Hey thnx for pasting a very memorable and a very few collection of pictures …a very good designing is used in this blog….

We MUST reach out to the planets and other objects. The advancements enabled by space exploration are untold. We also MUST keep the space station in orbit.

It’s very exciting to have big dreams and ambitions focused on space exploration. However, regarding the sloppy mess humans have made here on earth, I’d admonish the space dreamers to “clean up your room, first, before you go out to play.”

Responsibility for one’s own domain comes before grand adventures into the unknown.

Think Apollo 17 was in 1972, folks.

Man on the Moon was the great exploration of our time. Yeah, you can get 10 times the bang for the buck with unmanned trips, but how many know anything about the spectacular landing on Titan in Jan 2005- a billion miles away, with an atmosphere 1.5 times Earths pressure, oceans of liquid methane/ethane, rocks of water, and a rain of dirty organics- all at –180C. If it was a manned trip, you would know every gory detail. I covered it at the time and am still flabbergasted what an incredible achievement it was. http://hammernews.com/cloudword.htm

CLOUD WORLD: MISSION to TITAN- Jan 14 the 11 year $3 billion Cassini mission to Saturn, successfully dropped a landing probe into the most earthlike atmosphere in the Solar System, Titan. Bigger than planets Mercury or Pluto, it has a nitrogen atmosphere 1.5 X Earth’s pressure and 4½X as dense. But it is a bitter –178ºC, leading to speculation of lakes, oceans, and volcanoes of liquid methane- photos seem to show that (inc.)

I saw the some of first pictures of the pizza world Io, and the waterworld Europa, and the car crash worlds of Callisto and Ganymede as they came in from the Voyager spacecraft to the Brown Planetary Center before they were ever released to the public and it is one of the great thrills of my life. I worked on a telescope on the best place on the earth to look at the sky- 13,700 ft at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii (which is effectively in the stratosphere cause of peculiar wind currents), and watched colliding galaxies and 2 big comets- Hyakutake and the brilliant Hale-Bopp (biggest, longest, and brightest comet). I watched the awesome Leonid Meteor showers from a beach in Hawaii and a frigid field in RI (a 1966 occurrence had 40 meteors a second, spectators said it looked like you were on a space ship moving at light speed toward the origin); and saw 3 total solar eclipses , and 3 lunar eclipses.

But nothing could compare to the wonder of seeing man ride in a little capsule 60 miles over the moon in Dec ’68 in Apollo 8 (unexpected, unplanned); and then a few months later land and walk on it. As I said in an article about Reagan cutting Voyager funds: even the most primitive African tribesman knows America had reached out and touched the moon, even brought some back with us. The worldwide celebration was spontaneous , heartfelt, wondrous.. and I’ve never seen the world so united and joyful before or since.

If I could, I’d go one way to waterworld Europa, which they think has up to a 60 mile deep water ocean underneath the ice sheets (more than earth?), looking for all the world like Baffin Bay, because I believe in all that water… there has to be life. It’s a tragedy that pinhead bureaucrats canceled the last 3 already built Apollo missions and that there is no Lunar base on the poles, cracking the water for Hydrogen fuel, and breathing and garden and fuel Oxygen. With water you have everything. Who knows what wonders we may have found there that could have changed our life for the better- some solar power breakthrough maybe? They still don’t have the functioning air-launched rocket plane that could radically drop the ridiculous price per lb of orbit (now about $10,000); or the mass driver accelerators to throw stuff into orbit; or the Arthur Clarke dream- the space elevator to geosynchronous orbit- the Fountains of Paradise.

But soon sadly, with the coming global warming, pop explosion, 12 Monkeys pandemic, Antarctic ice-sheet tsunamis catastrophes… the human race is going to be so decimated that the last thing people will think about or do is go into space. So this celebration is also a lament for the lost dreams of mankind.
SPACE ARTICLES:
http://tomhammers.tripod.com/menu.htm#space

Guys,

Let’s remember that the government space program receives far less than 1 percent of our yearly budget. These discussions about ‘cleaning up our own world first’ and ‘not taking money from health care’ are red herrings. There are other more dubious commitments (600 billion/year for ‘defense’, for instance) that deserve your scrutiny.

I do agree that space funding, manned or unmanned, should in the future be geared toward science instead of political stunts.

Does Mars have craters??? It has the highest mountain/volcano and the biggest canyon in the solar system.

Love the pictures, but my question is, why are they going to mars. They might come back with something that is worst then swine Flu. We need to be careful and focus on the planet we live on.

By the time we get to Mars, if we get there, the world might be in a downward spiral caused by not doing enough to ward off global warming.

Getting there might be moot as the earth’s temperature might have risen 3 degrees or more which would be a disaster. We might not need to go to Mars, it’s atmosphere will come to us.

