Space Exploration

Are NASA's future missions and budget justified?

  • It's worth the time and expenditures

    Votes: 223 66.0%

  • Complete waste of money

    Votes: 41 12.1%

  • We need to explore, but not at the current cost

    Votes: 74 21.9%
  • Total voters
    338
#701
#701
agent|orange said:
Article II of the Outer Space Treaty (signed by almost every nation in the world in 1967):



This says nothing of private parties. Loopholes, you guys were saying?
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cant wait to have planet McDonalds and Nike Asteroid.

but that does raise an interesting question/problem. i wonder what laws cover claiming land in space? can the company on claim what it actually has built/walked/driven on. or is there going to be something else.
 
#702
#702
Grand Vol said:
I agree on watching Congress like a hawk. But this bill seems like it's more of a "get the government out of the way of private innovation" while the opponents are saying "no! we need more government control to save the poor people!"

You've got private companies being innovative about something the government is politicizing. NASA has reached a point where it's a political tool rather than a serious research agency. And I firmly believe that the government can (and will) hamper that innovation by regulating it to death.

We'll disagree on the wording as it appeared to be partial to me. I'll check out the text of the bill later to find out exactly.
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Pretty much my position. We need to do as much as possible to support innovation in this sector. I strongly feel advancement here is critical for long-term survival. Maybe not for the next couple of generations, but probably sooner than we'd like to think. Some experts already believe we've exceeded the tipping point in terms of population the planet can support on a long-term basis.
 
#703
#703
LouderVol said:
cant wait to have planet McDonalds and Nike Asteroid.

but that does raise an interesting question/problem. i wonder what laws cover claiming land in space? can the company on claim what it actually has built/walked/driven on. or is there going to be something else.
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Some quack apparently looked at the moon and said "huh, nobody owns that" and then said "well, I do now".

He then filed a claim with the United Nations (who ignored it) and then, given no explicit response to the negative, created his own Lunar government.

He then started selling off 2,500,000 lots of 1 acre each for $25. And people bought them.

People are going to be sorely disappointing when MegaCorps lands on their lot and starts drilling and dumping terrestrial garbage on their pristine lunar lot.
 
#704
#704
There was another treaty set in place that effectively limits what private enterprises and individuals can do... but nobody signed it.

So, effectively, the only legal framework in place says "it's a free-for-all" which would be a massive and colossal mistake but we're very much in a "(*& you, I got mine" world.

The only problem will be when the council of aliens looks at our planet and says "Well, they got off it and colonized without killing themselves. Time to eradicate the vermin" and then we all die.

Thanks, Obama.
 
#705
#705
agent|orange said:
There was another treaty set in place that effectively limits what private enterprises and individuals can do... but nobody signed it.

So, effectively, the only legal framework in place says "it's a free-for-all" which would be a massive and colossal mistake but we're very much in a "(*& you, I got mine" world.
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I don't have an issue with corporations taking the lead in exploring and/or colonizing space. While it's a cutthroat business world, they tend to be far more civil about matters than nation-states.
 
#706
#706
Grand Vol said:
I don't have an issue with corporations taking the lead in exploring and/or colonizing space. While it's a cutthroat business world, they tend to be far more civil about matters than nation-states.
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At least to this point, in many circumstances, businesses have shown they're ready and willing to cut any and every corner possible to generate the highest ROI.

We're moving into space now, this is a whole new ball-game. There needs to be at least a legal framework these independent corporations need to follow.
 
#707
#707
I do tend to agree, however, that corporations will have to be the intellectual and exploratory bodies in space. It's a lot easier for SpaceX to spend all it wants on mining the moon while governmental bodies are limited by .... public outcry against it while cutting wasteful programs.

There should, however, be rules and regulations in place dictating rational use and application of resources on the moon.
 
#708
#708
agent|orange said:
At least to this point, in many circumstances, businesses have shown they're ready and willing to cut any and every corner possible to generate the highest ROI.

We're moving into space now, this is a whole new ball-game. There needs to be at least a legal framework these independent corporations need to follow.
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I don't disagree there should be a formal process that any person (regardless of government or private) should follow as for "staking claims" outside the atmosphere. But doing so in a manner not to stifle innovation as we talked about before.

If say SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Google, Exxon-Mobile and General Electric (just random companies) all decided to pool their resources to travel to Mars without government approval, it's safe to say they shouldn't have the ability to claim the entire planet as their own. But the area they put a colony in should be recognized as being property of said conglomerate since they bore the cost of going there and putting it up. I would think "squatter's rights" would apply more than anything in a case like that if they wanted to formally be recognized as a legitimate "landowner."

But what I don't think should happen is the government (any of them really) having the ability to step in and say "no, you can't go and stake a claim because we said so."
 
#709
#709
agent|orange said:
I do tend to agree, however, that corporations will have to be the intellectual and exploratory bodies in space. It's a lot easier for SpaceX to spend all it wants on mining the moon while governmental bodies are limited by .... public outcry against it while cutting wasteful programs.

There should, however, be rules and regulations in place dictating rational use and application of resources on the moon.
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How about "formal agreements" instead of rules and regulations?
 
#711
#711
Grand Vol said:
I don't disagree there should be a formal process that any person (regardless of government or private) should follow as for "staking claims" outside the atmosphere. But doing so in a manner not to stifle innovation as we talked about before.

If say SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Google, Exxon-Mobile and General Electric (just random companies) all decided to pool their resources to travel to Mars without government approval, it's safe to say they shouldn't have the ability to claim the entire planet as their own. But the area they put a colony in should be recognized as being property of said conglomerate since they bore the cost of going there and putting it up. I would think "squatter's rights" would apply more than anything in a case like that if they wanted to formally be recognized as a legitimate "landowner."

