Discussion on space exploration

[Caitlin]

This forum has hit a dry spell recently. There is not a lot of news being reported, mostly because the major media outlets are in hyperdrive and focusing their reporting efforts on hot button issues that are better discussed in Nicoleta's Campaign Bus. Being that I am not an active subscriber to any newspapers, magazines (Good Housekeeping doesn't count) or websites, I don't find much unless I really dig, which I haven't had much time to do recently.

So instead, I'm going to open a discussion thread about one of my favourite scientific topics, space exploration. We can get into (lighthearted) debates about the merits of space exploration, the possibilities of travel at sub-light and faster-than-light speeds, general finds in the cosmos, etc.

I'll start the discussion off, but feel free to speak about whatever you like within the confines of space exploration. Given the current problems of disease, famine and war on our planet, is it justified to spend such a large amount of the world's economy in exploring outer space? To develop new technologies that may not have immediate impact on the problems our societies face, rather than combat those problems? Or should we aim at colonizing Mars and the moon for raw materials, establish farms, etc for goods and services that can be used to solve our problems back on Earth?

 

[Shinobu]

Are we really spending that much money on space programs? America's NASA funding is tiny in comparison to federal government expenditures on things like healthcare. I don't know how much other countries are spending on space exploration though.

 

[DerMißingno]

No, we don't spend a lot of money on space programs. NASA is the most advanced space program in the world and it accounts for less than 0.5% of the national budget.

I could sit here and list all of the things that the space program has done which impact our everyday lives, and it would be quite a long list, but I believe the relevance of that would be very small to why space programs are important. Likewise, someone could list all of the other things that are wrong with the world that we could be spending the half penny that we spend on NASA to fix, but I think that would also be irrelevant. It's like when a parent tells a kid he should finish his broccoli because there are starving children in Africa. Whether or not the kid eats the broccoli has absolutely no bearing on whether or not children will be starving in Africa.

 

[Hunter Blade]

I agree. No matter how much we spend on poverty and hunger, there's never going to be an end to it. It has been, and always will be part of civilization. Cutting the space program would only free up extra money for other government projects that have nothing to do with poverty. This way we're at least seeing helpful advances in technology and research.

 

[DerMißingno]

A lot of scientists say that the human space flight program should be scrapped because better science can be done at a much lower cost only using robots. Humans are difficult to get into space. They need to eat and breath, they need pressure, they need to sleep and have leisure time, and they make mistakes sometimes. Any extra mass added to a launch increases the cost. Do you think the manned space flight program is worth it or do you think space is just for robots? I'll give my response after other people do.

 

[Caitlin]

Robotic space travel at first seems like a must. My inner sci-fi nerd wants human space exploration to continue though. We're eventually going to need to get off of this rock and out into other star systems, there's so much out there for us, even if intelligent life isn't among what we can find.

 

[DerMißingno]

I'm going to basically parrot Neil DeGrasse Tyson's opinion on this. We need the manned space program because the general public cares about people more than it cares about robots. People like Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Yuri Gagarin, Sally Ride, Alexei Leonov, Alan Shepherd, etc. are household names. Manned space flight makes heroes, and it puts a human face on all this stuff that is going into space.

There were a lot of robots that went to the moon, and even Mars and Venus before we landed humans on the moon, but the public didn't huddle around their TV to listen to them, they huddled around their TV to hear "The Eagle has landed" and "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Facebook didn't go crazy when the Spirit and Opportunity stopped transmitting, and no one ridicules their piers for not knowing about the Venera program, but when Neil Armstrong died that was exactly what happened.

So basically the short version is we need the manned space flight program because they don't name high schools after robots.

 

[Hunter Blade]

I know a bit about the space program, but I don't actually know what the Venera program is. Whoops.

 

[DerMißingno]

I know a bit about the space program, but I don't actually know what the Venera program is. Whoops.

It's a Soviet program that sent probes to Venus. They were the first probes ever to land on another planet and transmit data from the surface. It's pretty cool really, a lot of people don't know that we've sent that many things to Venus. For some reason the Soviets really wanted to go there and the U.S. didn't really seem to have any interest.

 

[Caitlin]

I knew of the Venera program, but not quite by name.

