NASA: We're sending humans to Mars | Hacker News Reader

NASA: We're sending humans to Mars

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1,424 pointsdidgeoridoo586 comments

Sometime in the past fifty years NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. And then there is all that pork that goes around with the entrenched contractors. The tale of the last Mars program that NASA put together is a great example of this. They got handed a technically sound plan to get there in reasonable time with reasonable resources. Then every org-unit in NASA wanted to add their own part to stay relevant and it got so bloated both technically and financially that it had to be put to rest.

So unless they convince me that they managed to get their internal structural problems under control, I don't think they get anytime to Mars within this century. And certainly not before the private sector does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

p.s.: There is a free movie on YouTube telling the tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w

I'm definitely expecting the private sector to do it at least a decade before NASA does it.

I'm curious why people think it will happen in the private sector first. Is there some applied science, resource, tourism, or other value to be had?

We haven't seen a private sector moon landing yet (it's been 50 years since NASA did it) simply because there isn't much market value in putting a person on the moon. So why Mars?

I suppose because Elon Musk wants to go there, and he seems good at getting stuff done.

This comment really sums up the cult of personality that's grown up around Musk.

The world needs more Musk fanboys and less Beliebers, thank you very much.

The kind of mind that can produce such a false dichotomy.

The world needs more critical thinking, and less judging.

Building a better car has an expected return on investment.

So far nobody is able to come up with a way to recoup the many hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to get humans to Mars and back.

Q: "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" - unknown

A: "Because it's there" - George Mallory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory)

That's not a reason, that's a trite saying.

> So far nobody

Well...Elon has made guesses/estimates/given us lots of ideas about his monetization strategy. I think the most promising is to sell tickets at $500,000 apiece, which he thinks will be about the going market price to meet a demand of ~100,000 colonists.

Mars One thinks they can do it on a TV show (they'll fail, though, obviously).

My point is that your "nobody" comment is unfair and incorrect. Lots of intelligent, capable and experienced people have articulated a number of different business models around the colonization of Mars. None of them are proven, of course, but that will take time.

Many great voyages of exploration were privately financed, often by newspapers who got exclusive story rights in exchange.

Considering all the money corporations spend on marketing to create goodwill, I'm surprised none have financed a space probe for goodwill purposes.

> So far nobody is able to come up with a way to recoup the many hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to get humans to Mars and back.

Have you seen the price of "sovereign" islands lately? Say what you want about the validity and enforceability of the claim (and the sanity of the people who buy them), but land separated from any Earth government by ~55 million km+ doesn't seem like it would be a hard sell at any price.

It's entirely possible that Elon Musk doesn't care about recouping his investment in SpaceX. It seems like the end goal of the company is to start a colony on Mars so he can go live there.

Curing malaria also doesn't have a return on investment to whoever is doing it. We're at the point where governments are doing the neccessary things, but private individuals are able to sponsor the visionary but less practical endeavors - simply because they believe that it's the right thing to do and don't have to answer to millions of voters who might quite rationally prefer more bread and circuses instead.

You think the organization that landed man on the moon and rovers on mars can't get stuff done?

Today's NASA has little in common with the organization that put men on the Moon, but they can put rovers on Mars so they have some ability to get stuff done.

The private sector will be selling the trips to Mars because they will make money.

The people buying the trips will not be making money. It will be consumption, not investment.

I doubt it, the private sector only innovates if there's enough & immediate enough profit on the line. Even the libertarian darling SpaceX is just piggybacking off the research and hard work of the public sector (ie, NASA's work in the 50's -> 80's)

Because private-sector corporations never have problems with every manager wanting to add something to justify his/her budget and existence, resulting in a bloated over-budget under-delivered project.

Upside: you could end up owning your own goddamn planet!

Downside: you can't do anything with it.

You're not going to make the staggering costs back in space tourism, notwithstanding geeks' relatively high risk tolerance; you need the possibility of some self-sustaining economic activity.

What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars? Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO, let alone get someone to the Moon, we can start talking about whether they'll be able to pull off a Mars mission.

What exactly is the incentive for anyone to go to mars?

Well, that will differ from person to person. My personal incentive to go to Mars is that I want to study its atmosphere, help modify it to become denser and warmer, to be friendlier to life. Others will have different incentives to go, I imagine.

Monetarily? No benefits, or even negative benefit. Not unless the research leads to the ability to capture one of the thousands of asteroids which contain an upwards of $1 trillion in minerals.

A better question is probably, "What will the consequences be if we limit ourselves to Earth?"

> What will the consequences be if we limit ourselves to Earth?

Very good question, man.

At the rate we're going, both at the rate we're reproducing and the rate we're (mis)using what this planet still has to offer, we better start looking for another location.

Anyone want to start a company?

"Because it's there" - George Mallory

Improving the odds of the survival of the human race.

I suppose its true that the private sector doesn't have the traditional governmental incentives of religious persecution, exploitation of indigenous people, proselytization, and banishment of undesirables to encourage them to seek out and colonize new lands. But who knows, maybe we'll come up with other reasons to do it in the future.

I wonder when Hobby Lobby will go to Mars.

> I suppose its true that the private sector doesn't have the traditional governmental incentives of religious persecution, exploitation of indigenous people, proselytization, and banishment of undesirables to encourage them to seek out and colonize new lands.

I disagree. Private sector has those incentives when they lead to making money. Both past and present is full of cases of companies committing atrocities.

Difference being, one can choose to not support companies who slaughter innocents. You cannot choose to back your government. (and voting doesn't work as we've seen with the hypocrisy from Obama.)

You can, it's called migration :). Someone here mentioned "vote vs. exit"; both of them are available in either private or government sectors.

That's in principle of course. In practice, migration is hard and not supporting companies doesn't usually work (boycotts don't really hurt companies in any significant ways).

> What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars?

Sponsorships, reality TV, claiming undiscovered land

Which are all pretty base incentives. We should be going to mars, as a species, for its own sake. The idea that the thing that might justify our first visit to another planet, for some people, might be because it would make good reality TV is just horrifying and saddening and stupefying and should be confronted at every opportunity.

The news is also a reality TV show.

Um, the moon landing was reality tv and it was awesome.

> We should be going to mars, as a species, for its own sake

> The idea that the thing that might justify our first visit to another planet, for some people, might be because it would make good reality TV

In this post-modern age of hyperreality, there's not nearly as much difference between the two as you may think.

> just horrifying and saddening and stupefying and should be confronted at every opportunity.

Yes, well maybe. You can fight it. You can wallow in it. You can also see it as a kind of gravity-assist :)

> Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

Lookup the British East India company

Trade isn't identical to exploration. And the grant of a monopoly is a form of governmental support.

The key difference, of course, being that there are no tea or indigo or opium to be gathered on Mars.

The East India Company went exploring because there was money to be made in the places they explored. Those places were full of marketable commodities, many of which were extremely rare in the West and thus could fetch extraordinarily high prices.

If the Moon or Mars were covered in some easily gathered resource that people back on Earth would happily pay top dollar for, private industry would have gone there decades ago. But there's nothing there that's worth the money it would cost to bring it back.

We don't know it's not. The early trading explorers were doing it for potential, however unknown profit.

True. But we DO know the asteroids are valuable. The recent comet rendezvous was invaluable information for future mining missions.

Umm, nope, there's absolutely nothing on asteroids that's valuable enough to justify mining them in near future. Even being made of solid platinum or diamonds wouldn't make it profitable. Everything that can be gathered from asteroids can be mined from, for example, the Antarctic or the floor of the ocean which are both simpler and cheaper to reach.

Sure, but it never happens unless you do these early experiments to find out how e.g. to dock with a comet/asteroid, to attach, what energy budget you expect to need once you're there and so on.

You don't think a large supply of water, hydrogen and oxygen would be valuable in LEO?

If your goal is to do X in space, then mining asteroids might be a valid means to help you do X, but not an end goal by itself.

Most missions don't need a large supply of water, hydrogen and oxygen located in a random orbit around the sun. If you need them at Mars or Moon, then likely it's easier to find the supplies there instead of spending a large supply of fuel in order to move a large supply of stuff to that orbit.

If we'd need stuff at LEO, it might be that flying to an asteroid (generally far, far away from LEO) and then pushing it to LEO is more efficient than pushing it up from Earth, but it's not so clear.

In any case, this scenario of mining asteroids is very different, I somehow think that the grandparent poster meant mining stuff for us back at Earth.

Even so, the cost of lifting is unrelated to the cost of landing material. Conflating prices.

Asteroids and comets will be valuable in so far as they contain plentiful minerals that are already in space. If people want to build bigger things in space then having available materials already in space to build them with would be valuable, and it would (probably/eventually) be cheaper than flying them up. Not to mention more environmentally friendly as mineral processing is a pollution intensive industry.

> True. But we DO know the asteroids are valuable.

The only value of asteroid mining in the forseeable future is to support other off-planet operations, since the only time that getting anything from asteroids will be better than getting it from Earth is if you plan to use it outside of Earth's gravity well.

Parachute it. Drop it like a rock into a lake. Shape it and glide it in. That technology is in its infancy, and will end up unrelated to the cost of lifting delta-V. Its wrong to conflate the two.

Look at the delta-v required to reach various asteroids. The near-Earth ones are lower than most.

Look at the cost of delta-v per kg of material.

If your target were Mars, and Mars were paved with gold, then gold at $1,800/troyoz is only worth $57,870/kg, meaning that if Mars were paved with gold, it would cost you $942,128 per kg after selling the gold to bring it to Earth.

Then factor everything else into your equations. You'll need drilling and prospecting equipment, you'll have exploratory trips, if you plan on sending up humans you'll need life-support systems and their added mass.

Quite simply, there's nothing material in space that's going to be less-expensively procured for Earth on Earth.

Communications, surveillance, exploration, and research would be the exceptions.

Cost per delta-v is dropping, hopefully by an lot if/when we get reusable rockets. Given that near earth asteroids require dramatically less delta-v than Mars (because no gravity well) and some are high in platinum, iridium and other expensive things it sounds like mining asteroids could be cost effective soon.

I'm not arguing with your numbers, but could you spell out your calculations a bit more? How are you calculating the cost of delta-v per kg?

Cost is dropping, but even if/when we reduce the costs by 10-20 times (as expected by the rocket reusability plans) then it's still unprofitable.

Even if Santa gave us a free colony of Mars and the rocket costs dropped as much as we hope and Mars was covered with bricks of platinum and iridium - even then it would be economical to simply leave it alone.

As I asked the other reply: do you have any substantiation of this?

I do tend to agree with your conclusions. Just looking for solid sources / methods.

I've had similar discussions previously. I've yet to see anyone post any credible (or for the most part any) estimates of cost per kg.

You'll find a list of delta-v budgets here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget

Hrm. Some low-cost references:

LEO on the Cheap

http://www.quarkweb.com/nqc/lib/gencoll/leocheap_ch9.htm

"Highly Reusable Space Transportation: Approaches for Reducing ETO Launch Costs to $100-200 per Pound of Payload"

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1996000... (Pre-1995 paper).

Both references are vastly lower than any extant launch system:

Falcon 9 v 1.1- $4,109

DNEPR- $3,784

Ariane 5- $10,476

Delta IV- $13,072

Atlas V- $13,182

http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1989/what-is-the-cu...

(Cites a Wikipedia article which doesn't / no longer presents the data in $/kg).

And more: http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/S...

Confused: what relationship does the launch cost from earth have, to the weight of returned material from asteroids/mars?

Rocket equation.

There's presently no way of constructing or provisioning a rocket entirely in space without first lifting materials (or the entire craft) from Earth. Should there be, whatever costs are associated with that will shift the equation here.

In the meantime, you're stuck with the reality that whatever mass you plan on transporting to the asteroid, and whatever mass is required to haul back your loot, needs to be boosted from Earth's surface to LEO.

The tyranny of the rocket equation dictates what delta-v costs you. Trips with burns at both ends are vastly more expensive than those with burns at only one. So, yes, aerobraking (on return to Earth) is a highly cost-effective method, but that's going to require budgeting for the mass of your reentry shielding and landing mechanism (likely parachutes).

Ultimately, you're looking at a high-speed, high-temperature reentry, atmospheric slowing, and an ultimate soft-ish landing of whatever you've recovered.

While ion rockets have been proposed as vastly more mass-efficient than chemical rockets, existing designs based on xeon rely on an element whose prevalence in known space environments is quite low. The one exception is Jupiter, but that's the second deepest gravity well in the Solar System:

Within the Solar System, the nucleon fraction of xenon is 1.56 × 10−8, for an abundance of approximately one part in 630 thousand of the total mass.[53] Xenon is relatively rare in the Sun's atmosphere, on Earth, and in asteroids and comets. The planet Jupiter has an unusually high abundance of xenon in its atmosphere; about 2.6 times as much as the Sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon#Occurrence_and_production

Sure I get that. Landing via parachute remove almost all the return cost. Leaving the cost of a mechanism in space that can run for years, delivering asteroid metal to earth. Its disingenuous to claim a fixed startup cost prevents profiting from what essentially becomes an industrial infrastructure. It costs billions to create a new oil refinery, yet we do it all the time.

You still have:

Earth -> LEO

LEO -> Asteroid transfer orbit (ATO)

ATO -> asteroid capture orbit (ACO)

ACO -> landing

Takeoff -> Earth transfer orbit (ETO)

ETO -> Earth Capture Orbit (ECO)

ECO Earth de-orbit burn(s)

Your delta-v for return may be low (60 m/s), though most are higher (see below), but that relies on finding near-earth asteroids with favorable mineral characteristics. You can reduce the mass you're returning _if_ you can refine or reduce it on-site, but that requires additional mass to be transferred out.

Orbital mechanics are far from my forte, but none of this comes cheap, and you're still stuck with costs in the order of $5,000 - $10,000 / kg for Earth to LEO. Which includes the mass of your vehicle, its fuel, and any mining equipment your lugging around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Near_earth_obje...

A catalog of 11,834 NEOs as of yesterday maintained by NASA / JPL shows a minimum delta-v of 3.8 km/s and a high of 26 km/s. Mean is 7.97 km/s, median is 7.1 km/s.

http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~lance/delta_v/delta_v.rendezvous.h...

This isn't a matter of fixed startup costs. Every fucking mission incurs the transfer fuel costs.

Every mission doesn't have to start from the ground. We don't build a new refinery for every tanker. Make your factory in orbit (or better yet- near the asteroid field). Send the refined metal back.

The deal is, deflect just ONE asteroid to earth orbit, and that's maybe more metal than our civilization has mined so far. The potential is, a new order of society here on earth. The cost - some billions.

"Every mission doesn't have to start from the ground."

I've already addressed that. We do.

"Near the asteroid belt" is meaningless. "The asteroid belt" is huge, and "near" in this case would mean "within a low delta-v orbit". Either way, you're shuttling raw ore or the refining equipment.

There's actually an avenue you haven't proposed: utilizing the asteroid directly for propulsion. There are a few possibilities, including laser ablation (there's a recent PhD thesis on this proposal: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5219/1/2014GibbingsPhD.pdf ), "pebble drives" in which a mass launcher ejects loose material from the asteroid directly (creating potential collision hazards for other craft, though space is big, really mind-bogglingly big), or solar sails using sunlight to alter orbits gradually over a long period of time.

I'm pretty skeptical on all counts.

Oh, and per the reference I pulled up, cost per pound wasn't falling appreciably by 2000. Yes, we're another 14, call it 15 years further on. But as the chart on page 4 of the Futron report shows, aside from a big drop in 1992, there was effectively no movement during the 1990s.

http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/S...

and the Hudson's Bay Company and the Roanoke Colony as well.

And find that they traded mostly with India after 1600?

What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars?

For a company like spacex, the advantages are clear - if they can promote human space flight around the solar system, they stand to earn huge amounts of money providing the infrastructure/launches etc, so promoting a Mars Mission makes a lot of sense for them as a company. Even if it never happens they'd make lots of money from preparation, investigation of launch options and the renewed interest in human space flight. Of course that money has to come from somewhere, but I'm sure any such mission would attract all kinds of science missions and funding from national governments, particularly as it becomes clear they can pull it off.

No-one will make money mining down a gravity well like Mars, but there are plenty of other reasons to go there and to other bodies in the solar system, even if only for short periods for scientific investigations. Of course you can do a lot with robots, and personally were I to be investing I'd invest in orbiters and landers, not human missions. The public would disagree though and national governments are more likely to fund a first man on mars than they are another rover.

I think companies like planetary resources are also interesting as when one of them tows an asteroid back to earth orbit and starts mining and sending lumps of metal with a heat shield back to earth, or mining for reaction mass and selling it in orbit, that might be a game changer.

Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company, there are lots of examples of private exploration, and many examples of private individuals simply seeking funding from governments for an enterprise they had already decided upon, so it's hardly fair to characterise exploration as uniquely government funded.

Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO

This is already scheduled to happen soon - they're testing human-rated capsules at spacex for example, so it's looking probable over the next few years given the pressure to remove dependence on Russia for the ISS.

>I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company

The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant. Even putting that aside, these are trading companies, not exploration companies. We're not at the point in space travel where exploration can be a nice side-effect yet.

The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant.

They're relevant because they raised private capital in order to explore unknown lands, sometimes very inhospitable ones (HBC). In their initial form they didn't have any of the trappings of state you impute to them, those came later, and are not really very far from the operations of large corporations nowadays many of which are supranational.

The parallels to private exploration of space are obvious, and costs of access to space have fallen dramatically in recent years.

HBC & EIC didn't make money by gathering useful things for sale in Europe. They did it by taking advantage of the people living there, and paying them significantly less for things that were of high value in Europe. There are no local natives to take advantage of to gather items to be sold at a handsome profit in space.

There are still very valuable resources in space.

certainly, as there are in the "new world"/"india", they did it cheaply on the back of the know-how(geographic knowledge, on where to go and how to stay alive) and the labour of the indigenous.

If your time scale is long enough, and your pockets deep enough, there is plenty of money in space in the form of asteroids which could easily be nudged to earth or lunar orbits and mined with robots.

Maybe a bit far fetched, but creating a colony on Mars would be the foundation of creating a new, highly advanced trading partner.

Colonists on Mars would have to deal with extreme environmental conditions and therefore be forced to invest the majority of resources in science and engineering instead of politics and entrenched systems.

Also, martians would be natural space travelers. Mars has a gravity that's less than half of Earth's, so they would get off that rock much easier and they would have a wealth of natural resources through asteroid mining that they could sell to earth together with advanced technology.

After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.

Come to think of it, America was/is that highly advanced trading partner colony.

The exploration of this side of Earth had its own share of danger and uncertainty. Remember, people back then think the Earth was flat. Traveling far enough is doomed to drop off the edge.

I was with you until the Earth is flat comment - most everyone knew the Earth was round - the thought was that you could get to the Far East by going West.

