NASA & DARPA Work on Nuclear Rocket for Fast Mars Trips
- Thread starter Borg Refinery
- Start date
BR #1 !
Science fiction often precedes science fact.
And much science fiction is driven either by demand & supply. Star Trek originally a 1960's vintage television series initially seemed so marginal the series was canceled. Vociferous public demand resurrected it.
The human seed proliferating though the galaxy has broad popular appeal. BUT !!
It's '60's vintage fantasy. The practical reality is, most of the places on our own home planet, the Earth we've evolved with over hundreds of millions of years, are not suited to sustaining human life. We have outposts on Antarctica. But they're not self-sustaining. They're supplied from extensive support teams based in warmer climes.
Astronauts / cosmonauts experience health affects, some reportedly long-term or permanent, from spending as little as one year in micro-gravity. Travel among the stars could solve that problem for stellar explorers traveling in a centrifuge.
But can we identify from light-years away planets that provide magnetic shielding from lethal solar radiation the way Earth's Iron core does?
Based on simple numerical probability, given the number of stars, there may well be habitable planets elsewhere. But if there are, is it reasonable, rational to believe they won't already be inhabited? And if so, then what? Shift the spaceship back in drive, and whoosh off to the next promising looking planet?
I'm not denying the appeal.
As a practical matter, we're fooling ourselves. And these "first step" escapades to our moon & Mars will end up being $extravagant $colossal $waste.
Bottom line it's a question of how we slice the $resource pie. If we spend a $Trillion on space adventures it's a $Trillion we will NOT have to spend on hospitals, infrastructure, world peace, curing cancer, etc.
None the less, both the notion of nuclear space drive, and fusion energy, ideal for fora such as this.
Science fiction often precedes science fact.
And much science fiction is driven either by demand & supply. Star Trek originally a 1960's vintage television series initially seemed so marginal the series was canceled. Vociferous public demand resurrected it.
The human seed proliferating though the galaxy has broad popular appeal. BUT !!
It's '60's vintage fantasy. The practical reality is, most of the places on our own home planet, the Earth we've evolved with over hundreds of millions of years, are not suited to sustaining human life. We have outposts on Antarctica. But they're not self-sustaining. They're supplied from extensive support teams based in warmer climes.
Astronauts / cosmonauts experience health affects, some reportedly long-term or permanent, from spending as little as one year in micro-gravity. Travel among the stars could solve that problem for stellar explorers traveling in a centrifuge.
But can we identify from light-years away planets that provide magnetic shielding from lethal solar radiation the way Earth's Iron core does?
Based on simple numerical probability, given the number of stars, there may well be habitable planets elsewhere. But if there are, is it reasonable, rational to believe they won't already be inhabited? And if so, then what? Shift the spaceship back in drive, and whoosh off to the next promising looking planet?
I'm not denying the appeal.
As a practical matter, we're fooling ourselves. And these "first step" escapades to our moon & Mars will end up being $extravagant $colossal $waste.
Bottom line it's a question of how we slice the $resource pie. If we spend a $Trillion on space adventures it's a $Trillion we will NOT have to spend on hospitals, infrastructure, world peace, curing cancer, etc.
None the less, both the notion of nuclear space drive, and fusion energy, ideal for fora such as this.
Borg Refinery
Active member
In the future, when the USA has more money I'm guessing it will make sense to regularly go to Mars and perhaps colonise other planets.
It's a question of priorities. How do you want to slice the resource pie?
a) $money.
That in turn is not an issue of whether in a nation with a $25 $Trillion GDP could allocate the % of resources necessary for such space adventures.
Instead the issue becomes, will the U.S. perpetrate such a catastrophic blunder.
b) Justification.
Why? So we can have a spare? If humanity blows up Earth, rendering it or its fragments uninhabitable, humanity can continue elsewhere?
That would be monumentally expensive with current technology, simply creating a Noah's Arc capable of perpetuating the species without further contact / assistance from Earth might approach or exceed Earth's GDP.
