I caught this at the end of an article about how (thankfully), we probably won’t end up wasting too much more money on manned space travel:
Nasa’s budgetary woes are also hampering efforts to keep an eye on asteroids that might travel too close to Earth. The agency needs about $300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government’s target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth. Congress has not come up with the money and is unlikely to, according to the National Academy of Science.
Three hundred million may sound like a reasonable amount of money, but it’s about one one-thousandth of the low end of the estimated price for sending humans to Mars. It’s significantly less than the cost of a single space shuttle mission. I also suspect that this telescope network would have much greater scientific value than shuttle missions (which isn’t saying much).
This puts me in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Gregg Easterboork and Jonah Goldberg. Now, Gregg and Jonah argue their points quite stupidly, as you would expect; Easterbrook’s argument is based on faulty statistical reasoning and Goldberg’s is “I saw ‘Deep Impact’ and Al Gore is fat”. But for $300 million, a near-earth asteroid detection system seems like money well spent to me.
A.Political
I recommend watching this TEDTalks lecture on potential space exploration as well as un-maned space exploration – derived from robotic cave exploration.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html
El Cid
Yes, $300 million on telescopes to monitor near Earth objects may sound reasonable, but the teabaggers must come out in force to stop this Obama plan to try and spy on God and steal His secret recipes.
srv
NASA wants to keep the shuttle flying and Augustine is soon to hand the axe for killing the Ares 1. I’m sure that leaves plenty of money for “science.”
Not.
DougJ
Yes, $300 million on telescopes to monitor near Earth objects may sound reasonable, but the teabaggers must come out in force to stop this Obama plan to try and spy on God and steal His secret recipes.
Yeah, I should have thought about the asteroid death squads.
malraux
Just how dumb is Goldberg? Apparently we should stop worrying about asbestos in the ceiling because just maybe a terrorist put bomb in the basement.
RSA
I kinda think it depends on what we could do about it. Has that been worked out? That is, if there’s nothing we can really do about such a cataclysmic event, maybe it doesn’t really matter how far in advance we know it’s going to happen.
JasonF
After reading that Goldberg piece, I’m rooting for the asteroid if only because it will spare the world more of Goldberg’s writing.
Allen
And what we do after an impacting Near Earth Object is discovered? Send Clint Eastwood? In my opinion this a pretty low priority for NASA as there is nothing we can do upon discovery. The higher priority for detecting NEOs is for astronomical observation, not the impossible deflection.
Mark S.
@RSA:
From what I understand, damn little. I’m not sure we could shoot missiles at it, since our missiles aren’t designed to be shot up into space. Even if we could, we might only succeed in breaking the asteroid up into radioactive chunks.
In short, if a meteor that killed the dinosaurs was on its way, we would be royally fucked. Fortunately, such events are extremely rare.
joe from Lowell
Not to mention, we will gain considerably more scientific knowledge from the asteroid program than from sending a human to Mars.
JK
@A.Political:
The TED website http://www.ted.com is one of the greatest goddamn websites on the Internet. You should check out http://www.poptech.com and http://fora.tv. They both have many kickass presentations.
For any BJ reader who plans to get extremely rich in the next few years, check out http://www.spaceadventures.com/index.cfm
The Moar You Know
@srv: The shuttle needs to be grounded ASAP, and the damned Ares should never have been built – we already have rockets that are far less dangerous that are capable of the job that the Ares was designed for. I guess Congress and NASA couldn’t resist another giveaway to Lockheed/Martin.
El Cid
@joe from Lowell: What if we could send all the teabaggers and their Republican allies to Mars and promise them it’s their new libertarian dreamworld? We wouldn’t have to bring them back. And surely that would advance science here remarkably, what with so many fewer people getting in the way of science because they’re convinced that Jesus rode a dinosaur or that global warming is fake because Al Gore is fat & has a big house.
PeakVT
NASA wants to spend $300M on telescopes when we could buy 1.5 F-22s with the same amount instead? Craziness.
mike
I worked on a bunch of advanced planning studies for NASA in the late 80s – it has been long understood that the manned space program drains resources from much cheaper, much more high value missions.