>After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.

To ensure sovereignty? I'm all for technological progress, but I don't think it should be forced due to a then real threat of a martian invasion. ;)

Invasions, or threats thereof, tend to be excellent incentives for technological progress. Until we hit singularity and/or become radically better as a species, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

> After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.

Native Martians would not be able to invade and occupy Earth on account of their adaption to Mars' much lower gravity. Even aside from them having to handle their weight tripling, they'd be facing major medical issues.

It's well worth watching Neil deGrasse Tyson on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CJ8g8w1huc "The 3 Fears That Drive Us to Accomplish Extraordinary Things" - if you look closely, the actual successful colonization of North America was driven by private enterprise. I gave a talk on this topic at the last Mars Society convention, in case you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BOOuGUnDek

Bringing Commercial Space Fantasies Back to Earth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQd7zqyd_EM

The comments on that video are diametrically opposed to Neil's view. It's interesting how many fans of his do not share this particular of his sentiments. I wonder if Carl Sagan, his own inspiration, would have supported the nascent commercial space industry. I can't imagine why not.

To add to the discussion... according to the briefing, they believe that all of the technologies required for a human mission to Mars are 15 years away, assuming that all technologies are fully tested. This puts an approximate time-line near 2030 [1].

Question from Scott Powers, The Orlando Sentinel:

"The technologies you talked about that are still a long ways from being fully developed, the EDL [2], the propellant and communications. Do you have a sense for what kind of time tables we're talking about, to get those to the point where they'll be able to be used in manned missions?"

Answer from Dr. James Reuther [3]:

"[...] To get all the way to the point where we are able to put 10 metric tons, 10 times what we can do today, to the surface or greater, which is what's really required for a human mission, is probably going to take until the beginning of 2030 before we have all of those technologies in hand, ready to go at that scale. And, that means that they're fully demonstrated and ready for that kind of mission."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU#t=2304

[2] Entry, Descent and Landing

[3] http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/about_us/bios/reu...

"15 years to launch" means it isn't happening.

I would love a Mars mission, but this isn't it.

The moon mission was 9 years to launch.

And that was very close to the deadline. By the time Nixon was in office, Apollo 8 had already orbited the Moon and Apollo 9 was less than 2 months away.

No administration is going to carry the water to push along a rival administration's space program that's only ¼ complete.

The moon is also much closer than mars.

That's relative ;)

I'm really curious why weight and propellant are even an issue. I imagine in 5 to 10 years private corporations will be making regular trips to space very cost effectively. I would think the smart idea would to bring as much as possible and assemble in space.

I'd suggest many smaller deliveries of supplies to the surface of Mars first, topped off with human cargo. They would find tools and supplies, and already-charged power cells ready on arrival.

SpaceX says Falcon Heavy will be able to put 14 tons on a mars trajectory, and it's having it's first launch next year. The soviet Energia could (theoretically) already do that almost three decades ago. What is missing from NASA's perspective?

Everything else. Lift to orbit is only one of hundreds of factors.

I want to see a concrete plan. Dates on a calendar. Milestones and targets.

I want to be able to sit down and spend a weekend reading the step-by-step book-sized roadmap.

As far as I'm aware, there's not even a project name.

NASA is not going to put a human on Mars in the 2030s. I simply don't believe them anymore.

In all honesty, I saw an #Onion tag at the end of the tweet and I thought it's a story made by the onion - had to read twice to see it's Orion, though it has more credibility with my first interpretation.

It upsets me that NASA is reusing "Orion". It's another, very cool project using nuclear bombs as propulsion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

> political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape.

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization.

Name every place in the solar system where NASA missions currently are located. Outside the solar system? Where they have gone historically? Their achievements are staggering; history-making events are routine; they are by far the greatest explorers in the history of humanity. Certainly they aren't perfect and every organization can improve, but they do pretty well.

One could make the argument that the organizations that manage their processes with the least amount of in-fighting will be the ones that survive.

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition. Sometimes it even does a better job at killing, which is why private contractors exist for warfare, such as Blackwater/Academi.

If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks. But it does, all the time, because contracting is far more effective, and results matter.

It seems like your view of NASA is rather rose-tinted. Along with the impressive, courageous explorers, there are political opportunists and all of the other drama you'd expect of any large organization.

It will be interesting to find out whether the private sector or the public sector reaches Mars first.

EDIT: Regarding the political nature of NASA: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

That was a different time. In fact, it was an entirely different generation of people. But the important question is, in what ways has NASA changed since then?

EDIT 2: So, this is a troll comment, then? I'm becoming a little disenchanted with HN, actually. It's grown large enough that the voting system seems to be becoming less and less relevant. There's a certain effect that you see on Reddit where, if someone disagrees with your point, then they will downvote your comment and every subsequent comment you made, regardless of content. I've noticed the same thing happening here on HN, and it's a very recent phenomenon. I've also observed it happening to others, not just myself. I've restrained myself from talking about it, but I think I'll go ahead and speak up at this point.

I'm not sure what to do about this, actually. HN has always been a kind of second home to me, but now it's too large to have meaningful conversations. In order to even get into a position to have a conversation, you have to either be one of the top comments in the thread, or you have to reply to one of the top comments. This is less true than it is for Reddit, but it's definitely happening. The problem is this: Those who are quickest to a thread are usually the ones who will get those top spots, rather than the most reasoned or comprehensive comment. HN has some defenses against this; for example, all comments appear at the top of the thread for a limited time period, and ostensibly the voting system is supposed to keep the good ones there. But HN is growing so massive that those algorithms may need some tweaking, because the deluge of upvotes is making it difficult to achieve those spots.

But the distressing thing, for me, is that replies are becoming less and less logical and reasoned. For example, the question wasn't whether it's a good thing for governments to be contracting with the private sector, or what the negative consequences might be. The question was, is the private sector more effective than the government, in general? Yet the reply was "[privatization advocates] are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful," which is totally unrelated to the question at hand.

Anyway. What I just did is against the rules, so I'll stop now. Sorry. I'm just becoming concerned with the timbre of the site, and feel like there is no outlet to discuss this kind of thing.

> It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition.

I know that's a commonly repeated idea, especially in this forum, but I don't share that assumption and don't see evidence for it. I believe they are two different tools, each better at different tasks, with some overlap.

> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

Three thoughts: 1) Government doesn't contract out every task; the U.S. federal government has over 1 million employees and a $2 trillion budget, so it does quite a bit in-house. 2) Government does contract out many things; when they do it right, they are contracting where it's most cost-effective without undermining justice. There is much research showing that much privatization loses money but enriches the contractor. 3) Many of the contracting decisions are due to politics: Lobbying, and who has what donor or has which jobs in their district, for example.

Consider that many privatization advocates and those promoting the supremacy of the private sector are lining their pockets: They are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful.

The main difference is that private enterprises may fail if they do not deliver their product or the service to customers at a cost acceptable to the latter; government projects and departments do not have this check. This is not a guarantee that the private sector will do a good or even mediocre job, as they can make mistakes, malinvestments, get bailed out, or have rich and stupid customers. The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance, so government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent.

It is really a question of how one views the voice vs exit question, and how good a check those are (relative to each other).[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

But governments do slash budgets or cut programs altogether. And agencies typically continue on because their existence is mandated by law and (unlike the private sector) they can't choose to just ditch those customers that cost a lot to deal with. There are big variations in administrative competence to be sure, but the logical conclusion of your argument is that if you hate the President (or rather, the administration of the federal government by a given President) then the logical thing to do is get rid of the government.

I don't understand how " the logical conclusion of your argument is that if you hate the President... then the logical thing to do is get rid of the government." The voice vs exit paradigm has been employed in some arguments for anarchism, and many arguments for limiting the scope of government, but those arguments have nothing to do with the executive, and I didn't make any such argument.

I know you didn't, but where is the line between saying individual agencies are inefficient and should be shut down and the administration as a whole? There's certainly a contingent (not necessarily including you) that wants to scale the federal government back to the bare minimum sketched out in the Constitution and devolve everything except national defense and certain enumerated powers back to the States.

There is no line to draw, but there is a counter-argument. The (most effective) counter-argument is that the government agencies are capable of achieving objectives that the private organizations can or will not.

> The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance

I'm not sure even this claim is warranted, from either side. Each has mechanisms for attempting to ensure the link between funding/performance, but from my perspective it seems like those mechanisms fail as often as they work in both sectors.

The mechanism is the voice in the case of government, and the exit in the case of private corporations; opinions definitely differ on the effectiveness of either.

Where governments provide critical services, their funding should not be tied to success. That would only ensure more failure, and that's the last thing you want to do to a critical service.

You just described the problem with public schools.

"government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent."

In which universe?

Government projects get stopped for incompetence or wasting money about as much as they do in the private sector.

And it turns out that the private sector is just as capable of firehosing money at bullshit as the government is, otherwise all those repackaged loans wouldn't have screwed the economy.

There is a different limit on money for governments, given they back the money, but to assume that some form of cost/benefit analysis isn't generally practiced in public enterprise is to be working from a purely faith-based model of economics.

The public sector is, by definition, more efficient than the private sector.

The main difference is the profit motive. When a government department does something more efficiently, it has to use that efficiency to either reduce cost or improve quality.

When a private company does something more efficiently, it can take the spare money and shove it in the pockets of its shareholders.

It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department will be more efficient than an equivalent private sector one; the Peter Principle may well scupper any efficiency improvements.

I am sorry, but I think you live in a different world than I do. Where I live, many government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget. This is not the behavior of an organization trying to "reduce cost or improve quality".

In addition, corporations which are closely-held have a very strong incentive to be efficient, as the officers/owners are the residual claimants. In larger, public corporations, their checks are shareholders, and their competitors, who (if more efficient) can drive a corporation bankrupt by under-pricing, or out-competing. I cannot recall the last government department driven to bankruptcy by a competitor.

What is the last large public corporation you can recall driven to bankruptcy primarily by private sector competition under-pricing or out-competing them? Let's say "large" is roughly as productive as, say, Luxembourg.

Well, large corporations that are failing usually (but not always) get purchased, and subsumed by more successful corporations, or bailed out before they go bankrupt. Some examples of this would be RCA, Lockheed, Delta Airlines, Chrysler (twice), Enron, General Motors.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

I even found this convenient little slideshow.[7]

Here is a challenge: find more equivalently-sized government departments shut down for their failures. Examples of such failures would be the two dozen financial market regulators (as well as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) who failed to anticipate or mitigate the housing problems of 2006-2007, the various police agencies which regularly shoot innocent civilians (such as the LAPD), the department of Veteran's Affairs which caused untold suffering, or the education departments which have greatly increased spending without any improvement in outcomes.

Apologies for not addressing the second sentence, I wrote this reply before you had added that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors

[7] http://www.thestreet.com/gallery/tsc-bankruptcy2-decade/0/ph...

This makes no sense. Say we shut down The LAPD or the VA. What would it be replaced with? The idea of a private sector police force is a little scary, and what private business would perform the function of Veteran's Affairs?

The point is that there are some things which only government can and should do. Shutting down vital services isn't practical nor popular. People wouldn't stand for it. If a the leaders of a city the size of LA decided to shut down the police force and replace it with something different, they would be immediately voted out of office. The government isn't some external actor forcing its will on the people. The government serves the majority, a majority that prefers that not to have basic services shut down because they aren't performing optimally.

I agree with all but your first sentence. Perhaps I am projecting my own beliefs on nickff, but nowhere did they say that government should not provide police or similar services. They correctly stated that the private sector has the substantial advantage of being able to fail if they do a bad job. The obvious conclusion is that Government should not do things unless there is a compelling reason not to leave it to the private sector. As you point out there is a reason for the government to provide police (and other services) that outweighs the private sector's fundamental advantage.

The issue is that if the public is unhappy with the police force there is no way for them to vote in a re-organization.

However in the private sector this happens all the time; either forcing one company to re-organize or a re-organization happens by a company going out of business and getting replaced with another one.

Voting for a politician (especially when you are stuck with two political parties) hardly constitutes voting for a re-organization.

Maybe there is a way to create competition in some way shape or form by having several different police forces (still government sponsored) that compete for your vote or maybe something else. But there definitely is a problem that there is almost no way to properly restructure a bloated government organization when it is underperforming, and somehow that should be addressed.

> The issue is that if the public is unhappy with the police force there is no way for them to vote in a re-organization. However in the private sector this happens all the time; either forcing one company to re-organize or a re-organization happens by a company going out of business and getting replaced with another one. ... But there definitely is a problem that there is almost no way to properly restructure a bloated government organization when it is underperforming, and somehow that should be addressed.

The public is unhappy with Thames Water, a private company, but no amount of private sector competition pixie dust is going to make another company start digging up London's streets to provide a re-organization.

It's not a problem with governments, it's a problem with natural monopolies and that's difficult to solve. Saying "government bad" is oversimplifying.

> Where I live, many government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year

Government offices I've visited are no comparison to lush corporate settings; in fact they tend to be old buildings with old equipment and furniture. Consider what Silicon Valley corporations provide to their employees.

I've heard this story before and I believe it's a myth. I am aware of what goes on in many government offices, local and federal, and never heard of such a thing.

government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget. This is not the behavior of an organization trying to "reduce cost or improve quality".

The organisation includes the bit setting the budget, so if they are willing to cut it next year if this year's isn't spent, that looks a lot like the behaviour of an organisation seeking to reduce costs.

Besides, end of financial year budget spends in divisions of large multinationals also look like that.

Throwing money around at the end of the year is a product of a dumb budgeting process, not a govt. vs. private issue. I've worked at businesses where some units were funded the using the same process who did the same thing - coming in under budget, and squandering cash on things to avoid losing funding the next year.

Private organizations have this wonderful ability to fail if someone else can do the same job better and cheaper. This does not prevent subsets of a private organization form being wasteful, but if the organization as a whole is significantly more wasteful than their competition, they will lose.

Yes, private orgs. can fail if someone can convince them to move to another party for their goods/services. Ideally - it happens occasionally, though not often.

Democratic societies can choose to elect better suited leaders for their governance to do the job better, and vote to improve their models of governance to be more effective and provide better services/efficiency. Ideally - it happens occasionally, though not often.

Voting with dollars works about as well as voting with ballots, though. People are driven by the exact same irrational drives and misinformation whether they're behaving as consumers or voters.

TARP? GM? AIG? It seems like private organizations under a certain size threshold have the ability to fail if someone else can do the same job better and cheaper. Beyond a certain size, they are indistinguishable from government.

You have a valid point (although your examples not failing was the results of public action, not the private market). I think there is a trade off between economies of scale and "too big to fail". There is some size that is still too small to hide colossal mistakes, but big enough to streamline its processes.

I have seen the exact same bahavior ("get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget") occurring in large multinational corporate companies, where individual departments are very, very away from the top decisionmakers and spend a majority of their effort on budgets and infighting, and not on company results.

It's not a symptom of public vs private, it's a symptom of lack of oversight, agency problem, and 'too big to manage' problems.

the difference is, if a private company generates waste, its shareholders pay and competitors benefit. If government generates waste, everybody pays and nobody benefits

Ok, you seem knowledgeable in this. Can you name the departments and where you are?

> is, by definition, more efficient

This is not a reasonable position, nor is it consistent with the rest of your comment.

How so? The very fact that someone makes a profit means that the end consumer is paying more than cost price.

If I pay £10 for something that costs £5. The organisation that just pockets the difference is less efficient from my perspective than the one that either reduces my next bill by £5 or gives me an extra £5 worth of service.

The point is that even if a private sector company operates with perfect efficiency, there is a built-in inefficiency from the consumer's perspective because investors need to make money on the deal.

Efficiency is not part of the definition of public sector or private sector, so clearly your statement is false. It's inconsistent with the rest of your comment because you wrote "It's not a guarantee that a particular public sector project or department", which could not be case if it were true by definition. Your argument that public sectors, depending on circumstance, tend to be more efficient is quite different from your assertion that they are more efficient by definition.

What I mean is that all else being equal, public is more efficient than private. The same team doing the same task with the same information, constraints, and money will be able to provide better value to the consumer in the public eector than the private.

The caveat is there because a handful of strategically placed idiots or geniues could easily make more of a difference than the fact that all the money stays within the system.

> The difference is that the government agency's source of revenue is not dependent on its performance, so government agencies and projects almost never get closed down or cancelled because they did a bad job, wasted money, or were plain incompetent.

This cuts both ways - that's exactly why the government can and does shove money into things like infrastructure, basic research and, well, space exploration, while the private sector doesn't. There is no direct short-term profit motive for private sector in such endeavours. I emphasize "short-term", because the private sector is structured to care mostly about that. It takes a company to grow really big to invest in stuff like basic research - but at this point the internal structure of such company is more like that of a government than a free market.

I think you make the strongest case for government investment (which is) in expensive, capital-intensive, high-risk projects; this is probably the most defensible area of government spending. There are two strong counter-arguments I have heard against yours. The first is that the reason private organizations do not invest in these projects is that the government's tax structure makes such ventures unprofitable, and the government crowds-out private investment in these projects. The second argument is that the government is the only investor in these projects because they are investing large sums of money when it is unwise to do so, because the project is not yet worth doing, or it is too risky, and a private organization would have invested less initially, and followed-on as the project became more affordable.

> The main difference is that private enterprises may fail if they do not deliver their product or the service to customers at a cost acceptable to the latter; government projects and departments do not have this check.

Every government executive's job (including appointees' jobs and to a degree every program), relies on a public vote every 2-6 years.

Democracy isn't nearly perfect, but as we've seen, neither are the markets.

If you read the link, you will see that it makes a point similar to what you are saying (but more nuanced, and well thought-out than an HN comment). No one is arguing that perfection is achievable (or even a goal), the question is what form of feedback is most effective in providing desirable outcomes.

> If you read the link ...

You're right that I didn't; sorry. I have a hard time putting faith in the value or accuracy of Wikipedia, especially for sophisticated analysis.

> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

There are other possibilities: corporate lobbying, the revolving door, regulatory capture, plain old corruption ...

... which would lead to the civilization being destroyed (EDIT: subsumed) by a more effective one, if the private sector wasn't actually effective. Therefore the private sector must be effective.

Over what timeframe? All the evidence is that failed states can stick around for quite a while before collapsing or being subjugated. As the US has been (re)discovering the hard way, there's a massive cost in taking over a failed state even where the intention is to rebuild it and leave - and countries like Afghanistan and Iran were obviously dysfunctional for decades. Even the Soviet Union persisted for a long time despite its fundamental economic contradictions. Even if we hypothesize some similarly fundamental dificiency in the private sector of the US of the sort that Marxists are fond of toying with, in an economy of this size it might take most of a century to play itself out. Look at Japan, whose economy has been stagnant for 20 years and whose territorial security basically derives from the US nuclear umbrella.

