Should NASA go to Mars or back to the Moon?

Jamestown never showed a profit, which is why it was declared bankrupt and the Virginia Company was taken over by the royal government.

Duh . . .

...in your opinion. So far, "the government" has not found your position persuasive.

In addition to "let's find something to eat", I suppose there could also be "let's run away from these bastards that just beat the crap out of us".

Who wants to lay bets about whether NASA is willing to sustain the same kind of attrition?

Sorry, but when your point is that expanding human settlements isn't about economics, you can't support it with a parable tha may well be about economics. There need be no difference between a cave man saying "let's explore the other side of that hill, see what we find" and him saying "let's explore the other side of that hill, see if we can find food there." DrewDad's parable is just a little more focused on your parable. Your parable doesn't support exploration for its own sake at all.

One of the problems with the going into space crew is that they lack patience. HMS Beagle was on a surveying mission to Tierra del Fuego on the voyage in which Darwin participated. It was her second voyage to the region. The first voyage, 1826-31, was a grueling enterprise in a ten-gun, flush deck brig, commonly known in the service then as coffin ships. It was a miracle that she survived at all, given the poor design of the ship. The original commander, Pringle Stokes, became so despondent that he attempted to blow his brains out. He missed, and lingered on in agony for two weeks before he finally died. It was then that Beagle returned to Rio de Janeiro for a refit, and Lieutenant Robert Fitzroy took command. That was in 1828, and Fitzroy continued the surveying mission for nearly two years longer, finally sailing back to England in October, 1830, and arriving in early 1831.

Fitzroy had a bright future, but he was not a high-ranking officer. Being appointed to the command of Beagle made him Master and Commander, with the courtesy title of Captain--but he remained a lieutenant. It is really rather remarkable that the Admiralty put up with someone so difficult, but in the summer of 1831, he was again appointed to the command, and Beagle went in for extensive repair and modification to make her more seaworthy. Beagle departed England in December, 1831, and resumed her surveying mission, dropping Mr. Darwin off here and there for his geological studies, which was his principle goal, and the reason he was along on the voyage. Beagle spent almost four years continuing her mapping and surveying mission in lower South America, before completing a circumnavigation (a part of an extensive mission to get chronometric observations at points around the globe) and returning to England via New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. She arrived back in England at the end of 1836.

So, Beagle spent more than eight years surveying and mapping the coasts of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and lower Chile--and had not completed the job. This is not to detract from what was accomplished, but merely to point out what an enormous task that apparently simple, but pragmatically extremely difficult mission was.

Magellan's mission required three years for a circumnavigation, and they weren't trying to survey the coasts or to make accurate maps. How much time do people think it would take to make, for example, even a superficial survey of the "asteroid belt?" When people around here speak of getting to Mars within 15 years, i immediately think of how very little it would represent in terms of real accomplishment, how much money and resources would be used, and all for the essentially vain purpose of being able to say that we'd done it.

Real accomplishment could take a century or more. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal sponsored the mission to Madeira which arrived there in 1420. From that modest beginning, it took more than 75 years for the Portuguese to make their way around Africa, at which point Vasco da Gama made the bold move in sailing directly from Malindi on the African coast to India, arriving in 1498. People could sneer at the technology and methods they used, but there is no reason to assume that we are any more comparatively sophisticated for the purposes of the exploration being touted here. And, of course, as DD has pointed out, i seriously doubt that NASA and the United States would be willing to support those kinds of losses.

George Anson took an expedition to harry the Spanish in the War of Jenkins' Ear, leaving in 1739 with more than 2000 sailors and Marines, and eight ships. He returned in a circumnavigation in 1742 with slightly more than 300 men, and Centurion, his flag ship, having lost every other ship which had left England with him, and all those ships captured along the way which had not been successfully sent in with a prize crew. Of course, he also brought back more than one million three hundred thousand pieces of eight, and literally tons of gold and silver ingots. The pay-off for an ill-conceived and ill-equipped expedition, badly managed by a niggardly and skeptical Admiralty is almost incalculable.

As DD asks, would we be willing to sustain those kinds of losses, and to wait literally for years and years, to see a pay-off? I doubt it. I suspect that we are not the "stern stuff" of the men who made such voyages and took such risks. The pay-offs, though, could easily be as great.

Certainly not if we could have gotten just as much exploring done with unmanned robot ships, operating at a fraction of the human and pecuniary cost that Columbus and da Gama incurred.


I think the payoff of 15th and 16th century expeditions is widely exaggerated. I blame the tradition of European historiography, which until recently has callously omitted the losses to native peoples in calculating the projects' costs and benefits.

The payoff was overstated!!!!!!!!!

Spain became a world power from the gold of the new world alone!!!

http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~gel115/115CH8.html

New supplies of precious metals began flowing from the New World after 1513, when Balboa annexed the Panama isthmus for Spain; 1517, when Cortes conquered Mexico; and 1531-34, when Pizarro encountered, then overthrew, the Inca empire. In Mexico, Cortes looted the treasure that the Aztecs had in turn looted from their defeated enemies, and in Peru, Pizarro looted the treasure that the Incas had in turn looted from the Chimu around 1470 AD. New silver mining in Mexico had to wait for the discovery of new strikes, but in Peru the Spanish were able to move fairly quickly to expand existing shallow mines, using the labor of their conquered enemies.
Beginning in 1531, Peruvian bullion shipped to Spain was something like 100 million pieces of gold, and twice as much in silver, over the following forty years. When Pizarro conquered Peru and murdered the Inca emperor in 1533, the ransom that Atahualpa paid in vain was worth 1,326,000 bezants (gold pieces), weighing more than 7000 kg. Even more than that was looted from the Inca capital of Cuzco by the victorious Spanish in 15331534. The gold and silver "production" (loot, that is) from Peru in the early 1530s is estimated as follows:

I completely agree with the idea of doing "un-manned" exploration--but that's not what this thread is about.

