In Part I we asked Why Aren’t We Dealing With Extra-Planetary Supply Management on a Daily Basis? We decided that while it was a fair question, it wasn’t an easy one, for a number of reasons which include, but are not limited to, cost, time requirements (for a mission to Mars), and human safety (as some asteroids hurtle through space at 30 km/s, which is roughly 3 times the expected speed of a rocket-propelled shuttle). In Part II, after examining these issues, we decided that the primary reasons we aren’t yet on Mars and dealing with extra-planetary supply management on a daily basis are lack of funding and lack of focus. We also decided that both the US and China should provide this funding and this focus because it would solve a number of problems both countries are facing. Today, we explain how this focus, and a new space-race to Mars, is what is needed.

In our last post, we identified these problems facing the US and indicated that they could all be addressed, if not solved, by a nation-wide focus on a mission to Mars.

• High Unemployment
• Continual Decline in Manufacturing Jobs and Expertise
• The Housing Crisis
  
• Privacy Issues
• The Drug War
• Unfunded Liabilities
• A Collapsing Dollar

Consider the root causes of these issues. The collapsing dollar is primarily due to the stagnating economy and lack of faith therein by the global investment community, unfunded liabilities are due to declining tax revenues, which in turn are due to economic decline and high unemployment, which is due to a lack of jobs, which is partially due to continued job loss to other countries and a lack of talent, which is due to lack of training. The housing crisis is also a result of unemployment and the economy, since it’s a result of people not being able to pay their mortgage and declining property values as a result of a weak economy. The drug war is ongoing partially due to a lack of funding but also due to a lack of technology and programs to detect and prevent drugs from entering the country, and privacy issues are due to a focus on internal vs. external surveillance, which in turn is partially due to an overfunding of military efforts.

So what if you corrected the funding, and focussed on meeting one big challenge, like the US did in the 1960s? You’d need talented people to meet this challenge, so you’d create jobs. Initially you wouldn’t have enough qualified people to fill the jobs, so you’d train them. As a result, employment would be lower and the output per person would be higher, as they’d be trained. In addition, since you’d need to create newer and better technology, and do it quickly in-house, you’d not only bring back manufacturing, but take it to a new level. The housing crisis would vanish. In addition, more employment and more innovation, which would have the side effect of developing new technologies that could be sold around the world, would prop up the economy, increase taxes, and decrease unfunded liabilities. Some of the necessary sensor technology would likely spark advances in technologies that could be applied to border security and drug tracking, without invading privacy, and advances could be made on the war on drugs. The only thing the space race wouldn’t address is the privacy issue, which could be solved simply by turning off the technology that monitors residents and citizens beyond a reasonable point and directing that funding to the new space race.

Moreover, it would also fix many of the problems facing China. As per Mitch Free’s recent article in Forbes on how Nothing Is As It Appears in China, China has some serious problems. The big ones we noted in our last post were:

• the need to maintain an appearance of success and save face,
• 1.3 Billion citizens to keep happy and 930 Million to keep employed,
• population growth that can’t be adequately managed by the one-child policy,
• factories that need to run and products that need to be consumed, and
• corruption and the age-old tradition of bribery.

An appearance of success is important in China. That’s why the streets of Shanghai are lined with beautiful buildings, striking architecture, elaborate homes, and professionally marketed businesses even though the layouts are sparse and the offices bare or even unfinished on the inside. In addition, the government, needs to provide the appearance of stability, productivity, prosperity, and optimism in order to keep calm and order over an unprecedented population living on the edge of poverty. One has to remember that in China, the 1% control nearly 70% of the country’s wealth, which is double what the 1% control in the US. And even the one-child policy is not managing the growth the way the government wants. First of all, those that can afford to pay the fine and have a second child. Secondly, those who can’t afford to pay a fine and have a second child, especially in rural areas, will favour male children, even though families in most rural areas will be permitted a second child if their first child is a female. (This is evident by the fact that China will soon have 30 Million more men than women of marrying age.)

In addition, in order to keep its citizens working, if it has no other option, China will not only keep factories producing goods that the market doesn’t need or want, but will keep building entire cities in preparation for an urbanization that just doesn’t happen. For example, one Chinese State Owned Enterprise (SOE) produced 60,000 machines in the last year that are manually operated for a global market that only buys automated machines. Even though the market is no longer there, the machines were produced just to keep workers employed. In addition, in an effort to get rural citizens into affordable urban housing, China has been building as many as 10 new cities a year, some the size of New York and London, to accomodate hundreds of thousands or millions of residents, that never arrive. These beautifully planned, fully finished “ghost cities” designed to accomodate large populations only have a few thousand residents, who are primarily infrastructure employees and construction workers. (Forensic analyst Gillem Tulloch estimates there may be as many as 64 million empty apartments in Chinese ghost towns.)

Now imagine what would happen if China declared that its mission was to be the first country to land on Mars? It would likely start by taking all of that money being used to build “ghost cities” and directing it at R&D establishments. It would move the brighter workers out of the factories and into R&D labs and re-tool the factories producing useless machines to produce proto-types and components for rockets, shuttles, and other space vehicles. It would be able to keep just as many people employed, but it would be working towards a meaningful, useful goal. In addition, it would increase its rate of innovation, improve its GDP, and not only cement itself as the world’s second largest economy, but accelerate towards the point where it could potentially overtake the US, which would make it enormously successful in the eyes of its citizens and allow it to not only save, but gain, face in Asia (where face is important). And if it happened to figure out how to successfully create workable, maintainable artificial gravity in a manner that was hydroponic friendly, it could be the first to colonize Mars, which could help to solve its population problem (especially if it can also figure out how to mine water from asteroids).