My claim isn't that the civilization will be wiped out. It's that it will no longer be in control of its own destiny.

If the private sector model of an economy is worse, then why has every first-world country begun to follow it? Because it's more effective.

You can argue that the private sector is a different tool for a different sort of job, but my point is that regardless of the job, small organizations almost always do it better. (Incidentally, that's the thesis of startup investing.)

The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. But space exploration isn't that sort of job.

I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. Strange day. It seems like it should be perfectly obvious that private sector control is more effective than public sector control in almost every area where people need to accomplish things. There is practically a mountain of evidence in support of this viewpoint, and it's hard to find examples that contradict it, unless it's also a highly parallelizable task like constructing a highway system. The most obvious counterexamples that come to mind are the justice system and monetary regulation. But those are two counterexamples in a sea of examples.

The UK was a model of privatisation of public enterprise.

Only it turns out that a hell of a lot of the companies that bought stuff like the utilities and railways are actually the public enterprises of other countries.

So 20 of the UK rail lines are still publicly owned and run, just by another countries public sector, while our own is banned by law from bidding.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/revealed-how...

Indeed. The only UK rail franchise still in public hands is also the only one that makes money for the state rather than requiring a public subsidy.

So, with impeccable logic, the government has privatised it.

Presumably, while in public hands though profitable, it has not been paying dividends.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of our services eventually get renationalised through a legal challenge based on competition law opening up the bidding again, as the whole logic breaks down rather completely at the point at which you try and fix it by banning any foreign publicly owned industry from bidding, then realise that you have knocked out most of the best qualified bids.

> Presumably, while in public hands though profitable, it has not been paying dividends.

But it has been returning money to its "shareholder", the government, which is kind of analogous.

I was being cynical. While profits are going to the government it is hard to line your own pockets through buying shares, or get appointed to the board after leaving office.

I'm not arguing that the private sector is no good, but that you're making a rather circular argument in its favor. What about examples of private sector failure like the financial crisis? Equally, what about the fact that government services are typically mandated to serve everyone who comes, whereas private enterprise is free to set its own prices?

Don't get me wrong, there are numerous flaws in the public sector that I would like to see changed, but its also saddled with constraints that are at least as burdensome as regulatory overhead the private sector deals with, if not more so.

The Internet. The Apollo Project. D-Day. The Manhattan Project. Federal Highways. The National Park System.

How on earth could a small organization do any of these things?

I can understand why you feel like you're living a Strange Day in an alternate universe, because the reality of human social organization is completely opposed to your thesis. If small groups are superior to large organizations in every case and in every way, why in the hell have people been forming large organizations for so long? Are we all just stupid, incapable of seeing the basic truth that you see? Were the Romans, Mongols, British, Mayans and all the others just a bunch of idiots? People have been forming ever larger organizations for the same reason that NASA is a large organization: because it's the best way to to do big things. That's why Google moved out of the garage and hired several thousand people. If small organizations were always better, startups wouldn't require investment at all.

It seems like your reasoning is based on the Homer Simpson quote, "Because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." But I can assure you, we aren't all stupid. Organizations get big because big wins.

Would you please read my comment before replying?

The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. But space exploration isn't that sort of job.

So, here's your list:

D-Day. Federal Highways. The National Park System.

Those are highly parallelizable tasks.

The internet and the Manhattan project are better examples, but it's debatable whether those things would be invented regardless of governments. They were a matter of time.

Now, about the Apollo project: Congratulations, we spent a Metric Boatload of money, and it got us what? A flag on the moon. Whoopie. The US also got to thumb their nose at Russia for a bit. That is not space exploration. That is the ability to convert a large quantity of money into a really expensive, one-time-use space car that was designed to stick a pole in the ground.

More upsettingly, the Apollo project undermined real space exploration for decades. There were some viable ideas about how this could be achieved. You may be as interested and as surprised as I was when I first realized this was true: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html

Or you can dismiss this as readily as the rest of my comments. Either way, my new years resolution is going to be to swear off any kind of politics on any kind of online forum.

People get so hung up on one of them being fundamentally better than the other when in fact their fundamental differences and the tension that creates which is actually a decent compromise between a free market and a totalitarian state. "Free markets" are fully capable of leading to mass amounts of suffering. This "strife" we experience between different systems in friction is actually healthy I think.

I'd say that since the 90's there's been a general pulling back from the Washington consensus. So I take issue with your assertion about every first world country following the US. I say this as a citizen of a first world country where people are pretty concerned to ensure we do NOT follow the US in terms of political corruption and economic division.

Your point about startup investing is rather off the mark. Most startups fail - which is not something you can do if you're providing the water supply or sanitation services for a country (or county). Governments might be less lean but redundancy also means resilience.

Your comment about an alternative universe resonates with me. As a non American, it's how I often feel when I read comments from people like you who assert that "It's just true by definition" that the private sector is more effective at everything.

I didn't mean to assert the private sector was better at everything. Sorry for the confusion. I only meant to say that it's better at most things.

Is that really mistaken? Since I'm getting so much pushback, I should probably think about changing my view. But I don't understand how this could be true: "The public sector is better than the private sector at most jobs." It seems like the vast majority of the time, it's the other way around.

History is littered with civilizations that had an extended period of corruption and decay before their final collapse. Rome is one example - its "death" arguably occurred over most of a century.

Anyway, your argument is really weird. It implies that all existing regimes are optimally fit since they exist. But that's clearly not true.

So, when private sector organizations contract to other private sector organizations for certain tasks/projects that is somehow qualitatively different then when government does it?

Totally agree with your EDIT2. It is unfortunately why I am only using throwaway accounts now.

You've only been on HN for 450 days (I've been here 2500+), I don't think you can claim HN has gone significantly downhill since you joined.

IMO, this is a troll comment. If you are making a grand point, I don't see it.

EDIT: I'm not replying to your point because I can't understand your point. Apparently it's obvious to you, but it is far from obvious to me what you are saying.

I've been on the site since day two of its public launch. About 2800 days.

Why did this devolve into a number comparison contest, rather than addressing my main points?

EDIT: Oh, here we go. Now I'm looked down on with so much scorn that you won't even reply to me. Really? Edit wars?

My point was this: The average comment is becoming shorter, meaner, and less logical. Additionally, the value of the voting system is becoming diluted over time, as more people participate. Mainly I'd like algorithmic protection from people who downvote all of your comments regardless of how well-reasoned your followup replies are. Limiting people to one downvote per person per thread seems reasonable.

My thesis in the main discussion is that if you hand a job to the public sector and to the private sector, the private sector will accomplish it with fewer resources and more quickly than the public sector. The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. The counterexamples are the justice system and financial regulation, yet those are only two counterexamples compared to a huge body of examples.

In some way the assumption that the private sector can do it better is supported by NASA itself, it's why they have contracted missions to the ISS out to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, who have managed to successfully fill those contracts for $500 million (less money than NASA was spending on a single space shuttle launch). I have tremendous respect for the work NASA has done, but there are deep flaws at the agency, and they realize it as much as everyone else does.

NASA says their average space shuttle launch cost was $450 million.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shut...

edit: forgot the "million"

I should have been more clear. $500 million was the cost for the entire commercial contracts program, as someone else pointed out below that is ~$150 million per launch. Whether NASA spent $450 or $500 million on a shuttle launch is somewhat irrelevant, either way it is far more than the cost of private missions performing the same service.

The Shuttle was originally an Air Force partnership where NASA was supposed to also launch the USAF's payloads, including spy satellites and the like. The 20-ton payload created major compromises as far as reusability and then the USAF wasn't interested once the thing was built.

1 shuttle launch: $450M (reality) 7 people 53,600lb to LEO

1 SpaceX dragon launch (ignoring for a second that it doesn't exist yet): $160M (target) 7 people 7,300LB to LEO

So even if the Dragon V2 comes in at its targetted price and capacities (and all historical evidence says it very much will not do that), it'll take 7 launches of it to match the payload of a single Shuttle launch. Doing some quick math here... 7 * $160M is... a hell of a lot more than $450M

So pound for pound the shuttle is half the cost of the Dragon V2's estimated price.

And in terms of actually mission profiles take something like STS-31, the Hubble launch. Payload mass there was 26,187lbs. Assuming that weight could somehow be split perfectly into 7,300 chunks and assembled in space that's still 4 launches on the Dragon V2, or $640M.

It is not fair to compare the heavy lift capabilities of the Dragon to those of the space shuttle. The fact that the Space Shuttle does both heavy lift and crew transport means that whenever you want one, you also have to pay for the other. Of course you would not use the Dragon to launch the Hubble.

A fair comparison would be 1 Dragon launch and 1 Falcon Heavy launch which leave quite a bit of room for cost overruns before they surpass the cost of a shuttle launch while delivering twice the payload and the same number of people.

Lastly the total cost of the Space Shuttle program divided by number of launches gives us a cost of $1.5 billion per launch (2008 dollars), according to Wikipedia. While NASA lists the launch cost as $450 million, that does not include the majority of the cost of the program. NASA paid a comparatively small sum ($270 million) for SpaceX to develop the Dragon (Even if there was a second contract that I am unaware of, the cost still cannot approach that of the Space Shuttle).

Where did you get the idea that a SpaceX launch costs $500 million? The entire Commercial Cargo development contract with SpaceX was $400 million. The subsequent commerical resupply service contract is for 12 missions for $1.6 billion. If you spread the development cost over all those flights, it comes out to be ~$150 million per launch. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Commercial_cargo_contrac...)

I think you misread the previous comment. It was referring to $500 million for a contract that included many launches. I agree that it could have been more clearly stated.

the flaw starts that there 535 people who can tell NASA what do to, mostly indirectly but some are able to do it directly. None work at NASA.

This is of course the problem with the DOD as well, when the people tasked to do a job have to take into account the whims of politicians just how do we honestly expect it to be a job done well.

Of course this does happen in private industry as well, there is much ado about not rocking the boat, going with the flow etc, usually masked as some faddish project management system; only a moron wouldn't do proper project management, right?

> Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization.

SpaceX. I agree that NASA has done more for space exploration than the private sector and that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA funding, but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin. I would guess that NASA will be the first to land a human on Mars, but I would also guess that they will lift off in a SpaceX rocket.

SpaceX sits atop decades of resources in what constitutes sound aerospace engineering practices, and is being helped by the fact that their scope is far, far more limited than NASA's.

Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.

Their scope is to colonize Mars. NASA's scope is to land a man on Mars.

In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.

SpaceX's scope is irrelevant until they can be viable without substantial assistance from Mars, from the point of view of the private-is-better supporters.

It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project.

It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.

Well argued. I would just add...

1 SpaceX's ambitions may be broader than NASA's but their individual engineering targets are not.

2 Private space companies wouldn't exist without the public space programs, not just from a technological standpoint but public contracts have been the largest and most dependable source of revenue for private space companies.

3 Though private companies suffer from the same bureaucratic problems as governments they are more flexible because internal fights can always be resolved one way or another by engaged and decisive management (should you find yourself lucky enough to have such management.) Hierarchies in public entities are not always allowed to settle conflicts between subordinates.

I guess we could conclude from this set of arguments that a mission spearheaded by public space organizations and supported by the scalable infrastructure private space corporations provide is going to be the mainstay of any future missions; mars or otherwise.

"a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously"

Don't you think Amazon's stock price says differently?

To me, a private Mars colony sounds a lot like an Amazon. An endeavor with a very big mission and a very long execution time.

Amazon's failures do not result in the obliteration of their most valuable infrastucture. A small hickup isn't likely to completely ruin their company, it will only set them back a small amount.

Amazon isn't launching billion dollar servers that will explode in a big publicly visible fireball when you forget to plug a cable in.

I'm not comparing what Amazon & SpaceX are making, but the very-long-horizon vision both companies are committing to. Amazon reinvests today's income to work towards what they want to be in the 2030s and beyond.

SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars isn't about making money, it's about colonizing Mars.

But SpaceX needs to make money to make colonization of Mars happen.

If they were ready to make a serious attempt, I'm sure they could pull the funding together with sponsorships alone.

I'm not sure what your point is exactly.

Making money is about making things people want. Colonizing Mars is the thing that people want; and every step towards that goal (launch vehicles, human spacecraft, etc) bootstraps them onto the next step. Much like how Amazon works; they forfeit profit today to invest in not just tomorrow, but several decades from now.

Amazon could start turning a huge profit tomorrow if it wanted. The only reason it doesn't is because of titanic capital expenditures funded by operating profits.

How exactly is a mission to Mars comparable to this?

Amazon reinvests all operating income from today to build the Amazon of the future.

SpaceX reinvests all operating income from today's offerings (launch vehicles) to build the SpaceX of the future.

Both companies appear to be bootstrapping towards a gargantuan vision that is likely decades away.

SpaceX basically has just one customer which it is entirely reliant upon. The government.

Amazon has millions.

> SpaceX basically has just one customer which it is entirely reliant upon.

As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business. According to their website they have nearly $5 billion in contracts and I can only find reference to just over $2 billion in NASA contracts.

> As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business.

NASA ⊂ "The Government"

SpaceX also has Defense (USAF) contracts. At least around $900 million already awarded (and that may not be all), and they recently sued to be allowed to compete for much more under the EELV program.

Good point, I hadn't realized the USAF contract was awarded to them yet. That puts government funding at significantly more than half of SpaceX's existing contracts. I still wouldn't say they basically have only one customer, but it's closer than I thought.

With the "technological moat" SpaceX is building, does it matter how few customers they have today if no one can compete with them?

Didn't a SpaceX competitor install second-hand 1960s Russian rocket engines in a launch vehicle that failed recently? Its not a fault on the engines - I'm sure they were excellent - but rather an anecdote on the gargantuan barrier to competition inventing new space technology offers SpaceX.

    > yet they forget that a company can only survive for so
    > long without positive returns and that limits their risk
    > tolerance tremendously

A company can make a loss indefinitely, as long as they don't run out of money. While Elon Musk carries such a high personal net worth, and the dream of hitting Mars stays front and foremost, that means they can make a loss for a very long time...

For some reason, this all brings to mind the Keynes quote: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Elon Musk and his friends' personal fortunes are a drop in the bucket compared to an established federal agency's funding. NASA's requested funding for 2014 is $17 billion.

If you count their accumulated physical assets, manpower and "intellectual property" (assuming aerospace knowledge such as that could be valued effectively), you'd find that very few institutions outside of some multinational corporations and government agencies are that big.

I doubt Musk would be able to get such funding every year until 2030, or whatever arbitrary target is set to get a man to Mars.

> It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play

That of course depends on whether you expect political/military interests to be always represented by public institutes, not just today but also a couple of decades into the future. Not saying that will necessarily change, but I've read enough cyberpunk to at least consider the real possibility :)

SpaceX's scope is first and foremost to continue as a profit maximizing entity. NASA exists to improve collective scientific knowledge and research. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is, and therefore, acts like a business.

Without a firm mandate, a deadline and a budget it's kind of hard to pull off a Mars landing, or any sort of endeavor past Low-Earth Orbit.

I think limited scope is exactly the point made by skriticos2.

I don't doubt that a private entity is as capable of scope creep as a massive federal government institution.

But I suspect mission-fatal scope creep occurs with less frequency with private entities than with massive federal government institutions.

"massive" being the critical word, not "private" or "federal" or "government"

Google has had plenty of scope creep but it hasn't been mission-fatal

And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.

Google doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm.

When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.

And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

Because it's the exact same rehearsed process that's performed for years at a time on hardware and software that is considerably safer than off-the-shelf computer hardware.

You say the latest, but 2013 wasn't that long ago.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8911864/2013...

> And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

I dunno, I've often seen flaws in the broadcast of the latest football game. I think it would be more accurate to say "the latest football game is usually broadcast worldwide with flaws that are within the tolerances viewers are willing to accept", but then, people rarely die because of broadcast glitches in football games, so the tolerances there may be fairly lenient.

How do you reckon? iirc, close to half a million people worked on Apollo; that's much bigger than Google. I don't think there are any private sector organizations significantly bigger than that figure?

"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google's numbers.

I would argue that Google does a lot of things poorly, which turn out to not be a big deal in the sector they are in but would certainly be a problem in aerospace. This isn't a knock on Google, the requirements are just different.

Yes it has. Their search result pages are crap lately, overcomplicated with ads everywhere; it's the same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002. Google is in decline; a slow decline perhaps, but it's happening.

"..same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002." Are you serious?

Yes I am. Red Queen Rule applies - I'm sure Google's tech has got better, but so has that of the SEO folk.

SpaceX is better at putting a pound of stuff in LEO than Nasa per dollar by a massive margin. But that's all they do right now.

I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

> But that's all they do right now.

Well that and launch to GEO and design and build human spacecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2) and are closer to cost effective re-usable rockets than anyone ever has been.

> But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

I don't recall saying that rockets are more important than payloads, but neither one does much good without the other. I'm not even sure where you are drawing the line between payload and rocket. Is the rocket that takes people to Mars a payload, or the rocket that lands on Mars, or the rocket that leaves Mars?

I am excited about SpaceX because they are dramatically reducing the cost of space exploration and industry. This makes everything NASA wants to do cheaper and more likely to actually happen.

It's more than just NASA funding, a large number of the top guys at SpaceX are or were ex-NASA engineers (or NASA contractors). It's no coincidence that SpaceX hq is where it is (in El Segundo literally next door to Northrop, Raytheon, Lockheed, and so on); it makes the hiring that much easier. SpaceX is what you get when you cut through all the bureaucratic bs which plagues the NASA organization and let the NASA engineers do what they know how to do. Brilliant stroke on Musk's part, gotta hand it to him.

SpaceX is not well run because of magic private sector pixie dust. It is well run because of Elon Musk.

For every Elon Musk there are a million private sector apparatchiks who run their organizations with all the efficiency of a Soviet shoe factory (see Comcast for a particularly pernicious example).

Comcast is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CMCSA & CMCSK), which makes it liable to a host of external pressures, legal and otherwise, that SpaceX as a currently privately-owned company is not.

None of which have anything to do with why they suck.

Sure, but Musk would have MUCH less impact if he were inside an organization like NASA. All of his talents and advantages would be dampened to the point that they would make very little difference in the organization.

And why do you presume that?

I think if he were running NASA it would probably be run pretty well.

No, because he wouldn't really be running NASA the way he runs SpaceX. Government organizations are subject to a host of political influences that that don't affect the private sector. I used to work for the Library of Congress where the Librarian of Congress at the time was a political appointee who spent less time managing the collections and more time updating the carpets.

NASA has worse problems because members of Congress see is as a tool for funneling pork spending. Any director of NASA would have to spend time playing politics with Congress in order to keep his funding and that would undermine any coherent vision that he brought to the enterprise. If buying rocket engines from Louisiana would save NASA billions in the long run, but funding depends on buying them from Alabama, Alabama it is. High-level government bureaucrats must be career fundraisers first and visionaries/competent managers second.

