Daunting space mission: Send astronauts to asteroid

[uscitizen]

I Considering the moon is a mere quarter of a million millions away and Mars averages around 300 MILLION miles away, it's like building a gas station next door on your way to driving to California.

(The retard doesn't get the immense fuel/weight advantage of an escape velocity of 2.4 km/sec instead of 11.2 km/sec. )

What did you do in physics class - masturbate in the last row?

Now that's hilarious. The amount of fuel your talking about is negligible when comparing a quarter of a million miles with 300 MILLION miles. Look at the size of the rockets it took to go to the moon. They were huge. Sure they coasted, but it took a lot of fuel to get up to the speed needed to coast and a lot of fuel to slow down. Then you have to come back the same way.

Why do you think they are talking "ion" drive and using the gravity of earth and the moon? They start the ion drive ship and use the earth's and moon's gravity to increase speed to the point where you can sling shot off into space. They can do it over and over again for a long period of time to build up speed and no one even has to be on board. Then you use a fast rocket to catch up and dock with it and load it with passengers and whatever else they need.

Right wingers think they should just go ahead and build a "warp" drive and get it "out of the way'. Now THAT is hilarious. No wonder they don't make good scientists.

There is no warp drive, just the teleportation drive. With which you really do not go faster than light. you just kinda jump from one point to another pretty much instaneously.
After all a person cannot be in two places at the same time can they?

 

[rdean]

(The retard doesn't get the immense fuel/weight advantage of an escape velocity of 2.4 km/sec instead of 11.2 km/sec. )

What did you do in physics class - masturbate in the last row?

Now that's hilarious. The amount of fuel your talking about is negligible when comparing a quarter of a million miles with 300 MILLION miles. Look at the size of the rockets it took to go to the moon. They were huge. Sure they coasted, but it took a lot of fuel to get up to the speed needed to coast and a lot of fuel to slow down. Then you have to come back the same way.

Why do you think they are talking "ion" drive and using the gravity of earth and the moon? They start the ion drive ship and use the earth's and moon's gravity to increase speed to the point where you can sling shot off into space. They can do it over and over again for a long period of time to build up speed and no one even has to be on board. Then you use a fast rocket to catch up and dock with it and load it with passengers and whatever else they need.

Right wingers think they should just go ahead and build a "warp" drive and get it "out of the way'. Now THAT is hilarious. No wonder they don't make good scientists.

There is no warp drive, just the teleportation drive. With which you really do not go faster than light. you just kinda jump from one point to another pretty much instaneously.
After all a person cannot be in two places at the same time can they?

If it's "teleportation" it's not really a "drive". Drive implies directional movement, with teleportation, you are just "there".

Now a "warp" drive is something scientists can make. Ask a Republican.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Develop "warp" engines? Hilarious. Someones been watching too much "Star Trek".

Considering the moon is a mere quarter of a million millions away and Mars averages around 300 MILLION miles away, it's like building a gas station next door on your way to driving to California. It makes way more sense to build the gas station "halfway" to California, wouldn't you say?

And consider some of those asteroids. Some are almost pure iron 9 to 11 miles across. That makes it a tiny moon.

And think about this, why do scientists work so hard to find water on the moon? Or Mars? Give up? Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. One means breath, the other is fuel.

Now one of the most interesting things about asteroids is many of them are made up of water. Just floating around. Oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen for energy, oxygen for life.

With the right asteroid, you could build a city way more easily than you could on Mars. Weightlessness takes way less energy. Raw material just floating around. Water right there for hydroponics for food and energy. Brilliant.

You're a bigger moron than I thought you were.

I'm sorry Frank. It just occurs to me that you may not know water is made from "hydrogen" and "oxygen". Just to make sure, you do know the earth is round? Right?

That you don't see and understand the problem is not surprising at all.

 

[Liability]

The daunting aspect of the mission identified, by the absurd little man, in the OP is even more daunting when you consider that President Obama is content with having us hail a taxi.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

All this has to be ready to launch by 2025 by presidential order.

Presidential order? Is that something like a decree from god? Presidents in this country do not issue presidential orders, nor can they tell us want to do 14 years down the road.

It has the dreamers of NASA both excited and anxious.

"This is a risky mission. It's a challenging mission," says NASA chief technology officer Bobby Braun. "It's the kind of mission that engineers will eat up."

This is a matter of sending "humans farther than ever before," says NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. It is all a stepping stone to the dream of flying astronauts to Mars in the mid 2030s.