I think I calculated at one point that the space shuttle budget for one year would fund, cradle-to-grave, TEN Hubble space telescopes. Yes – full -life funding for 10! And at that time, the Hubble was the single most expensive unmanned space mission ever.
The problem is that NASA is chock full of manned space idealogues who will not compromise at all on the notion of curtailing manned space flight to permit broader unmanned exploration (which I alway thought of as providing the data that would generate more enthusiasm for sending people out there). A great example is the space station with is probably the single most useless expenditure of space funds ever conceived – and we knew it would be in the late 80s.
That’s why I quit and went to law school, dramatically increasing my value too society (and if that isn’t a condemnation, what is? :-) )
Joey Maloney a/k/a The Bard Of Balloon Juice
@RSA: Yes, this.
Just Some Fuckhead
With what we spend on NASA already, we could shoot giant bags of cash into space that act as a buffer against incoming asteroids.
malraux
@Mark S.: Gravity tractors. You maneuver a satellite into orbit near the astroid, close enough that the astroid feels a pull from it. Over time, the small pull is enough to move the astroid out of the way. The important aspect is seeing the astroid with enough time to spare.
tavella
If detected early enough, quite a lot. The trick is not blowing it up, the trick is moving it, and it takes very little force to do that… if you have time. Small controlled explosions is the simplest, though tricky given the pile-of-rubble quality of many asteroids. The cleverest and simplest plan I’ve seen? Gravity. <a href=”
If detected early enough, quite a lot. The trick is not blowing it up, the trick is moving it, and it takes very little force to do that… if you have time. Small controlled explosions is one option, though tricky given the pile-of-rubble quality of many asteroids. The cleverest and simplest plan I’ve seen? Gravity. Park a spacecraft next to the body, and it attracts it; not enormously, but you don’t need huge changes if you move early enough. Park a spacecraft next to the body, and it attracts it; not enormously, but you don’t need huge changes if you move early enough.
tavella
Hmm, trapped in moderation hell — can someone free my post at 17? Don’t know why, only one link and I don’t see any of the Bad Words.
Leelee for Obama
@RSA: This is my question. I live here on the Space Coast, so the jobs are important, I grant you. But what exactly can we do about said near-earth objects if we have the 300,000,000 dollar telescopes to see them with. If we can divert or destroy them, I don’t want to know about them, do I?
Leelee for Obama
@Leelee for Obama: DUH! If we can’t divert of destroy them. Did I mention, I miss edit?
random asshole
How does Jonah Goldberg get paid to write that crap?
Martian Buddy
@Mark S.: If it’s a smaller-sized one (meaning megaton-range equivalent,) it would seem to me that we could at least evacuate some people out of the threatened area even if we can’t do anything to prevent or mitigate the impact.
El Cid
How can we be sure that these telescopes will not be used to spy into senior citizens’ bathrooms to read their medicine cabinets and then tax them on their pharmaceuticals?
Mark S.
@Martian Buddy:
Oh yeah, I think $300 million would be a good investment and give us warning about Tunguska type events.
bago
You could always plant an ion engine on an asteroid to move it out of the gravity well assuming you had 5-6 years to work on the problem.
arguingwithsignposts
This really qualifies for the “lifestyles of the not wealthy enough” thread, but since nobody’s there anymore:
Taibbi: Real Housewives of Goldman Sachs. Amazing.
WyldPirate
Because Jonah’s hagbag of a mother got him a job after she rocketed to fame writing about jizz-stained blue dresses?
Martin
Make it 10-12 years. You need to factor in the teabaggers shouting everyone down for not letting the asteroid free-market solve the problem, or more likely, accusing the administration of turning it into a death asteroid, designed to crash only into Republicans.
After that, Congress will need to find a way to make sure some part of the ion engine is built in each of the 435 congressional districts. Remember that the Senate, which Democrats hold by 99 seats to 1, will need to find a compromise with Senator Palin, who will insist that the NYTimes be shut down and McDonalds only serve moose meat in order to make God happy enough to move the asteroid for us. In the House, the Blue Dogs will hold up funding for the mission based on a study of how a 180 mile-wide crater in the center of the U.S. will actually reduce government spending, and demand that Congress match that number in the appropriations bill for the craft.
