NASA spaceflight review concludes agency lacks ability to get humans to Mars

The biggest obstacle to making significant progress in space exploration is a 4 year election cycle and a 1 year budget cycle. Ever since 1969, a manned Mars mission has always been a 20 year endeavor.

Practically speaking, no one seems to be focused on building space infrastructure that is the preamble to a Mars mission. Launch vehicles, first, certainly, but all that should happen after that for a sustainable exploration agenda seems limited to fancy artists renditions and CG animations. We need: a space station for construction, a moon base for prototyping a Mars base and all that must be, then robotic builders establishing the initial, sustainable elements of a Mars base, including return ships, and regular, continuous Earth/Mars shuttles for supplies. None of these can happen in a 4 year election cycle with one year budgeting.

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Did you or did you not suggest that we shouldn’t go anywhere until we are better as species, and we’re likely to export our mistakes if we try? That is defeatist to me. You expect us to fail, so why should we try? If I interpreted that wrong, let me know.

I think we become better as a species, by investing more in science and exploration. Its how we got this far as a species. There is absolutely no good reason for us not to.

1: It will lead to innovation, including technology that could push us to be more sustainable as a species than we otherwise would be.

2: Cost isn’t an issue. A Mars mission would cost somewhere between 6 and 500 billion dollars.

Americans spend 100 billion a year on illegal drugs, and another 100 billion dollars a year on waste disposal. We can totally do 500 billion over 20 years. That is doable. That’s what? 25 billion a year? Which is about what states/local governments spend on the war on drug in a year.

Divide that 25 billion between Europe and the United States and that’s 12 billion dollars a year that the US has to kick in. Doable, and 500 billion is at the high range. I’m quite certain Space X can bring that down.

The point is, the only thing stopping us is our lack of will to do the impossible anymore as a species. We’ve given up on dreaming about the future and a better world. In part because of people like you, who don’t see the point of trying.

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Meanwhile, in Washington DC…

-Honey, do you remember that Spanish restaurant?
-The one with the olive tree and all those fish?
-Yeah, that one. It was pretty nice, right?
-Yes, it was delicious. We had a great time there.
-What if we go again tonight or next weekend?
-Michelle, we’ve been there before.
-And? You loved it!
-We’ve been there before. No need to come back. Ever.
-But…
-EVER!
-Christ, what an asshole!

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I’ve often said that today’s NASA couldn’t find its way back to the Moon if the Sea of Tranquility was a bar in Orlando. And it’s not just about competence, money, the will of the public, or the will of politicians. The whole paradigm has become culturally anachronistic. After 57 years in space, there isn’t a single nation or corporation in the world today with a truly coherent and comprehensive space development plan. How is that possible?

The essential problem of space is our own cognitive dissonance. Our now deep-seated and ultimately irrational cultural desire to personally experience space in conflict with the standards of practicality our society–and physics–imposes. Governments aren’t in the business of inventing new places for people to go and not pay taxes. Corporations are not in the business of seeking ROI that can’t be put in a bank on Earth. Science doesn’t need human hands to do it’s work. The public is no longer satisfied with some vicarious participation through dutiful contribution to the general national productivity. It’s not enough to wave pennants and cheer from outside the space center fence. If they can’t directly, personally, participate they have no reason to care. Engineered heroes don’t matter. We have more active astronauts now than ever in history. How many can you name? Can you describe what they do? The single-most culturally significant event to come from the ISS will be Chris Hadfield’s cover of Major Tom, which Bowie just pissed on. And yet, we still want this as a society. The idea of people going to space is a cultural pursuit, which would be OK if we could actually admit that to ourselves.

