What might a second term of Trump mean for the US space program? President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the US White House. What does this mean for the US space program, NASA, and a return to the Moon? "Trump is such an unpredictable person," said Garry Hunt, one of the original Voyager scientists, when considering possible scenarios. As far as human spaceflight is concerned, not …
Thank you for your insight - you are probably right. However - re: "Pull the other one" - Richard didn't pull anything. Proper journalism sticks to the base truth and lets the readers exercise their own power of deduction and do their own moralizing. Jeff Bezos denied he made the call to endorse no one. The editor in chief of the WP claimed himself to have made the decision. Because we are not stupid we can read between the lines, but IMO Richard is right for not being patronizing and connecting the dots wherever some slow readers might be in danger.
I might add I (and apparently many others) got sick of reading the WP when every *news* article (not opinions) started connecting the dots for me because they thought I was too stupid to think for myself. Boring. Also close minded. I wonder if there are some dots between that and last Nov 5? I voted Harris, btw.
"Can we please send all these entitled bazillionaires to Mars? One way preferably."
No. Let's send them to Venus instead. It's got a corrosive and super-hot atmosphere, so any organic contaminants will be broken down in no time at all. Plus, it's downhill, so it's easier and cheaper than firing them up the gravity well, so to speak. Also, we might make it to Mars one day (humans landing on Venus seems far less likely) and when we do, we don't want to come across the remains (or, heaven forbid, descendants!) of Trump, Musk, Bezos en the rest of that crowd.
Or we set the controls for the heart of the sun. That'll also work.
>>Plus, it's downhill, so it's easier and cheaper than firing them up the gravity well, so to speak.
err is it? seems to me you would need to shed a lot of KE to descend the gravity well...
>>Or we set the controls for the heart of the sun. That'll also work.
As long a Eugene is careful with that axe we will be OK!
SpaceX has money and Musk has even more. To make a difference with money congress would have to vote to send billions per year to SpaceX, which is concentrated in Texas, Florida and California. The only government space project that big is SLS and it gets votes by spreading money over fifty states. The thing that would make a big difference to SpaceX is to be able to launch Starship from Florida. The only practical launch sites for medium and bigger rockets are from coastal nature reserves. It took years to get a license to launch Starship from Texas and it was going to take years to complete the environmental impact assessment for Florida. Musk thinks Trump will short circuit the procedure. We shall see.
you mean plenty of Pork?
NASA uses metric. A quick glance at the SpaceX website shows metric units displayed first and in bold, followed by imperial conversions without bold. Metric is the logical choice and rocket engineers are logical people.
https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/dragon/
"A metric fuckton of cash for SpaceX I reckon."
Shirley if it's metric then it would be a fucktonne?
And anyway, which "ton"? A long ton is a little more than a metric ton which in turn is only about 10% more than a short ton. So from that logic, I can only assume a "fuckton", metric or otherwise is non-traditional and therefore a candidate for the El Reg weights and measures soviet.
@Pete 2
"Well, it will supercharge many people's desire to leave the planet."
That could make for an amazing movie! Picture loads of screeching, multicoloured haired creatures landing on a civilised alien planet and the locals defending themselves from the oncoming hideous creatures! Explaining how they got a ship and managed to fly it would be hard, maybe they were put on the ship and auto-pilot away from earth for the good of the rest of us.
@Yorick Hunt
"B Ark"
Damn thats funny. I cant imagine it would be a long film as they would die off pretty quickly as they leave the ship screaming nooooo into the air.
I had in mind some sort of alien invasion but instead of the Xenomorph it would be the usual caricatures (and fools posting the videos) of extremist libs jumping out of the dark screaming and terrifying civilised locals.
Picture loads of screeching, multicoloured haired creatures landing on a civilised alien planet
With all due respect to Mr. Hunt I've no doubt Humans will walk on Mars, and likely a lot sooner than many of us think.
As the great Arther C. Clarke said, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Musk might be a bit of flake, but he is a very smart flake, and he's already done a lot of things many people have said were impossible.
It's relatively simple to put a human on Mars. For a little extra they can survive landing.
It's even technically possible to get them back afterwards.
It's just a really, really stupid thing to do, because it will instantly make it completely impossible to ever learn whether or not there has ever been life on Mars.