As the sole owner of his own launch company, Musk as a degree of freedom that he could never get as a member of the government bureaucracy and it's that freedom that allows him to run SpaceX as well as he does. In lesser hands that freedom would be a noose, but at least in that case the cost of failure to the public would be very little.

>Government organizations are subject to a host of political influences

The private sector is not magically free of political influence, and SpaceX feels it stronger than most due to its reliance upon what is effectively a government monopsony.

my impression of Elon is that he would get crushed in any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy such as a large federal government agencies.

the people that float to the top in those organizations aren't good managers, innovators or motivators - they're political strategists and careerists

SpaceX is nothing compared to NASA in scope (and history) and would be even less without NASA's (and general government) past work and experience.

> but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin.

...using NASA's money. SpaceX's money is coming from NASA. So, no, SpaceX is not doing more per dollar than NASA is.

And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars. Let's first see if they can even get people into LEO first (using decades of research and knowledge that NASA paid for, of course)

Amount done per dollar = total done / total spent

It is fair to count everything SpaceX has done with NASA money as stuff NASA has gotten done, NASA still has an astronomically larger denominator.

> And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars.

fwiw NASA does not either and SpaceX is much closer. The Falcon Heavy is expected to launch next year and will be capable of putting 14 tons in a trans-Martian orbit to Mars.

> the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported

Well, the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives.

(1) There are unfair practices in the private sector like monopolies and fraud... which are at least nominally against the rules in liberal democracies. If we allow that the government fails to enforce its rules, I'm not sure why we're confident about its ability to execute in other areas.

> the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives.

I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership.

If a government leader fails to often, they change their direction (as many politicians do!) or lose their job.

> I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership.

I'm not talking about leadership, I'm talking about organization. As in bureaucracies. It's extremely hard for any leader to streamline an organization. It's possible though difficult in a private organization. I'm not familiar with a national government that has, say, dropped its headcount by 50%.

If a private organization can't successfully make that sort of change, it gets disrupted eventually. But governments don't get disrupted like that without something drastic happening.

>"These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported."

Sure, here's one study that supports that assumption: http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf

Took a bit of searching, seeing as I don't have access to any Journals. However, I did find more references, and no doubt you'll find quite a bit of other studies in the citations of this one.

>"Their achievements are staggering;"

So has their budget. I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D, but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

Alternate view: we could be a little less warmongery for a decade or so and easily fund the entirety of NASA's history 4-6 times over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...

We could solve all that stuff easily right now without cutting NASA's budget.

A further alternate view. We could stop the warmongering entirely, and the NASA funding... Using all those combined trillions of dollars on making the world a better place.

On a side note, I completely agree with you. To us there are completely varying degrees on what we consider useful spending. And on the war-funding we are in agreement; that money should be used first before NASA's funding.

> I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars.

Interesting, thank you, and much less than I would have guessed. Given their achievements, I think that's economical.

> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D ...

The economists call that "opportunity cost" and I agree. I'm always a little uncomfortable with funding NASA missions to Mars, etc., though I think the benefits are worthwhile. Also, NASA has produced much science, including climate change research, which I think is clearly a good investment (based on my limited knowledge of the marginal value of NASA's research).

> ... but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

Not really; it's not a matter of asking. Federal funds are limited and agencies fight wars, publicly and privately, over access to them. As in private enterprise, sometimes funding is decided on merit and sometimes politically.

Ironically, much of private enterprise is funded the same way -- from the federal budget.

If the only thing NASA had done were the two voyagers - for a trillion dollars it would still have been on the cheap.

The trove of scientific data they have gathered over the years is insane. And for the 60 years it exists, a trillion dollars is not much.

> One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D

Or borrow the money, or use wall street magic, or whatever. Also one of the recurrent critics of the current system is that corporations are slaves to the quarterly reports.

The problem with NASA in recent years is not that they spend a lot of money, but that they don't dream big enough.

> That's a trillion dollars that has been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

There, fixed that for you!

The old canard that space exploration has been a total waste of money just keeps popping up. Yet, our economy and the world itself have been dramatically transformed by the innovations and improvements coming out of the space program: solar energy, CAT scanners and MRI for medical applications, ceramic shielding, computer miniaturization, software methods, weather prediction, new kinds of materials, better propulsion systems for planes, food preservation, insulation, on and on.

There are many more. And then there are all the people who were inspired by the space program to go into science and technology fields.

I'd say $1 trillion, if accurate (the entire Apollo program cost about $200 billion in 2005 dollars) would be a bargain.

Compare this with, say, the Dept. of Education created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. It's cost about $1.5 trillion over 35 years, and for what? Literacy and math skills have declined almost every year since then.

Let's shrink federal spending in the entitlement and defense sectors, and put more money into space exploration and basic science, and I'll bet you we'll all end up living richer and better lives (and longer lives, too).

"Compare this with, say, the Dept. of Education created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. It's cost about $1.5 trillion over 35 years, and for what? Literacy and math skills have declined almost every year since then."

Could you provide references for the cost (including any programs it replaced) and the downward progression in literacy and maths in the USA since 1979?

It strikes me that more people are regularly communicating in writing than ever before and mathematics is sort of cool for the first time in several decades.

The Dept of Education's annual budget is about $70 billion and has been in that range for several years. I did a thumbnail estimate based on that. In fact the accumulated cost might be considerably higher.

The decline in literacy and math scores is well documented.

That is all very well, but could you provide references for the cost (including any programs it replaced) and the downward progression in literacy and maths in the USA since 1979?

edit - Just looked at budgets. You are picking the peak. Which makes me somewhat doubtful of the rest of your analysis. In 2009 it was $32 billion. In 2010 it was $56 billion. It peaked at $71 billion in 2011 and has been almost flat since then.

edit2 - heh, actually the peak was in 2009. Do not trust wikipedia. http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chtt=Department+of+Educati... http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-fed...

Still, the general point holds, it has not been remotely steady at $70 billion.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/edhistory.p...

Appropriations since 1980 add up to about $1.334 trillion. This is not inflation adjusted, however, so the equivalent amount in 2014 dollars would be much higher.

I wish they had given NASA that money instead and maybe we'd have a colony on the moon by now.

You have to factor in the cost of the programs it replaced, given it was largely created by transferring education programs from other government departments.

Also, you have given no references whatsoever for your claimed steady decline in literacy and maths since 1979.

I thought I was aware of the early history of CT and MRI and am unaware of the space programme connection. Any chance you could point me at anything - my googling isn't getting me anywhere.

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinfaq.htm#spinfaq9

Nasa and Nasa-related contractors did not invent MRI and CAT scanners, but they contributed significantly to the technology as well as related aspects like digital image processing (developed at JPL for processing Moon images).

I mean, probably MRI and CT scanners would have been developed anyway. But space research definitely helped move things along.

NASA costs about as much as the Carried Interest tax loophole for hedge fund managers.

And proponents of both justify them as ways of making capital available to worth while endeavors. In my mind that rings true for one slightly more than the other.

It's also a lot smaller than the 4.5 trillion sunk in quantitative easing.

Quantitative easing doesn't actually cost money. The fed buys securities with it and probably breaks even or makes a profit.

Considering the population of Earth has more than doubled from around 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion in 2014 i hardly think we can blame NASA for spending a trillion dollars.

On the scale of world hunger over a 50 year period, one trillion is a blip. On the other hand spending a trillion on space research over 50 years seems well worth it if within the next 50 we can colonize other planets, moons or terrariums and ensure that the Human race has a backup should something catastrophic happen.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

Regardless of which one does it better, NASA is funded through forcefully-extracted US tax dollars. They can be as stagnant and bureaucratically bloated as they want to be thanks to moral hazard. I'll gladly support space exploration, but it should be using resources that are donated voluntarily.

I know I'm philosophizing, but let me challenge the views you express with the following: people opposed to government and taxes always assume that taxes are "taken" or "extracted" from private property. Historically, though, the opposite is true: private property was extracted from common property and given to private individuals. Shared property predates private property by more than a few millennia. In fact, private property had to be invented when the agricultural revolution came about. That an individual (as opposed to a tribe) could own something was a big revolution in human thinking, and an artificial cultural construct. This doesn't change much in how people think about distribution of wealth, but it seems like people, especially in the US, seem to believe that private property is the natural state of things and government infringes on that, even though the opposite is true. Society decided to let individuals own some things -- not the other way around.

I'm not under any illusion that "private property" is some kind of perfect solution (even libertarians schism into geolibertarians, libertarian socialists, etc. around the sticky issue), but let's not fly off into pure philosophy land here. This situation is pretty direct: the federal gov't, and by extension NASA, skims off my paycheck to fund what it thinks are noble endeavors.

Unfortunately this leviathan that nobly funds NASA also spends trillions dropping bombs on brown people halfway across the planet, funding revolutions to topple governments, and violently suppressing victimless crimes (e.g. drug use, prostitution) that have a very real negative impact on my life and the lives of others I have no qualms with.

If we could decide which systems to voluntarily contribute to, which ones would be funded?

You can. It is called migration.

But you can look at it the other way around: the US government is good enough to let you have your paycheck. Why do you assume the money is yours to begin with? The gov't also spends money on police and roads so that you'd be able to earn your paycheck, so it seems to me like it's doing the hard work for you.

And as to voluntary choice, why do you think that voluntary choice by the individual is more important than the choice of society as a whole? After all, you have a democratically elected government, so it represents the set of deals or compromises struck by the members, and various groups of members, that form society. How is that not voluntary? Who says your own individual will is more important than that of society? It seems to me that the current system is a lot more voluntary than the one you're proposing. In the current system deals are formed to pool resources together to achieve common goals. Because pooling resources is required to achieve some goals, how would that be achieved in your system? My guess is that people who have accrued more wealth (thanks to the government's work) will use their influence to advance the goals they desire, without taking into any account the will of most other people. Is that fair?

To me, it sounds like you're saying "Don't be upset at your husband for beating you, you're lucky he's letting you live at all!" After all, ownership of wives by husbands predates feminism by more than a few millennia...

Private property is an enlightened concept based on the fact that a person's own labor is his and not the property of the state/tribe to appropriate at will.

I was just playing devil's advocate to explore a different point of view. But if you're talking about enlightened ideas, then welfare states are also an enlightened idea predated by centuries of feudalism (which a private-property-based society with little or no government looks like).

And the tribe didn't appropriate the individual's labor. It was naturally assumed that if you're a member of a tribe (that you rely on for survival) then your work should benefit the tribe -- not you specifically. Doesn't that make sense?

Same goes for roads and the fire department, amirite?

You don't think there are alternate ways to build roads or put out fires? I can tell you one thing, I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department so that my parents' house doesn't burn to the ground again when our shitty municipal fire department runs out of water.

edit: since I'm getting downvoted anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/whowillbuildtheroads

> I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department

Then why didn't you? Are there laws against private fire departments? Of course that's not a fair question because public fire departments suppress the demand for private fire departments, but do you think better fire departments would be available for comparative prices without public interference?

> These things happen in private sector organizations too

It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become.

* In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately.

* In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company.

Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity.

Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

The difference is that NASA will likely keep getting their money regardless of whether they can come up with a viable plan. In the private sector, investors are usually not interested in financing an enterprise if it can't produce a viable plan.

I don't think there's much difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of professionalism of the teams. The big difference is the incentive of the two companies: SpaceX either has to turn a profit, or their owners have to be willing to provide capital without seeing a return. NASA has no such restrictions, and can keep operating without turning a profit.

It's a lot like nature, really. Zoo animals don't have to hunt for food, and can lie around all day and be fed. Wild animals have to hunt for food, or they die. So if a wild animal were to meet a zoo animal, and a battle ensues, who wins? The animal that is used to lying around all day, or the animal that has to fight to survive? The two animals are not different in quality (both may be lions, for example), but they operate with very different incentives.

It's not necessarily pretty, but it works. Wild animals grow strong because if they don't, they die. Private companies grow strong because if they don't, they go bankrupt.

Why would the private market want to go to Mars? I can't think of a convincing reason, other than say maybe tourism

SpaceX was created to get to Mars. Elon Musk's reason is simply that he wants humans to be an interplanetary species. [1]

[1] http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-int...

>>> NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape.

My best friend's dad was a NASA scientist for almost 30 years. By the time the 90's rolled around and in the post Challenger era, he used to tell us neighborhood kids the same stories.

He finally retired in the early 1990's when budget cuts, in-fighting and the struggle to remain relevant were just too much for him to take. He' still bitter to this day about how he felt politicians ruined the agency.

Love NASA but we heard this tune many times. If only 'we are going to Mars' actually took us there.

NASA is not even close... Not with this budget not with the current brain drain, and 1970's style management.

You don't think they'll put humans on Mars within this century? Really? That's not a conservative statement. A conservative statement is, yea we'll probably get to Mars this century, but maybe not in the next 20 years.

I worked for NASA, the budget cuts alone helped bring it to where it is today. In the 1980s, we were still using technology from the 1950s because we couldn't afford to replace it. Things have only gotten worse since then.

It's not just that. The difficulties in sending a human to Mars and safely returning him/her are way beyond anything we have ever tried. It wouldn't be that bad to send a human to, say, Phobos, but Mars poses some extra problems, not the least of which is how to land.

An atmosphere too thick for retro rockets and too thin for parachutes is a major impediment.

So until I start seeing progress on those issues, I will see this just as sci-fi.

Why do we have to bring the person back?

It might be politically easier to justify the program if we do....

Sure, but it might be possible to actually have the program if we don't.

Then why not just send a dog to Mars?

Probably because the dog can claim property rights upon the Red Planet. They would send a very smart dog there, right?

Yeah but as long as it doesn't have a flag ...

It's harder for a dog to start building a colony base.

We should send giant ants, then.

Why would the private sector want to send humans to mars? Scratch that, why does NASA want to send humans to mars? Just because we can? Anyone know?

@skriticos2: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141203050450-7...

I really enjoyed watching the movie. Always amazes me how dedicated some people like Robert Zubrin are towards their goals.

Have you read anything about what's been happening at Microsoft? I don't think that private organisations are necessarily better.

This is just stupid. What is the point? This will be extremely expensive, it will gut a lot of useful science programs.

Send robots! They are thousands of times cheaper and they get the job done. And when they die it is not a national tragedy.

Robots have been doing an excellent job of planetary exploration over the past 20 years or so. There is no reason to stop this. And this will mostly stop if nasa decides to seriously pursue a human mars mission, because such a mission will soak up most NASA resources.

The only reason to send humans is to satisfy the science fiction fantasies of a bunch of stupid fan boys. And everyone knows that these fantasies can just as easily be satisfied by a cheesy movie or TV show.

Now I have to emphasize the word stupid, in "stupid science fiction fanboys." If you were a smart science fiction fanboy or girl you would know that continued robotic exploration will make the science fiction fantasy of mars tourism much closer than a human mission.

If we keep sending robotic missions we can study the mars soil and perhaps move on to having the robots build stuff on mars. If the robots can build a base with solar based energy gathering, oxygen generation and even perhaps rocket fuel generation, then mars travel may become a regular if expensive thing.

Otherwise we will have a single mission that with great fan fare sends one or two people to stomp around on mars for an hour or two and quickly return. (Or even worse, perhaps die there). After the mission the whole thing will be scrapped and only the newspaper clippings and tv documentaries will remain. This is what happened with Apolo. It was great but it did not really lead anywhere in terms of moon exploration.

I don't think there's anything wrong with your perspective, but what do you think about the potential in-direct value that could come from a mission like this? Such as inspiring young people to pursue STEM, or the general population getting behind and funding other exploratory missions involving robots? You say that most NASA resources will be soaked up. That's possible, but what do you think about the potential in-direct benefits of getting the human race excited about space exploration?

This is a very very expensive way to do advertising. You will be able to do a lot more advertising to shape people's perceptions with just a small portion of the costs.

Furthermore, government space exploration is essentially a business of elites. It is only a few scientists and engineers that are involved with the space program. It is only a couple of the most elite astronauts that will get to actually fly the rockets. The vast majority of americans will have to be inspired by watching it all on tv.

This all worked out in the 60s with Apolo, but the world is changing and America is changing. Americans are watching less and less TV and are more willing to do things.

If you want to inspire people to go into STEM, it will probably be better to spend money on new and interesting educational programs to get kids interested in science and engineering. Furthermore, spending money on adult education programs would probably also help.

I think the ultimate goal with space travel is to reduce the risk of human extinction, which is a distinct possibility when we are confined to a single planet or planetary system.

Transporting and then returning humans to a "distant" destination will be a worthy milestone that will teach us a lot. We have to start somewhere.

Perhaps you're right: maybe we can more quickly achieve distribution of humanity by solely focusing on robotic exploration. But I just wanted to point out that satisfying science fiction fanboys isn't the only reason to travel to Mars.

I get the sense we're going to need to do some heavy genetic engineering before we're able to survive long-term on other planets. Probably more than anyone from this generation will be comfortable with. This of course will raise the question, have we really saved ourselves from extinction if what we save isn't exactly human?

Given how far away other earth-like planets are likely to be, the more immediate challenge is long-term survival off earth, either in a spacecraft or on mars.

Once we learn how to survive "on our own" then one could envisage making the journey to some Earth II.

It seems incredibly arrogant and short-sited to assume that humans would be able to somehow survive outside of their original environment. There isn't a grocery list of things we need to bring into space or to another planet. Everything on this planet is interrelated and inseparable in largely unknown ways.

(replying to pond_lilly, who appears to be shadow/hellbanned)

> pond_lilly 4 hours ago | link [dead]

> Exactly, like bacteria in our guts that gets replenished by consuming foods grown in Earth soil. On Mars this stuff will die out right away, and to replicate it you will need to create another Earth.Gut bacteria is just a tiny example, there is other stuff like bone problems, vision problems, etc. I am appalled that instead of fixing mess here on earth, the only known planet to support life, we waste brains, time and resources on these idiotic fantasies

Well there's one thing, if we can manage to build a survivable habitat on a planet like Mars--relatively mild as it may be, compared to other space places--surviving on a planet on the verge of some global climate catastrophe is going to seem like a piece of cake ;-)

You don't need that much to just survive - food/water, atmosphere, low enough radiation, manageable temperature.

All of these problems can be solved with our current level of technology on Mars. After you establish the base near a water source, you can grow your own food, you can make oxygen, you can mine for whatever elements you need.

Nobody says it's easy, but it's doable.

It needs a human touch.

How much did Avatar cost to make? How much will it cost to go to Mars?

True. But how much will going to Mars bring back?