But we can’t. Our culture, dominated by economic reasoning, can’t allow itself to value this activity in that context. And so, as the nationalistic motivations of the Cold War were abandoned and the propaganda engines pointed elsewhere, space agencies, space advocacy, and aerospace industry alike cultivated these increasingly complex systems of circular reasoning to justify what had once been easily rationalized by the exhibition of national industrial prowess. Like so many government agencies, NASA resorted to the strategy of a eunuch in the ancient Chinese imperial court–alternately pandering to the vanities of opposing political factions and banking sporadic windfalls against future shortfalls in ways that seemed increasingly wasteful and nonsensical but was actually perfectly logical within Washington’s Forbidden City. They began obsessing with concepts like CATS and magic bullet breakthroughs in the hopes that clever design might somehow cheat physics. They bartered The Dream and the accomplishments of the past till they tapped their cultural currency dry.

I think there is an epiphany coming. One akin to that of oceanographer Bob Ballard when he first experienced the use of the underwater ROV. It was then that he realized that the heroic era of oceanography–the era of costly manned submersibles–was over and that was OK because a new era of opportunity and accessibility was opening right before his eyes. For all the obvious limitations of robots compared to humans, the machines cost far less and could operate for far longer periods and there was no practical difference between the view through a video camera and a porthole. Divers could only work for very short period within a very small volume of the sea and those human advantages mattered very little once people were stuck in a big steel and plexiglass container. The technology of the manned submersible was complex and the risks to human life very high making the whole proposition of exploration extremely costly and thus limited to a tiny elite community. By embracing this new technology, limited as it obviously was at the start, we gained a great expansion in accessibility, participation, and potential activity, scientific and industrial. By letting go of our childhood adventure fantasies we gained a grand re-opening of the marine frontier in shirt-sleeve comfort.

The heroic era of space is over–and good riddance! Man was never going to do the heavy lifting there anyway. That was never in the cards. We were never justifying a human presence in space as a workforce. The astronaut has always lived on borrowed time for the same reasons as the submariner and the factory worker. There is no longer room for humans in the Bottom Line. It’s time for new paradigms about space development that are consistent with a truly 21st century context. That’s not going to come from national space agencies. It’s not going to come from the ranks of space advocacy, which has sadly become a retrofuturist cargo cult. It’s not going to come from Willy Wonka oligarchs. It’s going to have to come from a new generation that understands that the point of going to space is cultural and creative and rests in what we can make out there, not bring back. If we can make that cognitive leap, let go of the past, seek to leverage emergent technology, we can re-open that frontier to its full potential–in shirt-sleeve comfort.

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Beautiful rant. Long, but coherent.

And the climax, “retrofuturist cargo cult”, brilliant!

+10

It’s a little hard for people to justify budgeting something as materially non-productive as space travel when there are far more pressing things to spend money on.

In the 60s, space travel was new and exciting, it was a symbolic competition with the USSR, and the US was enjoying great affluence with high employment rates and manageable poverty levels. None of those things are true today.

So Glitch, even if you dismantled NASA the money spent there wouldn’t solve either of those problems. That 16-17 billion dollar budget isn’t going to help poverty levels if you throw money there (You know, because something like 700 billion was spent on poverty alone in 2011. Mostly on healthcare for the poor), if anything it’ll hurt the economy/mean higher unemployment rates. Worse, brain drain will happen. Are you prepared to see our brightest people go elsewhere? To China, or Europe, etc?

Also, I’ll note that this is an old question your post is wrapped around. The why should we spend money putting stuff in space, when we have problems here on earth. People have been asking that since the 1960’s, and I’m still convinced that that is a short sighted sentiment.

I’d give you an answer as to why that is so, but since its an old question an excellent answer has already been given. Warning, its a bit long but well worth reading.

Though, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here is some meat and gravy. Also, it should be noted that some figures in the letter are outdated. We no longer spend 1.6 percent of our budget on space exploration. Its something like 0.47 percent now.

