From Streetcars To Spaceships

No more waiting. Let's start sending supplies to Mars now.

So I see that NASA has just announced their newest Mars mission. If all goes well (yeah, right), five years from now the next exploratory robot (the "MAVEN") will launch to spend the next Earth year studying the atmosphere of Mars.

At this rate, by the time the universe reaches heat death we'll almost certainly be ready to choose and budget a committee to determine final mission parameters for the test reviews to articulate goals and concerns for evaluating factors to be analyzed that will be relevant to specifying a first manned mission to Mars.

If, that is, all goes well.

This is pathetic. Look, we can argue science all day and all night but out here in the real world, barring the discovery of sentient lifeforms who forbid our doing so, we've made the decision. We're going to Mars. And while more knowledge is nice and while science and technology will advance, we already know that we're going to need tons of materials, equipment, supplies, shelter, and so on, and I simply don't believe that none of it at all can be specified, built, and shipped yet. So let's start now.

I know that I've said variations on this before but the point remains valid.

Every year that we delay is another year that our society may fall further into depression, making funding shakier.

Every year that we wait is another year for storms to get worse and environmental regulations tighter, making launches more expensive, dangerous, and harder to schedule.

Every year that we wait is another in which some war or other crisis might cause the relevant organizations to say, as the U.S is doing right now about the ISS, "let's just pull back for a couple of years until things get more stable."

The longer we wait, the more we risk.

And even beyond that, the more materiel we get to Mars, the easier the other decisions get to make. Each payload delivered to Mars gets us closer to having a viable manned mission and to having a viable settlement. I'm not speaking just of what NASA can do but of what can be done by other countries, private corporations, or even universities.

It's time to start assembling payloads and launching them on trajectories to Mars. Okay, we don't know locations yet. Fine. Let the payloads reach Mars and wait in orbit until told where to land. I understand that landing location is part of what determines landing strategy and therefore the equipment provided to carry it out but it's not like each square meter of Mars would require a different approach to getting the payload down to the surface. Not to get all high tech or anything, but have we run out of bouncy balls?

As for orbiting, are we incapable of specifying a common communications standard and protocol so that orbiters can start to accumulate in parking orbits around Mars while we wait for humans on Mars to retrieve or call down those supplies? We know that the "space internet" is tested and that it worked. We've bloody well gotten IP v6 working up there, which is more than we can say for most of the internet down here. So we know that we have the means to handle, let's call it traffic control. We manage a far larger and less coherent population of objects in Earth orbit so this should be much simpler, speed-of-light delays notwithstanding. And, on top of everything else, each of those orbiters would become another node in the communications net around the planet. the more nodes in the network, the better communications gets for everybody.

Do we know that we'll need at least one robotic rover? We do. Somebody should send one.

Do we know that we'll need insulating panels? We do. So we should be getting a few hundred square meters of reflective mylar or equivalent out there. (Personally, I'm partial to a silverized kapton polyimide bubble wrap system but maybe that's just me.)

Do we know that we'll need at least one greenhouse? We do. Somebody should be working on sending robots to make clear panels from Martian materials. And dig tunnels. And make bricks. For crying out loud, can we at least send some goddamn food? It's utterly crucial. It's heavy, it's large. It's, to say the least, established technology. If well chosen and packed it can survive high G launches and years in orbit. Let's see if the University of Oregon will send five pounds of local salmon to wait in Mars orbit for retrieval. Betcha that if one farm state announced that they were launching a payload of their products, that around the world several dozen others would step up to the plate. And even if most of those missions never launched, they would end up funding research in storage and rocketry and all sorts of other things that we could stand to have more people taking their shot at.

Reading this, are you afraid of what happens if "that sort of people", people who "aren't real experts" were to take their clumsy steps into the world of launching rockets and sophisticated aerospace engineering? Yeah, whatever. I have a hell of a lot more confidence in a program run by a bunch of professors and students at, say, UW Madison than I do in what we already live with: programs run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the Saudi royal family. Go for it - tell me that Rupert Murdoch launching payloads the size of a truck, which he does on a regular basis, is less dangerous than a bunch of Research Triangle geeks getting the North Carolina government to fund a payload of twenty pounds of barbeque with some frozen blueberries and local corn. Or some pullovers made of some of that fine North Carolina cotton.

And, of course, all of the same arguments apply to a mission to the moon.