Rush Limbaugh will proclaim that the asteroid proves that Obama hates white people, and Glenn Beck will assure the nation that such a mission is more example of Democrat cowardice because we surround the asteroid and 9/12.
gopher2b
Shouldn’t we come up with a plan for dealing with asteroids that are going to hit Earth before we spend money to look for them? I think I would rather not know.
Leelee for Obama
@Martin: I’m dying here. It was the moose meat that did it. Martin, you are funny Actually getting rid of the NYT will soon be a movement of the Left I’m thinking. Also.
malraux
@bago: Dropping the engine on the astroid is risky. You’d have to properly hit center mass and hope that the force wouldn’t tear it up. That’s why you put the ion engine on a nearby satellite and let it use its gravity to move the astroid. But either way, the real secret is that you need several years of slow thrust to get it shifted, and the earlier you can start planning, the better.
Chris Sastre
I believe the reason that NASA doesn’t much care, as Goldberg put it, is that the know that the odds of finding any such meteor in time to attempt to do something about it is virtually nil. Massively increasing the resources available to them would probably increase the odds to around roughly nil.
There will be just about enough time to say “Oh shit…” before the angry space bullet hurtles itself lustfully into poor old Mother Earth – and then we might all get to see Lucifer’s Hammer be made into a real-life TV movie.
Cheers.
bago
@malraux: That’s why I was going ion instead of a conventional rocket, but yeah. Slow push over long time.
Violent topic switch here, but kind of interesting. How much coverage did the teabaggers get? Shit tons. But I just searched all of the local news sites (king5, komo4, and kiro7 TV) in Seattle about the quarter million people in Myrtle Edwards park this weekend and got one result from 2001. The pathetic tea parties in Seattle that got about 50 people each pulled in thousands of results.
You wonder why newspapers and media are going down? They report what they think is proper, rather than on what is actually happening.
I was looking on the local media for crowd estimate sizes and found a virtual blackout. I’d figure I’d check TheStranger, which employs Dan Savage and Dominic Holden (who used to run the festival) for stories, but they were much more insider stories, such as moving the protest away from a celebration of hippies to the futility of prohibition.
But it’s the media blackout that bugs me the most. The Seattle PI building is literally 50 feet from Myrtle Edwards park, and it is the only news organization covering it. Everyone else in town is pretending these people don’t exist, even when they walk past the corporate headquarters just 5-10 blocks away.
A quarter million people three blocks away united behind a cause gets no mention, but a couple of cranks down at westlake center get national coverage. It’s BULL I tells ya, bull.
(Personal note, don’t imbibe, I just DJ’d one of the stages there a few years ago, and well, a lot of the people behind it are my friends).
bago
Seriously, I can bike over to a lookout point overlooking the 4 mile long park filled with hundreds of thousands of people, and not see any live coverage from google news on my phone. Support the Seattle PI because they are ACTUALLY doing some coverage, even though they are literally 50 feet away from the park the event is held at.
steve s
Sure.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
jones
Cole’s bitterness at the fact no one thinks he’s worth paying for his opinion burns deep in his soul. He can’t stand that those with whom he disagrees are so successful and he is such a resounding failure. Maybe changing your political stripes 180 degrees opportunistically isn’t working out so well for you? The conservatives are on the ascent, you could always try flip-flopping back.
Cole, the Arlen Specter of bloggers.
WyldPirate
Bago at 31 and 32, are you sure you don’t imbibe? You wrote six or seven paragraphs in two posts, yet no indication about WHAT you were bitching about that wasn’t getting any attention from the media. ;)
For those interested–bago is referring to the Seattle Hempfest
Sean
The debate over whether to spend a paltry 300 million on an asteroid detection system really illustrates how humans evaluate risk.