A whole class of science would be instantly and forever destroyed because it would become impossible to tell whether a future discovery was contamination from the messy human or a native Martian microbe.
It is impossible to properly sterilise a human and have them survive the process.
"It is impossible to properly sterilise a human and have them survive the process."
True is we were to put an unprotected hum on the surface of mars, but that would kill them. I would say it's possible to sterilize a sealed suited human, otherwise effectively we have likely already have buggered it up with everything we sent to the surface so far..
The probes are built in a clean room and sterilised before launch.
How and when do they get into the suit, then out of the spacecraft?
Airlocks aren't perfect. You're actually suggesting they stay in the suit for the whole trip - or at least several hours before landing and the entire time on the surface, if someone figures out sufficient rapid sterilisation in microgravity.
That doesn't seem reasonable - your diaper needs changing more than once every ten months, for a start.
Aside from that, if the landing fails it'd spread human jam around a wide area. I suppose we could quickly nuke the site from orbit, but historically there has been resistance to that idea.
Perhaps not completely impossible, but fraught with technical difficulties and dangers. A round trip would be 21 months making the appropriate assumptions for minimizing requirements for fuel. Note that the fuel requirements for landing and taking off from Mars are well over 4X the amount needed for a lunar trip due to Mars' greater gravity. There is the issue of radiation, particularly that associated with Solar Particle Events. Anyone who does reach the Martian surface will find it an inhospitable environment with a tenuous atmosphere that would require full space suits to be worn and an absence of free water on the surface. Moreover, if anything goes wrong, there is little hope of getting help.
Fuel management is the least of the problems. For a 21 month round trip plus a decent stay on Mars to make said trip worth it, you're looking at a closed ecosystem that will be stable for at least two years, preferably a lot longer. ISS has to be resupplied several times a year or the onboard crew can't survive. If there's anything Biosphere 2 taught us it's how difficult that is, how easily it can fail and what will happen when it does.
Compared to the problem of keeping humans alive for several years while they're locked in a hermetically sealed container, everything else will be a dawdle.
https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars
From the article: "The South Pole is around 2,800 meters above sea level, and like everywhere else on Earth around 44 million miles closer to the sun than any point on Mars. It sits deep down inside the nutritious atmosphere of a planet teeming with native life. Compared to the very most hospitable place on Mars it is an unimaginably fertile Eden. Here is a list of the plant-life that grows there: Nothing. Here is a list of all the animals that reproduce there: None."
StudeJeff,
Musk might be clever. But he's not radiation proof. One solar flare in the wrong place and everybody's dead. As Mars doesn't have a magnetic field to speak of, that's also true when they're on the ground. Unless they take all the expensive and heavy gear required to dig an underground base. The ISS is within Earth's magnetic field and the lunar astronauts only left its (relative) safety for a bit over a week.
The odds mount up on a multi-year mission.
There's also normal levels of radiation to worry about. Think: the astronauts having a good chance of dying of cancer in 10-20 years of getting back to Earth. A risk people would be willing to take. Even that might be optimistic, and there's a limit to how much shielding the spacecraft can have, due to weight.
The issue is that solar and cosmic radiation is very difficult to protect against, and can cause serious damage to human tissue with only a few days of exposure. All of the astronauts who went to the Moon suffered kidney damage due to being outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere for a few days. See for example:
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/a-mission-to-mars-could-destroy-astronauts-kidneys#:~:text=Exposure%20to%20simulated%20space%20conditions,kidney%20function%20and%20permanent%20damage.
"... In seven of those simulations, mice were exposed to galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) doses equivalent to about two years in deep space, comparable to what astronauts would experience during a Mars mission. Each of them suffered severe kidney damage.
Increased risk of kidney stones in astronauts has so far been laid at the feet of bone loss. As the bones break down, extra calcium gets dumped into the urine and builds up in the kidneys. Stay in space long enough and you’ll start literally urinating your own bones. The new study suggests that damage to the kidneys also contributes. Exposure to simulated space conditions caused the kidneys to remodel themselves, shrinking structures which balance calcium and salt in the body. It’s not a huge problem in short-duration missions or those close to home, but a 2-year mission to Mars is likely to cause loss of kidney function and permanent damage."