Every gram we send, every cubic centimeter of material we send, every item we can render "dealt with" makes it easier for the rest of the program to get done. So what the hell is everybody waiting for?

-Rustin

So how do we access the ISS now?

As a number of people are pointing out, with the Russians invading Georgia, which is both an E.U. candidate and a U.S. ally, the option of using Russian craft to get to the ISS is fading fast. Even if we assume that the U.S. government is willing to use Russian launch systems, it's damned near certain that they would charge rates that make Halliburton look like a non-profit. After all, Putin and his new proxy boy have made it pretty clear that they're none too fond of the U.S.A. and selfless they ain't.

So what do we do now?

Personally, I say that Congress should immediately, as in within the next month, put another billion or so into scholarships for engineering students and another billion into funding for U.S. manufacturing startups. Because not only are we going to be desperate in coming years for the kind of labor that engineering students and engineers provide, we're going to need a hell of a lot more people who can help aerospace ventures tool up. Admittedly, I was convinced of this *before* Ossetia became the new word for "place where people are shooting at each other a heck of a bunch" but I'm still convinced that I'm right.

Beyond that? Will, first of all, NASA should be reactivating the X-38 program with a quickness, including open-sourcing as many of the specs as possible. NASA is running behind and letting the rest of us understand and take our shot at improving the designs should help us to catch up.

There are plenty of other options, as this article lays out nicely.

But the other big lesson we should be taking away from this is not to make our strategic assets dependent on the cooperation of a totalitarian regime. This should be a no-brainer but evidently it wasn't. I have been as happy as anybody to see the U.S. coming up with reasons to keep the aerospace community in the former Soviet Union employed and equipped doing relatively non-military work but there really need to be limits.

Will this experience keep our government from doing this again? Probably not. We've got a long history of cozying up to dictators of all stripes to do our work for us. But that's a subject for another day.

And *why* exactly do they call it WASTE?

Maybe I'm just dumb. Maybe I'm missing something. But I just can't understand why NASA protocol is to regularly take considerable amounts of mass (empty packing materials, small non-working stuff like pens, feces, etc.) and drop it into the atmosphere.

I mean, hey, how much does it cost per kilo to get something into Earth orbit?

And there's no viable solution possible to take our leftovers and turn them into something useful? I simply don't believe it.

I remember back in elementary school building a solar reflector out of cardboard, aluminum foil, and Elmer's glue. It worked fine. Sure, it wasn't ideal, but my little fourth-grade hands did just fine using stuff from the kitchen to make a servicable device able to concentrate sunlight enough to burn stuff.

So tell me, why can't NASA, with their billions of dollars in staff and facilities (and all their buddies at Morton Thiokol, et al), come up with a device to melt materials to vapor (plasma?), spray the vapor onto strips or sheets, thereby separating it by compounds and maybe even elements, and then, at the least, boost the stuff to a parking orbit? Which would be a more efficient use of load capacity, a typical launch of one more ISS component or one of a dozen low speed booster tugs to take existing garbage out to L5? At the very least we should be making shielding out of this stuff.

I'm not even going to get into the issue of all the "junk" wandering about various earth orbits. I'll just point out that at even an assessed current value of, oh, say, three hundred dollars a kilo, there's a hell of a lot of valuable bits and glops up there waiting to be recovered. I must admit, I am curious as to what folks like Lloyds have decided about the law for space salvage. I have a sneaking suspicion that once somebody was recovering materials at a facility created to service the ISS and/or shuttle, they could add to that income by having little robots puttering about collecting the rest of the little bits wandering about unwanted near our planet. I'll even bet that insurance companies would subsidize the venture, one orbit at a time, as a way to cut their current risks on insured satellites.

Now again, maybe I'm missing something obvious and would be most curious if anybody (with facts to present) could show why this is impossible. But it looks to me like we're talking about a very finite set of problems here.

1.) put matter in openable or burnable bags.

2.) transfer bags to predictable, stable, and reachable location.
This can mean storing them within the ISS and/or shuttles, storing them at the ISS/shuttle but on an external tether, or even moving them off to a stable orbit somewhere or even to someplace like L5. All that matters is that when it's time to take out the garbage/empty the toilet the resulting matter reaches a location that is predictable, safe for crew, reachable for later processing, and will not cause the matter to dissipate/burn up.