"I think it is THE mission NASA should embrace," says University of Tennessee aerospace professor John Muratore. "To be successful at this mission, you've got to embrace all of the technologies that you need for Mars."

The reason NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and others give is that this mission could save civilization.

Save civilization? Talk about hyperbole.

If NASA goes to ion propulsion, the best bet would be to start the bulk of the ship on a trip to and around the moon without astronauts. That would take a while, but if no one is on it, it doesn't matter, Joosten says. Then when that ship is far from Earth, astronauts aboard Orion would dock and join the rest of the trip. By this time, the ship would have picked up sufficient speed and keep on accelerating.

What?

Let me get this straight. NASA has to perfect a new technology, build an unmanned ship that uses it, send it off, and then catch up to it using chemical propulsion? That is not an engineer talking, it is a fantasy writer.

Much of the habitat could be inflatable, launched in a lightweight form, and inflated in space. On Friday, July 22, 2011, NASA announced a competition among four universities to design potential exploration habitats.

Daunting space mission: Send astronauts to asteroid | R&D Mag

Brilliant plan by visionairies. Truly brilliant.

It is visionary, that does not make it brilliant.

 

[Old Rocks]

Hmmm..... When President Kennedy stated that we would put a man on the moon in less than a decade, I thought, nice, but what are you drinking right now. Well, we did it.

If we truly choose to put men out in the asteroid belt in a generation, we can do it. Of course, we will always have the 'No we can't' people around.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Hmmm..... When President Kennedy stated that we would put a man on the moon in less than a decade, I thought, nice, but what are you drinking right now. Well, we did it.

If we truly choose to put men out in the asteroid belt in a generation, we can do it. Of course, we will always have the 'No we can't' people around.

Deany didn't realize that we were talking about putting Men out in the asteroid belt; you at least mentioned it.

Can you tell Deany the location of this Asteroid belt?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Hmmm..... When President Kennedy stated that we would put a man on the moon in less than a decade, I thought, nice, but what are you drinking right now. Well, we did it.

If we truly choose to put men out in the asteroid belt in a generation, we can do it. Of course, we will always have the 'No we can't' people around.

There is a slight difference between Kennedy and Obama, Kennedy was a leader. Obama, on the other hand, has a been there done that attitude about going to the moon, and did not even attempt to inspire the nation to get to Mars, or even an asteroid. He only made that speech to NASA.

That means it will not happen because the nation is not trying to do it.

 

[HenryBHough]

It'll happen if Our Kenyan President can convince China to lend him enough money to rent a spacecraft from Russia.

 

[shintao]

The left thinks that the US can't afford to be the world's policemen but they think the US is responsible to take care of threats from outer space. Maybe the assumption comes from a century of Hollywood propaganda. Bill Clinton sold space technology to China. Let them take care of it.

yeah, Bush Sr. sold China space technology as well, so let china take care of it.

 

[CitizenPained]

I'm glad for NASA. The 'trickle down effect' of technology that NASA develops that makes my life better is noted.

But seriously, if we're going to go to Mars (and wherever else), we may need practice first. It took 'seven years' to get to the moon, but there was a lot more planning and science that came before that. Since Galileo, really.

 

[Liability]

(The retard doesn't get the immense fuel/weight advantage of an escape velocity of 2.4 km/sec instead of 11.2 km/sec. )

What did you do in physics class - masturbate in the last row?

Now that's hilarious. The amount of fuel your talking about is negligible when comparing a quarter of a million miles with 300 MILLION miles. Look at the size of the rockets it took to go to the moon. They were huge. Sure they coasted, but it took a lot of fuel to get up to the speed needed to coast and a lot of fuel to slow down. Then you have to come back the same way.

Why do you think they are talking "ion" drive and using the gravity of earth and the moon? They start the ion drive ship and use the earth's and moon's gravity to increase speed to the point where you can sling shot off into space. They can do it over and over again for a long period of time to build up speed and no one even has to be on board. Then you use a fast rocket to catch up and dock with it and load it with passengers and whatever else they need.

Right wingers think they should just go ahead and build a "warp" drive and get it "out of the way'. Now THAT is hilarious. No wonder they don't make good scientists.

There is no warp drive, just the teleportation drive. With which you really do not go faster than light. you just kinda jump from one point to another pretty much instaneously.
After all a person cannot be in two places at the same time can they?

Interestingly enough, advanced physics has already performed the minor miracle of "teleportation," although (as I grok it) it involved particles of light as opposed to "matter."