From: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6900789/
"Looking Back 50 Years at the Biology of Mankind in Space: The Renal-Cardiovascular Fluid Shift Conundrum
...
Of possibly greater long-term importance was the fact that urinary calcium excretion exceeded preflight urine plus fecal calcium loss. This area was covered in detail by the endocrinology panel (not discussed here), but it was also addressed by the renal panel given its relevance to the kidney. Continuous urinary calcium loss was considered to be due to bone demineralization. It was not responsive to exercise or any other maneuver. Of relevance to the kidneys was the fact that plasma calcium concentrations rose by about 0.5 g/dl (not fractionated). The hypercalciuria was considered to be due to suppression of tubular reabsorption, partially driven by the initial natriuresis but not sustained by it. Hormonal mechanisms were analyzed by the endocrine panel, but the implications for the kidney were obvious for long-term space flight (i.e., possible damage to the kidney either due to calcification of the parenchyma or formation of kidney stones).
...
These insights do not imply that longer-term flights or residence in deep space are risk free. The long-term effects of hypercalciuria may have damaging effects on the kidneys. The effects of radiation exposure on vascular endothelium may be significant. Only 24 astronauts have thus far existed in deep space (12 have walked on the moon), and limited information has indicated that such lunar astronauts may have a higher cardiovascular mortality than those who flew in low-earth orbits, possibly caused by radiation injury. If this finding holds up in a larger population of astronauts living in deep space, it will be a cause for major concern."
(My emphasis.)
From: https://www.popsci.com/science/mars-kidneys/
"New research suggests that a Mars-bound astronaut may need dialysis on the way home.
Research from nephrologists at University College London (UCL), recently published in Nature, identifies another challenge we’ll have to face as we venture beyond Earth. This new work shows that long term spaceflight might permanently damage a human’s kidneys, so much so that an astronaut going to Mars might even need dialysis on the way back."
From: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1
"Abstract
Missions into Deep Space are planned this decade. Yet the health consequences of exposure to microgravity and galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) over years-long missions on indispensable visceral organs such as the kidney are largely unexplored. We performed biomolecular (epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, epiproteomic, metabolomic, metagenomic), clinical chemistry (electrolytes, endocrinology, biochemistry) and morphometry (histology, 3D imaging, miRNA-ISH, tissue weights) analyses using samples and datasets available from 11 spaceflight-exposed mouse and 5 human, 1 simulated microgravity rat and 4 simulated GCR-exposed mouse missions. We found that spaceflight induces: 1) renal transporter dephosphorylation which may indicate astronauts’ increased risk of nephrolithiasis is in part a primary renal phenomenon rather than solely a secondary consequence of bone loss; 2) remodelling of the nephron that results in expansion of distal convoluted tubule size but loss of overall tubule density; 3) renal damage and dysfunction when exposed to a Mars roundtrip dose-equivalent of simulated GCR."
(My emphasis.)
(And before you ask, I have no idea what the long words mean, just that this could be seriously bad for human health in long term space missions outside the Earth's magnetosphere, although I do like the idea of a 'microgravity rat'.)
as the full article says
"our simulated GCR experiments only looked at acute unfractionated dosing, which may not accurately model the chronic cumulative exposure that would happen on a Mars mission"
The mice did not get a simulated 6 months of GCR exposure, they got 6-months worth of GCR in a single dose.
So nothing about Apollo kidney function as you claimed.
Meanwhile Buzz Aldrin still going strong at 94, still travelling the world advocating human Mars missions, married for the fourth time in 2023 to a woman 30 years younger.
Michael Collins was 90.
Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan 82, Edgar Mitchell 85 etc
Reverse trip isn't necessary. Just make it a colonisation mission.
Continual delivery of supplies until it gets self-sustaining.
But Mars is a stupid place to go anyway. Find a nice chunky asteroid a few km in length, hollow it out and spin it for gravity. Get the water you need and O2 from other asteroids. Leave a nice 500m thick skin to keep out the radiation.
"Find a nice chunky asteroid a few km in length, hollow it out and spin it for gravity."
Sounds like a very large amount of work and some very heavy equipment.
"Get the water you need and O2 from other asteroids."
