Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V13_6/V13_687.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V13 #687

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 13 : Issue 687

Today's Topics:
            Re: Gibson & Sterling
             More on Freedom Vote
         Re: Self-sustaining infrastructures
               * SpaceNews  03-Jun-91 *
Re: The Reasons for a Station? Was Re: Rational next station design...
             Re: RFD: talk.politics.space

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 3 Jun 91 02:24:28 GMT
From: spool.mu.edu!agate!earthquake.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (George William Herbert)
Subject: Re: Gibson & Sterling

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Who cares about Mars missions? Not I. That's the problem with the space
>station... and all sorts of other NASA stuff: they have *no* idea what
>they want to do. In fact, they don't even have the saving grace of having
>a bad goal: they have no goals at all.
>
>I say, blow off Mars, use the moon as a staging point at most (why do we
>need a space station when we've already *got* one?) and get serious about
>taking advantage of small matter: asteroids, comets, moons. We don't have
>the technology or resources to take on the planet we've got *now*, let
>alone starting over on another one.

Why Mars?

    Well...for one, it's energetically easier to go to Phobos or Deimos
than it is to go to the Moon... If you want resources then (if they're there)
it's better to get them there than anywhere else in the solar system
except earth-crossing asteroids (which are even more poorly understood).

    For two, if you aerobrake, it's cheaper to do a round trip
surface-to-surface to Mars than Luna.

    For three, Mars has WATER 8-)  At the poles, we can make rocket
fuel, not just part of rocket fuel.  And we know, not suspect, that it's
there.

    For four, it's more interesting from a scientific standpoint.
There probably is no life as we can find it on Mars.  Given that there
is evidence of large amounts of water previously having been there,
it's possible there was life at one point... which means it's a good
place to pry rocks up and look for fossil stromatolites etc. 8-)

    Admittedly, the science to know for sure wether Phobos & Deimos
are good places to use hasn't been done (mostly the fault of Soviet
mission software and radio hardware, but it would be nice if the US would
get in the act), but they seem promising (some Phobos data notwithstanding).

-george william herbert
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 3 Jun 91 18:22:20 GMT
From: iggy.GW.Vitalink.COM!widener!hela![e-mail]  (Allen W. Sherzer)
Subject: More on Freedom Vote

They are coming out of the woodwork to get funding for Freedom. McDonnell
Douglas has been putting large ads in Roll Call (the House newspaper) and
the Washington Times. Rockwell and Boeing are also lobbying big time and
it seems to be working.

On the floor of the full house Jim Chapman (D-TX) will introduce an
amendment to restore full funding. The amendment will 'tax' 3% of all
the agencies except Vetrans and NASA which will raise $1.5B for the
Freedom space station. In addition, $500M in cuts identified by the
NASA Authorization bill (and ignored by the Appropriation Subcommittee)
can be enacted to bring Freedom up to full funding.

The Democratic Whip says 77 Democrats will vote for the amendment and
Rep. Walker says 140 to 160 Republicans will vote for it. The Whip's
numbers should be regarded as shakey but walkers numbers are very
conservative. If the full house voted today, Freedom would receive
full funding.

Another interesting note is that the President is playing hardball on
this issue. He recently spoke with Jamie Whitten who is the head of
the Appropriation Committee. He told him that if Freedom isn't built
then there was no reason to build the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM)
for the Shuttle. ASRM is built in Whitten's district and he consideres
it an important project. Bush's veiled threat should have a big effect.

   Allen

--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Allen W. Sherzer |   DETROIT: Where the weak are killed and eaten.         |
|   [e-mail]   |                                                         |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

Date: 3 Jun 91 19:17:46 GMT
From: prism![e-mail]  (Matthew DeLuca)
Subject: Re: Self-sustaining infrastructures

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Nick Janow) writes:
>[e-mail] (Matthew DeLuca) writes:

>> 'And who fixes the fixers?'

>The same problem holds true for humans, and humans are probably less reliable
>over long trips.  They'd certainly be a lot more expensive.  Furthermore, you
>don't have to bring the robot back.  :)

Humans are less reliable than machines?  When was the last time your joints
froze because of a temperature change, or the wires in your head became
disconnected, or your balance mechanism got fried, or you forgot where your
home was?

All these things happen to machines all the time...witness the Phobos
missions, Galileo, Magellan, and Voyager.  Healthy humans are generally
self-repairing...machines aren't.

As for 'long trips', the discussion has been geared more towards earth
orbit and inner solar system discussions than towards things like Neptune
probes, which is why I didn't comment on that scenario.  For things
within the asteroid belt, there's nothing better than the man on the scene.

>> Looking at it in another way, you are counting on what would be the greatest
>> revolution (artificial intelligence) since ENIAC was first plugged in to give
>> us a routine operational capability in space.

