I talked with a NASA engineer in 1998 who was working on the planned Europa probe, and hoping it would be funded enough to include a lander and not just a Europa orbiter. Sad to see how little progress we've made since then, and how arbitrarily the cause advances.
Even more, it's continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA's space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don't have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.
Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.
>with any specific direction from Congress forbidden
The only way for a present Congress to bind a future Congress like so would be by way of a Constitutional amendment. That seems like overkill.
An alternative is giving NASA independence in the model of the Federal Reserve, FDA, or NIH. This is more workable. The problem is the public doesn't value space travel per se. There are sound economic reasons for maintaining an independent central bank. Voters understand the benefits of better medicine. But space travel is less accepted in itself. It is pitched as an article of national prestige, or as a way of encouraging other technological development.
At its core, NASA suffers from an asset-liability mismatch. Its liabilities, missions, carry decade-long terms. Its asset, Congressional funding, comes in election cycles. A myopic NASA, considering only projects realisable in the current election cycle, would be disastrous. Moving to locking in, each year, NASA funding for the next N years seems like a good first step. It avoids the messiness of NASA's year-to-year budget variance. It also side-steps the politics of granting NASA independence.
A good way to fund NASA and the NSF would be to create a "technology trust fund" funded by a small tax on the sale of gadgets and software.
This would operate like the National Highway Trust Fund, which helps maintain the interstate highway system and is funded through a fuel tax.
Because the money comes from a tax dedicated to the purpose, congress doesn't get to change the funding formula every time they pass a budget. While a future congress could dissolve the fund, that's a lot bigger step than adding or deleting appropriations during the budgetary hog-trading process.
The politics would be arduous. If NASA can choose which projects it pursues it can also choose where to base operations. NASA has facilities in states and Congressional districts which make no sense beyond politics. Those who stand to lose from a de-politicisation of NASA would bring a hard fight. That is the political reality.
Yes. It would take a president and/or members of Congress who cared enough about having an effective space program instead of using NASA as a pork delivery truck, to make the change.
It would also be resisted at least as much by members of Congress who represent NASA's contractors, besides just its facilities (like Dana Rohrabacher, the congressman from Boeing). On the other hand, it would also naturally be supported by members of Congress representing at least some NASA centers and contractors who would clearly gain from the move.
A reform like this will also be boosted though by SpaceX as it keeps accomplishing more and more on a comparatively low budget, making forward-looking technologies readily available of its own volition (Grasshopper, Falcon Heavy, methane rocket engines that can use Mars in situ manufactured fuel, etc.), and creating more and more embarrassment for the traditional space program and its contractors (like the Senate Launch System (SLS)), and forcing everyone to ask, why can't NASA do that? Hopefully they will eventually shame Congress and the President into reforming NASA into a professionally-managed organization, i.e. reforming away their own control over it and making it more like a Federal Reserve for space exploration.
Not necessarily. Any constitutional amendment should be vague enough to survive for long periods. It should not even mention NASA, but make the exploration of Earth and other worlds something legislators cannot easily cut in favor of more convenient short-term gains and remove politics from technical decisions (which is what made the shuttle the sad thing it ended up being).
The amendment idea was actually a very clever hack.
NASA must remain an American company, headquartered in America, with (SOME_NUMBER)% of its workforce living and working in America. The highest authority at NASA is its version of CEO, and something like a board of directors. Their decisions outweigh political decisions. The board of directors may not be more than 20% (some arbitrary percentage) made up of people with a non-technical background.
Bureaucracy and politics are a bitch. Lately there's been the JWST overruns which have been screwing over a lot of the NASA space science budget (it's probably worth it but damn it's inconvenient).