3.) Divide matter into usable materials.
This problem itself subdivides and I'm not up for going into all the possible subsets or techniques. These include:
- thermal depolymerization
- melting the organics off packing materials but saving the metals and glass
- holding organic waste aside for slow shipment to the moon or L5 giving us an instant headstart of maybe as much as thousands of pounds of starter to create soil.
- fractionating columns in solution and/or rotational devices to separate by mass.
- organic and/or chemical means of separation including everything from microbes in water solution (we've got ones now that can concentrate everything from petroleum to various metals) to enzymes, to simple chemical reactions.

An infinitum. But personally my favorite (just as a starting point for this type of discussion) is what I think is the most elegant. That consists, as I said above, of making a big melting device at the head of a series of magnets and/or a rotating chamber such that the resulting vapor (again, probably actually plasma, but not in all cases) will separate as if it were passing through a giant mass spectrometer. Then we take everything but organic matter and put it into our beastie. At the far end of the chamber matter will accumulate in thicker and thinner bands of divided materials, ready for harvesting and, in some cases like iron, immediate reuse. I've had people comment that mass spectrometers are expensive, complex devices. To which I say, yes, they're designed as precision diagnostic tools; this is merely a way to separate garbage into different materials. This would be to a mass spectrometer as a a steel box with a blow torch under it is to a laboratory calorimeter. The vibration problems give me the heebie-jeebies and I don't doubt that thousands of technical problems would stand in the way of implementation. But I also don't doubt that we've got the know-how to address this kind of thing if we decide to take it seriously.

4.) Store until we begin space-based manufacturing.
Now this can be addressed easily but probably inadvisably by storing the stuff in the general neighborhood of the ISS. I understand that in general our space program is easily dissuaded from processes that are slow and/or gradual, not doing things that involve "and then we sit around for twenty years" if there is another answer that is far more resource hungry but faster. ("Why" is a discussion for another post. Let's just say that I'm well aware of issues of funding concerns, desire for career enhancement, etc.)
I suspect that the best bet is to, again as I've suggested elsewhere, build a fleet of tiny, slow robotic tugs. Probably ion-engine driven and solar powered, such tugs could readily cycle through a libration(sp?) point (like L5) to LEO route, bringing one load after another to a truly stable location well out everybody's way and stored somewhere that we will certainly want stuff later.

Fundamentally, what I'm saying here comes down to three things.
First of all, Americans are terrible at recycling and waste management in general, which sucks, but for us to extend those habits to a place where materials cost thousands of dollars a pound or more is flat out offensive. Especially since doggone it, this is, in a very real way OUR FRACKIN' SPACE PRAGRAM. We have allowed them to be in charge of what is for now, pretty much the only game in town in an aspect of civilization that is incredibly important to all of us. If they want to play sloppy on their turf, well, I'll just be conceptually annoyed. But when they are sloppy at building my house, I don't intend to stay so blase.

Secondly, materials handling procedures, like so much else in the space program, takes a very short-term view. In other words, they say "we don't have any use for such matter today, so why save it?" Well, I dispute that they cannot use any of what they now throw out but even if they can't, I find it highly unlikely that reuse will be impossible for the forseeable future. Or, to get to the real point, it looks to me like figuring reuse and recycling is much smarter per kilo than figuring cheap ways to get more mass up the gravity well.

Third, this looks like a commercial opportunity to me. I don't expect NASA, the ESA, or their bureaucratic brethern to manage this, only to allow somebody else to work with them to do it.

So, what do you think?

Rustin

Speaking of life on Mars. . .

According to the May cover story in Geology, it's looking like there may have been more water on Mars more recently than is generally concluded. A lot more.

To quote:
After examining . . . images taken last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars' mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years[.]

And if there was that much more that much more recently, that ups the odds that there is still more there now.

Take a look.

I'm sure as the dickens interested.

-Rustin

Jet Packs - some history to think about.

Back in the late nineties for a bit over a year I was the last line of defense for IT problems at a cluster of architecture/civil engineering magazines in McGraw-Hill. I wasn't even on staff. I was a freelancer and paid through a temp agency.
So I was in an interesting position. I had flexible hours (sorta) and no career commitment. And, due to a power vacuum, no one boss. But I has an office, a McG-H email and voicemail, could send out packages through the mailroom, and was, de facto and in some ways de jure, the "technology director" of a magazine called Engineering News-Record, which many engineers in other fields had heard of and had vague feelings of respect towards, even if they couldn't quite remember what field it actually covered.