We’re very good at evaluating every-day risks ( don’t blindly run into a busy street before looking, for instance) but the long-term risks, such as those posed by asteroids or global warming are hard for humans to grasp, even when we have good information.
Since an asteroid detection system is such a small percentage of our budget and the potential benefits are so huge, to me it seems worth spending them money. Once you know the orbits of all the Earth-crossing asteroids, you don’t have to be as vigilant.
In other words, this is a short-term expenditure that has long-term payoff. Possibly, the ultimate payoff: preventing our species extinction.
I say, go for it. And while we’re at it, lets throw a little more money at Volcano Monitoring, just to piss off Bobby Jindal.
-Sean
shelley matheis
Talking about budgetary woes. Just read that Cuba is facing a severe toilet paper shortage.
Wow, is the fifty year-old embargo finally working?
gary
We should go to Mars. How many unmanned probes have we sent there and we still don’t even know if there’s life. Go to Mars I say.
Joey Maloney a/k/a The Bard Of Balloon Juice
It was the only way to divert the giant asteroid that is his ego from being utterly destroyed when it smashed into the reality of his much more massive douchebaggery.
@Sean: Where we really suck is at evaluating tiny risks which can have very bad consequences. The result tends to be either pretending “very small” equals “zero” (asteroid collision) or flailing, counterproductive overreaction (sex offender registries, TSA).
arguingwithsignposts
Totally off-topic again, but when exactly did John Cole switch sides? I took a gander at some Nov. 2004 post, where he was raving about “Buy Nothing Day” and idiot liberals.
I’d like to see the archives from when he actually flipped.
demimondian
@arguingwithsignposts: John tipped gradually over many, many months. He was, for some reason, totally fed up with torture — using shrill terms like “un-American” — and gave up on the Republicans in the summer of 2005, though, as he and we sat and watched New Orleans drown. Even then, he was a lot more patient than a lot of his commenters, being willing to sit and let the facts come out before jumping to conclusions.
Unfortunately, when the facts came out, the were worse than anyone could have imagined.
Martin
Most outside observers put the moment right here.
Cole may well point to a different moment in time, but that looked like his moment to be public about it.
Geoduck
@arguingwithsignposts:
I believe it was the whole Terri Schiavo fiasco that finally tipped him over the edge.
David
The comparison should not be with the space shuttle, which burns up money each time it flies for no reason. How about comparing it with the ENTIRE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION BUDGET FOR ALL ASTRONOMY, about $250 million (http://www.aip.org/fyi/2008/021.html). In other words, this one mission costs more than the rest of astronomy combined.
steve s
Sending humans to Mars is roughly like hiring a little midget at $10/hr to sit inside your refrigerator in thermal clothing to tell you how cold it is. A simple thermometer is much, more more practical and efficient.
It cost less than a billion dollars to send up those two rovers. It would cost a trillion or so to send a small group of humans. Is a small band of humans poking around in 2020 better than sending two _thousand_ probes between now and then?
mclaren
For perspective, 300 million dollars is less than the cost of one (1) F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Robert Sneddon
I’m not sure where this 300mil asteroid-hunting plan actually came from, how it sprung into the public gaze and suddenly earth-impacting rocks were the Fear du Jour, but…
Astronomers around the world (not just NASA) have been observing the Vermin of the Skies for centuries. All of the big really dangerous rocks have been logged and their trajectories determined to an amazing level of accuracy. The smaller rocks and occasional drifts of cometary debris (the recent Perseid shower, for example, is from the Swift-Tuttle comet) are little danger to us. The only real risk to people and property on Earth is a high-ball from the outer cometary storehouse in the Kuiper belt and they are easy to spot once they light up and become comets. Before the time they start to out-gas and the tail(s) become visible no telescope on Earth or in orbit will spot them as it’s dark out there with only 1% or less of Earth-orbit sunlight levels to reflect off the cold dark surface.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
That was some grade A snark, Martin. Thanks for the LOL. Of course you forgot to mention the numerically tiny but highly convenient (for the false-equivalence worshipping news media) counter-protests from teh Left, specifically from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Asteroids), because space rocks have rights too, ya know!
