We can actually define and make the borders of the national parks since we are building the ecosystem over the newly terraformed land. We can also designate areas to be cities, others to be farm land, others to be timber forests, etc. We want to probably avoid continent specific fauna and flora like Earth has nowadays (Australia being the extreme example) and try to make it more universal.
It might also be possible to terraform the moon, Mercury, Titan, Enceladus, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, though they will require alot more work than Mars and Venus and we need a sustainable way to continually replenish atmospheres that would other dissipate after like 10,000 years. Since gases like CO2 and H2O are naturally produced by rocks thru chemical reactions inside planets anyhow. We could make a factory that duplicates this process on these planets. The amount of mass loss on these worlds caused by this practice might be insignificant enough that it won’t matter. We can always import rocks from asteroids too if it is a problem.
What about Jupiter? What will it do for us? What if there was a way to use it’s radiation to generate energy and then use microwave power transmission (MPT) to beam the electrical power to the rest of the solar system. If this is possible, then that would be a badass power plant.
So, every single planet is possible to be utilized in a way to help us. We can terraform some planets. We can get helium 3 as an energy source from many places in space. Sky bases on Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune can serve as places that mock earth’s gravity and would be good long term habitable zones (we can always make space stations that spin to make gravity but these things would be hard to land on and they don’t have an atmosphere full of resources to exploit). Jupiter could possibly be made into a solar system wide power planet. The possibilities are endless. We might not conquer the stars but we can at least conquer our own solar system!
As the intelligent species, it is our job to do our part to take all of the wonders of life that earth created and spread it to other planets. We are already gods among organisms, we need to use our strengths for the good of all. This is the prime way life can begin the hop from planet to planet. It would be the pinnacle goal of life to manifest an entire solar system. We have 5 billion years before the sun begins to act up and turn into a red giant. If we colonize enough places, we have a better chance of surviving this event. Earth’s life as a whole would be more fit too if it had the advantage of several planets. Meaning that an impact that causes a mass extinction would have survivors elsewhere and us humans could quickly restock the planet of species after the impact settles down.
To make this happen, an attitude change needs to happen. We are way to focused on individualism and short term. We need to start looking at the big picture and the long run. Perhaps when we find a way to greatly expand our lifespans we care more. Ants do what is best for the colony rather than what is best for themselves. As humans, we may need that kind of thinking to get us to focus on growing as a species rather than short term benefits and issues.
We have alot to live up to. We are the main representatives of Earth and if we can expand our powers beyond our planet, we will be able to deal with and stand up to possible encounters with other intelligent life that may happen someday (even if it is millions to billions of years from now).
Anyhow, good blog, it got me fired up. My post is long but full of interesting material none the less.
Good arguments, I will reconsider my position.
And you’re right, my approach is reactionary, at least to a degree. I’m just trying to point out, reactionary or not, our most immediate problems need to be addressed immediately. But I suppose feeding the world and exploring space aren’t mutually exclusive, we could progress in both simultaneously.
And I’m sure the NASA budget is trivial compared to our defense budget (since most other budgets are trivial compared to that one). I’m not going to touch whether or not that spending is “necessary” to our present safety; I’ll just say that if there’s any spending we should strive to reduce, it’s that.
That’s a v-e-r-y long-term project, but yeah, it’s true. You have to start somewhere, sometime.
I agree that if it’s a choice between NASA and vital parts of the government shutting down, NASA will have to wait. We’re not there, though, and the cost of trying to restart the space program after pulling the plug will be very high, probably more in terms of lost technological capability than actual dollars.
> Perhaps if we ever get a damn space plane we could reduce the cost of escaping Earth’s atmosphere.
The space shuttle proved to be very expensive. A space plane that doesn’t use rockets to take off will be very expensive as well. Building moon bases will probably be too expensive for one country, even the United States, to accomplish. Your other ideas are not close to economically feasible now. They’re going to be very long-term projects.
Right now, a lot of science can be done with unmanned missions. I hope that’s where the focus is for the time being.
A lot of what I suggested probably won’t be feasible for a long long time. I’m sure unmanned missions will continue though. But in more of a short term basis, it seems the next logical goal is to get a moon base and put a person on Mars. The first moon base would probably just be a science lab like the international space station is. The moon base could eventually add on observatories and launchpads. Perhaps putting a major communication device on the near side of the moon could be beneficial as well.
I wasn’t sure what the cost of space planes were. But I think they will eventually need replace rockets with cost efficient space planes to make getting to space an easier task.
