NASA Missions

asteroid mining is a ridiculous meme
I don't think there are any asteroids worth travelling to to mine, maybe a handful of NEO's with low delta-v requirement.
The moon would be ample for this, could launch shit to Lunar Orbit with a rail gun too

Are we talking flying RTG here? because that would be fucking awesome

>Nuclear powered drone flying around a planet with lakes of liquid methane.

Don't get me wrong, I'll love to see a sample return mission, but is there really any contest?

>planet
Fuck, I meant moon.

If it was up to me, we would be mass-producing Couriosity-like landers and Cassini/NH style probes and just spam them in every direction.

I wonder what could be conjured with off the shelf parts and and minimal use of exotic and expensive materials/equipment. Simply put sacrifice mass efficiency for cost efficiency.

But is there even a commercially available equipment that lets you build a solar powered curiosity rover even if its 2-3 times heavier?

Regardless of the reasons, if China gets into space and gets an advantage over everyone else, we are all doomed.

Mass production of landers doesn't work because different targets has dramatically different environments. You could spam a bunch of copy/pasta landers to the same place though after proving they are viable. However curiosity needs a different wheel design before we send more, also probably a different power source before we spam because I believe NASA is on a tight budget as far as RTGs go

Mass efficiency and cost efficiency tend to go hand and hand to a point as far as rockets are concerned. Unless you plan on building your own custom rocket, you tend to have a limited payload weight budget. The more mass efficient your equipment is, the more stuff you can fit in the payload.

Only if your launch costs are extremely high, rare, and mass limited.
If they are not, what then?

that'd be expensive as shit and not achieve much
would be better to put science on the backseat for a a decade or two and focus entirely on getting space mining and industry up
once that is fully functional, and we can start building ships and probes in space itself, then we can do science and exploration on a scale unimaginable because of the massive cost reductions it would bring

why spend all this time trying to make clown car probes that might wind up blowing up on the launch pad, when you can make full sized science ships with no risk of boom in space

Existing rockets have a maximum payload to target orbit. If you aren't building a rocket, then you will be bound by this maximum payload weight, and if you don't care about mass efficiency and just use the cheapest shit you can find, you will very quickly deplete that weight budget. So you will likely also end up sacrificing mission objectives as well as reliability/redundancy of payload when sacrificing mass efficiency.

I hope China BTFOs American (((ULA))) and (((NASA))) employment programs and contaminates the fuck out of the entire solar system.

At least we'd be getting somewhere.

China's space program is pretty clearly designed around being the dominating power on moon.

>You could spam a bunch of copy/pasta landers to the same place though
I'd be ok with this

So the only way is 2-3 billion usd per probe once per decade? Smells like interests here, and not scientific ones. Keep going though.

>implying that's not the idea
better for a socialist nation to rule space than a capitalist one

meant for fuck if i know how it happened.

9386335

Yeah fucking this. Hopefully they don't fuck it up. "oh no turns out the RTG makes too much heat and now the probe melted the ground, we now have very expensive lander."

When launches have to be booked 5 years in advance, and cost upwards of 200 million
you don't mass produce jack shit

I thought NASA was completely devastated when their Schiapparelli blew up.

that would be ESA, user

>helicopter on mars
Oi m8 i aint no asstrofunkacyst or whatevs but aint u gotta need a dense ammosfere 4 dis shit?

While a proper Titan mission will probably get cooler results the process of getting to an asteroid and doing shit around it is very valuable.

Yeah,.....that's what I want to see every night I look up at the moon. NEW BEIJING staring back at us all.

Mars is 0.377g and the atmosphere is 0.6% of Earth's. Equivalent to the atmosphere about 35km/22 miles above sea level on Earth.

I'd like to see some math on flight dynamics of that sort of thing.

NASA just does what Congress tells them. If they didn't, they would get trash for a budget.

And most of the cost of the probe is ensuring it can actually complete mission objectives, testing and R&D. However, the design is always as mass efficient as possible because that is the only way to fit as much scientific equipment as possible on the drone. Sacrificing mass throws secondary mission objectives out the window.

Curiosity Rover: 2.5B, launch 2011
Juno: 1.1B, launch 2011
New Horizons: 700M, launch 2006
Dawn: 446M, launch 2007
Kepler: 550M, launch 2009
LRO: 504M, launch 2009

Smells like you don't really give a damn about any of this so you freely generalize whatever you want to support your opinion and assume you could do better than a couple thousands of scientists and engineers.

Obviously I want the Titan drone.

Obviously the comet sample return mission will be chosen instead because it'd be way cheaper and less risky, and the lawmakers in charge of NASA directives hate spending money on something risky.

>>helicopter on mars
Titan, not Mars. Did you read the thing? It makes no mention of Mars. Titan's atmosphere is denser than Earths at the surface, and there's less than 15% the gravity.

thatd be actually fucking cool to see a city on the moon with city lights and all that jazz

Anti-NASA idiots btfo by facts.

I hate the whole *great again* thing going on with the uneducated masses.

We've always been great and NASA is a prime example of amazing achievements never done before.

Wasting mass on probes is like wasting fuel on rockets, utterly stupid.

>last one was 2011
>intentionally leaving out the expensive parts of the cost to suit your argument

I just picked a few that I could remember that made the news (aka were easily recognizable). And left out any that were more than a decade ago, like cassini which was recently in the news but launched in 1997. I included New Horizons even though it was a touch over a decade ago because it made fairly big news with the Pluto visit recently and just got a mission extension. It was by no means an exhaustive list of recent NASA missions.

And explicitly stated "most of the cost" in the very post you are replying to. But again, you care so little about this that you didn't even bother with a rebuttal. You made absolutely zero claims in your post, why even bother replying, user?

It would be a chinese city, so the lights would be blocked by moon smog

New Washington > 3rd England > New Beijing