Venus has always fascinated me due to its atmospheric makeup and the fact that we can barely see through the thick smog on the surface when we do actually land something on it that survives the atmosphere. I've always wondered what caused it to become so hostile, and I've subscribed the theory that some form of intelligent life lived there at one point but completely destroyed the planet through unchecked industry. I keep hearing that the atmosphere is like "the greenhouse effect on steroids" so it's not 100% unreasonable.

 

[DerMißingno]

One cool thing about Venus is that, even though the surface conditions are very harsh, the conditions at an altitude of 50 km are quite Earth-like. First of all Venus is almost the same size as Earth, so the gravity there is about 0.98 g. The pressure at that altitude is about the same as it is here on Earth, and the temperatures are about 0 to 50 degrees C. Basically if there was a floating colony at that altitude on Venus, a person would be able to go outside relatively comfortably with only a respirator. Any breech in a structure would not cause any kind of decompression since the pressure would be pretty much the same on the inside as it is on the outside.

 

[Big Lutz]

One thing I am surprised that hasn't been pointed out is that in this one week there are three different tragedies that should be remembered

Jan. 27, 1967 Apollo 1 fire
Jan. 28, 1986 Challenger Explosion
Feb. 1, 2003 Columbia broke up on re-entry

It's almost shocking how some of the largest NASA tragedies have happened all within a one week time frame.

 

[Hunter Blade]

Wait, wait, those were this past week and Columbia is tomorrow? Why haven't any news stations done "Remembering the..." stories about them?

 

[Dralcax]

By the way, I was wondering, did they ever actually send that probe to Europa? I heard tons about it as a kid but never heard anything about their findings.

 

[DerMißingno]

Several probes have passed by Jupiter and photographed Europa, but none have been sent specifically to Europa. The only probe to ever land on one of Jupiter's moons was the Huygens probe, which took and transmitted this picture from the surface before freezing to death:

Titan has one of the thickest atmospheres in the solar system with about four times the density of Earth's at sea level. It also features hydrocarbon oceans, as well as a reverse greenhouse effect that keeps it extremely chilly.

 

[Nero the Giant Whiscash]

Here is some thing exciting to read and i am like WTF. Discuss

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Soviets Planned to Accept JFK’s Joint Lunar Mission Offer
by Frank Sietzen "SpaceCast News Service"
Washington DC - October 2, 1997

[Soviet Premiere Nikita S. Khrushchev reversed himself in early November, 1963 and had at the time, decided to accept U.S. President John F. Kennedy's offer to convert the Apollo lunar landing program into a joint project to explore the Moon with Soviet and U.S. astronauts, SpaceCast learned Wednesday from one of the last remaining participants in the decision still alive.

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the world's first space satellite, the Soviet Sputnik 1, Sergei Khrushchev, eldest son of the former Premiere and Soviet Union Communist Party General Secretary said that his father made the decision in November 1963 following a renewed Kennedy initiative to sell the Soviets on a joint manned lunar program.

"My father decided that maybe he should accept (Kennedy's) offer, given the state of the space programs of the two countries (in 1963)", Khrushchev told SpaceCast following a talk before a NASA conference in Washington on the effects of the historic Sputnik launch on Oct. 4, 1957. Sputnik was the world's first artificial satellite of the Earth, and its autumn 1957 launch into orbit is widely credited with starting the superpower space race that lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1991.

Kennedy had made the offer of a joint manned lunar program to the Russians on several occasions, but his most aggressive effort was made in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 20, 1963 in New York.

At the end of that address, Kennedy said: "In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity - space - there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts."

"I include among these possibilities," he added, "a joint expedition to the Moon." Why, the President asked, should the United States and the Soviet Union conduct parallel efforts that would include "duplication, of research, construction, and expenditure?"

He laid out a proposal for a joint series of space missions, which if enacted, he said "will require a new approach to the Cold War." But like his earlier proposals to the Russians on joint manned spaceflight, this one also was rejected by the Khrushchev government.

But Sergei Khrushchev told SpaceCast, that in the weeks after the rejection, his father had second thoughts. While the Premiere had agreed with Russian military leaders that said any joint Moon flight would provide an opportunity for the U.S. military to learn more about Russian rocket and missile programs, he now thought that it might be possible to learn more from the technology of the Americans.

"He thought that if the Americans wanted to get our technology and create defenses against it, they would do that anyway. Maybe we could get (technology) in the bargain that would be better for us, my father thought."