But what I don't think should happen is the government (any of them really) having the ability to step in and say "no, you can't go and stake a claim because we said so."
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Well, as broken and as bloated as the UN is... there needs to be a representative body of the people of Earth as a whole. So far, even as bad as it's been, the UN has been that joined voice.

Otherwise we also run the risk of Chinese/Russian companies going up there and that prospect is more concerning than Google, GE or SpaceX.
 
#712
#712
agent|orange said:
Something should be in place. This is how Alien started, if you remember.
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I'm glad the Predators are on our side.

My thought was that "rules and regulations" would end up regulating the industry to the point of inefficiency like many industries are today. And/or introducing politics into decisions that don't need to be made by the government. Take that Mars 1 thing for example. If people want to make that one way trip to Mars (even as it very likely nothing more than a large scam) they should be allowed to.

But introduction of bureaucracy with all sorts of rules and regulations will limit the private sector in their quest to do what the governments haven't (or won't).

"You can only do this, this and this. But you absolutely cannot do this, this, that, this and you won't even own the plot of land you spent your own money to plant a colony on."

So formal agreements that set very loose standards for colonization and exploration as well as the process of recognizing those claims.
 
#713
#713
Grand Vol said:
I'm glad the Predators are on our side.

My thought was that "rules and regulations" would end up regulating the industry to the point of inefficiency like many industries are today. And/or introducing politics into decisions that don't need to be made by the government. Take that Mars 1 thing for example. If people want to make that one way trip to Mars (even as it very likely nothing more than a large scam) they should be allowed to.

But introduction of bureaucracy with all sorts of rules and regulations will limit the private sector in their quest to do what the governments haven't (or won't).

"You can only do this, this and this. But you absolutely cannot do this, this, that, this and you won't even own the plot of land you spent your own money to plant a colony on."

So formal agreements that set very loose standards for colonization and exploration as well as the process of recognizing those claims.
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Those are still regulations. I think it's a terminology hang-up as regulation now instantly means "suffocating bureaucracy".
 
#714
#714
agent|orange said:
Those are still regulations. I think it's a terminology hang-up as regulation now instantly means "suffocating bureaucracy".
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Yes. Proposal of limited or no governmental regulations for the exploration/colonization by private corporations as opposed to what currently happens when the government becomes involved.
 
#716
#716
Good. SpaceX has the best minds working in the business right now.

Well, as long as Apple and Google don't decide to go into rocket launches like Apple did batteries.
 
#717
#717
Gravity Kills Schrödinger's Cat - Scientific American

If the cat in Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought-experiment behaved according to quantum theory, it would be able to exist in multiple states at once: both dead and alive. Physicists' common explanation for why we don’t see such quantum superpositions—in cats or any other aspect of the everyday world—is interference from the environment. As soon as a quantum object interacts with a stray particle or a passing field, it picks just one state, collapsing into our classical, everyday view.

But even if physicists could completely isolate a large object in a quantum superposition, according to researchers at the University of Vienna, it would still collapse into one state—on Earth's surface, at least. “Somewhere in interstellar space it could be that the cat has a chance to preserve quantum coherence, but on Earth, or near any planet, there's little hope of that,” says Igor Pikovski. The reason, he asserts, is gravity.

Pikovski and his colleagues’ idea, laid out in a paper published in Nature Physics on June 15, is at present only a mathematical argument. But experimenters hope to test whether gravity really does collapse quantum superpositions, says Hendrik Ulbricht, an experimental physicist at the University of Southampton, UK. “This is a cool, new idea, and I’m up for trying to see it in experiments,” he says. Assembling the technology to do so, however, may take as long as a decade, he says.

How gravity collapses the cat

Cinema-goers who saw the film Interstellar are already familiar with the basic principle behind the Vienna team’s work. Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that an extremely massive object causes clocks near it to run more slowly because its strong gravitational field stretches the fabric of space-time (which is why a character in the film aged only an hour near a black hole, while seven years passed on Earth). On a subtler scale, a molecule placed nearer the Earth’s surface experiences a slightly slower clock than one placed slightly further away.

Because of gravity’s effect on space-time, Pikovski’s team realised that variance in a molecule’s position will also influence its internal energy—the vibrations of particles within the molecule, which evolve over time. If a molecule were put in a quantum superposition of two places, the correlation between position and internal energy would soon cause the duality to 'decohere' to the molecule taking just one path, they suggest. “In most situations decoherence is due to something external; here it’s as though the internal jiggling is interacting with the motion of the molecule itself,” adds Pikovski.

No one has yet seen this effect because other sources of decoherence—such as magnetic fields, thermal radiation and vibrations—are typically much stronger and cause quantum systems to collapse long before gravity becomes an issue. But experimenters are keen to try.
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Nothing Earth-shattering here. Just a subtle twist on a popular theory.
 
#719
#719
agent|orange said:
Good. SpaceX has the best minds working in the business right now.

Well, as long as Apple and Google don't decide to go into rocket launches like Apple did batteries.
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The SpaceX rocket exploded after take-off this morning. Millions of a paid-load vanished into thin air w/bits of small pieces falling into the Atlantic Ocean.
 
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#725
#725
BigOrangeTrain said:
I am sure someone else will take up the worthless cause.
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You say this as this will change the direction of Musk's vneture. They still have a scheduled flight in September, which has not and probably wont change. "Wortheless" is a hilarious term to give space exploration, especially seeing as you are this scientist and all.
 
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