Buzz Aldrin Says NASA Should Ditch the ISS and Make the Mars Jump

[TexasTowelie]

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is done with the International Space Station and he maintains that NASA officials need to pull the plug on the ISS entirely, and as soon possible, if they want to really get serious about undertaking the journey to Mars

Why? Well, because of the money, of course. The ISS costs about $3.5 billion per year to maintain. That would be fine if NASA were awash in all the funding it could possibly need, but the federal space agency has only so much to spend. In Aldrin's opinion, it's a waste to keep dumping money into the ISS, which has been orbiting the Earth for years now.

"We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," Aldrin said at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. this week. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost."

Aldrin is being pragmatic, but his advice on the ISS doesn't mean he wants to give up on orbital space flight altogether. But instead of using NASA's own resources to keep up a presence in low Earth orbit, Aldrin thinks that the federal space agency should be giving private companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Orbital these projects. These companies might even develop their own space stations and work with China since the Chinese are planning to put their own mid-sized space station into orbit by 2023.

Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/nasa-should-cut-the-iss-funding-and-go-for-mars-apollo-11-buzz-aldrin-says-9433097

[Warpy]

4. Not much if the Em Drive actually works when it's tested in low orbit later this year

The impossible, violates everything Newton said drive has generated thrust in a hard vacuum here on earth. If it pans out under actual conditions above the atmosphere, it would be the perfect way to move stuff around once it's up in orbit.

That's a big "if."

[longship]

6. IF!

No physicist worth their education takes the scam EM drive seriously... because it violates every principle of basic physics. If one is going to propose that ones new spacedrive upsets basic physics one had better damned well have new basic physics to back it up!

In other words, EM drive is rubbish.

[Warpy]

7. It might be

or it might not be. Remember Newton's time period. There were a lot of things he didn't know about in the early seventeenth century. His model has stood up well for 400 years. If this thing works under actual operating conditions, it will simply be time to expand upon it.

I know your mind is closed and nailed shut on this subject. That will be a liability if the damned thing continues to work.

[Ghost Dog]

9. What if,

instead of producing thrust that pushes against resistance behind thus moving forward, as Newtonian physics would have it, this 'drive' somehow opens a way, a change in the space in front, drawing the 'drive' forwards as if by suction?

[longship]

11. Huh?

Or maybe magic flying unicorns pull the vehicle along.

[longship]

10. Newton works perfectly well to get space probes to Pluto, and beyond.

Last edited Mon May 15, 2017, 12:50 PM - Edit history (1)

So we'll have no gum flapping about the 400 intervening years.

I suggest that people consider precisely what the existence of a practical EM drive would mean to the body of physics. It would mean that Newton's action/reaction law be false, the conservation of momentum.

It would mean that one could get ones car out of a ditch by sitting in the driver's seat and pushing hard enough on the fucking steering wheel. (Possibly saying "beep-beep" while doing so.)

It would mean rewriting all the physics textbooks, even elementary ones.

That is the hill one has to climb when one makes the EM drive claim.

My mind is closed only to extraordinary claims without the requisite extraordinary evidence, which is precisely what the EM drive screechers do not have.

Sorry, my friend.

EM drive is tooth fairy science.

[longship]

12. Here. About wacko warp drives and EM drives.

Sean Carroll responses:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/05/26/warp-drives-and-scientific-reasoning/

There is no "if" here.

[Jack-o-Lantern]

2. 45 years ago the last man left the moon.

We should have had a permanent self-sustaining lunar base decades ago, and the first mars landing years ago.
But no, we need all that money for never-ending wars and killing.

[longship]

13. It should have been Moon Base Alpha in 1999.

[Warpy]

3. Easy for him to say, he's not going to have to do it

There has to be one hell of a lot of unmanned exploration before we're anywhere near ready to go there. We also have a hell of a lot of technical problems to solve before we can get someone there and back. Likely the vehicle to get there and back would be best assembled in orbit, at the ISS or something like it, so dumping it is highly premature.

Buzz really hasn't thought this through. Mars is one hell of a lot farther away than the Moon is.

[still_one]

14. Exactly. In fact they better justify why a manned Mars mission is significantly more useful at

this time then unmanned ones, for a lot of the reasons you said, we need more data first

[LunaSea]

8. Sorry Buzz, you're wrong...

ISS is the platform for On Orbit Construction of a variety of vehicles that can open up the whole inner system if we'd apply some modest funding in the right places.
One of the best things about ISS is the fact that we didn't do it alone, but together with so many other nations. It's a good model for future development.
Our penchant for developing, then abandoning terrific ideas (and hardware) is one of the one of the things keeping ourselves "down on the farm".
I've a great admiration for Buzz, and was honored to work with him several years ago on a lunar related project, but he's just wrong about this. The entire inner solar system and its resources are our goal, not just Mars.