So, why should you care?

Well, you see, this didn't happen quite as randomly as I make it sound. Actually I had worked hard and long to make this kind of thing happen. I knew that such gigs would give me something I wanted very much. Not only did this give me access to world-class experts who now wanted me to like them and the magazine reference libraries, I could also call up an astounding range of people and companies, tell them my title (and, of course, since almost nobody worth reaching answers the first call, have them call back and get my voicemail) and tell them that I was curious about a project of theirs and they would tell me all about it. Free samples, documentation, access to engineers, the works.

Even when I would explain that this was just a "personal interest" they wanted badly to believe that nudge-nudge, wink-wink, this was a prelude to a story. Also, being the geek that I am, I would never call up the cool people until I had some degree of clue. So it all seemed serious because, after all, I wasn't asking, "what is project foobar?". I was asking "given that I've heard that project foobar has problems with loss of blah under conditions of zorch and some work I did a few years ago with blahtoo mostly did that at high temperatures, are you focusing mostly on low intensity applications?" Show me the techie on a wired, underappreciated, and edgy project who doesn't want to bend a sympathetic and knowledgable ear and I'll show you a techie who has burnt out.

So . . . finally getting to the point, one thing that I looked into was jetpacks. You see, I'ld found it odd that people said that jet packs wouldn't work because jets didn't function well enough at those sizes, since back in my pre-teen model airplane days (I was an unpowered microplane builder, but I kept my eyes open), people were already building or buying jet engines for their *toys*.

So I called around. I called around a lot. And I finally reached a guy at JPL who told me an odd tale. Now I'll share it with you.

According to him, as far back as the forties, aerospace types were curious about the viability of doing jet packs and would have bull sessions about it when the chance came up. Since there wasn't any real military money in it, or commercial for that matter, it all sat on the back burner. But little by little stuff started to come together and, as we have all seen in the famous clip in The Six Million Dollar Man the military started to get interested too.

So, one guy at a time, a team was assembled at JPL. Basically the word got out around the country that if jetpacks were your bag, you should make your way to Pasadena. And they started to work on the problem in a low-key but structured, let's-get-serious way.

So, what are the specs of a good jetpack?
-It doesn't need to go fast. By aircraft standards, it will virtually stand still as anything faster will tear the wearer to bits.
-It must run cool. Really cool. Hot engine equals leg kebob.
-It must be quiet. Human limitations again.
-It must have plenty of range. No point in the thing if it just goes up and back down again.
-Small payload. You've got a person and his gear. No big bombs or weighty frames to support.

So they picked their slide rules and got to work. But there was just one little thing. A tiny thing. Go back and read that list. Looks a lot like the specs for stealth aircraft, doesn't it?
Allegedly one day during the Nixon administration a couple of folks from the White House just showed up at the project and said, "as of now you're all reassigned. Your work is all classified; you're now funded."
"Welcome to the cruise missile program".
And so the jetpack project morphed into cruise missile engine work and the original project got uncreated. And, predictably, as the years passed, when the none too large community of aerospace engineers would think of doing a jetpack the first thing that they would think of is "didn't Harry/Phil/Irving go off to JPL to work on that back in 19blah and nothing came of that at all? It must not be viable."

So here we are, all these years later, and yet we wait. Now I've looked around some. I know about the various rocket packs out there (and the novelty act crews making their living with them). I know about the ex-corporate guy and his big muckin' turbofans. I know about the New Zealand pulse jet crew. I've kept an eye open. But I suspect that there's some very cool stuff coming one of these days and it'll be a lot more polished then most people expect.

Sweet dreams.

- Rustin

Living In The Kuiper Belt

Did you know that by current estimates there are about ten billion objects over one mile across in the Kuiper Belt?
My, that's an awful lot of real estate.
So, what exactly does that mean? To me it means lots of elbow room.
In the past few years I've increasingly suspected that, barring the invention of a practical warp drive, the real advance of humanity will be:
* Earth
* * Earth and near-Earth orbit
* * * Earth-Moon system with small, Antarctica-type settlements on/around Mars and Venus
* * * * Earth, Mars, and Venus systems with Asteroid belt as the Outback
* * * * * () () Discrete civilizations in regions of Near-sun, Venus-to-Mars, each of the gas giants, off the orbital plane, and Kuiper Belt.