$237 million to make and advertise Avatar. [1]

The Space Review estimated in 2010 the cost of Apollo from 1959 to 1973 as $20.4 billion, or $109 billion in 2010 dollars, averaged over the six landings as $18 billion each. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost

So if a meteor wipes our earth, we'll still have robots on Mars. Now isn't that something to strive for?

Are you trying to be sarcastic? Because with the current technology, even if we do have manned mission to mars, if a meteor wipes out earth there will be no living humans on mars either. With the current technology any human mission to mars can only be on mars for a very limited time and will rely on earth for all of their resources. Thus, if a meteor wipes out earth, any mission to mars will die too.

If you want to build a sustainable mars presence, a manned mission to mars is not going to do it. We have to find a way to use resources on mars to sustain a human presence. That will require a lot of research into mars resources, a lot of engineering to build mars factories etc. I am not sure if this is possible at all but if it is, it is best done by starting with robotic missions. A robot can spend a year on mars looking for materials that can be used to make bricks (for example). A human, even if we can get him on mars, will probably have to go back in hours.

> I am not sure if this is possible at all but if it is, it is best done by starting with robotic missions.

It is very hard to imagine a self-sustaining Mars colony. You face two huge hurdles: a very thin atmosphere (average surface pressure 0.6% of Earth's) and low gravity, which sounds great until you consider the correlated long-term health problems.

Even if we could somehow import massive amounts of air and water to Mars, it would rapidly evaporate away and be lost to space. We may be able to establish science stations on Mars in some kind of pressurized air-tight dome habitats, but colonization, particularly independent colonization, is practically inconceivable for the foreseeable future. Mars is simply not suited at all to human life, and the problems with Mars are not something that can be fixed with any terraforming that doesn't involve somehow adding 2/3rds of Earth's mass to the planet and somehow recreating a magnetosphere.

We can already send robots to Mars. The challenge is sending living human beings. Thats where the innovations will come from, that goal will motivate and push progress.

"And when [robots] die it is not a national tragedy."

Exactly. No one, apart from a few invested souls, really cares. For this reason progress slows and innovation reverts to incremental steps rather than leaps.

Fuck the cynicism. The fact that NASA finally has its head turned around to at least announce is indicative to me of a cultural, maybe generational shift towards giving a shit about space travel. Who cares who does it first, at least this is a trend in the right direction.

NASA has "announced" Mars timelines 20 years in the future many times before.

Exactly. There's not even anything you could reasonably call a timeline here, either. There's almost literally nothing to it.

I have never seen their announcements in the past. Between SpaceX, the global international space travel movement, and hey even Interstellar, there is a lot more buzz around space travel. Plus, we have landed a rover on mars, plus people have landed a rover on a comet. NASA has had a hand in space advancement. I don't give a shit if they have been wrong in the past, the growing hype around space travel is exciting, and I refuse to be a buzzkill about it.

If you are citing Interstellar as a reason to believe this, I don't know how to help you.

For anyone else:

Obama in 2010: to Mars by the mid-2030's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_policy_of_the_Barack_Obam...

Bush in 2005: to the Moon by 2020, to Mars soon after 2030 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

NASA 1998: DRM 3.0 calls for first launch to Mars in 2011, human crew in 2014. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1998021...

Bush in 1989: 90-day report, which was a joke, but also 30 years to spend $300 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative

I am not sure I believe it, fuck believing it. I have worked on enough software projects to know its not entirely true. But why should I not get excited? I got excited when Obama announced his policy and I will continue to get excited. It means people are still thinking about Mars and space exploration and that is a positive amongst all this cynicism.

If you lap this up, they'll give you more of it.

"This" being "plans 20 years in the future."

I get that this is your first time getting your heart shattered. I'm the old crone who doesn't understand the true love you found with your soulmate who is promising you the moon, er, Mars. But if you repeat our mistakes, you will repeat our heartbreak.

The more excited the public is, the more NASA sees it as a blank check to cram more things as "necessary" for a Mars mission. The 90-day report is the perfect example. Today's press conference is talking about creating "solar electric propulsion," something that was never mentioned for prior Mars missions but is now suddenly a requirement.

That's the pattern. The public wants a Mars mission, then NASA says "yeah, we'll get there in 20 years, but first we need to spend time inventing <new tech>." It's a different <new tech> each time.

Unless you think that <new tech> is somehow detrimental to getting to Mars, I don't see what the cynicism gets you. In fact, I've never understood how cynicism helps achieve anything at all.

We'll send humans to Mars when it makes sense, when we can, and when we want to. If we stop wanting to, we'll never go...we'll never even develop the capability.

Mankind spent a long time--hundreds, maybe thousands of years--using boats before we started sailing across oceans. Going to Mars is way more complicated and dangerous, and that's still only the closest planet.

Enthusiasm for plans might create license for NASA to experiment, but lack of enthusiasm would be far worse. There's no lack of other people who would love to spend NASA's money. And even the private sector spaceflight companies are largely dependent on NASA today.

Yes, <new tech> is detrimental. It becomes another hurdle that every subsequent Mars mission has to clear in the debate. "We can't go to Mars, we don't have <new tech> yet!"

I think they mean <new tech> for <new tech>'s sake. Not <new tech> that's absolutely necessary for reaching Mars.

Call me cynical, but I feel like NASA won't end up shuttling humans to Mars. Instead, NASA will more likely be shuttling government money between various contractors before having the program cancelled in the far-future...

Politics + exploration for exploration's sake always seems at odds.

Perhaps, but I feel like NASA is at a point where if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night.

Robotic space exploration is awesome, but it doesn't capture the human imagination the way a human mission does. I also think -- and the academic types be damned -- that there is a difference between sending a robot and actually going somewhere.

In the long term I think Mars will be settled by humans. Sending humans to land there for a bit is a first step, a fact-finding mission.

"if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night."

If that is true, they have already lost. Doing "something big" for the primary purpose of "avoiding fading into the night" is doomed to failure. (Again, per the other comments.) Take all that money and give it to Elon Musk and we'd probably get further. And I mean, just give it. Free and clear. To spend on hookers and blow if he wants to. We'd still probably get more out of it as a species. He doesn't want to ensure the continued existence of a big bureaucracy... he wants to get to Mars.

I'm sure there are people within NASA that want to get to Mars... but are they the ones in charge?

There's a way to do this... Recruit Musk as the head of NASA. That would be interesting, to say the least...

I doubt he'd take the job.

Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled. Mars is vastly more difficult to get to and provides an even more severe environment. It's going to be just like the moon - once we're there, we'll wonder why we ever bothered to go to this miserable rock. Leave the private industry to go there and do as they wish. After sending a small band of rovers there we haven't found any compelling reason to go, have we? Other than exogeology?

NASA should be dreaming much bigger. How about manned missions to Jupiter? Maybe after failing at the impossible for a while we'll at least get a better concept of how far away the rest of pretty much anywhere in space is, and stop thinking about planetary exploration as a lifeboat for our species.

Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled.

NASA should be dreaming much bigger.

There just isn't any good real estate off-Earth in this solar system. Relativity limits us to the solar system. Deal with it.

"Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled."

This is a broken analogy in two ways.

One is that there's a huge qualitative difference between going elsewhere on Earth and settling another planet, and I don't think you can hand-wave that away. You might have no interest in settling another planet, which is fine. There are seven billion plus people on Earth, and all we need is about 10,000 over, say, a century or two who do have that interest. I think you'd have so many applicants for a serious mission you'd have to be very picky.

Secondly, it's illegal to settle Antarctica. It's all "claimed" and tied up in various treaties and conservation laws. What would happen if you opened Antarctica to settlement and allowed squatters' rights or land claim rights? I think a whole bunch of people who are interested in trying new political ideas, etc., would jump at it. It'd be significantly easier and cheaper than seasteading. There'd also be natural resources to be found, so you'd probably have a gold rush.

What's your lifeboat for our species?

If making a lifeboat is the real goal, then let's colonize the moon. It's much closer, and about equally inhospitable.

The best option is not screwing up our planet. If asteroid strikes is the concern, then funding a planetwide network of residents living in underground bunkers with supplies to last decades is probably cheaper and more effective than going to Mars.

>The best option is not screwing up our planet.

That isn't even close to the best option. That's like saying: "don't make backups, just don't screw up."

edit: to be more specific, "make makeups, but also try not to screw up"

Makes sense if you are a very short-term thinker.

> That's like saying: "don't make backups, just don't screw up."

That does not even belong in the same category. Data backups in computer systems are cheap, and people/organizations not doing them even cheaper!

On the other hand, doctors don't make backups of the gravely ill[1] before a dangerous surgery. That is beyond our current capabilities, so "do not screw up" is as good as it gets.

Yet another example, civil engineers do not make backups of skyscrapers[2] before doing maintenance work, even major maintenance work. While technically feasible, the economic cost would be prohibitive.

My gut feeling is that a "backup planet" would fall somewhere in between cases [1] and [2].

> The best option is not screwing up our planet.

It's very hard to imagine what we could do to Earth so that it becomes even less hospitable than mars.

It's not what we could do. It's what the universe could do to Earth.

The top mosty likely existential threats, including "what the universe could do to Earth" would leave it more habitable than Mars.

If "lifeboat for species" is the goal, then going to Mars is a solution in that direction but not a particularly good one - building an underground colony in Antarctica or a self-sustainable isolated underwater colony would achieve the goal better, be reachable quicker, and at a lower cost. However, 'lifeboat for species' right now is not an explicit end goal for anyone who would be capable to fund that.

>The best option is not screwing up our planet

We're not looking for a lifeboat, humanity is simply looking for another planet to screw up.

While this argument isn't untrue, I personally prefer forward-thinking positive arguments like:

- Expanding into a new environment drives evolution.

- The technological innovations that will be needed to sustain a settlement on Mars will be hugely valuable back home.

- There is presently no frontier where new political or social ideas can be attempted without interference. Again -- the results of these "experiments" can be exported back home.

The last two are huge. The main exports from a Mars colony would probably be ideas and technology. Those also have the advantage of being able to be transmitted wirelessly and having no mass.

>Expanding into a new environment drives evolution.

Evolution is usually very unpleasant for the individuals being naturally selected away. How is this a good thing?

We could likely skip some of that via genetic engineering and other medical methods. But I'm also referring to cultural and technological evolution.

BTW... if we don't transition off fossil fuels in the next 50-ish years we are going to experience some of Ye Olde Tyme Evolution here on Earth. Personally I think Mars would be a better place to be in that scenario. There was a sci-fi film called Alternative Three made about that.

Nowadays there are more kinds of evolution. Cultural evolution springs to mind. ^_^

Mother Earth?

We have some exoplanets 100-500 light years away that seem very earth-like. I think the first step to finding a lifeboat is to start researching on space shuttles speeds (faster than light), wormholes, teleportation etc. As far-fetched as these may seem, its unlikely that with sufficient time and investment neither one of these alternatives will be successful. Something is bound to work. We only need one of these to be able to travel farther in human time. And it is only then that we should even think about sending manned missions to these potential planets.

We are looking at space exploration in the wrong way. All space organizations seem to have entered this sort of competition where manned missions to just about anywhere currently reachable in limited time is the goal. Nobody is pausing to think that maybe we should look into better travelling options to be able to explore far off planets and objects. The probability increases with reachable area.

> Something is bound to work.

It absolutely isn't. It is very, very unlikely that one can break the laws of physics no matter how much time it takes to research it or how advanced one becomes.

Still - it is important to research it in-case we've missed or gotten something wrong.

Your point is valid, but my understanding is this: if FTL in any form is possible, then the universe is VERY weird-- it would allow "closed time-like curves" and causality paradoxes and all kinds of other wackadoodle.

Many theories of "FTL" do not actually involve travelling faster than light, just taking a shorter path. While these theories are still far-fetched they do not result in the kinds of wackadoodle you describe.

I think the point is to do it without breaking the laws of physics. Like how entanglement could occur without breaking them.

> I think the first step to finding a lifeboat is to start researching on space shuttles speeds (faster than light), wormholes, teleportation etc. As far-fetched as these may seem, its unlikely that with sufficient time and investment neither one of these alternatives will be successful.

FTL travel is completely unnecessary for interstellar travel, thanks to relativity. If you're traveling 1000 light years at 0.99999999999999999c, you will get there very nearly instantly. Of course, you've basically taken a one way ticket - if you turn back around, 2000 years will have passed back home even though you're only a few seconds older.

Of course, 0.99999999999999999c is itself no mean feat (to say the least - the energy costs for even 0.5c would be incredible), but there's nothing about it that violates the laws of physics.

So you want trillions of dollars of taxpayers' money to have your imagination captured? Isn't there a cheaper way? Like a good book perhaps? Is your brains power to imagine so insufficient that capturing your imagination requires an enormous government program?

I am sorry about being dismissive, but I wish people would be more contemplative before sending our government headlong into the next boondogle. This is important stuff. We are talking about a lot of money here. Democracy is a duty is as well as a right. There are a lot of government agencies that would like to "capture your imagination", i.e., get you to write them a blank check, but we have to be a little more discerning.

People wanting to explore space are asking for a fraction of what was spent in the Iraq / Afghanistan wars.

That would be a good argument against people that supported those wars, but I am not one of them. Furthermore, if NASA is serious about this, this may easily cost about as much as the Iraq/Afganistan wars.

Those costs are estimated at about 4 trillion. The apolo mission cost about 100 billion in today's dollars. A Mars mission will be much more difficult and building rockets has not gotten cheaper over these years. It might be more expensive, because quality engineers are much better paid now even after adjusting for inflation.

I would not be surprised if a manned mars mission costs a trillion or two.

So after all your arguing for reason, you just make up a number that feels right to you?

Very reasonable.

That is an incredible over simplification.

Guess what, the Navy doesn't build nuclear submarines. They contract companies to build nuclear submarines. The Air Force doesn't build fighter jets. They contract companies to build fighter jets. NASA didn't build a lot of the Apollo tech, they contracted companies to build Apollo. NASA also contracted companies for Constellation, the Space Shuttle, Orion, SLS, etc.

It's how the government works.

There are some 100% government financed research labs. There is the question of how much oversight the government has over the contractor (service vs design/build). There are different kinds of contracts (fixed price vs cost+).

At no point in time was the government ever building things 100% on their own, it has always been a spectrum. We are moving towards the end of the spectrum where NASA moves one responsibility (launching unmanned payloads to LEO) to a fixed-cost low-oversight service contract. That's great. But it's not like NASA woke up yesterday and realized the private sector is good at doing this kind of stuff.

My frustration (and likely most people's frustration) isn't with the contractors - not at all. It's the politics that can change at the drop of a hat. The perceived effects of cancelled or scrapped missions is a lot of money and time spent with none of the payoff.

So many cynical comments in here. I can't disagree with the substance, because the past track record has been mixed, and because of the issues with NASA's political structure have been well documented.

I also can't disagree with the practicalists that suggest the money would be better spent elsewhere.

However, one thing I can't get past: I don't think humanity will ever escape self interested nationalism without space exploration. I have zero hope for the long term survival of our species, barring significant human cooperation.

So I get all the intellectual arguments, but I also dream that space could be the one freaking thing that joins our species together -- the understanding that we really are very similar. I think only space will provide that push.

My opinion is that without space, humanity will destroy itself in a matter of centuries, through environmental pollution, nuclear war, disease, or any of the other methods we've come up with in the last 100 years.

> My opinion is that without space, humanity will destroy itself in a matter of centuries, through environmental pollution, nuclear war, disease, or any of the other methods we've come up with in the last 100 years.

People say this, but I don't get what it's based in. Our track record for surviving is incredibly impressive. In fact, if there's one trait we humans have that's worth noting, it's our ability to survive, no matter the conditions.

I also find it amusing that predict that humanity will destroy itself in a matter of centuries after starting your post with "So many cynical comments in here." :)

I hear what you're saying. I had the first thought just after making my comment, and explored it a little more. I hope you'll indulge me, because I'm genuinely curious what you think.

It's really only in the last 120 years that humans have been able to inflict enough damage within a few generations to seriously damage our existence. So I limit myself to that era (and forward), because I'm focusing on human-inflicted extinction.

I have 4 or 5 nuclear near-events that very narrowly started a nuclear war. (I suppose I forget that humans will survive total nuclear war, but there would be so much death that I'm not sure I'd want to survive it.) We can add in global warming, although we don't know what the effects will be.

So 6 events or so in the last 120 years, 1 of which is still undecided. The "next few centuries" part was a bit dramatic -- but over the next 1,000,000 years, how many more near-misses will we have? Even if we survive 99%, there's still a pretty high chance that humanity is gone. And from reading descriptions of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think the odds of nuclear exchange were much higher than 1%.

I must confess to resembling the second comment. In humanity, I see a lot of hope, but I see also reason for despair. I guess the cynicism hit me a bit because it's people being cynical about the one endeavor I believe holds hope for uniting our species.

I suppose I might agree with you that it's likely catastrophic events will be caused by us at some point, but I very much disagree that the survivors of those events will ever consider life not worth living. Wanting to stay alive is probably our most fundamental desire, and we happen to be pretty damn good at doing it. I think of those types of events like forest fires. On the surface, they seem devastating, but they actually end up serving a wider purpose and thus, one should not despair.

Excellent points, from an abstract perspective.

However, if 99% of the world's population died and the remainder had to scratch out a difficult living, I think it would be difficult to distance myself from the reality that my existence, as I had known it to that point, was dead.

One of the great things about the human spirit is the resilience of our species and our individuals. However, it's hard for me to think I'd just accept it as part of a greater purpose. (In fact, that language makes me think of a religious approach to death -- "they're in a better place" -- which does nothing to soften the blow from a loved one's death.)

Alot of cynicism in the comments on this, so I just wanted to say I am excited and I believe in NASA.

Seeing as I was in my own world today, I just heard about this news. I was(still am) ecstatic and excited by the news just to be bummed down by the comments. I'm with you on this.

"I have no desire to do a Mars landing on our own," Bolden said (two years ago).

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012...

I've more faith in Musk than in Bolden. "[going to Mars has] always been a goal of SpaceX. We're hoping to develop the technology to do that in probably 12 to 15 years."

http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-0801-morrison-musk-spacex-20120...

There's something I always asked myself about Mars expedition: well I kind of believe that it's possible to put somebody down on Mars within the next few decades.

But... what about coming back to earth? Escape velocity is about > 5 km/s. Wouldn't you need to build a launch site having at least half of the power of our launch sites down here on Earth? How are they going to do that anytime near in the future?

So is it going to be a on-way trip? And if so, are they going to maintain a supply chain from Earth to Mars for the whole of the life time of those explorers? Water, air, food...

I imagine water can be got from Mars (as there is Ice on Mars), and from that plants can grow, which will produce both air and food.

That would be a bummer for those personally involved wouldn't it? From astronaut to subsistence farmer.

At least somebody would make lots of money from the reality TV show that ensued.

There's not much you can spend it on there. I'm guessing Amazon shipping fees would be pretty high too.