Please explain that weightlessness is not any big concern, and Mars is not an American-only challenge :

Robert Zubrin suggested the spacecraft to be in rotation all along the 6-8 month travel, to create an artificial 0.38g gravity, the same like on Mars. Thus the crew will be in good health to land and work on Mars at arrival. What about Spacecraft’s size? NASA’s opinion? Medical scientists opinions? (instead of braindead counter-measures!)

Also don’t forget that the Moon is just an intermediary step to Mars for non-American people (who will also pay for this adventure, won’t they?)

Thx from France !

Bring a few earth-crossing asteroids to near-earth space. Establish real industry in space, supplying platinum-group metals and other materials to earth.

Don’t send a heavy passenger with an even heavier life-support system to Mars or anywhere just so that there can be a person in the snapshot. For the same costs, we could send vastly more useful unmanned scientific instruments.

There is plenty of water, oxygen and more minerals to grow food in the soils on mars than people realize

Man needs a challenge.We must go forward and terraform MARS! WE will allways have problems on earth to deal with and naysayers like some of these people.
We are looking at a great new frontier and we must explore! WE MUST!

The moon is currently feasible. Mars, currently, is not. Lets do what we currently know exactly how to do technologically, and begin building one nation, together with partners of the world’s existing nations, on the eighth continent – our moon. Armstrong and Aldrin brought the words, “We came in peace for all (humankind)” there 40 years ago. It is time we should follow up on that! There is already overpopulation on our earth. “A one planet society will not survive”. Helium 3 is a key reason for building in to that promise – safe, radioactive-free nuclear energy for there, and for export back here to earth.

God bless Robert Zubrin for his passion and zeal in pushing for a manned voyage to Mars. It would be a most exciting venture. However, if such a complex mission were ever to fail, it could set back manned exploration of space for a very long time. This project must not be rushed. I do not believe that successful robotic missions to Mars in any way provides confidence in a manned mission. The duration is too long, particularly if the crew is confined to a small “tin can” space ship. Dangers of radiation & micrometeorites are potentially lethal. It is reassuring that the very serious problem of weightlessness is being addressed. Two “tin cans” swinging around each other on a string (or tether) is almost ridiculous, but some method should be found. I am also very concerned from the point of view of reliability, maintainability and availability with the complexity of systems & equipment required. These “..ilities” are of course necessary for the most important one, namely survivability. A great deal of failure mode analyses must be carefully done. I believe, as others do, that a voyage of this nature should include a number of ships (3 – Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria?) and travel in a convoy. These ships should be properly sized and designed for the challenging voyage envisioned. Of course that means more time and money. Sending life support and habitat on ahead is a great idea. I hope that the planners and designers exercise great caution so as not not rush such a historic trip. Good luck.

We should not be mistaken: the target is Mars, not the Moon. It is on Mars than we can really make Science worth our spendings.

Mars is more similar to Earth. Water has altered the Martian rocks over hundred of millions of years and possibly started the process of Life. The Moon has been dry and sterile since it was created. On Mars, we have matter to look at and scrutiny to understand ourselves and the Universe.

Mars is less dangerous than the Moon thanks to a gravity twice as strong, some atmosphere to protect the astronauts against solar and cosmic radiations. The Martian dust is also possibly less aggressive than the Lunar dust which is more pristine and sharp because on Mars grains of dust have been somewhat worned out and softened by billion of years of atmospheric erosion.

Mars is more economical because we can use its atmosphere to produce our oxygen and methane to move and retruen to Earth. We can do it with today’s technology which is not the case with Helium 3 because, do not be mistaken, we CANNOT control the nuclear process which would allow us theoretically to use it. We can also benefit from Mars days and nights which are similar to ours (24h38mn) to work, grow vegetables, raise animals. We cannot do that on the Moon which has 14 hours day long night and where we have no choice but to use artificial light (except on very small areas at the poles).
The Moon has almost certainly no water.

During the trip, we can use artificial gravity as described by Robert Zubrin (rotation of the couple created by the last burnt out stage of the launcher tied to the habitat).

Let us not waver! Going to Mars can open us the door to Space and myriads of possibilities but…nothing is written. We have to decide it and we have to fund it. On to Mars!

We often hear of JFK’s dreams for his presidency, but his quote is usually only 1/2 there. He said he hoped to “put a man on the moon and SEE THAT NO CHILD WENT TO BED HUNGRY” Even though I’m for space technology in times of peace and prosperity here on this planet, it seems better to use the money trying to get to Mars to fulfill the second part of JFK’s dream and work on world poverty and the hunger crisis here. That would be a more priceless heritage to leave our world than all the trips to outer space. We could also put our efforts into keeping space for peace and work on the end of our militarization of space.

