2020 is less than 4 years away

>2020 is less than 4 years away
>Still no definite plans to have manned missions to Mars, let alone full blown colonies

What happened to lead us to this failure? In the 90s, we believed we'd have the first colonies on Mars by 2020

Other urls found in this thread:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-nasa/2011/06/09/AGliJgtH_story.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/02/10/elon-musk-just-lost-33b-double-whammy/80086284/
bbc.com/news/science-environment-15863549
web.archive.org/web/20141006071746/http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data#TOC-IV.-Comparison-with-Solar-System-Planets
discord.gg/hJF4Z
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

We rely on nasa to bring us to a new space age but for years all they've done is hemorrhage unspeakable amounts of money and cry when feminazis say something about their shirts. Nasa is literally a group of cucks

why is /pol/ constantly shifting up this board and bringing 'feminazis' and 'cucks' up in literally every thread and politicising EVERYTHING?

NASA’s budget for fiscal year 2011 is roughly $18.5 billion — 0.5 percent of a $3.7 trillion federal budget. In 2010, Americans spent about as much on pet food.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-nasa/2011/06/09/AGliJgtH_story.html

>No interest in colonizing Mars.
>Outer Space Treaty
>Russia and China being antagonistic forces in the world
>Focus on getting rid of aging and medical stuff.

Pick any.

Unfortunately for humans, politics get in the way of many good efforts...

It's not about money. Focusing on the percentage of the federal budget is misleading because back in the day the federal budget was much smaller, not just in absolute terms but also as share of GDP and adjusted for inflation. See the 2014 constant dollar expenses in this table:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

It is equally misleading to focus on the peak year of expenses, because the Apollo program ran from 1961 to 1972. And the development of the Saturn rocket family began even before Kennedy, back in 1959 (actually 9/11/58 but let's skip those few months). If you take the average NASA budget in 2014 constant dollars from the years 1959-1972, then you see, it was just 20% more than today's budget (calculated as average from 2001-2014).

There are two main reasons NASA can't do shit today despite being financed almost as good as during Apollo. First it got rid of the Germans after Apollo in an attempt to americanize NASA. This was a huge brain drain. An ESA manager once said: the day von Braun left NASA lost the equivalent of 10.000 workers. The second reason is that NASA is already invested in a big manned spaceflight program which eats up a sizeable chunk of the budget: the ISS.

Capitalism. Mars is such a long term investment that people will dismiss it in favor of something that makes money while they're still alive.

The Cold War is over and so is the space race.
We're stuck here until we fix all problems on earth and there is not a single starving child left.

Obama turned NASA into a state funded muslim dicksucking organisation.

Mars is the moral solution to overpopulation,

m-muh feelings

spacex?

>colonies
>on Mars

JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES JELLO BABIES

If you want mars colonies, then make up a plan to get a profit from it. Same goes for moon colonies.

If it doesn't make money, then nobody wants to put money into it.

theres no oil in mars

>>Russia and China being antagonistic forces in the world
Ayy lmao.
They're cunts, that's true, but you call them "antagonistic forces" because they don't suck American cock.

>Focus on getting rid of aging and medical stuff.
Not happening or not happening for the common folk. It would be a disaster.

There could be though

Kinda surprising that the term Cuckold has made a comeback due to its use in the 1800s

Because politics get in the middle of many things, for example, science.

>until we fix all problems on earth and there is not a single starving child left.

So forever then.

you know that when they get resources from other planets they are going to fucking only invest in this shit ? lets give them some time before the huge burst

>nasa isn't political

People got bored of "faggot" plus being a faggot isn't even seen as bad anymore in the 21st century.

Which is totally fine as long as they never return to Earth

Musk is announcing his plans this month.

If he can build a rocket that doesn't blow up

Sure...

usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/02/10/elon-musk-just-lost-33b-double-whammy/80086284/

Mars sucks and is something your grandpa would think is a valid destination. It's a desert at the bottom of a gravity well and a useless atmosphere. Terraforming it is also something your grandpa also thought was workable, but we now know it could never sustain an atmosphere. We'll all be more machine than man in a century, anyway, so we won't give a shit.

The modern man wants to harvest asteroids, build lunar bases and target valid life-sustaining moons like Europa or Titan for exploration.

>colonies on Mars

To teach us how to properly set up colonies on other planets

Or would you rather start on Venus?