>No, I haven't been assuming a major breakthrough in AI.  We can do quite a lot
>with low level AI: the types we have available now or evolutionary improvements
>on them.  Basic robotic control, with human intervention when required, should
>be able to handle a fairly wide variety of tasks.

Oh, I'm sure they can...but when it gets down to the vital, tricky tasks
your robot is going to fail.  Think of what they're going to have to do when
they fix Hubble, for instance; would you like to design a robot to go down
that tube and start tearing parts out?  Keep in mind that one stuck actuator
could send your robot flying into the main mirror, destroying a billion
dollar scientific instrument.  Mechanical devices will likely *never* be so
reliable that you can routinely trust them with valuable instruments in
space.

>The Voyager team managed
>great improvements by reprogramming a fairly aged robot.  Modern robots should
>be much more capable, especially if designed for versatility.

The Voyager probe is in no honest sense a robot; it doesn't manipulate
its environment in any way.  The Voyager team showed that you could do
amazing things from a distance, but it only has marginal relevance to the
issue at hand.
--
Matthew DeLuca
Georgia Institute of Technology      "I'd hire the Dorsai, if I knew their
Office of Information Technology      P.O. box."  - Zebadiah Carter,
Internet: [e-mail]    _The Number of the Beast_

------------------------------

Date: 1 Jun 91 16:19:50 GMT
From: mintaka!think.com!ocpt!tsdiag!ka2qhd![e-mail]  (John Magliacane)
Subject: * SpaceNews  03-Jun-91 *


Subject: * SpaceNews  03-Jun-91 *
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* SpaceNews  03-Jun-91 *

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------------------------------

Date: 3 Jun 91 14:39:04 GMT
From: usc!rpi!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!watyew![e-mail]  (James Davis Nicoll)
Subject: Re: The Reasons for a Station? Was Re: Rational next station design...

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (George William Herbert) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Daniel Fischer) writes:
>>>    * Long-term Human studies
>>This kind of study is being performed by the Soviets since two decades; they
>>have had people up for 1 year and flown a doctor on a 200+ days mission. What
>>could be learned by repeating these boring adventures that they don't already
>>know and are likely ready to join?
>
>    While you're confident that the Soviets have learned all we have to
>about people in space, I'm not.
>    First: they have very little nonintrusive biomonitoring equipment.
>Having looked over some of the data they have on their cosmonauts, it's
>pretty obvious that their data is rough and incomplete.  Not only that,
>but it's not continuous... it's seperate point samples weeks apart, often.
>The US has continuous data on subjects... for a period of a week.  We need
>detailed long-term studies...and the soviet work so far doesn't go very
>far.

    Material deleted

    Another point is that what is being proposed is not 'duplicate
Soviet research', but rather 'duplicate some aspects of Soviet research
*facilities*. Duplicating facilities is not terribly uncommon. For example,
the University of Waterloo has an engineering department, and so does U of
Toronto, despite the fact that they are within 90 km of each other. The
UW chemistry department is even worse: they have multiple chem labs,
containing similar equiptment, and multiple chem *profs*, also containing
similar equiptment (two basic models). However, the work these labs and
profs do is not identical. Mr. Fischer seems to be saying that the Soviets
have already done all the biological research possible, in only 20 years
of research. Given the man-millenia of research squeezed out of environments
we are familiar with, is it not possible the the Soviets have left some
questions about biology in free fall unasked and unanswered?

                                James Nicoll

------------------------------

Date: 3 Jun 91 16:32:53 GMT
From: bonnie.concordia.ca!clyde.concordia.ca!altitude!elevia![e-mail]  (W.A.Simon)
Subject: Re: RFD: talk.politics.space

In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Herman Rubin) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Randall Atkinson) writes:
>> The proposal for  talk.politics.space  appears to be well-done
>> in charter, rationale, and naming.
>> I fully support it.  I stopped reading sci.space some time back
>> precisely because of the flood of "political" postings.
>I agree with the first paragraph.  However, I do not see that it is
>possible to separate the political from the scientific.  How would one
>class the recent arguments about manned space which hinge on what is
>scientifically true or technologically possible?

    The real world is not divided into discrete class intervals |8-).

    I agree with you that very little that affect our life can
    be split from its political underpinnings.  But the focus of
    interest can be legitimately narrowed.

    Cross-posting will, by necessity, occur.  But there are a
    number of philosophical, or political question that could be
    best segregated from the main scientific news flow.  An L5
    pamphlet would definitely belong there, when a study of the
    properties of Lagrange points would belong in sci.space.  A
    defense of the Lagrange point approach, to the establishment
    of a space colony, would demand X-posting.  A thread on the
    respective merits of private and public funding, would belong
    in t.p.space and sci.econ, but not be welcome in sci.space.

    ps - does anyone know what has the L5 Society become?  I have
         not hear of/from/about them in years.

>Herman Rubin
--
William "Alain" Simon
                                                   UUCP: [e-mail]

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V13 #687
*******************