So, how much room is out there anyway?
Hmmm. Lessee. Assume that the objects are spherical (therefore a gross underestimation) with a diameter of one mile. r of 0.5, rsquared of 0.25, times 4, times pi, gives us a surface area of about 3.1. Given the roughness of the surface and that we're dealing with greater than one mile, then even if we skim off one hundred feet from the top, we've got an average area of about four miles.

So the total surface area is about forty billion square miles. Conservatively estimated.

Well, the Earth's surface area is about two hundred million square miles, meaning that the Kuiper Belt objects have a combined surface area of about two hundred times that of the earth.

Put another way, if there were a hundred thousand projects like this one going on, they'ld be using one seven thousandth of one percent of the rock out there. This all assuming, by the way, that all rocks are equal and basically hunks of iron ore and ice.

Who will do it?
The more I find out, the more I suspect that first the Asteroid Belt and then the Kuiper Belt will each be settled much the way the religious utopians settled the American West. In other words, forget this NASA To The Stars mahooah. Forget even the Big Corporation Takes Over Everything model. Governments can't get their act together and corporations will not see a profit justification. The real settlers will be those strongly motivated to get away from the rest of society and organized enough, well capitalized enough, and with enough oomph (that's a technical term) from some charismatic leader to keep them from getting distracted or settling for easier targets.

Three kinds of folk will *really* settle non-planetary space. Small groups of genius-loners, outlaws, and whatever the equivalent will be of the mid-1800's Mormons, in other words, tightly integrated communities with resources, a vision, and a serious antipathy to the company of most people. Because only they will have the will, the means, and be up for handling the hardship. The first to give up the comforts of "civilization" are those who are least comfortable in it.

One strange statement that turns up all over to "refute" approaches like this is that people would never survive the isolation. As for interaction, well, again, look at the American West. Or look at the small groups of Polynesians who would settle a new island hundreds of miles from their home and be isolated there, sometimes for decades. Add to that the admittedly time-delayed high bandwidth interaction that may be possible (I see no limits on technology, only on possible desire to stay low profile). In other words, "video" messages with 3D images at a resolution of perhaps 50K pixels by 200K pixels, sound beyond our ability to distinguish from reality with perhaps the equivalent of ten channels, and probably some limited spacial and or other sensory cues. The round trip message transit time would be under a day. No worse then many people's email routines now. Vastly superior to the mail delays with which people did just fine for millennia. And hopefully, just like on any frontier, every once in a while a ship should come by with terabyte upon terabyte of books, movies, music, etc.

Given that for centuries sailors and occasionally soldiers routinely lived alone with each other for months and with only minimal contact with others like them for years at a time and I don't see the problem here. And frankly, given recent advances in things like biofeedback (don't you scoff at me, boy! the navy gets it, as do doctors and many others) and psychology in general and this whole "oh dear, they'ld just wilt away of loneliness and die" thing sounds to me like the people who used to say that the human mind would tear itself apart if we ever traveled faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour.

But. . .
Of course, the big x-factor in all of this is power generation. Because for now, bottom line, all of our energy but nuclear is solar powered. If current fission reactors as we know them continue to be a condition of living without sun, then it may well be more practical to travel to another solar system. I'm betting that a way will be found.

What will they do?
So, if we pull that off, then tunnel out the inside of a rock and give it light and heat it up. Once it's hot it should stay that way if fifty or a hundred feet of rock is left as insulation. And we certainly know of plenty of ways to insulate otherwise. I suspect that making foamed rock in space won't be too big a deal. Even foamed rock with a shiny, reflective surface. Making O'Neill type colonies within asteroids should be the natural way to go.

Here's the plan. Choose a rock, send out plenty of robots to drill out the center or at least chambers in the center. Maybe even allow them fifty or a hundred years to finish the job. Give the robots the plans to melt in "piping" and chambers for atmosphere compression and expansion, greenhouses and a few other densely vegetated areas, utility rooms separate from the rest, landing areas, surface structures built from the processed "waste" rock, and at least one really big room in the center. Let's say a central chamber three miles by two by two.