Brett
So, in other words, Doug, you support being able to see the dangerous asteroids coming towards Earth, but oppose funding for the capabilities to do anything about them?
“Long term human survival”, people. That’s why we need to keep the manned space program afloat, and expand it. Realistically speaking, we ought to be using it focus on testing the capabilities that will be needed for an off-Earth colony to sustain itself, like agriculture, maintenance, small-scale manufacturing, etc – as well as setting up a colony and maintaining it.
AhabTRuler
Hey, hey, hey! Can we finish fucking up this planet before we fuck up any others?
Comrade Kevin
@Just Some Fuckhead: I’m pretty sure Berke Breathed suggested something similar back in the 1980’s.
DougJ
Cole’s bitterness at the fact no one thinks he’s worth paying for his opinion burns deep in his soul. He can’t stand that those with whom he disagrees are so successful and he is such a resounding failure. Maybe changing your political stripes 180 degrees opportunistically isn’t working out so well for you? The conservatives are on the ascent, you could always try flip-flopping back.
John Cole didn’t write this post.
But I will say this for John: name another blogger with no institutional support who pulls in 25K+ readers a day.
steve s
If John ever gets hit in the head by a city bus, and loses 45 IQ points, we’ll have to worry about him agreeing with such quality notions as ‘conservatives are on the ascent’. Til then, I think the site’ll be fine.
shoutingattherain
I say let the fuckin’ Chinese pay for it. They have all our money anyways.
And since when did we become our solar systems’ policemen? Why can’t somebody else save the planet, just this once.
Martin
So? Why do you insist on inserting your facts in other people’s realities? You completely fuck up their fictional narratives (something they call ‘Reality™’) when you do that.
Though he is right about conservatives being on the on the ascent. In 3/4 of the country the GOP has single digit approval ratings. With some work they could even become half as popular as VD.
AhabTRuler
I don’t know, VD’s got more charm and personality.
Plus, it’s catching..
arguingwithsignposts
Thanks to Martin, Demimondian, and GeoDuck for helping out with the historical perspective. The mid-00s were amazingly f-ed up.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
Everyone should start calling Easterbrook “Easterboork” with the “boork” part of it sounding like the Swedish Chef on the Muppets. OK, it’s jejeune, but it would be funny and it would probably really piss him off.
Wile E. Quixote
Goldberg is working on a new book called “Liberal Astronomy” in which he proves that earth destroying asteroids are all liberals.
Anne Laurie
You know the movie IDIOCRACY? The basic idea was taken from a Cyril Kornbluth short story, “The Marching Morons”. Your whimsical ‘solution’… well, everyone should read that story. But especially the MAD MEN fans!
Wile E. Quixote
@Anne Laurie
You’ve read “The Marching Morons”? Wow. Have I told you lately how incredibly cool you are?
Mike G
A cataclysmic asteroid with a Kenyan birth certificate can only be good news for John McCain.
Everyone knows only one thing can save us from such a disaster — a giant tax cut.
Jacob Davies
There is nowhere on Earth less hospitable than anywhere on Mars.
There is nowhere on Earth less hospitable than anywhere on Mars even if you set off a megaton thermonuclear bomb in each and every single square kilometer of the Earth’s surface all at the same time. The atmosphere, water, and much of the subsurface life would survive, and a couple of million years later you’d never know the difference. The Earth is tough and thoroughly infected with life; it has survived such events before.
And surviving a megadeath event like that (or a huge asteroid, or the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting, or whatever) with a colony large enough to repopulate the human race would be about 10,000 times easier than setting up such a colony on Mars. Here we would still have water, oxygen, and an external biosphere, and the eventual hope of a return to more normal conditions.
On Mars all you have is dust and a thin film of CO2.
And Mars is Disneyland, Mars is a comfy sofa with blankets and your mom serving you hot cocoa with marshmallows compared to every other planet in the solar system: places that variously offer you the exciting opportunity to be roasted, frozen, crushed by pressure, or blasted with high-energy particles. Many offer more than one of these at once, or in alternation, for extra variety.