You know how far apart asteroids are, don't you? It all sounds a bit SF compared to "simply" building a Moonbase or Marsbase which is theoretically possible with the tech we have now, even to sending robot bulldozers to start digging holes or mounding up ""stuff" for shielding. It's just all very, very expensive.
Other ideas from SF include using large mirrors to melt or soften an asteroid that you previously set spinning so it moulds itself into a hollow cylinder(ish) shape and then just cut a hole in the held to attach an airlock. Easy peasy, but still has the issue of other "local resources" such as water being quite a long way off, probably in different orbits :-)
NASA does a lot of Earth Observation satellites, and of course measurements and research here on Earth. Many NASA scientists supported the warnings about man-made effects increasing climate change during Trump's first term as President. I wonder how they will fare under Trump 2.0?
What I would have expected him to want from Trump is completely uninhibited testing and release of everything from driverless Teslas to twice daily Starship launches, even if most explode and turn half of Florida into a toxic wasteland (IBF "how would people tell the difference?" snark)
He'd push NASA to launch before the end of his term, so he can get the "credit". He will not be interested in anything that happens in 2029 or later because it doesn't stroke his ego.
So if NASA scheduled manned landing on the moon in summer 2028, there's no way they'd be allowed to slip the schedule. They'd be forced to cut corners as necessary to make sure it happens when he's in office. If people die, he'll just blame NASA since he's always jumping to take the credit for anything he thinks is good but never accepts the blame for anything that goes wrong even when it is 100% his fault.
Honestly though he's just as likely to say "we don't need NASA anymore, we have Elon" and push to have the entire agency defunded.
>>Honestly though he's just as likely to say "we don't need NASA anymore, we have Elon" and push to have the entire agency defunded.
Elon is apparently going to be the head of the "department of Govt efficiency" (whatever that may be) so I guess wasteful departments/administrations will feel his knife... which nicely removes the blame for axing NASA from Trump.
It is a miracle that Joe managed to get this far and its quite funny seeing the rest of the party seethe as he won't step aside early. But I can't take anyone seriously when they try and claim Trump is suffering mental decline after they put so much effort into covering up Joe's very public decline and the sudden faux shock and scramble to come up with excuses over his debate performance.
And now that the party lost horrifically the finger pointing has started. Nancy Pelosi, one of the people behind the coup in 2020 and a long time pusher of the 'Joe is as sharp as ever' lie, helped force Joe to drop out of the 2024 race and a day later endorses Kamala as candidate. When pressed on the issue of not having a primary for Joe's replacement says 'we had an open primary, she won!' (yes, she said this!) and now is blaming the fact there was no primary and that its all Joe's fault for endorsing Kamala.
You've lost all credibility. Not that members of the Democrat cult had much to start with...
Still no-one can answer the very glaring question of what happened to 9 million voters. Was Kamala Harris really that awful? (yes, she was) Was the populist campaign she ran on which focused on abortion, TQ+ and name calling a disaster? (yes, it was) Was her reliance on the MSM to prop her up and edit her interviews into coherent content a huge mistake? (duh, obvs!) Were her over rehearsed and carefully scripted campaign speeches and answers to questions just pure cringe? (oh so much so! '32 days! *cackle* 32 days!') And did the paying off of celebs to endorse her, paying off of media personalities to give her soft ball interviews where she still couldn't answer a question and the bussing in of supporters to rallies just give everyone the ick that her whole campaign was utterly fake? Heck, even AOC has come out and said that people don't want to vote for fake candidates!! You know you've failed hard when a member of The Squad turns on you!
Federal employees are required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work.
Trump said the Department of Government Efficiency will not be a government agency and that Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside government to offer the White House “advice and guidance”, “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.” He added that the move would shock government systems (I bet they are already shocked).
Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations on any potential conflicts of interest (like owning SpaceX, X, Starlink or Tesla maybe).
It's letting the wolves in to advise the shepherds.
Federal employees are required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest
Trump will just order his DOJ lackey to not prosecute anyone for failing to do so, so I expect to see a lot of people working in his administration who don't make the required disclosures.
For a claimed "democracy" (at least that's what the US calls itself), it seems to me that all the big important jobs are political appointees "suggested" by the President and are not actually elected by The People. Yes, the Senate gets to argue about the proposed appointees and may reject some of them, but Trump seems to be looking at ways around that with something called "recess appointments" and may even be looking at ways to force a Senate recess so as to allow unopposed appointments. Not sure how that works or if "recess appointments" can be rescinded after a recess or, more likely, once in, it's harder to get them back out.