We are doing good with our unmanned missions though. Spirit and Opportunity are the rovers we have on Mars. They have been roaming the surface of Mars for over five years now. Voyager 1 and 2 are still running, 20 years after Voyager 2 passed Neptune in 1989. Currently we have a mission at Mercury, 3 landers and 3 orbiters around Mars, Saturn has Cassini which has been orbiting Saturn for five years now. India actually put something on the south pole of the moon, though NASA and other space groups donated some technology to the mission. There is a mission on it’s way to Pluto. Venus and Jupiter are frequently used for gravity assists and usually get photographed along the way. So we have alot of stuff going on simultaneously already. NASA also had a mission planned for Neptune to launch in 2015 but that one may not happen for awhile now due to budget limits.
While I was double checking some of the facts I posted in the above paragraph, I ran into the Wiki article of the Asian Space Race. This is a topic of interest here.
China put people into space, India has put a lander on the moon, and both India and China, along with Japan have placed orbiters around the moon. India, China and Japan are leaders in this space race. Iran and Israel are in this was well and South Korea plans to enter the scene. The Space Frontier Foundation estimates the space economy to be worth 180 billion dollars. Now I am not clear on how to interpret that data but it sounds to me there is money to be made from it which is a good thing. From what I read in the article, it sounds like these Asian nations are taking space exploration very seriously and some experts think that Asia might surpass in the US in space dominance. Being that Asian nations are often collective in socio-culture the national pride from it could drive them to do some serious space missions. China and India are especially spending alot of money on space exploration.
China and others deny there is an Asian space race from the facts I read, I think it is probably happening. Japan, China, and India all want to put a person on the moon. Meanwhile the US and Russia already explored the moon thoroughly and have done very few if any missions since.
Even if space races are costly, I think they are a good thing. Europe bursted into the industrial revolution because of intense competition between Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia (none of these countries could really conquer each other either due to geography so competition continued to persist). Not to mention that Europe also bursted into an exploration age due to competition. We need this space race for human progress.
We have alot of missions going on already, what happens when we add in all these Asian nations doing space exploration? Maybe they will do some missions to Uranus or Neptune. Maybe they will do what NASA isn’t doing. I also read that China and India have 60% of the worlds population and that Helium 3 from the moon could be used to provide the energy needs for those nations. I would think that nations that contain those vast amounts of people might find it economically practical to farm Helium 3 from the moon.
I still have to marvel at the fact that Asia used to be the world’s poorest continent but is now modernizing and advancing very fast (Africa is now the poorest continent in the world).
As I always say, there will always be people starving and suffering in the world and if we spend 100% of our time preventing it then we will never ever get other stuff done like exploring space.
Right now we are in an economic recession that is suppose to pass in a year or two so it would be understandable for NASA to slow down in this time frame. As I said in another post, they already have several active missions at the moment with Mercury, Mars, Saturn and it’s moons, and Pluto. We only have 45% of Mercury mapped so far and Pluto isn’t mapped at all. Currently the planned mission to go to Neptune and throw some probes on Triton and into Neptune’s atmosphere is no longer listed on NASA’s website, possibility due to the slow economy but I hope they revive that mission at some point. So NASA is technically studying several planets at once so having nothing new in development for a year or two wouldn’t be too detrimental.
Perhaps if Obama makes a “New Deal” thing to stimulate the economy, they could use NASA and space exploration for that kind of thing rather than making dams in Tennessee.
Seriously? Ya space exploration is cool, getting off our dependence on oil, protecting our borders, and fixing the economy. Are all great ideas and the only way THE ONLY way that it can be done “Right” is capitalism, people would have to create that technology, they should own it the government should not be regulating it nor should they be providing funding for it. I should not be enslaved to the whole world to “Save” the planet. I should be allowed to use my property (Money) for what I want. Capitalism is the only proper moral political system in history.
NASA $ 1,000,000,000
NOAA $ 830,000,000
Looks like favoritism to me…and as the deep ocean is analogous to space why isn’t there a race to it’s depths? Why don’t we have more floating cities? Isn’t there resources to exploit there, too and wouldn’t they be easier to get to Earthlings then H3 from space?
Introducing species to the greater universe…could be more devistating then smallpox upon native americans; are we even sure that we have not adversely contaminated Mars yet?
I think humans are smart, smart enough to get ourselves in trouble. Throwing money at it, racing to conquer it…throws caution to the wind.
Space is far more interesting than the deep ocean I am afraid. And if NOAA has that much funding than why haven’t they been to the bottom of the oceans yet? Diving deep into the ocean just lacks the appeal space has.
“Why don’t we have more floating cities?”
Wait, how can we have more floating cities when we have none? Perhaps you meant “why don’t we have floating cities on Earth?”
