NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:
If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for “the next 50 years.” We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.
>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.
Your comments re cost/lbs to orbit seems weird. Can you post a link discussing this, from the early days?
It doesn't seem supported by wikipedia. There was nothing on e.g. the introduction on the page I link above about the promised cost without crew and with crew, regarding the original sell of the program from NASA.
(Also -- there are big threats to human existence today. One example: Just a bit of lag for development of counter measures to better technology for developing biological weapons. If relatively primitive groups/countries can develop doomsday weapons, we have a real problem. It is a risk the coming 1-2 decades you can't just dismiss seriously.)
So, whatever planet-killing doomsday weapon will wipe out every shred of humanity from Earth, but its operators will just happen to forget to point it at a completely independent, self-sufficient Mars?
I feel that building a 100% successful planet-killing doomsday weapon is far harder then establishing an independent, self-sufficient Mars colony... That will not be affected by it.
The coming decade the answer is obvious -- something biological. It can be moved with e.g. sales of consumer products into a country.
Consider a contagious plague with an incubation time of a few days put into fresh food imported into a set of countries -- it will not be stored in dusty warehouses for weeks before reaching the population.
Large states should be able to do something similar now (this might need a start up time, since the biological weapons research was closed after the cold war) and soon major terror organizations or rogue states might be able to.
Will counter measures (creating vaccines quickly, etc) be ready before alQ have similar capabilities? I have no clue. The first targets would probably include geographic areas with the universities/agencies that could do something about this type of attack anyway.
(Frankly, I'm surprised that I needed to write that. With increasing technological possibilities the power to do harm increase too. If the power to stop harm increase slower...)
Ebola is one of the deadliest viruses. Its kill rate is only about 90%. Most biological agents would be less lethal. Delivery of biological agents on the sort of scale that could threaten the human race requires at the very least missile delivery (countering missiles once they've launched is hard), and then it's dicey: there's so many pockets of low-density population, and if you decide not to target a country, that country can very easily close its borders to protect itself (cf. the Ebola epidemic).
It is much, much easier to kill off the human race using nuclear weapons. And I'm not sure that's possible.
I'd note a simple possible solution to the Fermi paradox: A physics experiment that is logical to do, will discover new physics -- with really big and unexpected results. Or something like that. It seems something kills (or hides) civilizations.
The weaponized diseases were worse than anything natural (e.g. optimized to get a really toxic immune system reaction and so on). And multiple ones could be used at the same time, with different spread mechanisms and incubation times.
But about Ebola -- I have no clue if the kill ratios can be engineered to not go down for a fast spreading disease. (And if I did, I would not be able to talk about it, of course.)
Those militarized diseases are easily enough for an economical (/civilization) collapse, that would take the world at least generations to recover from. Which is bad enough, but is no extinction of course.
I don't know if nuclear weapons are on the table again, despite that they are spoken about in Russia -- it is probably just psychological warfare (maskarovka), everything new from there seems to be a smoke screen.
But how hard would it be for Iran or North Korea to build a Cobalt bomb, the doomsday machine out of Dr Strangelove?
So Mars Rover's, New Horizons, Juno....
Space exploration did not stop.
>NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:
No this isn't what he said, this is why I hate wikipedia they quote mined a sentence from the very last paragraph and made it look like it was saying "if we didn't had the shuttle we would've been on mars", he did not say any such thing, not even remotely.
The Shuttle had many issues, technical, conceptual and also political/budgetary overall it was a chicken and the egg problem with which resulted in that the Shuttle did not fly enough to be economical and was not economical enough to fly ;), and after the challenger disaster the shuttle program also lost most if not all of it's DoD contracts which made things quite worse.
The challenger disaster being on the 25th launch and the "risk aversion" of the US space programme didn't work that well for the Space Shuttle, but nonetheless the Space Shuttle did flew 135 mission which is technically more than the Soyuz (it's on 131 or 132 now), it had 2 loss of crew incidents which is the same as the Soyuz.
That's not to say that the Soyuz is not a great programme on it's own, yes the shuttle was expensive but at the end it wasn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be for some reason.
And again this isn't an argument for the Shuttle, NASA did what it could with the shuttle, the Air Force wanted it, it was supposed to be the cornerstone of space Station Freedom and many other projects including Star Wars and NASA got stuck with it and yes in the later years it fought to keep it alive not because NASA was stupid but because it had no other option since there were no alternatives on the table.
> the Space Shuttle did flew 135 mission which is technically more than the Soyuz (it's on 131 or 132 now), it had 2 loss of crew incidents which is the same as the Soyuz.
Two loss-of-crew incidents very early in the programme (the last in 1971 if I'm reading right) paints a quite different picture from the Shuttle's history.
So you have nothing to say about this weird claim you made about launch costs (or my other points you dismissed), which seems to be contradicted by Wikipedia:
>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.
[Edit: 600$/lbs is in "modern" dollars. In early 70s dollars it was ~ 110$. The real costs were somewhere between one or two orders of magnitude larger, depending on what year you select the dollar. The differential costs can only be a fraction of that.]
>> the Air Force wanted it
As far as I've read, NASA sold the Shuttle to the air force with unrealistic promises. That is why they wanted it. It isn't so?
>> No this isn't what he said
That full paper contained e.g.: the expense of owning and operating [the shuttle], or any similar system, is simply too great. Any new system, to be successful, must offer a much, much lower fixed cost of ownership.
And this was from someone that was as tied to not making NASA look bad as anyone can be!
[Edit: I really can't see that Wikipedia misrepresent Griffin's position, as you claim? Please be more specific about that claim. You really need to show quotes to dismiss wikipedia today.]
>> NASA got stuck with [the shuttle] and yes in the later years it fought to keep it alive not because NASA was stupid but because it had no other option since there were no alternatives on the table.
The Shuttle ate a large part of the NASA budget (30% at least some years), which contained lots of aviation and other programs. The shuttle was a gigantic job program -- that gave NASA, with a big weight to throw around, an incentive to kill off all competing launch systems! There was probably a reason not much happened in launch systems until the Shuttle died...
[edit: The point was, there were no other launch systems not just because the Shuttle took such a gigantic amount of the total budget but also because NASA had motivation to keep the job program going.]
[edit 2 on this: If you put your foot in a trap and can't afford the tools to get the foot out of the trap, because the trap was so expensive -- you're not "stupid"? :-) ]
And, to go back to the original subject, the Orion seems to be another cuckoo, eating up most of the food in the nest. :-(
When someone (at least) seems to know a lot about a subject area and have to dismiss Wikipedia without sources, it is just funny. Or sad.
The original claim was -- "NASA is good at doing very big and actually pretty efficient projects when you take reliability into account."
To support that weird statement, dogma1138 had to make multiple unsupported claims about the Space Shuttle. Like "unique" statements about the horrendous costs and that a NASA administrator is misrepresented about the Shuttle eating the budget (despite other quotes in the same document support that was his position).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...
NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:
If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for “the next 50 years.” We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.
>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.
Your comments re cost/lbs to orbit seems weird. Can you post a link discussing this, from the early days?
It doesn't seem supported by wikipedia. There was nothing on e.g. the introduction on the page I link above about the promised cost without crew and with crew, regarding the original sell of the program from NASA.
(Also -- there are big threats to human existence today. One example: Just a bit of lag for development of counter measures to better technology for developing biological weapons. If relatively primitive groups/countries can develop doomsday weapons, we have a real problem. It is a risk the coming 1-2 decades you can't just dismiss seriously.)