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[TheBronzePickle]

With the oxygen toxicity at too high pressures I agree. But you've got some weird understanding of the breathing reflex. Yes, breathing is based on CO2, in the sense that high concentrations of it cause you to breathe. The way you describe it, it looks as if it were the other way around, that is low concentrations of CO2 caused you to breathe(or high concentrations caused you to cease breathing), which doesn't make sense.

Sorry about the misconception, I only stated that breathing was based on CO2 concentration. The reason you would keep breathing is that while you have too much 02 coming in, you would be expiring roughly the same amount of CO2 (the trace amount of CO2 in our atmosphere has negligible effect on the concentration gradient). Therefore, even though you have too much oxygen, you keep breathing because your body is still generating CO2 That needs to be expelled.

I think it would be rather nice if we were able to visit, or perhaps even terraform and colonize, Mars. I don't know much about the minerals there except that the surface is covered in oxidized iron, but I'm sure we could probably find some reason to make it worthwhile, even if it's just to be able to wave our giant (inter)national penis spaceship around in everyone else's face.

[Flying Dice]

Space is the future, and only those who take the risk of grasping for it shall reap the benefits.

In other words, no space travel or industry until the bankers, CEOs and boards of directors figure out a way to fund it exclusively with money that doesn't belong to them. It may be a while, at least partly because certain individuals probably have a hard time understanding the concept of money that doesn't belong to them.

/cynicism

Or /realism

Take your pick.

[sneakey pete]

to the OP: 2017

that's when the first SLS is set to launch, supposedly.
Still think they should have just kept making the ares I, and scrapped the ares V and just put a modular crew service vehicle +lunar lander on a deltaV rocket (or a few) instead though.
Considering the costs of space ships, i'm still surprised noones advocated having a crew transport vehicle that remains in orbit until the next mission. Sure, you'd need more fuel to slow it down once it got back to earth, you'd need to relaunch the fuel for it, and check it over quite a lot, in space, which isnt' easy. On the other hand, the vehicle would costs millions, probably 100 million (70 million for command+service module of the apollo craft), plus you'd have to launch it. I'd have thought re useability would be all the rage.

[Jacob/Lee]

China wants to go to the moon so they can kick over the American flag up there, obviously.

[Heron TSG]

From what I hear, Titan is a pretty neat place. It even has oceans (of methane/ethane) and an atmosphere. The atmosphere has a lot of nitrogen in it, clouds (of methane), and a surface made of rocks and water ice.

[Il Palazzo]

pretty neat place
clouds (of methane)

It's like some kind of a cosmic fart joke or something.

[Flying Dice]

From what I hear, Titan is a pretty neat place. It even has oceans (of methane/ethane) and an atmosphere. The atmosphere has a lot of nitrogen in it, clouds (of methane), and a surface made of rocks and water ice.

Yeah, but the colonization cost is way too high, so either you spend years terraforming it or you have to import a lot of infrastructure. Also, it tends to have pretty poor Trans-Newtonian resources and is often very far from the jump points.

[/aurora]

Yeah, but it would be a pain to colonize, especially without any existing orbital manufacturing capability, because shipping everything we would need up from Earth would cost roughly twenty trillion shitloads of money too much.

[TheBronzePickle]

Obviously, we have to restart the shuttle program and get an orbital shipyard running. It's the only way.

[Heron TSG]

Or we could send supplies from the Mars/Moon base. Mars in particular has shitloads of iron everywhere, plus a bunch of carbon. Sounds like a good steel factory to me.

[mainiac]

There's always the value of making people feel good about themselves. I've no idea what magnitude of an investment would going to Mars entail, but let's assume it'd be like 1% of the whole US budget for twenty years - incidentally it's the percentage of one's taxes that one can opt to give to a charity rather than the budget in this funny country I live in - and that the only tax revenue is the income tax(for the sake of clarity). I would happily agree to pay 1% extra in taxes to see people go to Mars in my lifetime, and perhaps have my kids grow up in a world where it happened. Hell, I'd perhaps even pay as much as 5% more, and know that I'm getting something fun and inspiring out of it, instead of e.g.some war in Asia.

