In a country that plays "Star Trek" on TV for fifty years, and flocks to "Star Wars" movies, there are probably votes to be had from space exploration. Perhaps as many votes as the greenies have for shutting stuff down. As long as we are funding NASA we ought to ask them to do something for the money. The last eight years under Obama have been uninspiring. NASA got it's funding every year and produced little to nothing. They did manage to spend all the money though.
Four NASA missions for the future occur to me.
1. The Obama mission, draw your pay and do nothing.
2. The return to the Moon mission. This is clearly doable, we did it back in the '70s. Question: What could we accomplish? Setting up a permanent moonbase is surely possible, but what would it do? Mining, manufacturing, hydroponic farming? Astronomical observatory? I read as much science fiction as anyone, but I think a permanent moonbase might turn out like the International Space Station, cool, but what does it do?
3. The Mars mission. This could be a toughie. The flight to the Moon is a matter of days, round trip to Mars is a couple of years. The lunar mission can carry enough air, water, food, and fuel to last the trip. A two year Mars mission would have to recycle air and everything else, and grow food in flight. This means a bigger ship, more equipment and gear, much higher standards of air tightness. Plus make a jet landing on Mars, a blastoff back to orbit, and have enough fuel for the return to earth. None of this is impossible, but it's harder. The payoff? It's a first, it will go down in the history books, and we might discover life on Mars. Even some fossil bacteria would be exciting.
4. The asteroid mission. Fly to the asteroid belt and match orbits with a medium size asteroid. This is actually easier than the Mars mission. It doesn't have to land and blast off again which simplifies things a lot. The time to fly out and back is a little longer than going to Mars, but not that much longer. Scientific payoff might be high, examination of the asteroid might give important clues to the origin of the Solar system. And it would be a first, go into the history books.
It would pay Trump politically to pick one and get cracking on it. Long as we are funding NASA we might as well have 'em do something to earn their pay.
2 comments:
You musn't forget the mineral wealth that awaits in the asteroid belt, particularly for rarer elements like iridium and indium as well as the more common iron and nickel as well. There's no gravity well to overcome to get the minerals to Earth, there's likely to be a lot of water ice available out there was well, so oxygen for miners and fuel for spacecraft is already there. All we have to do is go get it!
Mineral wealth for asteroid miners has been a part of science fiction since E.E. Smith's stories of the 1930's. I saw a piece on the Internet about a peculiar asteroid that was thought to be a heavy metal chunk from the core of the hypothetical fifth planet. They were urging exploration.
I think it depends upon how the asteroid belt formed. It might be the remnants of a fifth planet that broke up some how. Perhaps as the result of a collision of the sort that formed our Moon. In which case chunks from the planetary core might be dense and metallic and valuable.
The other theory of asteroid formation is that Jupiter's gravity field perturbed the free floating material and prevented it from ever forming a planet. In which case we expect the asteroids to be mostly country rock, the likes of which we have plenty of back here.
Exploration will show the truth.
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