Good question, why don’t we? probably because there is no need yet. Perhaps someday when the world gets more crowd though, we might utilize air space and make floating cities. And the upper atmosphere of Earth I don’t think has Helium 3 in it, you’d have to go to the moon for that.
As for introducing species to the universe, we will make sure the planet in question doesn’t already have life. If we add life to a lifeless planet that we terraformed, how is that bad? We need life to complete terraforming anyhow. We need microbe to decay things and make the humus of the soil. We need plants to turn CO2 into O2. Insects to pollinate flowers. Birds/bats/shrews/moles/amphibians/lizards to control the insect population. There is alot of general niches to fill but they can be filled.
You seem to be against space exploration just to be against it. If I had my way, NASA would be getting alot more money and we would be sending landers to every moon of the outer planets and dropping atmospheric gauges into the atmospheres of all the gas planets. It cost alot but it is essential for progress. I only get to live long enough to maybe see a moon base and a human landing on Mars. I want to see alot more happen in my life time, we need to get cracking.
I was unaware of the planned mission to Neptune. I hope Nasa gets the money it needs to pull that mission off.
I also hope that we do joint missions. Things like huge particle colliders and huge space missions are too expensive for one nation to pull off alone. Besides, the benefits accrue to everyone.
China may have been pretty weak and poor for the past 200 years, but before that, they were pretty much the top dog. They are just returning to the traditional order.
You sound like you’re channeling Ayn Rand.
If you get beaten up and are lying broken and bleeding in the street, if you don’t mind that I step over your body, then I’m fine with your idea.
By the way, I’m going to dump toxic waste in your yard. But hey, no one can tell me what to do.
“In the Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 President’s Budget, the
Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration requests a total of
$4,109,847, an increase of $202,561,000 or 5.2% over
the FY 2008 enacted level, and $294,443,000 or 7.7%
above the FY 2008 President’s Budget.”
FY 2009 Budget Highlights: http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/~nbo/FY09_Rollout_Materials/NOAA_One_Pager_FINAL.pdf
They dropped three zeros off the total request. It’s actually $4 billion plus.
> And if NOAA has that much funding than why haven’t they been to the bottom of the oceans yet?
A lot of that money is allocated to things like weather forecasting and satellite operation.
NASA’s budget for FY 2009 is approximately $17,614,200,000
NOAA’s budget for FY 2009 is approximately $ 4,109,847,000
I don’t know where Leo got his numbers.
I just went to the NASA website and them and the ESA are planning a possible joint mission to the outer planets. Specifically they want to hit up Europa, Ganymede, and Titan. Each of these places will have an orbiter going directly around the moons and on Titan they want to throw down another lander and weather balloon onto it. In the process we will have flybys of other moons before the final destination is reached.
Personally I would prefer the Neptune Mission since compared the the Jupiter and Saturn systems, we hardly know much about it. We need to hit up Uranus too but Neptune is slightly more interesting than Uranus due to Triton and the fact Neptune has a more dynamic atmosphere.
Both Uranus and Neptune are very poorly understood planets and in the nebular hypothesis there is speculation that these planets may have been born several million years after the other planets and may have migrated outward away from the sun and in the process tossing comets all over the place and pushing back the Kuiper Belt to it’s current location.
There is also a question that has plagued me: What does a planet smaller than Neptune but bigger than Earth look like? Neptune and Uranus are like giant ice planets that got large enough to pick up hydrogen and helium and after doing so they got hot enough on the inside to melt the water/ammonia/methane into a liquid. So literally after the atmosphere is a giant ocean beneath it. And it isn’t cold in this area either (it might be too hot but I have no idea), it might be possible to put some boats in this place.
Hypothetically a planet bigger than Earth that is beyond the frost line would be a giant ice planet. And if it got bigger, we would see a solid ball of ice become more dynamic. We’d begin to get oceans and weather, probably at first of Titan’s nature with ethane clouds and surface liquid. Eventually we would get have a sub surface ocean. Volcanos would erupt water and other gasses making an atmosphere that would eventually freeze back into the surface. But if the planet was bigger, the subsurface ocean might extend it’s way to the surface forming an oceanic planet. Eventually at some point it would be large enough to pick up hydrogen and helium turning it into a Neptune or Uranus type planet. So many forms are possible. Doing it within the frost line probably produces larger Earths and/or ocean planets.
But technically Ganymede, Europa, and Titan are very interesting terrestrial worlds and all three have potential to harbor life. Though the main reason they want to explore Ganymede is because it has a magnetosphere. All three of these places are loaded with water (though as ice so solid that it resembles rock).
I really want them to do the Neptune mission in addition to the other outer planet missions they are planing.
This was cool to read, thanks.