> I imagine water can be got from Mars (as there is Ice on Mars), and from that plants can grow, which will produce both air and food.

I am doubtful there is enough air on Mars to sustain any Earth vegetation. The mean surface pressure on Mars is 0.6% that of Earth. Mars has virtually no atmosphere.

Has there been any research into remotely building launch sites?

Most of the mass (fuel) will be waiting in orbit. They need to bring down to the surface only the fuel to get back to orbit so they won't need half of a Saturn V. They still need to launch a lot of fuel from Earth.

Easier to manufacture the fuel on Mars. It only has 40% of Earth's gravity, so easier to lift to waiting orbital fuel depot.

I wasn't thinking about the whole journey back home, just the first part of it which looks damn hard to me: how do you get a space craft away from Mars? You need to reach escape velocity, and that's 5 km/s (> 11000 mph).

You'll have to build a complete launch site for that.

If you have fuel in orbit you just have to reach it, you don't have to get to escape velocity.

OK, got that. Did some further reading (again) on the topic and it's still about 4 km/s to reach the orbit. People are working on it, but for what I read it looks hard to overcome for 2030...

You still have to match velocity with the fuel. Crashing into your fueling station at 10000 km/h doesn't help anything.

Actually... it completely solves the problem of the return trip.

Somebody needs to teach NASA to embrace Crash-Only Design.

The Design Reference Mission calls for generating the fuel on the Martian surface, so you only need to drop a small amount of hydrogen feedstock to make the rest.

You need a huge launchpad to launch a 100 ton vehicle. You don't need it for something weighing only a few tons.

Well as you could see in the movie "Interstellar", once you have left the earth you can just zip around everywhere with your little space dinghy :-)

I don't know if lot of people realize this but you don't "leave" Earth just in low orbit or even significantly higher up. In fact the actual gravitational force at the level of ISS is almost same as on surface. The reason you "feel" zero gravity is not because you are so far from Earth but because you have acquired so much velocity that you fall with same acceleration as other falling objects. This is equivalence principal that creates feeling of weightlessness. But objects at that height otherwise feel pretty much same pull of gravity as us on surface.

This is why sending humans to Mars is stupid - at least in our current resource and energy constrained world. Humans requires suits, food, air, water, health support, housing, massive infrastructure to return back and so on. On the other hand, they don't contribute much more in terms of sensors or agility. I know most of you are now super uncomfortable reading this and you want to be poetic and tell me all about spirit of adventure and what not. But get this: We need to make best out of our resources and technologies. We can have self driving cars and robots working in warehouses and delivering pizza. Why do we really need humans on Mars? I'm all of sending humans to Mars once we have found almost unlimited resorvoir of enery and world GDP has increased to point where we don't know what to do with all the excess. But until then let's send 100s of robots to mars, let's survey as much land there as possible, may be establish robot colony there, send robots with more and better sensors. May be robots can even build there biosphere first over years to prepare arrivals of humans. That would be much better use of our limited resources.

On the bright side, you only have to send the people and not all the gear, so much less weight to accelerate. I couldn't find something to indicate how much less fuel you would need to send only a few people with an earth reentry capsule. you would of course need air and supplies for 200-300 days hmm.. I guess it will be somewhat a problem anyways..

I feel like the significance of humans going to Mars is largely attributed to movies and pop culture.

It's the Paris Hilton of the astronomical world.

I don't want to be labeled a cynic, but do the benefits of sending humans to Mars outweigh the costs?

>I feel like the significance of humans going to Mars is largely attributed to movies and pop culture. It's the Paris Hilton of the astronomical world.

I think that may be conflating cause and effect. I'd argue a manned trip to Mars is a focus of pop culture because it resonates strongly with so many. The drive to explore has always been etched into a portion of humanity. For many(myself included) Mars stands as the currently realistic pinnacle of exploration for humanity. Along with accessibility of understanding the accomplishment you end up with our current Martian fascination.

>I don't want to be labeled a cynic, but do the benefits of sending humans to Mars outweigh the costs?

With anything as expensive and complex as a manned mission to mars, we honestly can never know until we try. It's impossible to predict what fruits, if any, it would bear for humanity. That's the nature of exploration and discovery. For all we know there's some infeasible to overcome barrier that makes the task of manned travel to Mars impossible.

Due to the intractable nature of quantifying the value of manned Mars missions I think the reasoning for doing so falls to a far more base human condition than a positive cost benefit analysis. On a personal level the desire for continued human exploration is hard to explain to those who don't possess it. There's an intensely disquieting internal sensation that comes with feeling stagnation at the bounds of human capability. It's not dissimilar to the urge for preservation of the Earth for future generations, or to rid the world of undue suffering. These drives, like exploration, aren't built on entirely pragmatic foundations. They can and do often fail to justify themselves on purely practical terms.

Just for clarity, my response isn't made with the purpose of persuasion. It's to help convey my entirely subjective view of things and perhaps illuminate the thinking behind some proponents for space exploration.

> I think that may be conflating cause and effect. I'd argue a manned trip to Mars is a focus of pop culture because it resonates strongly with so many.

Game of Thrones, Star Wars, etc, also resonate with society. Things in those movies aren't necessarily worthy of exploring. Conversely, cancer research isn't represented well in pop culture... but that doesn't mean it doesn't warrant pursuit.

>Conversely, cancer research isn't represented well in pop culture

I'd disagree, with that sentiment(cancer awareness, research and prevention are widely popular; otherwise we wouldn't so tightly associate the color pink and breast cancer), but that's not really what I was getting at.

> that doesn't mean it doesn't warrant pursuit.

What I'm suggesting isn't that we should tailor our spending to match the frequency in which a subject appears in pop culture, but that humanity has an innate drive to explore. This drive manifests in both real attempts at exploration(NASA, WHOI, ESA, etc.) and fictional dramatizations of exploration that appear in pop culture.

Maybe a better example of a similarly inherent drive influencing pop culture is the one for sex. Pop culture's fascination with sex(and exploration) is merely a consequence fundamental human pursuits.

The NASA went to the moon because the russians wanted to do it. Today's space exploration is shaped by cooperation, but sometimes a little bit of competition is needed to achive great thinks.

This is why i'm really hoping for the chinese to announce a manned mission to mars. It's the red planet afterall ;), and this could be a modern sputnik shock for the NASA.

Sputnik had military implications. Going to Mars doesn't.

That’s a valid point. But Sputnik had also a component of harmed pride (›most advanced nation‹); at least this should be reproducible.

This is like Kickstarter campaign. I don't believe until I see some serious things happening.

I have more fate in SpaceX or Chinese to put man on Mars then NASA.

Quite right.

The Chinese are motivated for nationalistic and propaganda purposes, just like the United States was in the 60s. They'll eventually get to Mars.

Elon Musk is personally motivated, and appears to be able to make the construction and launch of space vehicles commercially viable. If SpaceX doesn't get to Mars, it will at the very least push the commercial space industry to the point where a competitor can.

NASA? They're beholden to a group of self-serving fools on Capitol Hill and the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (which changes every 4-8 years). They're subject to the whims of politicians, which can make the necessary long-term planning and execution of such an endeavor nigh impossible.

What about India? Are they considering any mission to Mars?

They have launched a Mars orbiter. It's an amazingly well done and cost effective mission, but it's not on the same scale we are talking about here. Hopefully they will expand their program.

I guarantee you if China or India were to make strides towards a serious Mars mission (i.e. they had a Moon landing) we would have another space race with the US involved. It's exactly what happened when the USSR sparked the first space race. Whether we would win, who knows, but there is still plenty of expertise and know how in about sending humans into space in the US ...

I really don't understand all the absolute trust in SpaceX, in terms of human exploration they have proved nothing thus far. Sending cargo to the ISS is a different thing than sending humans. Once they pull that off we can start talking about great strides they are making in human space exploration.

Otherwise it's still a risky venture that hasn't proven anything yet, the only reason to have so much faith in them is because you're over zealously infatuated with Elon Musk. Not to downplay any of his obvious success, but I still believe in seeing results in the same way you're waiting to see if NASA is going to do some "serious things". Let's hold people to same standards, shall we?

> Whether we would win, who knows

I like to think of "we" as humanity. Hence we would win, no matter which flag gets there first.

> I really don't understand all the absolute trust in SpaceX, in terms of human exploration they have proved nothing thus far. Sending cargo to the ISS is a different thing than sending humans. Once they pull that off we can start talking about great strides they are making in human space exploration.

I think the thing about SpaceX is it seems like they have no ulterior motives (no one honestly thought it was going to make money, until it did), and they seem to have some chance of success.

I also think your humans to the space station mark is entirely the wrong one, they could do that today if they were willing to accept a bit more risk, and will almost certainly be able to do it in the near future. But putting humans in space isn't solving any of the hard problems. Far more interesting will be if they manage to re-use a rocket (or even first-stage) with no or minor refurbishment... as re-use is the only way they will be able to achieve their goals (paraphrasing massively from what Elon has said on numerous occasions).

I guarantee you that people felt quite certain that SpaceX was going to at least have the possibility of making loads of money. No one invests capital or starts a business, much less an aerospace business, if they don't honestly believe it will make money. Even if you have a bunch of idealists who want to see humanity achieve it's destiny and reach for the stars, they would be fools to invest so much time and money in something that they believe was destined to fail.

Whatever Elon Musk is, he's not a complete fool.

Er, why?

SpaceX has put exactly 0 people into orbital space at all, much less to the Moon.

China has only just made it to space and are still struggling with getting probes to the Moon.

Not to say NASA is going to be the first to Mars, but they are far and away the only ones with anything remotely resembling a track record to support it. Well, NASA and Russia, but Russia doesn't seem to be doing much in terms of pushing new programs.

I honestly don't see the point of doing this. The scientific bounty from going to the moon was tiny comparing to the amount of resource put into it.

I think poet Gil-Scott Heron does a great job deconstructing the space-exploration efforts in "Whitey on the Moon". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

What? This is nonsense. We have an social and industrial complex that would not exist if not for the space program. This internet. Your cell phone. The attempt to do great exploration begets the technology, which changes the world. This has been true since sailing ship days.

I would guess if the capital and talent marshaled to send a man the the moon had been tasked to build a global mobile communications network we would now have a better Internet and would have had cell phones a decade earlier.

Yes in a Pollyanna ideal world you could choose what worked in hindsight. But we can't know until we try, what we will discover.

AI, underground cities, high-speed rail systems, package delivery systems, renewable energy, genetic construction, nanotechnology, infrastructure optimization, recycling, natural language, experimental schools, community integration projects, ...

There are plenty of great projects to work on that will provide valuable insights if they fail, and great benefit if they succeed.

The difference with these and the space program was that the space program had a very specific goal. These, on the other hand, are technological exploits.

I.e. a "high-speed rail system" is not a goal in itself like the space program was but a goal of "smallest possible travel time with lowest cost between points A and B" would be. The end result of this might be a high-speed rail system, or something else entirely.

The value of programs with ambitious targets is that they will provide real world solutions forged out of necessity. Sometimes these will lead to new areas of industrial production, sometimes find that all they will need is a bunch of ducktape.

To make great leaps, we usually cannot put the technology before the end. It all starts with a great goal. Von Braun was obsessed with rocket engines because he wanted to explore the space. Heisenberg did not invent linear algebra (he was not aware it already existed, I think) because he was obsessed of numbers but because there was a specific physics problem he wanted to solve and he intuitively grasped he needed new tools to calculate the stuff he needed to calculate. Etc.

The real world problems provide two things at the same time: need and validation. They create a real world need, and if the new technique provides a valuable solution, it establishes the usage of this technology as a valid method.

Some folks want to know how exploration can benefit them scientifically.

Other folks wonder what the point of science is, if not exploration.

Meeting the needs of humanity might be considered a point for science, differen than "exploration". It seems that the debate is whether we meet the needs of humans right now suffering on this planet, or if we meet the needs of the long-term species under the premise, the assumption that we are simultaneously unwilling or unable to solve the problems here on Earth that we ourselves have caused.

I'm all for expanding frontiers of science.

I'd much prefer sending robotic exploration craft, though.

I don't see much scientific gain coming out of putting the people in space, while the massively increased costs associated of keeping people alive and well in space just subtract from scientific gains in knowledge and exploration.

Putting people in space is for PR, putting robots in space is for science.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/01/nasa-orion-sp...

It seems they're just hyping this Thursday's mission.

That said, I don't know anybody could withstand a one year trip in a capsule the size of Orion...

> That said, I don't know anybody could withstand a one year trip in a capsule the size of Orion...

It's possible that they'd use something like Bigelow's inflatable module for extra living space during the trip. A year in Orion without additional space and with two roommates sounds like Hell.

I read some of the background material about Orion. The transfer mission will include much larger structures for crew habitation. Orion is there as the return-to-Earth vehicle which also provides something they call 'abort anywhere' - the ability to pull the plug on the entire mission at any point during the flight to Mars.

We just need to pick another country to race with. "Hey China! Bet we'll get to Mars faster than you!" Then we'll have Mars 2020.

You ask the average American whether or not they'd pitch in to beat China to Mars and they'd say no. We don't have the nationalism to make that work anymore.

I'm not so sure on this... Competition is still a strong motivator, even if nationalism is waning.

The key to why the space race worked is competition between nations. It's because the fallout from World War 2 was a strong sense of national identity. The same thing that made McCarthyism work is what made the space race work.

We don't have that anymore. It was probably a worthwhile trade: there are other vectors we can get technological advance from: but if Obama made a speech about beating China to Mars tomorrow as a proof of how America is a great nation, the Republicans would assemble on the dot to burn him at the stake for it.

There's still a sense of national identity, such as can be seen in the Olympics, but it's barely an echo of what it was 50 years ago. Before we lost in Vietnam. Before the Civil War was re-enacted to gain universal suffrage. Before Reaganomics. Before Cuba. Before Bosnia. Before 9/11 and Iraq. Before Snowden. Before Ferguson.

It's not the same. The Soviets inspired a level of cultural disgust and existential terror in the US that China just can't match. We not only wanted to discredit communism by winning the space race, but make sure they couldn't glass us from orbit the first chance they got.

We have to wait until the mid 2030s (20 years!) to put humans on Mars via the government's program?

I fear that this goal is not nearly ambitious enough. Set a deadline far away, and the time you "need" to spend preparing to meet that deadline will increase in order to fill the amount of time you have.

Isn't it prudent to spread out the $1 trillion cost over a couple decades? After all, we have to borrow every dime of that from future taxpayers. I'm including cost overruns.

Or are you willing to pay an extra $10K a year in taxes to get to Mars sooner?

The average taxpayer pays NASA $55 per year.

I pay less for my Science Museum membership.

I would love to see NASA fixed (firstly) and fully funded (once its fixed).

Well you haven't paid a dime in NASA funding yet. All funding to date has been borrowed from people younger than you or not yet born. Presumably the gov't will borrow many times more to get to Mars, than it has for any previous mission.

You think that will pay for a human expedition to Mars and back?

If the US wasn't $17 trillion in debt, I could agree. Pretty sure all NASA funding to date fits into that debt amount. Since it's a "nice to have", I'd say the average taxpayer has never paid anything to NASA, not even interest on debt since we borrow to pay that.

We're already scheduled to spend a similar amount on simply maintaining our (US) nuclear deterrent. Not that I think we should abandon it or that it lacks strategic importance, but I do wonder about scale, in the same way that I wonder if NASA could find more efficient approaches.

So you're okay with paying extra taxes today so money needn't be borrowed from the kids (and their kids) for a Mars expedition?

Yeah, some, although I think that with 30 year t-bills at ~3% some of it should be financed by debt, as we're likely to develop multiple growth- (and thus revenue-) enhancing technologies over a 30 year period.

For perspective, Medicare and social security outlays over the same period are likely to exceed $50 trillion.

Okay, thanks for sharing your opinion on that. Myself, I'd rather see it paid off as costs are incurred, if we spend the money at all. If we weren't so in far in debt already (i.e. if future kids weren't so doomed), then we could take a chance on those revenue enhancements coming to fruition.

yes, and if weren't going to happen in my lifetime otherwise, 20-30k.

Wow, I applaud you for being among the very few people who can both support a space mission and be willing to pay for it!

don't take it as a personal demonstration, i mean it should be generally true for all

it's a small individual sacrifice for the most significant accomplishment yet of all known life

i can't think of anything larger or more important to support

NASA's budget over a couple decades isn't anywhere near $1 trillion. It's a skimpy little agency, relatively speaking.

You don't think the budget will increase as they take on their biggest challenge yet, by a couple orders of magnitude?

Even the stupidest plan to get to Mars only got a price tag of half-a-trillion (over 30 years).

The same team that gave the sticker-shocking $300-500 billion price tag to the Space Exploration Initiative gave a price tag of about $30-$50 billion to a MarsDirect-style mission. Spread over 10 years, that's about 10% of NASA's budget.

Even if, incredibly, there are no huge cost overruns and the final tally is $30 billion, are you willing to pay extra taxes starting today so the money isn't borrowed from future generations who presumably would like to have their own space missions to enjoy in real time, rather than just read about them in the history as they struggle with high taxes to pay down the debt we ran up for them?

Yes.

Then kudos to you!

Some of it has to do with the mathematical realities of the solar system. Mars will be closest to Earth in 2018, but if we can't get there that quickly, after that Mars will not come nearly as close to Earth through the 20's until we get to the 30's[0]

[0]http://cseligman.com/text/planets/marsoppositions.htm

The variances in fuel over that ~15 year cycle are really minor. Normally launch windows to Mars open every ~24 months.

An unmanned probe can take an extra month or year to get there with no changes to the actual mission as long as the path is fuel efficient.

For human cargo, the time difference is as important as the fuel expenditure - extra life support supplies can be heavier than extra fuel to make the same flight faster, or the need for much longer life support may make the whole thing impossibly heavy.

The closest Mars approaches (in a reasonable time frame) occur on a roughly 15-year period. The next one is in 2018, with the one after that being 2033. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#mediaviewer/File:Mars_oppo... and the associated article for a bit more detail.

That said, I agree that the plan is pretty pointless: when I was in high school, I was super-psyched that we were going to Mars in 2018. Couldn't wait. Then we got to ~2008, and we had to go from dreaming to doing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also decided to go to Mars in 2033. This time I'm less excited.

How big is the difference really? Another month or two travel time? Humans have spent over a year (Mir) and routinely do six month stints on the ISS. If you've got the tech to get to Mars and land there, then an extra month or two flight time is not going to kill you.

I say go as soon as we have the flight hardware built and qualified.

If you're sending humans, that's another month or two of the most expensive supplies in the history of human endeavor. It's not exactly a detail that we can currently afford to wave away.

(And I do mean afford. If we had better propulsion tech, like, oh, say, anything nuclear, we wouldn't have to worry so much about such details. But if we're going to hobble ourselves by rejecting that out of hand, we can't afford much mass.)