All of that said, I do support manned spaceflight but mostly for only semi-rational reasons based on how awesome it is that we can do it at all. I would rather see a 2001-type flight to the outer planets and back than go to Mars (er without the crazy murderous computer, of course, although I will take the omnipotent god-monoliths should one show up). But I don’t think the funding or the public interest is there.
The new program looked interesting in some ways and not in others. The capsule was a return to sanity after the Shuttle, the Worst Spacecraft Ever Designed, and in carrying more than any other non-Shuttle spacecraft did bring a new manned capability.
The split into a lighter manned launch and unmanned super-heavy launch was good news all around; the Shuttle-derived technology at least exploited some fairly well-tested tech that the NASA people have a lot of experience with. The Earth-orbit rendezvous and setup made for a much simpler and more fault-tolerant system than the Saturn V/Apollo one-launch system. The super-heavy launcher Ares V is unique in being able to put 188 metric tonnes into LEO – Saturn V could do “only” 118 tonnes, the Shuttle could do only 24 tonnes (progress!), and current heavy launchers are designed for satellites and can only lift 10-30 tonnes.
People advocating a radical chance in NASA manned spaceflight have been pushing for “small, safe, Apollo-derived” manned vehicles and “big dumb boosters” to replace the Shuttle for decades. I know I’ve been reading it for decades. Ares – while it may be a sop to the Shuttle contractors too – fulfills those desires and creates a wholly new super-heavy lift capability.
Those are big steps towards a saner manned program. But a permanent manned base on the moon is not. Frankly the ISS is not, although I think it would be a grotesque waste to de-orbit it before 2020 (or preferably later, or never). As for Mars, first let’s try a robotic sample return mission, and then let’s talk.
Now on days with an T in them I tend to think the whole manned program should be scrapped in favor of purely robotic scientific missions, which are far more successful and productive and also, you know, cheap. Just not today.
Wile E. Quixote
@Jacob Davies
I’m a huge fan of a manned space program and believe that we need to expand into space but ISS and the Shuttle have made it damned difficult to justify a manned program. I mean yeah, we’ve explored the fuck out of low earth orbit (Yessirree Bob! That is one region of thoroughly explored empty space) and all that’s been is a colossal waste of money. I mean at least we got samples when we went to the Moon, we got flags and footprints, and Skylab did some cool stuff, but what has the manned program done since then (and don’t say “Hubble” because the manned program ended up delaying the launch of Hubble and Galileo).
If there were a realistic commitment to a moon base I’d support it, and I’d be willing to pay increased taxes to do so. But as far as what we have now and the anemic program proposed for the return in 2020, fuck that. It’s just a stunt.
If NASA wanted to do something cool they could try this. That would be a lot more interesting than a half-assed return to the Moon. Or maybe we could use the current moon program money to develop the Ares booster and then develop some really kick-ass unmanned probes to go on top of it. I mean look at all of the science we’ve gotten back from Voyager I and II, which were limited in size by the launchers we had at the time, the Titan/Centaur. Imagine the probes we could launch with a booster that could put 100+ tons into LEO?
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Mark S.: Gravity tractors. You maneuver a satellite into orbit near the astroid, close enough that the astroid feels a pull from it. Over time, the small pull is enough to move the astroid out of the way. The important aspect is seeing the astroid with enough time to spare.
It’s doubtful you can even predict an asteroid’s orbit finely enough in a chaotic system over enough time for a slow thrust system to work. You wouldn’t be able to tell if they’d hit or miss the Earth in a decade or not.
Implying that you’d need to monitor and actively correct near-Earth grazers over the long term.
And, Jesus, can you see the idiots screaming about climate denial supporting spending vast resources on a project to deal with something that has a small and unquantifiable chance of being dangerous?
(Of course, while you’re at it, you might wanna figure out a way to park one at L4 or L5…)
Phoenician in a time of Romans
There is nowhere on Earth less hospitable than anywhere on Mars.
My girlfriend’s bedroom, 1991, very shortly after I announced my intention of remaining unmarried.
My ex-girlfriend, rather.