All this newly acquired technical knowledge is also available for application to Earth-bound technologies. Every year, about a thousand technical innovations generated in the space program find their ways into our Earthly technology where they lead to better kitchen appliances and farm equipment, better sewing machines and radios, better ships and airplanes, better weather forecasting and storm warning, better communications, better medical instruments, better utensils and tools for everyday life. Presumably, you will ask now why we must develop first a life support system for our moon-travelling astronauts, before we can build a remote-reading sensor system for heart patients. The answer is simple: significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.

Spaceflight without any doubt is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spin-offs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation.

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Better? No? Capable of surviving somewhere that we evolved for? Yes, that.

That can be defeatist to you. It isn’t to me. Your sense of reality is quite different from mine.

I am saying we should make it out of primary school before enrolling in the fire academy. We should dream of the fire academy, and not make decisions that stop us from going, someday, when we understand the world (the universe, in this analogy) better.

For now, we can try as hard as we like. We’re not capable of anything but the dreaming part.

It’s a good dream. Do you understand the vastness involved? I say this as someone who has studied planetary biogeology and had a few professors who either came from or went to NASA Ames Closed Ecological Life Support System center *(they;re the people learning how to DO long term space flights) and my very very informed opinion is that interplanetary missions are a great source of practical earth technology and earth science, and earth jobs… and disappointment.

Whereas daydreaming about space is a great way to pass the time if I get bored while volunteering to help actual people with actual problems.

But keep dreaming. I’m not trying to discourage that. I am also not going to be discouraged. It’s no attack on your character to say I find your dreams unrealistic. But I do. Don’t go changing for me!

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That is well stated. It’s a good dream, but so is a functioning republic.

There is no material value in going to Mars. It possesses no resources we can extract, and even it if did it wouldn’t be economical.

Oh! But it’s so darn inspiring! If only we give “our best and brightest” this triumphal challenge of getting us to Mars, they’ll invent all sorts of new space-age technologies!

Bullshit. If all it takes to produce new technologies is a nationally embraced engineering challenge, why not pick one that will actually benefit people? There are countless areas of worthy endeavor we could put that same engineering effort into in our own backyards. How about renewable energy? How about civic reconstruction? How about pollution reduction and environmental rectification?

There are a thousand and one massive engineering problems we could be collectively fascinated by the concept of solving. Why aren’t we?

Because they’re not glamorous. Because they don’t make for good movies and exciting sci-fi nonsense. Because people don’t want clean, affordable energy, they want to have a flying car and a personal jetpack and laser guns. Because people don’t want to improve our biggest cities to make them better places to live, they want to build different cities on giant rotating space stations. Because people don’t want to preserve the environment and stop destroying the planet, they want to find new planets to fuck up with their garbage and their stupidity and their laziness.

Nevermind that we can’t reach anywhere that can support life. It has been estimated that to get to our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, using strictly hypothetical (but fervently hoped for!) technology that might someday exist would take FIFTY YEARS EACH WAY. Hell, it would take over four years just to transmit communications traveling at the speed of light - again, one way!

And Alpha Centauri doesn’t even have planets capable of supporting life!

But let’s do it anyway! Congratulations! After trillions of dollars and billions of manhours and a great big firework display of rocket fuel that we all Ooohed and Aaahed over, we somehow managed to stick a handful of people in a tin can with enough provisions to feed them for half a century; they most likely had to conceive, give birth to, and raise children mid-journey simply to have anyone capable of doing anything useful when they arrived; they somehow didn’t go insane or suffer any of countless possible catastrophes both natural and man-made for that entire time; and now fifty years later they’ve landed on a barren rock with no life and can set up a base, I guess?

Even if they succeed, what is the POINT? We’ve now got a dozen or so people stranded a half century away on an empty planet, who we can’t even effectively communicate with because of the half decade transmission delay! What good does that do anyone? What value is there in that, aside from blind vainglory?

‘Behold! The first humans to step foot on a planet in another star system!’ sounds great, until you realize it means absolutely nothing. You could be the first human to live your entire natural life inside a tiny metal box full of bees if you really wanted to be - but it would still be entirely pointless to do so, record or not.