And nuclear thermal isn't even that good at 'only' (should I say surprisingly?) about 2x ISP, so you'd still need lots of mass.

It's not just the problem of having astronauts hanging out in their ship playing zero-gravity poker for an extra couple months. You also need to have adequate supplies for that time and make sure the crew is protected from any additional radiation exposure they'd experience during that time.

No matter when, you are going to burn extra fuel to shorten the trip for humans. You can get down to about 6 months travel time before it starts being crazy to spend extra fuel to shave extra days off the trip.

I'm not sure NASA has the budget to accelerate things the way they did during the Apollo era.

I just watched Neil DeGrasse Tyson's word on the subject yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxnCzz5oQE) and he quite agrees with you: "We're going to Mars in 20 years" is not what NASA should be about. NASA (and other space agencies) should strive to make space re-enter our culture so its benefits can rain on all aspects of our lives. In order to do that his proposal is to double NASA's budget and focus on building a suite of vehicles able to transport whatever they want. Kind of like the space shuttle but for longer distances, such as the moon, asteroids, Mars, Lagrange points... If you have perfected a space vehicle, going to Mars is about adapting that vehicle.

There are two possible scenarios where I'll get my hopes up that humans are going to Mars:

1. It is so close that it is obvious. A heavy lift human-rated rocket is in service. It is demonstrated that humans can live long duration without the radiation shielding of the Earth. The capsule is human rated (planned to happen in 2021). A robotic landing of the vehicle on Mars is done (a lot of Mars probes have failed on this step). That humans are selected / training. This goal is set for the 2030s, so it fails this criteria.

2. They announce a huge amount of funding to be spent within a few years. The pages I've read thus far don't suggest what funding levels are.

I'll happily listen to what they say, but I'm still skeptical.

EDIT: Expanded the conditions for point 1.

#2 is out of their control. I'd speculate that at least part of the purpose of this announcement is to shame Congress into ensuring sufficient funding.

Shaming congress doesn't appear to be effective at the moment.

Bush Sr. talked about going to Mars with SEI. Bush Jr. talked about it after Columbia. Skylab (the space station in the 70s) was supposed to teach us about long duration spaceflight in order to go to Mars (and we've been parked in LEO ever since).

I want to believe... And I like Zubrin's plan to go to Mars. As it could work with an incrementalist approach, and thus is pragmatic (and sounds like what they are doing). But the problem is that there is a long time before the work on the incrementalist dream starts and landing on Mars. Who knows what will happen to funding in the mean time.

It doesn't, but what other choice do they have? If you only have one button to press, you might as well keep pressing it. Maybe it'll work one of these times.

"The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

It would be very difficult to chop down a tree with that mentality.

In quoting Einstein's definition of stupidity, the analogy is to ineffectively chopping at a tree without managing to fell it, and then proceeding to ineffectively do the same to N other trees.

First, the quote is about insanity, not stupidity. Second, Einstein didn't say it. Third, it's not a very good definition of either.

I've done a bit of (very marginal) work for NASA, and the problem they have is that it takes 2 weeks and 5 signatures to get $200 worth of parts approved... while everyone is always in a hurry regardless. Just give your engineers $300 a month for miscellanea, it'll be faster and cheaper. I can see why being a federal agency they have to be spotlessly above-board when it comes to who does what with money, but there's a limit to that.

What ended up happening with my projects (PhoneSat and a couple other things) is that I was there part time, and just bought parts on my own dime, then I sent a global itemized bill for everything. It took six months but they did pay me back.

Huge PR move, but i dont think it's gonna work. Do people really need to "send a human" to mars? To prove what to whom (the soviets are no more). It's not like we haven't already been there and taken our pictures. Or that we expect any surprises from this mission. How about we make a plan to terraform Mars? Or to work on more mysterious things like genomes, like the brain etc? Sending a human to mars is a PR move, maybe typical of our times, but not useful.

Looks like the briefing already happened. Does anyone know if a recorded version is available anywhere yet?

It's up on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU

All this means to me is that somebody in the NASA PR department is leading a push to appear competitive with private companies. I imagine very little has changed operationally in the past few months at NASA. This announcement is only meant to conform to the ebb-and-flow of media, a battlefront where private companies have been kicking NASA's ass lately. (Maybe NASA PR wants to capitalize on recent virgin crash, chink-in-armor, lol).

This push is great but it's definitely a case of "fake it till you make it" from NASA vs the private companies, since they're all competing for the same funding. Honestly, I love it. It's great to see competition in the space race again. This time instead of nation states duking it out in orbit, it's private sector vs host nation state. It's great. Hopefully this leads to huge space innovations in the next decade, and we actually do send humans to Mars.

Go space yay. ~= >===|=>

Notice that nowhere in the graphic is there a Martian lander. This looks like a re-purposing of the Orion spacecraft into a twin configuration to support a one-off slingshot around Mars on an approximately two-year free return trajectory, with a few months spent close enough to Mars to get some science done and photaos taken. It's an idea that's been floating around for years, and not very interesting because it's a strategic dead-end.

I am very saddened. When I saw the tweet I thought we finally got a commitment from high up to land people on another planet, and not just aimlessly building random congress-designed porkbarrel crap with a hope to someday do something somewhere as will be decided later.

A commitment to land people on Mars on a strict schedule would do so much to overcome the bureaucratic stranglehold on doing anything interesting in space ... too bad this isn't going to be it :/

What exactly is the need to send humans to Mars? Why not robots? Is it worth risking a human's life for science, when a robot can do an equally good job?

Because we can. Climbing to the top of a mountain is also dangerous and usually of no practical value.

existence proof. a necessary step toward multiplanetary human civilization.

> What exactly is the need to send humans to Mars?

Lots of reasons, some below. Primarily, the reason to send humans is because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe. Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

> Why not robots?

You ask as if we haven't been sending robots to Mars for the last 3-4 decades. (Edit: We should absolutely send robots. We should send way more robots than people. But we should still send people.)

> Is it worth risking a human's life for science, when a robot can do an equally good job?

Not sure if trolling. Humans have collectively agreed that it's worth 10,000+ annual deaths in the USA in exchange for the convenience of cars. So yes, 1-5 human lives on Mars is worth the science that they'd get done.

Also...there are no robot scientists yet. Maybe there will be in the future, but we can't bank on that and allocate budgets to imaginary robotic scientists that are better than humans.

I've been trolled haven't I?

I agree with you on these points, but think the vehicle deaths makes for a poor comparison since we're not really advancing science in the same way. I'm guessing that NASA would have its pick of qualified volunteers for a manned Mars mission because of the science involved; people who would willingly risk their lives.

Humans, as a species, have a very low bus-factor in planetary terms...

I think we're fine if a bus hits the planet.

Not if it's doing 0.999c.

obwhatif https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/

That sphere of diamond weighs about 3000x as much as a typical bus. So presumably we'd wind up with 1/60th of Chicxulub, rather than 50x. It'd suck (a lot) - and yeah, "we're fine" wouldn't hold - but I think we'd survive.

Edited to add: I don't know if I mis-read it or if you edited it, but the above was a response to 0.99c.

Sure, but you don't need to send humans from the first try, though. First send the robots to build up the bases, then you can send humans in those comfy bases with Internet connection, large screens and 3D-printed pizza.

We're about 40 years after the first success, much less attempt.

The reference mission for Mars for over 15 years has been to send the hab and a return vehicle in one launch window, and then send the humans in the second. The humans will know before they lift-off that the return vehicle is fully-stocked and waiting for them and has survived landing.

> because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe

Why not send bacteria which may evolve or may create environment for other form of life? If by known life you mean human, why is it so important to ensure the continued survival of human species in the universe?

> Why not send bacteria which may evolve or may create environment for other form of life?

We should absolutely do that. In fact, we almost certainly will. This isn't mutually exclusive with sending humans, though, it's something we'd do as well. I think the primary function of said bacteria would be to help terraform the planet - warm up the surface, add gasses to the atmosphere, evolve new Martian life forms to continue those processes, etc.

> If by known life you mean human, why is it so important to ensure the continued survival of human species in the universe?

I know this isn't a constructive comment but... Really? Like you don't see the point at all?

> Why not send bacteria which may evolve or may create environment for other form of life?

We should, but there are 2 reasons we are not doings so right now.

1) We don't want to destroy our ability to determine if there was life on Mars in the past, which would be much harder to recognize as martian life if earth life was all around.

2) It is quite difficult to come up with something that could survive and reproduce on Mars.

I don't think (1) is a compelling enough reason and (2) is just another way of saying that it's hard, so I completely agree, we should do it.

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Except that all planets in our solar system other than Earth are uninhabitable. So what benefit is sending a few humans to very far away and insanely inhospitable place?

It's a suicide mission for whoever goes. We don't have a great success even landing robots on these places. We've never even tried to return from Mars. Lift-off from Earth is hardly perfected!

> Except that all planets in our solar system other than Earth are uninhabitable.

So is Canada in the wintertime. We have spent billions (trillions?) of dollars to make it livable here, I don't see any reason we wouldn't think the same about the planets.

> So what benefit is sending a few humans to very far away and insanely inhospitable place?

I think I answered this already. It's a necessary step in building self-sustaining civilizations. Hopefully it won't be so inhospitable for too long. We can probably terraform in a few thousand years.

> It's pretty a suicide mission for whoever goes.

No more so than staying on Earth. Your life here is a suicide mission just the same as any astronaut's life on Mars would be.

> We don't have a great success even landing robots on these places.

We don't have great success at anything we do, when we do it for the first few times. We'll get better.

> We've never even tried to return from Mars. Lit-off from Earth is hardly perfected!

Alright, let's try a return from Mars in the next 5-10 years then. Also, that's sufficient time to increase reliability in Earth lift-offs.

> So is Canada in the wintertime.

What an outlandish comparison. I know that Canadians seem to pride themselves on how cold it can get in their neck of the woods, but... come on.

Indians and inuits managed to live there even before there was any concept of "dollars" on the American continent. Now, surviving on another planet? It's like comparing swimming in a lake in the fall to swimming in a volcano.

I don't mean to compare Canada to Mars!

However...it would be completely impossible to sustain a population of 20 million people living at -20deg C for 3 months at a time, without spending significant amount of money on infrastructure specifically dedicated to making sure we don't die from exposure to the elements. We all collectively decided it was worth it a long time ago, and here we are.

Now Canada's a pretty awesome place to be in the winter.

> However...it would be completely impossible to sustain a population of 20 million people living at -20deg C for 3 months at a time, without spending significant amount of money on infrastructure specifically dedicated to making sure we don't die from exposure to the elements.

What is this fantastical infrastructure that goes beyond the infrastructure that goes into sustaining a Western country (with densely populated pockets)? Compare the infrastructure to, say, middle latitude USA (latitude equal to NYC).

I'll list a few:

Many of our cities are architected entirely differently. Most of them have vast underground components (Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, etc) to aid in keeping the city livable and dense, while not having to go outside.

Our electricity generating requirements are pretty crazy in the winter, to heat all the buildings. Any gap in insulation will cause deaths.

Our construction industry is currently in upheaval, as new techniques are being invented to enable more growth in the cold climate. New concrete insulation tech, new building designs and materials, etc.

I'm not trying to say it's nearly impossible, or outrageously expensive, or anything. But, it's expensive to build out to a stage where we can reasonably house millions of people through the winters. Worth it, though, and hopefully good preparation for space travel / Mars colonization when the time comes.

Its comparable. Sure Mars is colder, but cold isn't an issue after you have a coat/insulated building. Its really all air food and water.

Air and water come from ... water and electricity. So that leaves food.

It can be hard to grow anything in a greenhouse in the winter - insulation blocks sunlight, which isn't any too bright out there already. So that leaves farming with lights in tanks, underground, or in insulated domes etc. Which will end up costing more than the human infrastructure. E.g. it can take a quarter acre of land to grow food for you; you can live in 500 sq ft. Orders of magnitude different.

You know, I'm quite sure those same arguments were made to the early explorers of the New World, back to the nutty Vikings and others.

Even as recently as mass immigration to America. People who got on the boats across the Atlantic weren't coming back, and communication was slow.

Some people just want to go.

I'm pretty sure the New World was actually habitable.

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization,

I think there is immense value in continued unmanned Mars missions and yes, even in manned missions, but I don't think that a trip to Mars would be a step towards becoming a multi-planetary civilization beyond "we can ferry humans between planets." Mars is not and most likely never will be colonizable. We might have an outpost or a station like the ISS, but Mars' extremely thin atmosphere and low surface gravity (a third of Earth's) means that long-term habitation will never be practical barring extraordinary technological developments in planetary engineering, the medical field, and/or artificial gravity.

Personally I suspect the only long term colonization prospect in the Solar System is Venus - thick atmosphere and near-Earth surface gravity - but for obvious reasons we'd still need extensive terraforming to cool the planet and make the atmosphere breathable - seeding the clouds with oxygen-producing bacteria would be a first step towards both, I suppose.

Why do you think humans won't be able to live in 3/8g?

Oh I think we would. But at the moment I think that living on Mars would be almost the same as living on the bottom of the ocean - both would require spending all of the time inside pressurized containers, looking outside through glass. Yet the perspective of looking at the ocean floor is incredibly boring, but perspective of looking at Mars' surface is exciting? Don't get me wrong, it would be AMAZING if we got humans to Mars. But if we are to live inside plastic structures, we can do it just as well on the Moon, which is much easier to reach.

> Oh I think we would.

We could. But there are serious health issues associated with living long-term in low-g environments and anyone who spent their whole life there would probably never be able to visit Earth.

No it's not trolling. I just want to see if a human's workload on space missions can be replaced by a set of sensors and robots.

> Primarily, the reason to send humans is because we have to in order to ensure the continued survival of (known) life in the universe.

Sure, but why not send multiple robots and a bunch of sensors? Humans need food and water to live (don't know how much of the payload will be a year's worth of food/water), and are generally inefficient at converting food sources to energy.

> Humans have collectively agreed that it's worth 10,000+ annual deaths in the USA in exchange for the convenience of cars.

Wrong. This is why we need autonomous cars. Driving is best done by computers, and humans will agree that it is NOT worth 10k+ annual deaths a year just to give humans "the pleasure of driving".

Thanks for your reply. I'll address some concerns, but I think we're closer to agreement than earlier actually.

> Sure, but why not send multiple robots and a bunch of sensors?

Well, yes, we absolutely should. We've got a long history of doing this, so we know what their strengths and weaknesses are. We should keep doing this, I think the vast majority of 'things' that we send to Mars for the next 10-20 years should be robots, not people.

> Humans need food and water to live (don't know how much of the payload will be a year's worth of food/water), and are generally inefficient at converting food sources to energy.

This is exactly the reason we need to send them. Since the eventual goal is (or should be, anyway) permanent colonization, it makes sense to send people right away so that they learn how to make food and where to find water. Robots won't be so concerned with this - and frankly, human ingenuity to find ways of making food is probably better done by humans than it is by robots.

> Wrong. This is why we need autonomous cars. Driving is best done by computers, and humans will agree that it is NOT worth 10k+ annual deaths a year just to give humans "the pleasure of driving".

I would agree with you if this had always been the case. But road deaths have persisted for decades without even the promise or idea that we're working towards a real solution. It's just been accepted by people. I agree that this attitude will change we when demonstrate that it doesn't have to be this way anymore.

But for the last ~100 years, humanity has definitely been quite relaxed at risking death just so we can drive cars (or, walk around nearby others who are driving cars).

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Only if we are able to make the Martian colony self-sufficient. This is quite a problem, as even major nations on Earth aren't really self-sufficient now. Any serious attempt at trying would most likely require tens of thousands of colonists and massive amounts of materiel to be transported to Mars and sustained there. This would require many, many orders of magnitude more resources than any plausible manned mission to Mars, which is already so expensive that nobody seems to be willing to do it.

A Mars colony would obviously not be an autarky. But after a few decades, equipment could be set up so that it could be self-sufficient if it needed to.

The US could be self-sufficient, too. It's not because trade is too valuable.

Yes self sufficiency is hard, we don't even know how hard, but the first step is a colony. A colony that produces or recycles all of its air and water and half of it's food is well within current technology (though still quite difficult) and the perfect way to understand exactly what we need to learn to have a self sufficient colony. Semiconductor fabs can come later.

Just sending people there for a year and a half is a great first step.

I don't think it would sound the same

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> That\'s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Because Elon Musk embarassed them when he repeatedly tells the tale of why he started his own Mars mission.

(because he went to the NASA website and they had no plans to go to Mars or to do much of anything since they got bored with the moon in the 70s)

I'm not a particularly big proponent of this or anything, but I've heard people in the know claim that humans would do a vastly, vastly better job than robots. I don't remember enough detail and it's too far outside of my area of expertise, but I think if you look you should be able to find some interesting information on the subject.

That's interesting. I'll try to look for a human vs. robot comparison.

> Is it worth risking a human's life for science

I'd volunteer, even if it was a one-way mission with a 10% chance of success.

“Men Wanted: for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

Exactly! Earth wasn't explored by sitting around worrying about the hazards!

That's great, but volunteering for adventure etc. should best be left to private enterprises. When NASA is funded by taxpayer money, the goal should be science and not adventure.

Keep in mind that there were deaths in the development of our space program in the past.

http://www.spaceanswers.com/space-exploration/heroes-of-spac...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...

If your goal is science send robots, if your goal is the eventual colonization of Mars still only send robots for now, if your goal is adventure send people.

Adventure is kind of a selfish goal, considering that only one or two humans get to enjoy the experience. All those resources and manpower is a waste if the rest of humanity doesn't benefit from it.

It's perfectly OK for a rich billionaire to do it...but NASA's focus should be science and not pleasure, I feel.

Human life is cheap - we can get a reasonable astronaut to participate in a 10%-chance-of-death mission for about the same resources as participating in a 0.01%-chance-of-death mission; and it's just as ethical as, say, sending people to Iraq or to fly a test-plane like "SpaceShipTwo".

The only concern is if the advantages of having a human on-site justify the extra weight of the life support systems.

The existence of Apollo is a curse that has made it almost impossible for NASA to plan any modest sustainable capabilities in human exploration.

Instead it's often "let's build our own huge rockets and launch a few huge missions per year". This makes it expensive and unsustainable. The development, the upkeep, the operations, everything is unscalable.

It's like if you want to create a new app, you decide you need custom transistors. Division of work. Added value. Concentrate on what your core competencies are. Start small and verify your solutions.

What are the physics behind the 20mb/s bandwidth limit over radio? He said more than that isn't "feasible", because of power requirements or why?

The information bandwidth in bytes/s is limited by the SNR and the bandwidth (in Hz) of the radio channel. The atmospheric "window" is only so large. At the same time, antenna's can only be so focused and transmit power is only so high. If you're interested in reading more about this look up "link budgets."