But things are looking up and the biggest change is in launch costs. SpaceX thinks they'll be able to operate a reusable Falcon 9 for $5-7 million per launch. That seems crazy but if you look at the math it's pretty sound. That sort of change, with a first generation reusable vehicle even, will revolutionize spaceflight, especially unmanned space science missions. It'll make it possible to fund small space science missions using crowd funding. It'll open up interplanetary science missions to a huge number of colleges, universities and research organizations. A lot of the cost of space missions comes about due to the high cost of launch carrying through to every aspect of the mission (if the launch costs $200 million then you can't just launch a $1 million spacecraft, that's a waste, you also need to have a very high (say >90%) chance of mission success so you engineer accordingly).
Within the next few decades there will be fleets upon fleets of science spacecraft looking at the stars and roaming about the Solar System.
Your wish sounds very romantic. I place my bet on commercial exploration. Private companies soon will have money that can be compared to government's income, and government will be only one among many possible investors.
Yeah, it's funny how getting $100k from NASA in research grants requires proposals and peer review, but super-expensive interplanetary probes happen, or not, without any scientist input whatsoever.
Explore space while you pretend to be in the military is not that bad. Space exploration has a lot of military implications, even if the military does not pay the bills.
About everything that humans can use to reach a destination in space can also be weaponized. If nothing else, a simple space rock dropped down the planetary gravity well can make a huge boom when it hits the bottom.
It was certainly a lot kore realistic than Gravity (which was massively hyped for its realism) and a lot more fun to boot. Of course, no space movie can do without plot device-related absurdities for the sake of drama, but at least it was entertaining and relatively clever.
One thing I liked too was that the crew was not composed of abrasive drama queens, which is refreshing considering the genre.
Huh? Gravity was massively hyped for its special effects and the very real feeling of exhilaration it creates. It’s an awesome action movie with none of the stereotypical and boring tropes of action movies. (Also, the cinematography is very much above average and I personally really loved its rhythm of quiet and action.)
The depiction of space hardware is actually awesomely realistic (to some level of detail) but I don’t recall anyone praising it for realism beyond that. Because it very much isn’t. (Still, getting the actual space hardware right is something not many movies manage to pull off and pretty impressive on its own.) I don’t think it matters very much or reduces the enjoyment very much. This movie is very much not about space travel.
Europa Report is a bit cringe but probably the best you can do with that kind of budget and in that respect it’s pretty and also pretty realistic.
Huh. I recall my friends citing articles from popular publications where astronauts supposedly praised Gravity for its utter phycics realism. I disagree with you about Gravity (I didn't like it very much) but I agree that in the great scheme of things realism isn't that important for entertainment.
I can't imagine an astronaut praising the "physics realism" of the "buffeted by the wind in space" moment that caused the death of the male character. His momentum had clearly been completely stopped by the tether, but instead of rebounding back toward the other tethered astronaut (as had happened multiple, more realistic, times earlier in the movie), some unknown force kept pulling him away until at last the tether came loose. If the setting were terrestrial the force would be inferred by most viewers to be the drag of a moving fluid such as wind. What similar force exists in space?
I don't complain about the presence of unrealistic space plot device in unrealistic space movie, but there it is.
Bullock's leg was entangled with the parachute cords, and holding on to Clooney's tether with one hand. The Bullock-Clooney system was inertially travelling away from the ISS, to which one end of the parachute lines was anchored. The tangle of parachute cords was straightening as the distance increased. Eventually, they will run out of slack, at which point there will be an impact which (in Clooney's opinion) would either cause Bullock to lose her grip on the tether (dooming Clooney) or cause the cord looped around her foot to slip free (dooming them both). Bullock is barely connected to anything, has only one hand free (at best), and is in a terrible emotional state, rendering her incapable of useful action.
Clooney throws off his tether which causes three things to happen:
1. A small amount of seperating momentum to both Clooney and Bullock, pushing Clooney further away and slowing Bullock towards the ISS.
2. Halving the force needed to stop Bullock's movement away from the ISS.
3. Freeing up Bullock's hands to improve her attachement to the parachute cord.
I have no idea if the math works out but I don't see the theoretical problem with the situation physics-wise.