The only problem that isn’t directly addressed is corruption, but if the population is focussed on progress, and not capital gain, corruption is less of a problem.

So bring on the space-race to Mars. The world will benefit! (A rising tide lifts all boats. And what tide is bigger than the tide that controls ¹/₃ of the world’s economy?)

Why not? Lack of funding and focus.

It’s going to be expensive, but we have the money. Even if it costs ten times as much to put a man on Mars as it did to put a man on the moon, that’s only 4 Trillion. The annual GDP of the US is close to 16 Trillion. If the goal was to reach Mars in 10 years, that’s 160 Trillion, and only 2.5% of GDP would be required annually. The US definitely can afford this. Right now, the US is pouring its money into its military at a rate that is unfathomable given that it has not been attacked in a declared act of war on its own soil since Pearl Harbour. The US is spending close to 18% of its budget on military efforts, compared to China which is spending less than 2% of its budget on military efforts and which still has the second largest military expenditure in the world. the doctor will concede that the US has other problems to fix, and the military budget should probably be reduced by more than 2.5% so that those problems can be fixed as well, but there’s no reason that 2.5% couldn’t be redirected to this effort, especially considering it could still be considered military expenditure and employ just as many (if not more) people. This could still be a win for the US that likes it’s military, and appears to like deploying its military given the number of wars its been involved in since WWII. Furthermore, when you consider the dangerous nature of going first, the US probably wouldn’t want to send anyone but its best and brightest. And if we’re not alone, and we advance our technology to the point where inter-stellar travel becomes possible, we might attract the attention of an aggressive alien race and need the ability to defend ourselves. (Which would give the US an excuse to try and democratize space!) It would be a win for the US any way you want to look at it.

But the US isn’t the only country to blame. China, the world’s oldest culture, wants to regain its glory as the dominant empire (even though it’s been centuries since it could make that claim). As the world’s second largest economy, with a GDP exceeding 8 Trillion, and the fifth country to launch a satellite back in 1970, it should be making more efforts to establish itself as a dominant player in space, and focussing more on Mars. A target of 2040 – 2060 for a crewed mission to Mars is just too far off. If China dedicated itself to this goal, it could spark a new space race (as the US would want to be in the lead), which is just what we need to advance not only our space exploration ability, but mankind as a whole.

In addition, if one considers these big, mostly non-political, problems facing the US right now:

• High Unemployment, partially due to a
• Continual Decline in Manufacturing Jobs and Expertise, another impending
• Housing Crisis,
  
• Privacy Issues, the never-ending
• Drug War and,
• Unfunded Liabilities, partially due to the
• Collapsing Dollar.

And if one considers these big, mostly non-political, problems facing China right now:

• the need to maintain an appearance of success and save face,
• 1.3 Billion citizens to keep happy and 930 Million to keep employed,
• population growth that can’t be adequately managed by the one-child policy,
• factories that need to run and products that need to be consumed, and
• corruption and the age-old tradition of bribery.

And if one goes on to examine the root causes of these problems, one will find that many of them could likely be significantly addressed, if not solved, by a space race to Mars. How so? Come back next Sunday for Part III!

It’s a fair question, considering that we put a man on the moon forty-four years ago and fifty years ago General Dynamics promised us we’d be on Mars by now (see this post).

It’s not an easy question, given the challenges involved, but the doctor thinks he has the answer. But first, consider the following:

1) Putting a man on the moon cost 400 Billion in 1969 terms. (Source: “The Cost of the Moon Race” on asi.org) That was roughly 9% of the US GDP in 1969. However, the effort really started in 1959 with Project Mercury, which had the goal of a manned earth orbit. In other words, the US put a man on the moon in 10 years using only 1% of GDP. NASA’s annual budget today is about 18 Billion, which is about 0.1% of GDP, or roughly 1/10th of what they were getting when the race to the moon was on. (With respect to the Federal Budget, in 1966 they had 4.41%. This year, they have less than 0.5%.)

2) Current robotic missions to Mars take about 8 months. Improvements in technology could probably shave a few months off of that. However, given that the orbits of Earth and Mars around the sun allow for opportunity’s to embark and return roughly every 26 months, even if the trip were shortened, it would just mean more time on Mars as one would want to minimize trip distances to ensure enough fuel. So that means over two years in space. Given that a Russian cosmonaut spent 1.2 years in the International Space Station, it’s obvious that humans could train, and endure, a mission of that length.

3) Damage from asteroids is a big concern, as they have an average orbital speed of 25 kilometers per second and we know of asteroids with orbital velocities of over 30 kilometres per second, or almost three times the estimated speed of the rocket. Large ones will be detected long before they reach the ship and enable it to make course corrections. Smaller ones could pose a problem.

However, we have the technologies to produce titanium-based metal alloys up to four times as strong as steel, exceeding 2 GPa, carbon fibres that approach 6 GPa, and lonsdaleite, an allotrope of carbon with a hexagonal lattice that is commonly called a hexagonal diamond, but which is 58% harder than diamond and able to resist pressures of 152 GPa (GigaPascals), which is a pressure that is roughly equal to 1.5 Million times atmospheric pressure. Given that standard atmospheric pressure is roughly 14.7 psi (Pounds per Square Inch), lonsdaleite can withstand an impact of up to 22 Million psi! That means we can make mighty strong spacecraft.

In other words, it’s not a question of money, trip duration, or the ability to create a space ship that can safely withstand the dangers of intra-solar system travel. So why aren’t we dealing with extra-planetary supply management on a daily basis?

Come back next Sunday for Part II and the answer.