Oh, and if I can have the Chinese or the Americans do it without my taxes, all the better!

I'm not sure exactly what you are proposing but it sounds like something in the range of a 200% to 300% increase in NASA's funding.  Not all NASA funding goes to space though so it's probably around a 400% to 600% increase in NASA spending.  This is a very rough estimate as I don't know exactly what you are proposing or the exact figures in question, but probably somewhere in that range.  Probably enough to get us to the mars.

But the thing is that the launch costs of getting to mars and back are so huge that for the same price tag we could probably afford a permanent moon colony.  Which would be more inspiring?  A permanent moon colony or a brief walk on mars?  Keep in mind that if you have a moon colony, traveling to other places in the solar system would be much, much cheaper.

[mainiac]

Or we could send supplies from the Mars/Moon base. Mars in particular has shitloads of iron everywhere, plus a bunch of carbon. Sounds like a good steel factory to me.

The moon see's your iron and carbon and raises you a surface covered in silicon/oxygen dust, perfect for making silicon wafers and breathable oxygen.

[Impending Doom]

There's always the value of making people feel good about themselves. I've no idea what magnitude of an investment would going to Mars entail, but let's assume it'd be like 1% of the whole US budget for twenty years - incidentally it's the percentage of one's taxes that one can opt to give to a charity rather than the budget in this funny country I live in - and that the only tax revenue is the income tax(for the sake of clarity). I would happily agree to pay 1% extra in taxes to see people go to Mars in my lifetime, and perhaps have my kids grow up in a world where it happened. Hell, I'd perhaps even pay as much as 5% more, and know that I'm getting something fun and inspiring out of it, instead of e.g.some war in Asia.

Oh, and if I can have the Chinese or the Americans do it without my taxes, all the better!

I'm not sure exactly what you are proposing but it sounds like something in the range of a 200% to 300% increase in NASA's funding.  Not all NASA funding goes to space though so it's probably around a 400% to 600% increase in NASA spending.  This is a very rough estimate as I don't know exactly what you are proposing or the exact figures in question, but probably somewhere in that range.  Probably enough to get us to the mars.

But the thing is that the launch costs of getting to mars and back are so huge that for the same price tag we could probably afford a permanent moon colony.  Which would be more inspiring?  A permanent moon colony or a brief walk on mars?  Keep in mind that if you have a moon colony, traveling to other places in the solar system would be much, much cheaper.

Ironically, the prohibitively high cost of a round trip to Mars makes the idea of a permanent Martian colony more attractive.

[Flying Dice]

The only question is if it should be a penal colony. Because Mars could be like Australia, except even more likely to kill you.

[kaijyuu]

We need to get a space elevator (or something) going before space exploration/colonization will be economically feasible. Sitting in a gravity well sucks when it comes to getting things away from the gravity well.

[mainiac]

Ironically, the prohibitively high cost of a round trip to Mars makes the idea of a permanent Martian colony more attractive.

That's just silly though.  There is no pressing need to go to mars before making a moon colony.  Once you make a moon colony, you can make trips to mars and still come back.  Mars might even be economically viable as a lower gravity place to put greenhouses once you have a moon colony.

Edit: I totally forgot about this baby since the last space thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus-X

But it helps you consider how much easier it is to do trips to low gravity objects.  If we want to return to the moon or go to an asteroid with one of these things, we just have to strap some propulsion on and go.  A trip to mars on the other hand will require a much, much more elaborate vehicle.  This thing costs 3.7 billion dollars.  A one way mars mission would be many tens of billions if not more.

Conceivably, the Nautilus-X will allow us to return to manned space exploration within NASA's current budget.  And that is so freaking great to think about.

A shift from the space shuttle to some sort of sensible heavy rocket booster to get off earth and the Nautilus-X to explore space will make space exploration so much cheaper.  In a decade we might have a fleet of several space vehicles operating simultaneously.  Combine that with asteroid capture and space based manufacturing becomes a real possibility.  Once you have space manufacturing, the solar system is your oyster!