I think the parachute cord is already taut when this scene takes place (see 1:08 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjLcIxcSaik), so I don't see how it can run out of slack beyond this. And in your version, where does the tension in the tether between Bullock and Clooney come from?
When I saw the scene, I imagined the cord and/or the parachute to be elastic. So even if the cord is taut, it may not be in a stable stationary state; the cord might snap beyond a certain amount of stress or the parachute might unhinge.
Infact, after Clooney's character unleashes himself, Bullock's character recoils back, which seems to agree with my elastic theory.
A realistic solution would be for them to be rotating which pulls the line taught and when released he would seemingly fall. However, I don't think that's shown in the actual visuals as they would have to be rotating fairly quickly or the cord needs to be really long for that to be a significant issue.
Anyway, just looking at the previews I saw a enough holywood physics to give the thing a pass. The way the ISS was destroyed looked cool but the physics was terrible.
They are shown rotating slowly, so it's sort of possible given an elastic parachute cord, but it's awfully contrived. You also have to wonder, given how slowly he drifted off, why Matt couldn't unstrap that empty thrust pack and use it as reaction mass, as Ryan does with the empty fire extinguisher later on.
The bigger gaffe for me was Matt's instruction to Ryan, right after the first hit, to detach from the arm on the grounds that it would carry her too far away. That makes no sense at all. Detaching won't affect her velocity except to add a sizable random component based on the point in the arm's rotation where she detaches, and since he's already lost sight of her at that point that's going to make her much, much harder to find.
All pedantry aside, loved loved loved the movie. Certainly the film of the year for me, and possibly the decade.
Some people can't stand bad acting, I hate bad physics. I think it's the same basic issue. When a movie shows something that's close but off it simply breaks the suspension of disbelief. It's probably got something to do with the uncanny valley where talking stick figures don't cause problems, but the more realistic the setting the less wiggle room you have.
I suspect most people have similar pet peeves. I remember watching a action movie with an ER doctor once. They had the same sort of reaction but with the long list of injury's people would end up with. Or how many tech people get offended by computer techno-babel in movies.
> I don't complain about the presence of unrealistic space plot device in unrealistic space movie, but there it is.
Normally neither do I, except if the movie's marketing made it an issue. I never actually researched realism claims about the movie (as I said, it came up during a discussion with friends, two of whom cited two different articles where astronauts had testified as to the accuracy of the movie's physics) until now. I have to say that claims of realism are in fact mostly confined to headline writers and journalists quoting astronauts out of context, for example when an astronaut referred to "stunning realism" of the special effects, that got mangled into "astronaut praises stunning realism of Gravity".
Reading the actual reviews, I still believe that misleading claims were made, but apparently experts were mostly quoted creatively.
It's been some time since I've seen it, so you may be right. However, the situation you describe would only obtain once the entire system was rotating. As I recall, the female astronaut grabbed onto the object and the tether immediately stretched out tight, with no time to impart angular momentum to the tether or to the male astronaut. In that situation, I would expect the tether to wind around the object somewhat in the interim before the male came loose, and in that case he would have been imparted with some lateral momentum that would have taken him past the object (although not necessarily within retrieval distance) rather than straight away from it as I dimly recall from the film.
It was not in any way portrayed as rotating. In fact Sandra's character seemed to be moving away from the ISS at a snail's pace. Furthermore, she was neither accelerating nor decelerating. It was poorly portrayed, that's why there is disagreement. As portrayed visually, it doesn't make sense. This was done I assume to stretch out the dramatic moment of decision so they could have an actual conversation about it. Even then that could have been achieved simply by having the conversation happen while the two were moving away from the ISS much faster.
Hahaha looking at the picture I realize there is no way the "object", let alone the tether and astronaut, could be rotating fast enough to create such a force.
Aside from the thing that jessaustin mentioned, there's also the problem that Hubble and the ISS have completely different orbits and that you can't just take your back mounted whatever-it-is-called and fly between them.