In late 1963, the Russian government was still designing their lunar launch vehicle, the N-1, and their manned spacecraft system, the Soyuz. Ultimately, the N-1 was abandoned following repeated launch failures. The Soviet manned lunar program would also be abandoned in the early 1970's following the U.S. landings in the Apollo program. The Soyuz was developed, however and became the spacecraft used in Russian space station programs, from the early 1970's right on through to today's MIR station.

Sergei Khrushchev also said his father viewed the prospects of new western cooperation linked with plans to cut back on the Russian Army size from its level of 2.5 million men in 1963 to possibly as low as 500,000 conscripts. And Khrushchev was also planning to begin diverting weapons complex design bureaus into more consumer and commercial, non-military production, a process started by the Yeltsin government that is still evolving in today's Russia.

If these newest revelations are correct, the prospects of a visit to the Soviet Union by President Kennedy during the 1964 Presidential campaign, suggested by several former Kennedy administration staffers or a visit to Russia early in a Kennedy second term might well have cemented the joint lunar plan. And such a Kennedy/Khrushchev initiative might have staved off the planning of a coup that eventually removed Khrushchev from office in October, 1964.

"I think," Sergei Khrushchev said, "if Kennedy had lived, we would be living in a completely different world." But a week after the reversal decision was allegedly made, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas and the decision was dropped.

Although the Johnson administration made a similar offer for joint manned spaceflights early in 1964, the Russians were too suspicious of the new administration, some analysts have suggested. And, Khrushchev said, much of the rationale for the acceptance of the joint mission plan was the "chemistry" built up between his father and John F. Kennedy, who had clashed repeatedly with the Soviet leader during the previous two years but seemed to be moving towards a new relationship and foreign policy following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy's speech before American University in the summer of 1963, proposing new U.S.-Soviet cooperation and a joint Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The Soviet government viewed the Kennedy initiative started at American University as a major turning point in U.S.-Soviet relations during the Kennedy Presidency.

Analysts, however, must be cautious about Khrushchev's new information. Both the Soviet Politburo and the U.S. Congress would have had to approve the bold plan, which would have abruptly ended the space competition started in 1957, and opened the U.S. space industry to direct Russian involvement, a radical idea in the 1960's Cold War environment.

Some have also suggested that, given the political atmosphere of the time, the U.S. Congress of 1963/64 would not have looked too favorably on dropping a space program sold primarily as "beating the Russians to the Moon" for one that would, in essence, bring them along on a spacecraft and booster paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.

But Kennedy fretted over the cost of the Apollo program almost literally until the day he died. A joint plan would have preserved the project while reducing the cost, further shifting its rationale onto foreign relations and superpower stability - goals now identified with the current US-Russian space partnership and a reason often given today for continuing the program. And had the President lived to conduct a 1964 campaign, U.S.-Soviet cooperation following years of tension may well have been a central element to the foreign policy espoused during that election effort. The available documentary evidence suggests that Kennedy was moving towards a new cooperative relationship with the Soviet government that he hoped to expand following a reelection in 1964.

But history will never know what possibilities existed in the space program that was not to be, in what Sergei Khrushchev called "those wonderful golden years" now long passed into the mists of history. ]


SOURCE

 

[Hunter Blade]

Titan has one of the thickest atmospheres in the solar system with about four times the density of Earth's at sea level. It also features hydrocarbon oceans, as well as a reverse greenhouse effect that keeps it extremely chilly.

Something built to survive freezing in space can't survive freezing on a planet?

 

[DerMißingno]

Titan has one of the thickest atmospheres in the solar system with about four times the density of Earth's at sea level. It also features hydrocarbon oceans, as well as a reverse greenhouse effect that keeps it extremely chilly.

Something built to survive freezing in space can't survive freezing on a planet?

It's different when you are in space and when you are in atmosphere. Its the whole heat vs. temperature thing. In the vacuum of space it is not difficult to keep the on board systems warm because they generate their own heat and there is nothing there to conduct that heat. In fact overheating is even more of a problem in space because a lot of the time you're in direct view of the sun and it's difficult to radiate your heat. Just think about how hot your computer's processor gets and how much it relies on moving air from the fan to keep it cool.

In atmosphere, there is a lot of convection going on which makes it very difficult to stay warm. Titan is particularly hostile because of its reverse greenhouse effect keeping the sun out.