As for the pay-offs, i specifically used the example of da Gama's expedition because that was a real payoff--it was the pay off of a valuable cargo of silks, spices and semi-precious and precious stones. The relative inflation rate would not have eaten away the value (see below) because inflation would simply make those luxury consumer goods more valuable.

It is only recently that people have begun to realize just how badly Europe was affected by Spain's new world empire. The influx of gold and silver, and especially silver, fueled what we call "run-away" inflation, and the effect lasted literally for centuries. In large measure, that empire and the wars of religion which Ferdinand and Isabella's grandson Carlos, the Emperor Charles V, fought were responsible for the destabilization of Europe. The consequences of that pouring in of silver and gold can hardly be cataloged.

So i prefer the example of Vasco da Gama. What he brought back had real value in terms of salable products which were largely "inflation proof," because their sale value increased with the rate of inflation. A successful enterprise to set up mining in the asteroid belt would have the same kind of real value. A mission to Mars would be an exercise in mere conceit.

But, as i was attempting to stress, we have to learn patience. Three generations from Prince Henry the Navigator to the fabulous cargo which Vasco da Gama brought back. And, as DD asks, are we prepared to pay that kind of price, or the kind of price that Anson paid? I doubt it.

Without wishing to sound too brutal, the "price" paid by the aboriginal inhabitants of this hemisphere has to be calculated on a moral basis--not an economic basis. I may be wrong, but i don't think the same situation would apply in the asteroid belt.

If we can figure out how to a) assay the mineral content of an asteroid, b) refine the materials, and c) move the refined materials somewhere useful, then we'd be on our way to a sustainable space program.

We can get some of the same stuff from the moon. Stuff we are going to need soon is LITHIUM, and Im not so sure that we have exhausted exploration sites on this planet. Lithium is found in several kinds of feldspars and in evaporite deposits like salt beds and evaporite flats. Were going to need He3 when we become a fusin economy. Asteroids (the metallic ones) aremostly FeNiTi and plenty of rare earths. HOWEVER, the rare earths will cost about 10K just for the travel bill. Processing will cost several orders of mag more and, the tech feasibility is a few decades away,

The moon is achievable now and the same minerals are available on one side of that body.(The moon is anucleated mass from several big collisions with asteroid like bodies).
I think that, whatever is decided, we make the efforts like a big feasibility study to extract and process these metals.
There are several solar processes that can be used to process things like rare earths and noble metals >BUT , they will all need to be reacyed within some kind of flux that we may have to carry up there in big bags. (Hardly an economic plus).
More work needs to be done for this overall feasibility. The spec cameras they have on the Rovers was a first step to determine the mineral composition and FORM. (We can produce many rare earths but only if they are in certain crystal lattices that can be worked by existing processes). Remember when aluminum was almost a precious metal before the Cryolite process was developed

It need not be about metal... H3 may provide the next century's energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3

Exactly. The gold and silver of the Spanish empire was chimerical wealth. It actually destroyed the value of gold and silver coinage in Europe, and Spain in 1800 was impoverished and weak.

But the metal wealth of the asteroids could be of real value to us. That is why i favor a moon base, rather than some silly ego trip to Mars.

Once again, this is why i think a moon base makes the most sense. Additionally, it is entirely possible that we can devise very inexpensive processes on the moon with it's 1/10th G, or in the microgravity of lunar orbit.

as I said, He3 abides on the moon and the way we make it today is by letting tritium decay. Were gonna need much more He3 in about 20+ years (if the fusion economy can be kept on schedule).

Since theyve found water on the moon in serviceable quantities,SADDLE UP!

In my pevious post, when I said the costs were about 1ok intrvel costs, that was PWER GRAM of substance recovered .

It would be neat to have the moon as a fusion center of research and development.

I don't know if i've mentioned it in this thread yet, but one of the attractive things about the moon is the lack of a deep gravity well. You could harvest the raw materials to make mining equipment from the asteroid belt, manufacture it in lunar orbit, and then run back out to the belt for more. It would make absolutely no sense to manufacture it on the earth, and the boost it out of the mother well--way too expensive.

Screw Mars, as i've already said, that's conceit, that's an ego trip. Let's go back to the moon and get busy. Wasn't Selena all about gettin' busy anyway?

First of all, I didn't say that expansion wasn't about economics. I said that it wasn't only about economics. My point was that in retrospect, the expansion of the human race from its origin in sub-Saharan Africa to cover most of the Earth was helpful to Man for reasons many of which he could hardly have anticipated in cave man days. My position is that for Man to stay on this little piece of rock in a cosmos with trillions of stars is short-sighted. The idea that there is no point in exploring and settling other worlds without an immediate dollar payoff strikes me as comically short-sighted.