I watched it! It's hard work in that it takes a very non-linear editing approach, but well worth worth it - a good, unpretentious hard SF movie, which is something you don't see very often. Had a strong Stanislaw Lem feeling to it, for anyone who's a fan of Solaris.
Just watched it based on your recommendation. Thanks! It was a really enjoyable movie. Very centered on reality, I could barely spot any innacuracies, really good hard science fiction story.
I felt similarly. While I didn't think it was bad, I didn't think it was good, either. I watched it, but it never really pulled me in despite having everything that should have pulled me in. I spent most of the time waiting for something to happen or trying to figure out what had happened when something did happen.
I don't agree at all. If that had been an unmanned mission the results would have been less than conclusive, if they had been transmitted back to earth at all (I'm being cryptic to avoid story specifics).
This would most probably end up being a New Frontiers class mission with a cost cap of a billion dollars or so. This is much less than the proposed 4.7-billion-dollar Jupiter Europa Orbiter [1], and also less than the already very much slimmed-down "Europa Clipper" concept [2] with a price tag of $1.5 billion or so. For reference, the Mars Science Laboratory mission cost about $2.4 billion.
With a sub-billion dollar budget, the achievable science objectives would be severely limited. It would probably still be worth it -- these days we have to take what we're given.
Since Europan life is separated from the sky by a kilometer thick shell of ice, could there be an entire global civilization down there we're unaware of? (Since they're aquatic, maybe low frequency acoustics have taken the place of radio for them, so we would not have detected them.)
Well, if there's life in that ocean, they're probably not tool builders (otherwise we'd have detected something). But microbes and maybe multicellular life isn't out of the question. It's also interesting to think about if we should count, say, a global population of whale-equivalents as a civilization or not.
I would not rule out that they have a way to build tools, assuming for a moment they exist. So earth technology is closely related to fire as a energy source. ( During the early development for smelting.) But this role could be filled by black smokers, or volcanic activity. But further development would of course be completely different, so I think it is entirely conceivable that we did not detect anything.
True, it's a matter of definitions. Octopuses also use tools, but do they qualify as an intelligent civilization? Probably not (yet). We assume, because we have little reference of what an intelligent human-equivalent entity might be like, that they'd probably build very complex tools over time as we have.
This judgement of what constitutes an advanced life form sadly carries a cultural component. If we encountered our own species at the very beginning of its intellectual journey, would we have labeled them a civilization? Would we have described them as having human-equivalent intelligence? It's tricky. But then we move hundreds of thousands of years ahead and suddenly there are monumental buildings and clever machines, suddenly you can meet individuals with astonishing capabilities, and now it's very easy to categorize them.
So if our hypothetical space Euroctopus species is in its early intellectual development, we might not be able to correctly attribute their intelligence. There's always the possibility of that development being stagnant too, and again we'd have a difficult time recognizing that. Therefore, the only real chances at discerning an intelligent civilization would be by either directly observing its behavior or by looking at the capabilities of their tools.
The funny thing is, we can only categorize intelligence to the peak and adjacent possibilities of where we're at now. Go back over 100,000 years or more and it would be very hard to categorize us as extremely intelligent beings.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but assume you are showing a picture of a programmer to someone from the past. One hundred years ago, the person would probably recognize a computer as some kind of type writer, and from his background then assume that the person is a typist. 200 years ago, there were no jobs which could be described as 'sitting in front of a box,' so the person would have no frame of reference to understand the picture. ( And it seems likely to conclude the same into the future.)
My criteria for whether a tool building species is really intelligent; Have they successfully avoided creating and extensively using a close relative to C++. (This reflects an afternoon battling boost, smart pointers, dynamic casts etc. etc. etc.)
For some equivalent of a big animal (where big is something like than a bug) I think that it's necessary to have oxygen molecules. I'm almost sure it would be possible to detect them escaping from cracks in the ice. So probably the biggest thing there is a bacteria equivalent.