One key reason to have multiple greenhouse and vegetated chambers is to isolate each from the rest. As the fiasco at Biosphere Two demonstrated, closed systems can go really bad really fast. Best to have multiple small-ish chambers separated by vacuum and with divergent temperatures, humidity, etc. And with modern approaches to permaculture, we can grow a wondrous amount of food in a very small space at a very low cost in resources and labor. Let go of any images in your head of rows of uniform crops spaced a meter apart in otherwise bare soil. I'm proposing something that would look and act far more like a block of rainforest, complete with several species of ants, bees, and all the rest. Integrated in to this would be what is known as a "living machine", which would look like a wetland but act as a waste processor. Add to this a few dozen tanks in which to grow in vitro "meat" and life on the far frontier might not be so bad in some ways.

Other robots are collecting the water and any organics they can, starting an atmosphere, seeding it with basic microorganisms and a few very hardy plants and animals which will happily terraform their surroundings, creating soil and the like. Ideally the animals and plants are designed to only survive in, say, less than one half atmosphere of pressure, insuring a big safe buffer zone between their turf and ours.
If you really want to get cute, a third species of robots is collecting salable raw materials like gold or even making finished goods and periodically sending shipments back to help fund the whole venture. Again, remember, it may be just fine to have a shipment take ten years to arrive so low-power things like ion engines running on thrifty trajectories are not a problem.

Let's say our group starts this plan in year X, and sends the first robots in X+2. The robots take their time but even so, there should be basic bunks and habitation ready by X+10, a period that is routinely accepted by real estate projects. (Most of the delay is due to transit time.) By X+20 there are perhaps five hundred people living there and creating all the essentials of a living community from bookstores to bars to local jokes and slang.

Now if we allow this project to incorporate a cluster of such conversions (taking as our community model groups like the Ecovillage people, who build first one unit and then allow a local sort of ongoing mitosis) then by X+30 there might be a cluster of habitats, with, say, five hollow worldlets and two dense-packed, aircraft carrier-type structures, and a total of a hundred thousand people.

Putting it in perspective
It seems to me that this whole thing is viable technologically, sociologically, economically, esthetically, and even in terms of being salable and manageable. Keep in mind that no aspect of this but the distances involved is a large as those of a spec housing development is now. If fuel use can be brought way down (taking us back to solar sails or ion engines with photovoltaics and using extremely slow flight paths) and the materials are mostly already out of the gravity well, then we're talking less in materials of almost every sort then must be gathered now to create a large casino complex or remote military base.
Our government built entire cities in the mountains of Laos during the Indochina wars with fifties and sixties technologies and they did it in contested territory, building everything from supermarkets to movie theaters to houses.

If you just stop and look at the whole thing from the perspective of how we have lived in this past, post-frontier century and instead go by the standards of things that people have done on a repeating basis for thousands of years along frontiers, then none of this looks like a big deal to me.

Or rather, it is a big deal, but only in the way that making a Steven Seagal movie is a big deal. Complicated, expensive, but not radical or edgy. We aren't talking about quantum advances in technology or anything else. Just difficult and expensive variations on things that will by then have been done thousands of times. And, as I have pointed out, much of this can be started now.

If you still don't believe me, then sit down three graduate students from any decent robotics program (personally I would choose my old fellows at Carnegie-Mellon, but I'm not particular) and show this set of tasks to each of them. I think that it's safe to say that at least two of them would agree that there aren't any fundamental leaps here. Just more effective versions of systems that we're building now.

And the finishing touch is that if one truly did want to send people to another solar system, then a cluster just like the one I described would be an awfully sane way to go. After all, if one chooses a cluster that is already a few decades old, then the "shake-down voyage" will be very long past and it will all have taken place within a few light-hours of Earth.

And. And. . . Go back, look again at what I've proposed. Expand the time scale, remove having humans travel out there during early construction as well as the bioengineered part. If you're willing to be very careful about energy usage, you've now got a project that could be started today. Just like my previous post about settling Mars. We could realistically have the first robots in transit by 2009. Just keep sending batches as funding comes through and technology advances. At the very least it would be a hell of a way to stake a claim to some prime Kuiper real estate.