>To teach us how to properly set up colonies on other planets

The proper way to colonize the galaxy (and later, universe) is to collaborate with an AI, launch Von Neumann probes to every single star in our path, and eventually, when we hit "gold" (an earth-like world with 99% terraforming success), "plant" humans (the same way we plant crops today). See Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs Of Distant Earth" for more details.

This is heavily implying anyone would want to strand biological humans on distant worlds to leave them to sweat and toil and die (but eventually be uploaded to the AI, lrn2transhuman), instead of just converting ourselves to uploads and letting the AI do it's thing.

Do you get what I'm saying? The path to the stars is technological advancement towards machine/man partnership NOW, not masturbatory space opera fantasies about flying into space like Flash Gordon or Han Solo sometime in the future. Might as well fire Jules Vern cannons full of people at the moon, or fly there in a balloon, like Edgar Allen Poe wrote about.

Get with the times, you futurist dead-ender.

>We'll all be more machine than man in a century

9/11 and related tragedies happened. All the $ that could have been spent on space research went to the military and homeland insecurity.

>America is the World

I hate how egotistical these Americunts are

In "Songs ..." serious space colonization didn't begin until they found out the Sun would blow up. Maybe that's what it would take.

But we know now that the sun is going to blow and we're doing jack all about getting away from Earth,

1. The dotcom bust followed by 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan happened. Money was siphoned off into the creation of the DHS, and the government doubled down on the V-22 and F-35 projects instead of Constellation. Shit happens. When Columbia blew up in 2003, people chalked it up to a random tragedy and not something that could have been prevented with a better vehicle.

2. Then, right as the Surge (which cost a lot of money) began, the economy collapsed in a way not seen since 1929. It still hasn't recovered and the government doesn't exactly know how to handle it. Take a look at how noncommittal the FRB is toward interest rate hikes right at this very moment. Money was funneled into the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the original stimulus. The F-35 and V-22 projects gave us flyable aircraft around this time, just as NASA went to reorganize.

3. Constellation itself couldn't get off the ground due to technical issues with trying to get Ares-1 to work, so it was scrapped and it's core components (Orion, Ares V/SLS, Altair) will be handled individually. As such, there's only about a +10 year delay to NASA's plans and not +20.

4. Ultimately, trying to plan something as nebulous, fickle, and expectedly failure-prone as spacecraft engineering out for 50 years as Constellation did isn't feasible. The fact is, Constellation is better as a "mission statement" or a "guide" than it is a formal roadmap.

Also OP, don't forget how stupidly overoptimistic the 90s were. People in the 90s thought history was over and more resources could be devoted towards fighting climate change, foreign aid and scientific research as the cold war (and the security spending with it) had ended. People had also expected that the prosperity boomers had would continue indefinitely and that full employment would continue as the working population held steady. These notions turned out to be patently false.

Especially with the EU, it's hilarious how everything has fallen apart in the past decade. First the debt crisis (which is a growing problem, as there are talks of instability inside Italy's banks and Deutschebank), then the migrant crisis (2 million in europe and counting). All the problems that were handwaved in the 90s (the major economic deficit between north and south europe, outsourcing of labor to china, the lack of border security) are now actual crises requiring a lot of time and money to fix. So things like the ESA get put on the backburner because it's just not a priority.

Basically things changed. New problems happened and the original optimistic space plans made became unfeasible. Shit happens. The only reason the US is even bothering with space travel now is because of growing tensions with Russia and China.

constellation was shit
F-35 was fine

I didn't say Constellation was good, or that the F-35 was shit. Only that they competed for the same limited pool of money.

The biggest problem is that NASA is hamstrung by Congress and its old space cronies.

Someone needs to start a nonprofit to do what NASA would be doing if its hands weren't tied. It'd be responsible for gathering its own funding, it wouldn't be beholden to career politicians whose only interest is keeping business in their home states, and I'm positive it'd get better bang per buck. It could start out with the goal of making satellites and deep space probes cheap, mass-produced, and accessible and then eventually move into other parts of the space biz direly in need of development.

Because /pol/ places their blame on everything but the cause, which is big business controls the world and interests. No profit, no mars colony. Everything is about profit profit profit, anything else is degenerate or a waste of time. Also they're all heavily anti-science, so there's that.

Everything involving money has politics in it. Also why are you announcing that you are triggered by memes?

