« Giuliani's Judges | Main | Dallas: Where's The Love? » Mars, Bitches12 Mar 2007 01:40 pm NASA can find and track most of the nearby asteroids that could hit and damage the Earth, but there is not enough money in its budget to finish the project within a 15-year deadline mandated by Congress, according to an agency report released Friday. Link. Program costs for doing this properly would be not-very-high in the scheme of things. Instead, we're getting a Moon base. Comments (33)
Most? MOST!? 
Well, according to the article they will have locked on to about 90% of them a year behind schedule. Keeping in mind, that the asteroids capable of doing the most damage are easiest to detect, the 10% remaining are probably not worth worrying about. Having resolved this issue, I would like to turn my focus to more pressing matters. MY, for the love of Christ, could you please change the dark gray background on your site? For some reason, the white and light gray backgrounds don't show up on mobile browsers, so you end up seeing black on dark gray. It's literally ruining my shit, cuz I usually read this blog on my phone's browser while I'm taking a dump. Please help. Thank you.
Be fair. It's not just a moon base; it's a moon base with lasers.
I used to think setting up a base on the moon would be totally awesome. Then I grew up.
> Most? MOST!? With all due respect, it's a big-ass sky. Cranky
But don't worry, we have no shortage of deep-water oil drillers we can send up to blow up any asteroids with a nuke.
> But don't worry, we have no shortage of I just watched that movie last week, which is why the line was at the front of my mind. One later viewing, it remains very cheesy and overall unrealistic, but it does have some elements that are more realistic than other space/asteroid doom movies. Specifically, the "big ass sky" comment is dead on, the depiction of the Russian space station turned out to be fairly accurate (!), and the overall physical effort involved in actually getting huge nuclear weapons to the asteroid and setting them up is at least hinted at. Plus the elven smiths were at the height of their powers when they forged Liv Tyler. Cranky
Red rocks!
I had a wingnut friend (yeah, he'a s friend, yeah, he's a complete wingnut) post this exact same story, only instead of "moonbase" he said "but we global warming scaremongering instead."
" "but we global warming scaremongering instead." Thus confirming that the real reason wingnuts deny global warming is a problem is that it can't be solved by blowin' shit up. They'd probably not care a whit about spending big% of GDP each year for decades, on a probably-never-to-be-used asteroid-exploding system, as long as the promised explosion is big enough. But spending smaller% on reducing carbon emissions? No can do!
well, if it comes to it, the view from the moon base of Earth being destroyed should be sweet.
Bruce Willis is still alive. Ben Affleck is still alive. So we have our plan. Why should we be spending millions of dollars on something Willis and Affleck can take care of? If other countries care, let them spend the money.
"Plus the elven smiths were at the height of their powers when they forged Liv Tyler." Elven Arrowsmiths?
I think the manned Mars mission is nuts but I figured Bush's plan, which establishes a moon base first, as an idea which was agreed upon as sound. Nothing could be further from the truth. The moon base for the Mars mission is universally scoffed at by the space engineering community. I should have known. Now that China has announced a moon mission we probably won't have to pretend we are going to Mars. We've got to take the moon and keep it. Period.
It's been mentioned by more than one SF writer that, if a way could be found to harnass its momentum, one astroid eased into orbit would equal every mine on Earth.
Any guesses as to how many Earth-grazing rocks are out there are exactly that, since there has been no methodical sky survey for near Earth objects. The computer shop I work at has been working with U of Hawaii on the software side of the AFRL-sponsored asteroid detection and tracking system, PanSTARRS. This project dedicates a telescope and attached computer system to photograph and process the entire (Hawaiian) night sky about three times a month. Over the course of a three or four year observation campaign, the boys and girls at the UH IfA hope to catalog just about anything larger than 300m that orbits in our general neck of the woods. Then, we'll have a really good idea whether we're going to be hit any time in the immediate future. As it stands, the funding is more or less there to finish putting the system together, but no one has ponied up the money to do the actual observations.
"It's been mentioned by more than one SF writer that, if a way could be found to harnass its momentum, one astroid eased into orbit would equal every mine on Earth." and if you could turn a liter of water into energy you'd get 25 billion killowatt hours.
As a autodidactic student of rightwing psychology, can someone tell why conservatives are so in love with grand and expensive space projects (mars vrs. hubble). Going on the theory that ideology=psychology, I have been able to explain a lot of weird policy. For example, the conservative psychology is drawn to authority, therefor someone like Giulani is semi-attractive, even though policy-wise he is poison. But why does the conservative psychology get so wet over missions to mars. It seems like exactly the kind of pointless government boondoggle they shoud be opposed to. ps. I have ideas, I just want to hear other peoples ideas.
There's a close encounter coming up in 2026 that I'm quite looking forward to. The other thing about watching the sky that's worth noting is that you don't need a dinosaur killer to cause major damage. A rough estimate of the impact energy of an asteroid is to multiply the mass of the asteroid by 25 to get equivalent yield in high explosive. Calculating backwards, Hiroshima was the equivalent of a 600 ton impactor (roughly 10 meters across). NASA isn't even *looking* for 100 meter potentially hazardous asteroids, i.e. those with an impact energy in the low tens of Megatons.
CW- Perhaps expressed as faith in technology to solve problems & technology as that which uplifts humans out of nature (and into civilisation) and allows society to avoid limits to growth. Similar thing with global warming: carbon tax=hell no; giant aerosol shade to deflect solar radiation=awesome idea. Also tied to love of nuclear power.