There are alternative weird metabolisms that don't use molecular oxygen, but they are used by bacteria. Also the eukaryotes can do some metabolic steps without oxygen, but these steps don't produce too much energy and they are mostly used as an emergency energy sources.
You're actually expecting too many similarities from life that would've evolved independently from Earth. If a certain metabolic pathway is only present in bacteria in Earth's ecosystem, it doesn't mean that you could not find a very optimized version of it in bigger organisms in an independently evolved ecosystem.
If you were from a world where photosynthesis is rare and not very efficient, or maybe not present at all in nature (like Europa's dark oceans?), you would probably assume that no large organisms could use such a weird and inefficient process as an energy source, whereas in an open sunlit ecosystem like Earth there are lots and lots of photosynthesizing organism.
(I give the example of photosynthesis because it's actually a very complicated process: in order to achieve the kinds of efficiency that they do, the systems in plants and algae use very complicated mechanism that exploit even obscure quantum effects that are probably not used by any other biomolecular systems - there are studies using quantum tunneling to explain some properties of the molecules involved and others that talk about states similar to the ones in superconductors to explain some of the couplings and efficient energy conversions!)
For example, it's very difficult to make a family of many complex stable molecules without carbon, so the "organic" chemistry of other words is probably based in carbon as our organic chemistry. Moreover, organic chemistry actually means "carbon based" rather than "life based". Many of these carbon bases molecules are built also by inorganic means in other words and in deep space. It's possible to make some complex molecules with boron and nitrogen, but most of them are not stable enough to bet your life on them.
Other main detail is that you need some very energetic reactions, like combining the hydrogen in a molecule with oxygen to produce water. (The smaller example is CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O, but methane is not easy to store, so most of the time earths life depend on the combustion of more complex molecules like sugars of fatty acids.) It's a matter using oxidations and reductions to obtain energy in a weight efficient way. Oxygen is easy to distribute, big organic molecules are easy to store and use in chemical reactions in controlled setting.
So if you want to find whales, look for oxygen. In Earth's atmosphere is easy to find some strange non equilibrium mixing of oxygen from plants and methane from cows. (In any case, most of the oxygen and methane on Earth is probably produced by bacteria.) If you are really pessimistic, look for any anomalies in the spectrum.
I checked Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Potential_for_ext... . The article says that there are oxygen molecules in Europa! Mostly produced by the decomposition of water by the Sun's radiation. Someone estimated that the concentration of oxygen in water is enough to support fish equivalents, but it's an estimation not a measurement, and estimation are usually optimistic.
a global population of whale-equivalents as a civilization or not
I think Star Trek IV actually made a good point. When deciding how to deal with alien sentients, observe how they deal with alien sentients. Human beings do pretty poorly in this regard. Imagine our finding sentient cetacean analogues under Europa's ice. What are the chances that whaling industry lobbyists would try to have them classified as animals to avoid awkward political implications for their industry.
Maybe. But the cool thing about this mission is that even a negative answer will mean a lot (like not finding anything, or finding primitive life forms plus proof that they have existed for very long but evolved very slowly): it would support the theory that the "3 zones" configuration of atmosphere + liquid water bodies + land masses, with any of the 3 zones in contact with all the others, dramatically increases the probability of life and/or the speed of its evolution compared to other configurations.
If I were to place a bet, I'd say that the "3 zones configurations" is as important for life's appearance and evolution as having liquid water.
(Wait, this is not Slashdot. Are these lame jokes allowed here when they are relevant? I know the site is moderated, but I don't know its netiquette rules. )
Jokes are generally not very well accepted here, unless they're being made by someone on the leaderboard and/or they are abnormally witty (although I'm sure it would be easy to find counterexamples).
It's not that jokes aren't well-tolerated on HN; it's that cheap jokes aren't well tolerated. The humor styles prevalent on other fora, in particular Reddit and Slashdot, are often very formulaic, and folks here tend to respond negatively to that kind of thing. I've seen (and made) funny comments that get plenty of karma here, though, so I know it can be done.