Asteroid mining base
Eventually as over population really starts to set in agriculture will become very profitable, and Terraforming might become economically viable

protip: all of NASA's red tape is because they have to setup the facilities to mass produce SLS, Orion and (eventually) Altair vehicles. As in they have to get every single contractor in the same room, and have them design everything with each other so that everything will work without blowing up on the launchpad or flying out of control. This is exactly why it's taking eight years to setup SLS, because they have to setup all the manufacturing facilities for it and then get it tested to ensure it works.

And NASA is only in this position because they spent the 2000s trying to build a LEO vehicle (Ares-I) which didn't work and whose role is now completely redundant thanks to SpaceX.

O ya because we all forgot about the Esa and chinese missions to mars

Which, in my opinion, displays quite nicely why the contractors-all-the-way-down approach to building spacecraft should be avoided. SLS likely could've been completed much more quickly and cheaply if ULA manufactured everything themselves, and NASA would've had a much easier time keeping everyone on the same page.

ULA itself is a hodgepodge of other contractors (Boeing, Lockmart, Rocketdyne) as is SpaceX. Remember, manufacturing is not the same as final assembly. Think about actually laying down the actual vehicle frame, then the casing, then electronics and engine ports. All of this has to come together and is supported by different industries (Forgemasters, Raytheon, Praxair, etc) all have to come together and make a single device that works. This is not an easy task.

Hasn't SpaceX pretty much moved to in-house production of almost everything these days?

Building the entire rocket in one location by one company which is empowered to make major design changes whenever they need to is the optimal way to do it.

Of course when you are operating on a cost plus basis, making design changes to reduce cost/delays is meaningless

At this point, almost anything that matters is manufactured in-house at SpaceX. When you're trying to move at the pace SpaceX wants to being moving at, the QC and supply chain issues associated with relying on other parties becomes a serious impedance and liability.

Like the whole strut-anomaly

Or try to move.

well they don't manufacture their own electronics

They will eventually. That's what their Seattle office is centered around: satellites and spacecraft electronics.

long term plans on mars are bullshit
terraforming mars is ridiculous

you wouldn't even be able to bring a fetus to term in low gravity, so forget generations of martians

we would at LEAST need to go back to the moon FIRST

We don't know shit one way or another until we're there. That's the point of going: to learn what it means to live in these environments and hopefully adapt our technology and ourselves to be able to thrive. Theorizing beyond the first steps has little applicability in reality, particularly when those theorizing are doing so from their armchairs.

The other reason to go is to give humanity a much-needed open frontier to vent into, and the moon can't provide that. It's far too hostile for large scale settlement. While Mars isn't exactly a tropical island, it's a hell of a lot closer to being Earthlike than the moon is, and going there isn't any more difficult than going to the moon from an orbital mechanics perspective.

Society cares too much about giving welfare to spend money on space. Blame giving women the right to vote: All they care about is caring for the weak and don't give two fuck about technological advancement

ROBOT ASTRONAUTS.

That's all.

>capitalism
>NASA

uhhhhh

As a percentage, how exactly earth-like is Mars? 20-40%?

Why is it that so many posters who say space travel is unrealistic scif-fi are transhumanist wankers? Are any of them aware of the irony?

Hard to say exactly, but the temperature ranges show what I mean:

Mars: -133° C (-207° F) to 27° C (80° F)
Moon: -153° C (243° F) to 123° C (253° F)

Similarly, Mars' 1/3 Earth gravity is much more favorable vs. the Moon's 1/6, and while Mars' atmosphere is thin the moon has none at all (and in fact, never will since it only has enough mass to hold onto the heaviest of gasses).

>Moon: -153° C (243° F)
I meant -243° F

Also worth noting that thanks to Mars' atmosphere, its equatorial areas are warmer whereas the moon is ridiculously cold or ridiculously hot no matter where you are

humans dont work well in places that aren't earth
its just a fact

keeping ~200lbs bags of meat living and breathing is like 95% of the challenge

And hundreds of thousands of years ago, I bet one man was telling the others "humans dont work well in places that aren't Africa" to those that suggested migrating out.

Human has adapted before and we can adapt again (or force the environment to adapt to us by building human-friendly colonies)

Screw this worthless planetoid.

We should be working to develop nukes that can turn it into useful asteroids.

>What happened to lead us to this failure?
I blame NEETs and non-white immigration.

How the fuck is a thread about the failure of our species not innately political?