And the kicker? Add another type a robot. A propulsion bot, that just reshapes stuff into primitive engines and/or can itself be an engine. These are probably about eight years away at current rates of advancing tech. Add some of those to the mix when they become available. Then you can have them bring the whole kit and caboodle back to earth orbit. Sure, at current tech building the propulsion and travel time would add up to about two hundred years, but the sooner we start, the sooner we're ready to leave.
And if the naysayers are right, and our economy really is heading to a collapse and we've got another little ice age on the way and the totalitarians are on the way to creating an innovation-dead worldwide police state, our descendants will know that as soon as they get their act together a whole trove of wonders will be up there waiting for them.

Conclusion:
So that's what I think. Interstellar travel is a cool idea. Great for storytelling and not only fun as the dickens but deeply satisfying for all those testosterone-soaked desires to go out and conquer all that there is to see. But realistically, our position in this solar system is about the same as the position of the early humans roaming a few sections of African veldt and calling it the World. We'll be spending a long time around here and have more chances then we'll want to diverge into indescribably diverged civilizations and races long before we first awaken to the sunrise of another star.

-Rustin

We should be sending robots to Mars. In 2008.

So now we're finally seeing people talk about getting humans to Mars.

I think that's just jim-dandy.

What I can't understand is why we aren't prepping a robot mission right now. Today. We know plenty of ways already to get something in the way of supplies there and we know how to send robots that would, at the least, dig a shelter, start collecting water, and purify a few thousand liters of oxygen and other useful raw materials. Or to be still more modest, we could send a few tiny surveying robots. Tiny, slow moving, solar powered beasties sending their data to a booster for retransmission to Earth but designed to work for months at the least, puttering along collecting information.

Seems to me like we should just bloody well choose a promising landing spot, choose something we can build with today's technology, and get some kind of payload on the way in, say, the next six months. And then keep sending them. Every. Six. Months. Or more frequently as we figure out what we're doing and/or round up more funding. Worst case scenario, the human mission will land at another site, in which case they'll still have supplies a hell of a lot closer than earth.

And let's keep in mind that small missions like this would actually work better if they were private. Which seems far smarter to me anyway. Then perhaps they can they bill NASA for supplies when the NASA mission finally shows up.

But the longer we wait to start, the longer it will take to get this going. Doesn't it make more sense to start with one robot crew to work as explained above, another to do more of the same and build a clear, airtight enclosure and make growing medium, and then the third to turn the first enclosure into a high-density greenhouse, (or two or three separated ones with different flora) all started from seed? If it also devotes some effort to purifying fuel, well, that would be great, too.

Plenty of people are working on the technologies and enough are ready now. No, they're not "just right", but right now is much better than just right afaic. We need to get our butts in gear and get some useful materials on the way NOW.

Yes, I am well aware of the limitations of current robots. I was trying to build little automated rotation points back when Reagan was president. But we still have plenty of devices that can run for years if done right. Think of it as a codesign between the Long Now folks and Rodney Brooks' lab. Maybe this means two really tough robots; maybe it means a hundred ones the size of your thumb, of which half will "die" within six months. But one way or another, it means that while we sit around here on earth planning the human mission, work is already underway to make Mars a more habitable place.

Let's ask ask some questions.
1- how small a payload could be of use? Two kilos? Five? A solar panel hooked up to a simple but slow crude ore digger and refiner? And when it's done you've got the metal to reuse. Keep in mind, no communications with earth beyond a once a month ping.
2 - how large a rocket would it take to get that on the way on the most "thrifty" trajectory?
3 - How much would that cost to buy at surplus? say, an old ICBM? And to refit?
4 - What fraction of a decimal place is this amount compared to the cost of sending THE SAME MASS IN A HUMAN OPTIMIZED VEHICLE?

Sorry about "yelling", but my point is that even if the frickin' thing doesn't work worth a damn, it's still cheaper, kilo for kilo, than waiting and shipping the same mass along with the human mission. Not to mention the things we learn simply from increasing the number of iterations we accumulate of getting stuff to Mars at all. There is no down side.

Seems to me like a perfect project for an ambitious and underrespected college engineering program partnered with a corporation looking to burnish their public image. Admittedly, any mission launched in 2008 would have to be almost literally off-the shelf. Probably a very low tech surveyor that will have to wait for the next mission to get its booster. Or even just a "dumb" box of supplies such as ruggedized solar panels. But I'll betcha that if we launch something in December 2008, something much better will be ready by June of 2009.

So, anybody know a good candidate?

'Cause you know that I'm going to talk to folks at my local engineering school and, hell, I know they're looking for ways to get publicity anyway.

-Rustin