I find that humor works here as long as it is also insightful, or paired with some useful information. A joke purely for a joke's sake doesn't generally do too well, depending on how serious the topic is or discussion is trending and how good the joke is.
Looks like NASA may be dragged into it kicking and screaming. It may be time to change some people at the top. There's no point having this kind of a mission if leadership doesn't believe in it.
I know personally that Europa is actually pretty high on Charlie Bolden's (and other NASA HQ folk's) as well as academia's radar, but has thus far lost out to other programmatic/political necessities.
NASA has a very hard time devoting resources to planetary science and exploration programs when key legislators continue to earmark NASA'S budget for (what are essentially) jobs programs in their own districts. SLS has shaped up to be a perfect example of that.
Well, the other problem is Europa is not an easy mission by any stretch. It's airless - so wave goodbye to parachute landings, which means we need to carry all the propulsion we need to decelerate into orbit with us.
No magnetic field either, so tethers for orbital adjustment are out to. And it's flying out to one of the more radiation hard environments in the solar system, where we have very little data on what exactly it'll experience.
And it's going to be a long long way a way. 1 hour signal round-trip time.
Think of all the new technologies and solutions that will have to be developed for it, and then will find their way to commercial sector. NASA at it's best!
I don't know. I feel hard pressed to believe the wonderful folks at NASA wouldn't be ecstatic to develop a probe to explore an ice covered moon of Jupiter.
Curiosity was a huge hit with the public, and although I'm not totally sure of this, I'm of the belief that it was a great success for NASA in a variety of ways.
I'm sure they'd be more than excited to have the funding for another probe.
And I admit, this is an extremely naive viewpoint with little more than my own excitement for such a mission (however shallow) and my intuitions about the nature of the scientists who work at NASA. I could be totally wrong.
Awesome, though it will obviously take a lot more than $15m or even $100m - Cassini-Huygens cost $3.6 billion. Personally I'd like to see NASA's project merge with the ESA's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer project - add some instruments or another probe to their launch instead of launching a completely separate craft. Although I guess this increases the risk - if the launch fails, both missions fail...
JUICE came about due to the effective cancellation of Laplace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EJSM/Laplace), a joint ESA/NASA mission. Laplace died because the ESA didn't think that NASA's budget allowed it. The ESA mightn't be hugely keen on risking that scenario again.
Mars has been very well explored. Titan just recently got a drop-in probe. Except for maybe Venus (which presents logistical challenges that would likely make a lander mission impossible) Europa is by far the most interesting place in our solar system that hasn't been extensively explored.
What are we talking about here, expense wise? $5 billion over 15-20 years? Totally worth it.
Probably more like $15 to $20 billion over that span (accounting for inflation, cost bloat, unexpected b.s. etc).
Still worth it. I'm hoping our technology for traveling the solar system, and the robotic systems to explore it, will get cheaper and cheaper on a cost per unit of result basis (meaning the nominal cost will rise as expected, but the value we receive from our technology will rise much faster).
I know we're all science geeks and enjoy the possibility of a Europa mission - but doesn't it bother anyone that we have a system whereby some congressman with a pet project can ram through tens of millions of dollars in the budget that will likely balloon to billions of dollars?
Yay, the broken clock shows the right time for this minute.
"I want to make sure you and I are here to see those first tube worms and lobsters on Europa."
If he wasn't joking, he is in for a disappointment and I am depressed with the quality of people who are deciding these budgets. But if its that or more weapons expenses, take the money and run NASA!
Likely he didn't specifically mean tube worms and lobsters (excepting the case of convergent evolution) but if he had said something like "life" or "aliens" then the sort of imagery that comes to most people's minds are the classic Roswell Greys.
$15 million (or for that matter, $100 million) is still a very small fraction of the federal budget, and in my opinion, a much more well spent $15 million than a lot of the other $15 millions in there.
Even more, it's continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA's space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don't have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.
Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.