Oh PHOOEY on NASA and even Space-X! I've GOT my 22K-High Patch and you can too with the introduction of Electrostatic Field Effects Propulsion AND small-form-factor Cyclotron-powered GWASER-based propulsion systems for low-orbital (ISS height), high-orbital 22,000 miles Geosynchronous paths AND Deep Space missions.
Electrostatic propulsion uses Terahertz waveguides built into the hull of any given aerospace planform (i.e. usually made of layered Aluminum, Magnesium, Bismuth, Platinum-group metals and Titanium alloys and YES I know not to put Bismuth near Aluminum!) that create massive Electrostatic and EM fields that push away the atmosphere AND have repulsive effects. The technology is actually quite old from the 1960's (i.e. North American Aviation Company now Northrup-Grumman) but modern computers and fancy CNC machining and 3D printing make it practical! You can go about mid-troposphere before the field effect weakens significantly.
From there, you can use a Portable Cyclotron (i.e. a circular particle accelerator) to bash together heavy nuclei such as Gold, Lead, Mercury, Manganese and even plain old Iron so that a series of atomic-level explosions take place that create a steady stream of minute HFGW (High Frequency Gravity Waves aka Gravity-A waveform) and MFGW (Medium Frequency Gravity Waves aka Gravity-B waveform) waves that get trapped and summed within a GWASER system (i.e. Gravity Wave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) which is a Stainless Steel cavity resonator and waveguide which uses RF or Millimetre surface waves and/or standing waves to create a virtualized gravity wave entrapment system. Gravity waves normally go through EVERYTHING so you MUST use another waveform to trap and confine those incoming gravity waves so you can create a sort of Gravity LASER which reflects, directs, sums and amplifies those HFGW and MFGW waveforms in the same manner as a LASER amplified optical band waveforms, such that you can direct them to a portion of local 3D-XYZ space that will be compressed/distorted by that sudden introduction of artificial-induced-mass to form a temporary space-compressing gravity well that will soon evaporate and re-expand 3D-XYZ space back to its original dimensions.
You use your fancy space-craft powered by 50 of the 250 Kilowatt Methanol-fueled Ballard Fuel Cells to create the 10 Megawatts needed to power the Cyclotron and the GWASER setup so you can create a series of gravity wells every few seconds which lets you "Surf" their now-compressed outer edges. On a general basis, the gravity wells created must be created and traversed quickly so that you get a linear space distance compression of anywhere from 5x the original linear distance up to as much a 100x the original linear distance DEPENDING upon how large and powerful the gravity well is! The actual linear distance travelled is very dependent upon how FAST you create, traverse and evaporate the artificially-created gravity wells!
Of course, don't create a gravity well so big that it has an event horizon (i.e. Schwarzchild Radius) and don't make a gravity well inside of or near any planet, asteroid, sun,etc). AND of course, you need a fancy and FAST navigational computer system to be able to plot the placement, number and duration of each gravity well created by the GWASER system so that they are not too large and evaporate quickly AND can be traversed quickly enough before evaporation! With a typical 3-day supply of Methanol (i.e. about the size of a typical four-bedroom house!) to power the on-board Cyclotron and GWASER system, you can create enough gravity wells quickly enough to traverse an actual linear distance of about 500 to 1000 Light Years each way. That puts quite a few local solar systems within Earth's reach!
The U.S. Navy-operated "Giant Flying Propane Tanks" deep-space mission systems my Defence Contractor "friends" keep bragging about when they are hopped-up on 25 year old Scotch and a 16-OZ Porter House Steak has been using this GWASER technology since about 1995, so it's NOT NEW technology and they have been "flying" to places that make Star Trek enthusiasts blush with envy!
I cannot WAIT to see the TS:SCI blow-up at ONI, Ft. Meade and Langley when they see this comment explaining the entire system in a pretty decent manner!
Dudes!!! I have a 22K-High Patch .... How do you THINK I got it?!
I helped BUILD OUR VERSION hovering silently in our secretive NCA-YVR hangar!
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