That may yet turn out to have some amazing applications for mankind, even if progress is slow and not generally known to most of the people for a long time.

The point, of course, is that despite the attitude of ludites like rdunce, it is not inconceivable that we will eventually come up with practical applications for notions that are, today, merely science fiction.

 

[Old Rocks]

Hmmm..... When President Kennedy stated that we would put a man on the moon in less than a decade, I thought, nice, but what are you drinking right now. Well, we did it.

If we truly choose to put men out in the asteroid belt in a generation, we can do it. Of course, we will always have the 'No we can't' people around.

There is a slight difference between Kennedy and Obama, Kennedy was a leader. Obama, on the other hand, has a been there done that attitude about going to the moon, and did not even attempt to inspire the nation to get to Mars, or even an asteroid. He only made that speech to NASA.

That means it will not happen because the nation is not trying to do it.

LOL. Really? Right up until President Kennedy was assinated, the right wing of that day refered to him as "That Pinko Punk in the White House". About every other week, there was an article concerning how he was going to let the Pope run the nation.

Kind of hard to talk about going to the asteroid belt when we cannot afford to repair the bridges on our Interstates. And if he had suggested something like that in a State of the Union address, you people would have been all over him for suggesting it.

 

[flacaltenn]

OleRocks:

Kind of hard to talk about going to the asteroid belt when we cannot afford to repair the bridges on our Interstates. And if he had suggested something like that in a State of the Union address, you people would have been all over him for suggesting it.

Yes we would. And even now -- it's nowhere close to "brilliant or civilization saving"..

To leverage technology from the space program that we can use to pull the USA BACK towards technical relevence -- MANNED space flight reduces the bang for the buck.. Especially with the poor photo-op opportunities of being on a space boulder.

But if you look at the potential gains in artificial intelligience, robotics, materials science, autonomous vehicles that CAN BE had from UNMANNED space flight ---- that's the larger ROI.. And it DOES means Jobs, jobs, jobs.. In technologies that will make cheap labor irrelevent again. When we have a lead in smart, mobile, robotic labs that can survive a trip thru the solar system -- we will also be capable of redefining the manufacturing process and less dependent on repetitive human labor..

 

[CrusaderFrank]

We have to send a few probes to find just the right asteroid.

Then we'd have to find a way to have a manned flight survive the multiyear journey out and back again, or is it a one way mission?

Yeah, well thought out to say the least

 

[Patrick2]

Now that's hilarious. The amount of fuel your talking about is negligible when comparing a quarter of a million miles with 300 MILLION miles. Look at the size of the rockets it took to go to the moon. They were huge. Sure they coasted, but it took a lot of fuel to get up to the speed needed to coast and a lot of fuel to slow down. Then you have to come back the same way.

Even my astronomy 101 students would laugh themselves silly at your stupidity!

Let's see if I can scope it down so even Mr. Dumber-than-a-box-of-nails can grasp it.

What's the best thing to do: Launch a HUGE rocket with a relatively tiny payload to escape the HUGE gravity of earth, sending a radically scoped down mission to mars, or launch a HUGE payload with a relatively small rocket from the WEAK gravity of the moon, sending a scoped UP mission to mars?

(Any bets on whether the idiot gets it yet? )

 

[HenryBHough]

yeah, Bush Sr. sold China space technology as well, so let china take care of it.

And a good thing he did! Had he not mankind's regression to the dark ages would have nipped along more smartly. At least the Chinese are moving things forward. Aw, what the heck, Russia has already claimed The Arctic (planted flags all over the place via submarine) so why should China not claim everything above the atmosphere?

 

[CitizenPained]

Now that's hilarious. The amount of fuel your talking about is negligible when comparing a quarter of a million miles with 300 MILLION miles. Look at the size of the rockets it took to go to the moon. They were huge. Sure they coasted, but it took a lot of fuel to get up to the speed needed to coast and a lot of fuel to slow down. Then you have to come back the same way.

Even my astronomy 101 students would laugh themselves silly at your stupidity!

You teach, too? Wow, you are a jack of all trades.

 

[Liability]

Even my astronomy 101 students would laugh themselves silly at your stupidity!

You teach, too? Wow, you are a jack of all trades.

EDITED:

I had not noticed that the quote function got misused. Evidently it wasn't rdunce claiming to be the educator.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

The irony is that by 2025 we're more likely to populate that asteroid than ever seeing Democrats pass a real budget