InSpace: There is definitly a love of technology in current conservative psych, but where does that come from? It seems contradictory in some ways, becasue technology is definitley connected to progress and progress is not really a core conservative value. It may be that they are still defining themselves against hippies, or something, who were/are very anti-technology. One idea I had about loving space exploration is to view it as conquest. The whole moon/mars base has a definite military undercurrent that is seldom talked about. But I believe that the Bush admin has put out some papers about US hegemony in space.
hopefully whatever hits the Earth, impacts in the Gulf of Mexico
I don't think it would be impossible to fund this using corporate sponsors: "Prudential is tracking potential killer asteroids because ... it's prudential!"
There is definitly a love of technology in current conservative psych, but where does that come from. My guess would be Italian Futurism.
Wow, I'm really surprised at all the animosity directed at the space program. It was Kennedy who sent us to the moon, after all. I happen to think that it was the greatest accomplishment in the history of mankind. Think about all the technological advances that have come from R&D into space. The space program has given us Direct TV, cell phones, computers, GPS, Tang, and astronaut ice cream. It has transformed the world. Let's face it, the more rocket scientists in the US, the better. Of course Bush is no rocket scientist, but I'm willing to bet that even the money spent on his ridiculous goals will be recouped many times over with civilian application of the technologies that are developed.
True, but going to Mars via the Moon is really stupid. a) it's not "on the way there" in any meaningful sense - the delta-v required to get from the Moon to Mars is actually greater than you need to get from Earth orbit to Mars - so it's useless as a waystation; and b) Mars is far more similar to Earth - in terms of temperature, insolation and atmosphere - than it is to the Moon, so it's useless as a testbed. It's like Ranulph Fiennes announcing that he is going to go from Norway to the North Pole via Sicily. As for impacts: really, unless we're very unlucky re: where they hit, megaton explosions are nothing much to worry about. The world is very big, and not much of it is inhabited. Think how many 1-MT nuclear tests there were in the 50s - they just don't have global effects (except fallout, which of course wouldn't apply to impacts).
Anyway, isn't "Mars, bitches" quite literally the most stupid utterance in the history of the Internet?
I would just like to point out that we are *not* getting a moon base- we are merely *talking about building* a moon base - with the concurrent outlay of cash that is needed to get companies like Martin-Marietta and Lockheed to discuss such subjects. As has been pointed out elsewhere (and in great detail), the best waystation to get to Mars would be from Earth orbit, not from the lunar surface. cheers-
Just Karl, The animosity is not directed at the space program. Its directed at the idiotic idea of sending people to the moon and mars instead of robots. You can accomplish more, with orders of magnitude less money, by using robots. And, the technological spinoffs will be much greater because of the investment in robot technology. I mean, just look at the idiotic space station. They've spent billions on it, and now have absolutely no idea what to use it for. In many ways, the Bush administration has been a bizarre throwback to the 1970s, in terms of how they think about things.
Gentlefolk, Support for manned space exploration is a throwback, but not in the way you think. Society didn't change; other planets did. Let me explain. Before WW2, and as late as the 1950s, most people believed that Venus and Mars were shirtsleeve environments in which you could just walk around. (In fact, there was much evidence to the contrary even then, but it didn't sink in until we sent probes to both places in the 1960s.) The rationale for exploration, then, was colonization. And there was romance in that, even without including the not-at-all-crazy belief that it would be a good thing for the future of the human race to put its eggs in more than one planetary basket. What changed wasn't that people grew up, or priorities changed, or the imagery of space became connected with neofacist militarism, or whatever. What changed was that the rocky planets turned out to be horribly difficult places to live. They made Antarctica look congenial. The romance (which Antarctica lacked) was still there. So was the human-survival rationale. (Also lacked by Antarctica.) But nobody in their right mind could imagine a colony on the actual existing Mars --- without a very lucrative economic rationale, who would want to move into an underground cannister for the rest of their lives? And what would be the point of using taxpayer dollars to send them there on nothing more than an extended junket? Some good science, yes, better than robots, obviously ... but fifty billion dollars worth of good science? Probably not. Had Mars or Venus turned out to have an environment like Australia, I would bet my entire annual income that there would be a colony there right now. Heck, I suspect that even an Antarctica-like Mars would have some people on it. But both places turned out to, well, suck. So the dream went away ... for most people. Deferred either until a far future when it would be cheap and easy to go visit these places, or gone forever, but not something for our time. Why the dream didn't go away for everyone, I don't know, but it seems to me that any analysis of the current conservative "Mars, bitches!" thing (talkin' to you, CW) needs to take into account the fact that the early fascination with space exploration assumed that the planets would be inhabitable. The explanation may simply be that non-conservatives found it more easy to change their minds when the facts changed.
Italian futurism, yes! It's all so clear now.
Just want to add something to ajay's point. There is a scenario where getting to Mars from the Moon makes sense. If you actually build your Mars ship on the moon, you get big savings when putting the pieces in orbit. Not that the plan is to do anything like that, of course. I wonder if people remembered that old idea but forgot how it was supposed ot work.
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Heads in the Sand
GOP thought process:
- it would be anti-God to track asteroids. If He wants to smite thee, thou shalt not peek.
- Moon base = more money for Lockheed et al. Support Free Enterprise, baby!!!11!
Posted by kvenlander | March 12, 2007 2:15 PM