Oh right, politics is about feelings and feelings only. Striving to be more is out of the question.

probably easier to make an o'neill cylinder because of human health affects of differing gravity environments, also, with smaller o'neill cylinders, no need to enter another gravity well to move supplies

probably easier to make an o'neill cylinder because of human health effects of differing gravity environments, also, with smaller o'neill cylinders, there's no need to enter another gravity well to move supplies.

I'm more worried about the internet than space travel to be honest

Depending on the metric used: around 60-70%
bbc.com/news/science-environment-15863549
web.archive.org/web/20141006071746/http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data#TOC-IV.-Comparison-with-Solar-System-Planets

>The biggest problem is that NASA is hamstrung by Congress and its old space cronies.
>Because /pol/ places their blame on everything but the cause, which is big business controls the world and interests. No profit, no mars colony. Everything is about profit profit profit, anything else is degenerate or a waste of time.

Stop this meme bullshit. It's nothing to do with politics. Look at the satellites and shuttles that were built over the 20th century. Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed Martin.

Most of you are just spouting this because you think NASA is god's gift to spaceflight, like in Interstellar, but the private sector has always played an essential part in spaceflight. Now that the US and Russia are actually working together in space instead of fighting each other, there's no point in propaganda wars anymore. China and India are now playing their own little space race but that's nothing particularly important - they're decades away from the accomplishments of the USSR and US.

The truth is that there is no point setting up colonies. Every planet is completely lethal, usable resources are minimal, the expense required to just get there is vast, the psychological strain that colonists would have would be terrible, the expense required to maintain just a small long-term operation would be inconceivably massive. It's like buying a bus ticket that costs $1,000,000,000 and defending the price by saying that "at least the bus company is trying".

So hate the private sector all you want but it's the only option left if you want to see real progress within the next 500 years. Or maybe even permanently.

Overall it's >1% like Earth but that means jack shit because there are millions of planets that are just as Earth-like as Mars. You're not going to see it terraformed, people five hundred years from now won't see it terraformed, people may never see it terraformed. You can build radiation-shielded colonies if you want but they'd be pretty useless and depressing.

>We'll all be more machine than man in a century, anyway

Yeah and we'll have colonies on Mars by 2020. Oh wait.

This argument held no water when Sagan's high ass first proposed it and it makes no fucking sense now.

O"Niell cylinders are great but they require space manufacturing capabilities centuries beyond what we have (which is nothing).

I don't hate the private sector. I hate huge, glacial, grossly inefficient cost-plus companies. That sort of company is barely even private industry; the way they operate, they may as well be part of the government itself. They're what's dragging space down. Can you imagine if all the cash pissed away on the shuttle and now the SLS was instead invested in companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Deep Space Industries, Planetary Resources, etc? The things they could do with some time and that level of funding would make Boeing, Lockheed, etc look like sad jokes. Why? Because they don't have to be perfect – they can make mistakes and learn from them in a rapid, iterative fashion.

T. Welfare cuck

because /pol/ has no ability beyond that

Affirmative action destroyed any competency in national agencies and is destroying the private sector.

test

and rampant liberal corruption in public office
coupled with an electorate that is supremely credulous & gullible

>In the 90s, we believed we'd have the first colonies on Mars by 2020
Nobody had a good reason to believe that, though. There was nothing promising going on.

The ISS wasn't going to be a propellant depot or place for simulated gravity experiments, and it was in a weird fucked-up place so rockets could get to it from both Baikonur and Cape Canaveral. NASA was still pushing the shuttle, which wasn't getting any more cost-effective.

I guess they were suggesting in PR material that ISS was a step toward Mars, but it's like how they talk about SLS being a step toward Mars: there's no plan, and no conceivable scenario where that's effective spending if you want to get to Mars.

discord.gg/hJF4Z

This chat has the best scientists known to mankind.

>hahaha space habitats are way too complicated

>dude lets just terraform Mars lmao

I wasn't suggesting terraforming as an alternative to O'Niell cylinders. Don't know why you got that impression. What I was saying is that establishing domed or undergound settlements on Mars is much more within the realm of our current capabilities.

I'm also not against space habitats. I'd kill for a sizable space station sitting in a lagrange point – really anything beyond LEO would make me extremely happy – but when people talk about O'Niell cylinders, they're usually talking about superstructures that'd take a century or more to build with current technology, and that's firmly beyond grasp. We should start with something 2x - 4x the size of the ISS and go from there.