But I guess the bee box thing would be entirely worthwhile so long as we invented the next big ‘space-age technology’ - like Tang and Velcro and Teflon! Oh wait. NASA actually didn’t invent those. Common misconception.

Of course, they claim to have had a part in countless other inventions. Some they genuinely are responsible for, like freeze-dried food, certain firefighting tools, spaceblankets, memory foam, et cetera. But most of the actually impressive or useful stuff that they claim involvement with? Yeah, invented well after the end of the Apollo program, and technically invented by outside teams “in cooperation with” NASA - which if you look into it, ends up meaning NASA simply let these third parties make use of their reputation to obtain funding and to promote and market the devices once developed.

To attribute these technologies to “the inspiring power of space travel!” is simplistic hogwash. These technologies were developed externally without any specific demand for them from NASA. Where applicable they’ve been adapted for use in NASA’s missions, but their inventions were not directly caused by or intended for the space program.

I’m all for championing the power of the human spirit and motivation, but there have to be sane limits. A glorious future in space isn’t a dream - it’s a delusion. It is an impossible fabrication. It is a comforting lie we tell ourselves out of a desperate need to cling to something bigger than ourselves when we’re no longer comforted by stories of a magic man in the sky who made and rules over everything.

It’s religion for atheists, alongside transhumanism and a handful of others, equally misguided, equally deluded, equally convinced that these things are even remotely possible, to say nothing of likely or reasonable. It is blind faith in the trappings of empirical science.

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Went to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum not long ago. Saturn V Rocket: burned 2.5+ million gallons of fuel in something like 2 minutes, generating ~7 million pounds of thrust. I watched one Space Shuttle launch back in the day and found it to be super cool, so I can only imagine how beyond awesome a Saturn launch (especially a Saturn VI) would be to witness.

But most Americans didn’t write Congress, because most Americans don’t care about that. As long as they’ve got someone working for their hot-button-but-actually-meaningless-in-the-big-picture issues, they don’t give a damn what goes on behind the scenes.

And who keeps re-electing the kleptocrat incumbents and their chosen heirs? The American people, which is why they/we do get - and deserve - the blame.

Yeah, if that was the binary choice that we were facing, but there are plenty of other ways that we can “prove” our worth as a species. Just stopping killing people and bailing out banks without going to Mars would be the tall podium in my book. I love space and science, and I think the case has been made for them, and should continue to be made, but I don’t really see the moral imperative for space exploration, or the need for “you’re either with us or against us” attitude toward science. You can be for alllll kinds of science and not for manned space exloration (even way into space exploration, via other means). For starters, @AcerPlatanoides brought bacteria into the discussion. Now there’s a universe that needs to be understood…

Seriously, that old trope? Did you mean to say, “If man were meant to fly, he’d have wings”? Or have gills to swim? Or do you mean, as you stated earlier, we haven’t evolved the wisdom to do it right, to not fuck up the next planet?

As a species, we have no track record for getting anything right just by sitting around and pondering it. We learn–evolve our brains–by doing. Right now, a space suit and a bunch of tin cans orbiting the earth is the material evidence of our evolution. As for the wisdom to go along with it, experience, along with all the fuck-ups it entails, is the best teacher.

Waiting to evolve, as you suggest, has a huge risk. The biggest fuck-up we can make is to ignore the asteroid strike that will change this planet up beyond all misguided human efforts. It is the one global catastrophe we actually have a chance to avert. Right now we are practically blind with respect to asteroid impact risk. Do we need manned missions to go to Mars to do it? Or manned missions anywhere? Maybe or maybe not, it depends on what asteroids we find and how big they are. Changing the human venue may be our only option for survival. It is far more prudent to develop the capability before the human survival depends on it.

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What part of my post are you disagreeing with? I think you just refuted something I didn’t even think - let alone write.