If we can't even be responsible stewards of Earth, does it really make sense for us to infest the solar system (or the galaxy) further?
<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
During the Cold War NASA's Apollo served multiple purposes. Among them, it demonstrated to the Soviets the U.S. is competent with big rockets. Not merely the Saturn V.
But the ICBM we had trained on the Soviets.
- The Cold War is over.
- We won.
- The dazzle of impressing bad people with our rocketry skills is soooo last Tuesday. Neither al Qaida nor ISIL care.
In addition, there are less inhospitable locations on Earth we could try. Antarctica / McMurdo Station isn't self-sustaining. For a minute fraction of an extended Mars habitation, we could expand McMurdo to be self-sustaning, AND also create a community on the ocean floor.
All of that would be a hideous waste of time.
"Miracle drugs" like Penicillin are losing their effectiveness. Pathogens are developing antibiotic resistance.
Doesn't mean we're done for. Instead what it means is, why not begin a new round of scrounging the jungles and coral reefs for useful antibiotic candidates?
We might not have to do that again after the next cycle, because after that with technology such as CRISPR we may be able to sequence our own artificial antibiotics, targeted to specific pathogens, potentially wiping out such diseases as we did with Smallpox eradication.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
Two separate issues:
a) $money.
That in turn is not an issue of whether in a nation with a $25 $Trillion GDP could allocate the % of resources necessary for such space adventures.
Instead the issue becomes, will the U.S. perpetrate such a catastrophic blunder.
b) Justification.
Why? So we can have a spare? If humanity blows up Earth, rendering it or its fragments uninhabitable, humanity can continue elsewhere?
That would be monumentally expensive with current technology, simply creating a Noah's Arc capable of perpetuating the species without further contact / assistance from Earth might approach or exceed Earth's GDP.
If we can't even be responsible stewards of Earth, does it really make sense for us to infest the solar system (or the galaxy) further?
<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
During the Cold War NASA's Apollo served multiple purposes. Among them, it demonstrated to the Soviets the U.S. is competent with big rockets. Not merely the Saturn V.
But the ICBM we had trained on the Soviets.
- The Cold War is over.
- We won.
- The dazzle of impressing bad people with our rocketry skills is soooo last Tuesday. Neither al Qaida nor ISIL care.
In addition, there are less inhospitable locations on Earth we could try. Antarctica / McMurdo Station isn't self-sustaining. For a minute fraction of an extended Mars habitation, we could expand McMurdo to be self-sustaning, AND also create a community on the ocean floor.
All of that would be a hideous waste of time.
"Miracle drugs" like Penicillin are losing their effectiveness. Pathogens are developing antibiotic resistance.
Doesn't mean we're done for. Instead what it means is, why not begin a new round of scrounging the jungles and coral reefs for useful antibiotic candidates?
We might not have to do that again after the next cycle, because after that with technology such as CRISPR we may be able to sequence our own artificial antibiotics, targeted to specific pathogens, potentially wiping out such diseases as we did with Smallpox eradication.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
Borg Refinery
Active member
But without experimentation, we never push the limits of what'[s possible, who knows what's up there? We may find amazing things that advance our whole civilization in leaps and bounds - without experimentation, we never find out what's possible? The entire set of space adventures, it can be argued, were a colossal waste of time and money and what have we gotten from it? The results are not yet clear, but we might eventually be able to colonise other planets and find new rare materials and other such, which might be a crucial turning point in our civilizations.
Certainly.
But why must we push that limit?
- Why not instead see what it takes to eliminate human hunger around the globe?
- Currently "public" education is "free" for education k - 12. In the new millennium, high school simply isn't good enough. So why not change it to k - 14? Or better yet k - 16?
What I've read of it indicates robots can obtain about the same amount of information as human explorers, but for about one tenth the $price, and if I may say so, much more safely. Apollo 13 was a gift we're ignoring.
Our most recent space fatalities were humans that burned up on re-entry.
Will it really be any better when we start losing them somewhere along the Mars round-trip? I'm not asserting it's not worthwhile. I'm observing we have more important, more immediate priorities.