To bean-counters: Zubrin’s Mars Direct Plan costs only $5B per year, a fraction of NASA’s $15B budget, which itself is less than a half a percent of the $3T federal budget.

If this was sufficiently addressed in subsequent comments, my apologies for not having read them all, but with regards to “clean up your room first”:

While it’s a cute psychological trick to suggest without directly stating that advocating space development is childish and immature, I would suggest instead asking yourself whether an ever-increasing population stuck in an increasingly cramped area with limited energy and land would ever permanently stop fighting over said energy and land? And does anyone seriously believe that said area would, in the long term, tend in the direction of increasing “cleanliness”?

Ever grown a potted plant? If you refuse to repot as it grows, no amount of care is going to save it in the long run. Stepping back from analogies to our actual situation, it’s going to take a lot of resources to make significant inroads into space. As long as we sit here on our pile of finite resources and wait, it’s only going to get harder.

Of course we should go back to the Moon, and on to Mars! And we should explore the asteroids and devise a plan for protecting our world from the next killer object from space. As others have said, even at the height of the Apollo program, space exploration was only a small fraction of the national budget. And there are plenty of willing international partners. It is misguided to say we should solve our problems here at home first. There’s no reason not to do both.

But as to which body we should (re)visit first, to me the most obvious difference between the Moon and Mars is that the Moon is three days away in the event of an emergency, while Mars is six months away. We have much to learn before we’re ready to establish long-term habitations on another world. Let’s do it on the nearby world first, and gain the experience. Or even on near-Earth asteroids. And then go to Mars.

Mars may be the more inspiring destination–and inspiration is indeed important–but I fear that a trip straight to Mars would be a repeat of the Apollo experience: a glorious triumph, followed by a collapse of public support, and another forty years before the next visit.

Phyllis, you are retarded.

We should spend several $billion per year on a human mission to Mars. If we weren’t wasting so much on the space shuttle and the interboring space station, we’d have plenty for a human Mars mission.

We’ve sent robots to Mars before and they’re great, but we should aspire to spreading our species to other planets. We are pioneers by nature and the inspiration, passion, and greater purpose will be only be realized by a human Mars mission, not by a nostalgic trip to the boring, old moon.

The moon is a dead end, not a stepping stone.

Human Mars Mission First!

The earth-first argument and economic resource argument are both answered by well-established truths of scientific and space exploration:

- If we’re worried about the environment, let’s relieve the load on the ecosphere by getting off-planet. Let’s learn about appropriate eco-management by experiencing closed-system space travel and harsh-environment living.

- Mars is cheap (compared to bank bailouts and other recent dubious expenditures) and has major returns on investment. Look at your cell phone, tennis shoes, computer, television, etc.

- the biggest return on Mars investment is in education. More engineers, more scientists, etc. means a stronger, more vibrant economy. And that is America’s economic survival depends upon! Not more lawyers and mutual fund advisors.

This was an interesting program that raised a number of good points. My only concern is that, 40 years after Apollo 11, it focused narrowly on one government space program and one choice: moon vs. Mars.

I suggest we go to both places as part of a robust global space program that includes all the nations that might want to participate, as well as the burgeoning private space industry that is now developing.

This need not be an established government program, just a recognition that there are in fact many countries heading out into the solar system, and that there is a commercial space effort as well.

That’s where the space future is really headed.

Americans are so much in denial about what is happening to our planet it is putting our species, along with countless others in jeopardy of survivable.

Forests are being burned to the ground at a rate that is terrifying. 20% of the rain forest is already lost to this practice. As it progresses faster and faster scientists are warning there is a tipping point where the remaining rain forest will turn into desert.

The oceans are being fished out 4x times faster than their rate of replenishment. 90-95% of all big fish are gone. Immense dead zones are spreading across the globe at the same time cores reefs are dying. The oceans are acidifying as they sink up the carbon we spew into the air. How soon until the oceans are dead to any life?

Americans only see the fresh fish in every supermarket across the country. It’s end is coming fast. It is only still abundant and cheap because industrialized fishing and cheap labor all around the world have made it that way, temporarily.

Global warming is bearing down upon us and we haven’t even begun to do even a tiny fraction of what we will need to do to survive. There will be mass migrations and untold misery. But again humans seem to be unable to see the future even the tiniest bit if it means doing without something today.

The race to mars is very laughable. Especially all the speculation about water on Mars. We are going to run out of fresh drinking water for billions on this planet long before we ever find evidence of it on Mars.

I feel like the people who are so excited about exploring space are like young children. They have no real perspective on life around them. It is all about how something makes them feel. No regard for what’s going on around them.

Too bad we did this to ourselves. We could have gone in such a different direction. One where going to Mars was a real possibly. But that spaceship has sailed. We are about to reap what we have sown on this planet.

Good luck to all.