If NASA funding went way up, I’m not sure if human travel to Mars would be high on the agenda. It’s much much more dangerous than travel to the Moon, and the payoff is pretty small. We no longer need to beat the Russians, and that face up there just ain’t talking.

You said the payoff for putting humans on Mars is pretty small. I disagreed and still disagree. The innovation that could happen as result of a Mars mission especially comes to mind. You have two years to live on Mars, and work towards being sustainable on another planet. That means food production techniques/technology, that means medical care technology, that means renewable energy technology, that means a more efficient water/sewage system.

All this technology would eventually make it to private industry, and benefit humans on earth. That is not a small payoff.

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Kerosene or unleaded? Maybe just pure crude or compressed fracked gas.

Stage I should be a gigawatt-laser-fired compressed-air reaction chamber (recyclable).

You aren’t surviving where you evolved for. You evolved to survive in the Rift Valley of Africa foraging for food. You didn’t evolve to survive in a machine driving down the road or an airplane flying through the sky. You didn’t evolve to survive on massive farming. You didn’t evolve to have medicine, the Internet, or to sail across the oceans. You didn’t evolve to have cities of millions of people that weren’t destroyed by disease. If you think you are currently surviving in a place that you evolved for, you are clearly mistaken.

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Hey look here–> another TL;DR post, except this is totally worth reading. First, I spent an hour writing a comment all about lack of vision. Then I re-read the comments here. Then, I ACTUALLY READ THE NASA REVIEW REPORT! Well, I read the intro and skip/scanned the report, download here, which is more than most. Here’s what I found:

It clearly outlines the obstacles, stating clear pathways are needed for NASA’s human spaceflight program to be viable. An operational pace needs to be set that will work within a budget, on time, with clear decision-making capacity for budget and political variances. Political cycles are the true enemy, always have been, undermining long-term (decade) projects. ISS is expensive. And, there is no way to reach Mars under the current budgetary and political constraints (but you knew that already). There’s much more; lots of background on other space programs, a bit of history, summary of prior reports etc. Notable comment about the slow-and-steady approach China has taken to their human spaceflight program, contrasting to US and Russian stalls and starts, etc.

My initial take-away is not so much what it said but what it didn’t: U.S. congress needs to shit or get off the pot with the NASA budget; lack of governmental decision-making capacity and politicking is NASA’s enemy #1. Another might be that if human spaceflight is untenable within this budgetary regime, which seems normalized, then NASA should exit or seriously reduce human spaceflight and concentrate on doing a good job with unmanned missions; prepare to expect less, with a reduced role relative to other space programs worldwide. Again, this is my opinion. A third thought is that NASA can play the game too, and should stop shouldering the load of dreamers unless they want to pay (I’m sure they are, what do I know?). I note that NASA budgets in the past decade were mostly higher than or equal to the yearly budgets for the 70s, 80s and 90s (wikipedia) (normalized to account for inflation) and that to develop and launch a Saturn V to the Moon took a multi-year budget about double the current year budget…so, we’re supposed to go to Mars on half the budget? (I’d take a string of new Cassini/Galileo/SOHO/New Horizon missions over that, thank you).

Mars is still the bar. Translation: we don’t have a clue what to do once we’re “in space”, so, Mars it is! (sending a few people to mars is not ‘colonizing’, btw, you need hundreds to start and thousands to sustain) NASA decided on asteroid retrieval because it was do-able). So now I revert to my original–unpublished comment–which I paraphrase as: Lack of XvisionX comprehension.

And with that…I can only hope NASA, in it’s greatest moment of pride and wisdom, cuts the human program down to the quick, dominates the robot probe/2nd gen space telescope/remote sensing mission sector for the next two decades while the private sector, gets up to speed with their own ‘vision’. If that disappoints anyone (here) then take a good look at the current program: on-edge and stretched; held together by the congealed blood and tears of dedicated defenders.

TL;DR ? really? come on, try the third paragraph at least.