Not in my lifetime.

Somebody may get humans to Mars -- an effort that I'm all in favor of -- but given that NASA is kept on a short financial leash by politicians more interested in dumping money into their constituent areas than funding a long-term space policy, the odds that the United States government will be behind the effort are slim at this point.

NASA's budget is the highest of all government run space agencies and is three times that of Russia, which is number two.

Isn't that kind-of like saying "My water is WAY cleaner than yours!" when we both live in a swamp? My point being, sure, we spend more than the other guy on space but compared to just about everything else we spend pitifully little on it.

Perhaps, but I wouldn't underestimate them! They have a lot of ground-breaking projects happening even though you don't see them in the media very often. They do a lot with what they get.

So your point is that russia's space program and the ESA (etc) are also underfunded then, yes?

No, Mobiu5 is countering MrZongle2's point that a non-NASA entities are likely to beat NASA to Mars.

I happen to disagree with his analysis, however, because he's not taking non-government entities like SpaceX into account.

I don't see him making any reference to non-NASA entities at all. All he said is that a trip to Mars made by somebody, anybody, might happen someday, but the odds of sufficient financial support for this attempt are poor.

> Somebody may get humans to Mars ... [but] the odds that the United States government will be behind the effort are slim at this point.

i.e. non-NASA entities have a better chance than NASA

Doesn't follow.

Edit: I see he has other replies that clarify that this is exactly what he's thinking. "I'm fairly confident that I'll see humans on Mars before I die. I just don't believe NASA will be behind the effort." I still maintain that this is not indicated in the original comment, but that starts to become unimportant.

I was really just trying to point out that he was trivializing NASA. Maybe a private entity will beat them there, maybe not. But they're clearly far from being an incapable organization and still achieve plenty of cutting edge, "world-first" scientific data gathering, engineering research, etc..

As a side note. I'm willing to bet they will be the first (with collaboration between the other space agencies as they often do).

Edit: Plus, I don't know of any other deep space crew carrier that currently exists. It sounds to me like they have a head start since they already have one in their possession, albeit untested.

Yes, but you have to consider the difference in costs...

NASA pessimism is one of the reasons the politicians have little incentive to change their minds.

Pessimism has little to do with the actions of politicians.

If Senators and Congressmen believe that a $5B mission to study lunar cheese via sub-orbital flight would drive that money into their constituents' areas, they'll support it.

It has nothing to do with what the public at large thinks about NASA; it's merely a bullet point they can trot out at the next election: see, through my work in Congress I brought jobs to your area, re-elect me.

And THAT is why I doubt NASA can pull this off, because it's clowns like that who control the purse-strings. It's why we junked Apollo capsules for the Shuttle. It's why we have an Orion capsule in development now to replace the Shuttle. It's why the target for HSF went from the Moon to low Earth orbit, languished there for decades, paused briefly on the absurd notion of an asteroid interception mission as being viable, and is now back at Mars.

My pessimism in NASA's manned program is well-founded.

They have the ideas and the know-how, but their plans are at the mercy of self-serving, science-ignorant politicians.

At this point we have corporations that can fund space flight. Do we really need governments funding a trip to mars? I think it isn't worth it. Leave it up to those who want to spend their own money. The government should be funding climate science, geo-engineering research, studying how to avoid war, and continuing to fund research into more powerful and cost effective propulsion and energy systems that we can use in space and here on earth.

I think NASA shouldn't send a manned mission to mars.

> "studying how to avoid war" I'm sure it isn't that straightforward....

Say you diverted NASAs 18.4 billion yearly budget. What can you do with 18.4 billion dollars? To give you contrast of how little that is relative to other American financial concerns, the GM bailout of 2008 was 51 billion.

Why not have Mars missions if the US can give car companies tens of billions?

Research, development, and construction will all take place in, y'know, areas.

SpaceX is more likely to get humans to Mars than NASA.

If SpaceX's approach shows promise I'd expect NASA's program to evolve to integrate it somewhat. SpaceX might become the launch vehicle for the unmanned portions, for example.

SpaceX's approach is to reuse well understood technology but do it mostly in house instead of farming everything out. The are innovating on process and cost but nothing else (at the moment).

Those are two areas where NASA certainly could learn something.

I really don't think you can claim they're not innovating when they've already propulsively test-landed (in the sea, but successfully) two Falcon first stages.

They've done those landings (as tests) on land with the Grasshopper as well. The videos are super cool.

NASA has propulsively landed many things (on other planets!). The fundamentals have been around for a while.

What I'm trying to get at is that SpaceX is currently not the go to place for rocket science. I do think they are making mark in rocket building science which is exactly what we pay them to do.

NASA's annual revenue is 73% SpaceX's market cap.

But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.

Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr

NASA does a lot of things, only some of which are related to any journey to Mars. Of course, they might suddenly drop everything and work towards sending humans.

As an example of a lot of things, New Horizons is coming out of hibernation this Saturday. It sends a periodic "ok" beacon every couple weeks or whatever since launch in the 00s, but its booting up for real this Saturday.

Pluto flyby mid next july...

The estimate in 1996 was ~30 billion for a trip to Mars. SpaceX has been accumulating the needed rocket technologies.

Roughly, the tech needed is:

1. heavy-lift

2. Mars EDL

3. artificial g for the trip and return

4. in-situ fuel production

5. methane rockets

SpaceX has been developing heavy-lift at a profit, so that takes care of #1. They are also working on #5, although I'm not sure off-hand who their customers are. (Methane has volume advantages over LH/LOX that might make it better for smaller missions.)

There are still some other pieces of the pie that need assembled. Rockets are surely a part of #2, but Musk is essentially building a company that will sell him a trip to Mars.

The advantage of methane is that it can be produced natively out of the martian atmosphere. Heat + Metal Catalyst + C02 + H2 = Methane + O2

Also hydrogen + O2 = water. So basically you ship the astronauts with nothing but hydrogen and live off the land. Or this is what the Mars Society was calling for.

Yes, any launch from Mars is very likely to be methane.

I was just trying to figure out how SpaceX could fund its development of methane rockets before that, through domestic use of methane rockets.

89% (by mass) of hydrogen/oxygen fuel can also be produced from Martian atmosphere, since Oxygen has an atomic mass 16 times that of hydrogen. I think Methane has advantages other than a slightly larger portion producible from Martian air.

I'm doubtful that such a mission could be organized privately, just because there isn't any money in it. When humans eventually get to Mars, they might be riding a SpaceX rocket, but the mission will almost certainly be planned and funded by NASA or some other national space agency.

Except that I'm pretty sure Elon's life goal is to make an impact on humanity, not die with a ton of money. He's repeatedly shown that he's willing to go all in to change the world.

That may be his goal, but even all of his money is orders of magnitude less than what it would take for either a small colony or a manned mission with return. See sibling post about NASA annual budget, relatively small though it is, still blowing away SpaceX's market cap and Elon's personal wealth.

Elon also hasn't just blown money senselessly on longshots or unsustainable one-offs, like a private Mars mission would be. SpaceX and Tesla both have some innovative concepts and have advanced their respective fields, but both are also perfectly ordinary businesses in most regards, with very reasonable plans for revenue. I don't see any potential for revenue in travelling to Mars.

Well how old are you now?

It's an interesting statement because technological advancements are virtually assured to keep increasing the average lifespan (especially in industrialized and wealthy countries, excuse the recent dip due to obesity) and they're also virtually assured to keep making space travel a more viable reality.

Combine that with increased global cooperation (possibly deteriorating right now) and increased private competition and I think it's feasible.

I'm 24. I have a feeling I'll more than certainly see humans on Mars barring any unfortunate calamity to myself. I've also been saying I'd live until I was three or four hundred years old since I was a ten years old. So call me an optimist in a variety of ways.

Everything I've said is totally from a layman's perspective and I truly have not given the question much thought besides an initial excitement at the prospect upon reading this headline and checking out the news.

My skepticism isn't based so much off of my age (I'm in my 40s) but rather NASA's track record when it comes to manned spaceflight.

I'm fairly confident that I'll see humans on Mars before I die. I just don't believe NASA will be behind the effort.

Hmm, I'm on the other end actually. I think that for humans to go to Mars it will have to eschew a profit motive, which companies like SpaceX simply can't do.

As NASA is the best funded space agency for the richest and most technologically advanced nation on Earth, I'll believe the odds are stacked in their favor that they'll be behind the first astronauts there.

Of course, if our politicians don't stop bumbling around we may very soon not be the most advanced nation on Earth which would be unfortunate.

When it was a race, NASA did good! Hopefully other countries will join in and spur us on. Even Republicans might be able to get around to the idea of showing off American exceptionalism (I think it's bullshit, American exceptionalism has been predicated off a very rich country investing lots of money into research. But call it what you will, it is what it is.).

This is great but we should really colonize the moon first. It allows us to get all the necessary systems in place in a test environment. Earth is only 3 days away from the moon rather than 9 months to Mars.

It also makes sense to work on the moon first so we can use it to leap frog to mars rather than sending a shuttle through earths atmosphere.

> leap frog to mars rather than sending a shuttle through earths atmosphere.

But you still have to get the human through Earth's atmosphere and out of orbit anyways. Once you're out of Earth's orbit you might as well coast all the way to Mars because landing on the Moon doesn't gain you anything.

I suppose that is true, is it to early to talk space elevators? ;)

I'll believe it when I see it. This must be about the 20th such announcement from NASA, and the other 19 have sunk into the bureaucratic morass without a trace. I see no reason to think this time is different, particularly in light of the mountain of unfunded liabilities that are going to keep budgets tight for decades.

Yeah, I believed you guys when you told me that in early 70s. I stopped believing after the fourth or fifth time you gave up. Or maybe when it was when you stopped being able to even put people in LEO. Humans may one day go to Mars, but they won't be wearing NASA logos. Unless it's ironically.

The intriguing point to me that I haven't seen addressed on any reporting of the announcement is this:

Is the plan to put humans on the surface and then bring them back home? How do they intend to land and get back off of the planet?

(Forgive me if they addressed this in the video; I haven't had time to watch it yet.)

What is this, a positive side effect of Cold War II? I'm sort of joking, but not really.

The essential issue for Mars, as well as for most other issues, is the Republican Party's refusal to fund government programs. Until they change or are voted out of office, all planning and discussion are hot air.

That's not the issue at all. If you look at the historical budget of NASA[1] it has a very low correlation with Republican presidents[2].

The main issue is that they get a lot of misdirected funding that's mainly allocated as a function of short-term political interests, and that's an entirely bipartisan issue in the United States.

1. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/NASA-Budg... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unite...

I meant now, not historically.

Neither party really cares. There has been one pro-space guy running for office in the past 15 years.

Unless you count goodspaceguy here in Seattle. http://info.kingcounty.gov/kcelections/candidatesonballot/pa...

Of course Mike Nelson wants to go to space. He misses his old spaceship, where he had to watch those bad movies with his robot pals.

(Oh yeah, I just remembered he dropped the "Mike Nelson" part of his name years ago. Too bad.)

GWB was pretty pro-space. But NASA can't get much done in one or two four-year terms.

Each president talks about how space is awesome. But lots of other things are awesome and need funding.

The one candidate with any real decent space cred didn't make make it very far in his party's primaries last time he ran.

Actually, funnily enough, the Constellation program got it's big funding push under Bush, while he was talking about all his typical Republican things.

Then Obama showed up, cut Constellation and privatized the launch industry, to cries of socialism and communism.

Neither party is going to fund the previous party's space mission. A mission has to be too far along to cancel by the time administrations change or else it will get the ax.

If Apollo was still trying to put people in orbit in 1968, Nixon would have ended it to little public outcry.

I love all the people saying that Space-X's main goal is to turn a profit, or that they have to turn a profit. They're a private company, not a public one. As long as they still have people willing to do work for them for what they pay them(if anything) then a private company can do whatever it likes(legally) without making a profit at all. It's private, the goals are up to the whims of the owners.

2030s? Why wait 5-15 years after SpaceX gets there? I'm guessing it will be a little awkward when they try to plant the flag on Elon's lawn.

side note, you can get SpaceX flags here: http://shop.spacex.com/accessories-58/spacex-flag-bundle.htm...

> Why wait 5-15 years after SpaceX gets there?

This isn't the 70s where there was political pressure to do what-ever it takes lest the damn Ruskies beat you to it and make you look weak. It is reassuring that they are planning for what they can achieve safely rather than doing what-ever is needed to get there first (assuming that is in fact what they are doing, of course). And maybe SpaceX won't get there as fast as they hope - their plans do seem rather ambitious.

Maybe the whole NASA budget should be used for researching a better propulsion engine first, with the current technology going to mars is extremely expensive and inefficient, we are stuck with chemical propelled rockets since ww2, with a breakthrough in this area we could achieve so much more, we need to focus our resources better.

If you got the politics out of NASA they could do just about anything. I've worked at a couple different places in NASA and the talent varies from place to place. It's the politics that ruin everything.

Personally I would much, MUCH rather see this money spent on further exploration of other planets and their moons. Imagine having a rover on one of the moons of Jupiter. To me Mars is just not that interesting.

Cool, space launch system (SLS) is a great start! https://twitter.com/NASA/status/539814651404754944

It's a launch platform without clear future missions or funding. After the surplus RS-25 engines from the shuttle program are used (designed to be re-usable, they are heavy and expensive and will be destroyed by the launches) it's not clear what will power the launch vehicle. It's a very expensive big rocket with an unclear future in both engineering and political terms.

I missed the live briefing ... is there a replay somewhere that I can watch?

Found it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBoj-1m-qLU

Is there any more substantive statement than this Tweet?

Wow! This is amazing, glad to be alive to see this!

What an amazing time to be alive.

Awaiting announcement of Commercial Crew to Mars program.

Love the fact that it was first announced on Twitter :)

Plutonium: The scary element that helps probe space's secrets.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29274491

Will they come back?

Can they come back?

Bush senior said so in 1989. Bush junior said so in 2004. Obama now says so ten years later.

I'll wait for hillary to send us to mars in 2050, thanks, women have more balls.

and at the ripe age of 103 no less...

We're all going to be immortal heads in glass jars by that point.

No no she will promise it twenty years earlier, just like everyone else. She'll be 80 or something and everyone would have forgotten by then.

It about time!

So uh, Mars is smaller than Earth now?

Not sure if serious...

Relative sizes of planets and stars:

http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/star-sizes/

You don't have any radiation shielding.

Why not try surviving under the ocean first? Fail Squad NASA.

"If you recruited the Mars crew out of smokers and sent them to Mars without their tobacco you would be reducing their chance of getting cancer." - Dr. Robert Zubrin

Sure! Let's destroy another planet with our insatiable resource seeking. Anyone know of any sci-fi tomes where humans play the role of an unstoppable galactic virus? If so, whoever/whomever wrote it may be onto something :(

What exactly does "destroy another planet" mean, in this context?

Sorry, misread the reply. Mars, if found to possess materials we deem valuable, will be mined mercilessly.

What's wrong with that?

So what?

This is not something to answer snappily. It's a question that can stand up to some serious scrutiny. We are used to a default "leave it alone" argument because everywhere we can currently get to is a rich, diverse, vibrant ecosystem, or within easy reach of one. Does our default "be careful" attitude apply where that is not true?

(And don't just dodge out with "Well, what if there's life on Mars?" Best evidence right now is still "no". Let's stick to best evidence for the moment. Failing that, there's certainly other places where there is no life, like the Moon. Who cares what we do to the Moon?)

Who decides what should be preserved and why?

If the Grand Canyon contained no life, would it be ethical to strip mine it? Should we preserve the Mars for future generations (in terms of science, natural beauty, ethics or economics/resources)? In doing that are we harming people that could be helped today by those resources?

If you find a beautiful rock in the woods is it wrong/amoral to smash it? What about fossils? Is it ethical to burn art for heat?

These are important questions to ask and the answers are non-trivial.

"If the Grand Canyon contained no life, would it be ethical to strip mine it?"

You are implicitly invoking emotional reactions. Make them explicit. Spell them out.

You might find they can't survive such a process. This is a sign.

"Should we preserve the Mars for future generations (in terms of science, natural beauty, ethics or economics/resources)?"

If we are unwilling to land on it and exploit its resources sufficiently to live on it, what future generations? Nobody's there now!

Besides, unless you're living in the Olduvai Gorge right now, congratulations, you live in a place that has been "ruined" for future generations. How do you feel about that? If the answer is anything other than grateful, you need to carefully consider how your own (implicit) answers apply to your own world in the past. Future generations must exist before they can feel anything.

This is just emotion dressed up in spiritualistic trappings, not an argument.

We (not being snarky here) have a very narrow definition of "life" and what is and isn't "alive". Imagine our solar system as an ecosystem as you mentioned. If this is the case, what is done to one will effect all (and in ways we may not yet understand). Oh and the Moon has great effect on our planet and our bodies -we should definitely care about what happens to it.

Wow... I asked you not to dodge out by imagining that Mars could conceivably maybe have life, and you went for near-pantheism. I'm impressed. Not in a good way, mind you, but impressed.

Is it really so hard to imagine that maybe there's absolutely nothing wrong with using every resource we can find on Mars or the Moon? Is "NO!!!!" really so deeply ingrained that you are simply incapable of dealing with it on any rational level whatsoever? That's... sad.

Also, "WE DON'T UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING ABOUT WHAT WE MIGHT BE DOING" is just another sophomoric ("that which seems wise to a second-year college student but is actually just cleverly-masked foolishness", since few people seem to understand this sense of the word) way of dodging out of an ethics discussion. We never understand "everything" about what we may be doing, but, alas, you must act, even if that act is to not act. Since it applies equally to all positions and all possible actions, it is a null argument.

We won't know until we do it MikeA. Suffer the consequences later -just like here on Earth.

What consequences?

Your argument could be made about doing anything. "You don't know what could go wrong!" is true about everything, and is therefore a worthless observation.

...yes?

The "destruction of mars" for the purposes of resource exploitation is a major theme in KSR Mars books[0]. Although the actual evil of resource exploitation and terraforming on Mars is highly debated in the books, with many perspectives represented.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0...

Interesting -thanks EthanH

Mars does not have a bountiful ecosysem. I would like to establish whether life has ever taken hold there for obvious reasons, but there are other candidates that are equally if not more interesting, such as Europa and Enceladus. Unless we find compelling evidence of life on Mars within the next decade or make breakthroughs in the fields of propulsion and habitation, then I'm all for nudging a few comets/asteroids into it and getting on with terraforming already. I'm not ashamed of our exploratory instincts.

What's wrong with destroying a lifeless rock if it allows us to propagate our species thus creating more life?

You seem to be very concerned for a giant rock. I'm not quite sure that Mars' feelings are so easily hurt, though.

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