NASA spent $79 Million on LCROSS mission!

What else could we have spent that $79 million on?
How about just $50 million landing a cool looking large rover
that can drill for water!
Put a 12 inch Meade telescope on it so it can send back images like the
Hubble Telescope.


Oh! Have it look for Helium 3 while it's there!

All for looking for water that we knew was thier in the first place.
If thier ice that means water.

I think its a cover up of some kind but maybe I am wrong, maybe the elites are setting a base up on the moon to watch the show when it starts.

yeah, phenom of a fail. unfortunately i believe that we could have obtained a larger pool of data over a more sustainable amount of time by simply sending up a sattelite and droping 30 dollar bowling balls lmao

in all seriousness though, i hope the info they got was worth the money. thats enough dough to pay off upwards of a thousand home mortgages

reply to post by wx4caster

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Could a large rover on the south pole shoot back a signal to Earth
24 hours a day?
Line of sight ?
Who needs water? Can't we just take it with us?
With automation for the mining operation only 5
people could run the whole operation.
Give them 2 large tanks of water and just resupply them.
- 5,000 Fiji Water Bottles -

Unfortunately no we can't just take it with us. The amount of water needed for each individual for an extended mission to the moon is just not logistically feasible. Not to mention the cost of sending it up the first time and continually resupplying a sustained mission would exceed 80 million by far.

As far as their being ice, and them already knowing about it, there are other chemical compounds that could have been in the ice making it impossible to purify to a drinkable level, so they weren't just testing for water but for its usability as well.

gah

the point is we dont understand the moon enough to predict accurately the type of plume. that being said alone means the data is not as useful as they claim because we are not certain that the explosion (or landing or bombing or whatever you want to call it) DIDNT alter the chemical and physical properties of the ice/dust. some physics chage at super low temperatures.

Umm... A rover like that would cost a lot. Way more than $79 million that's for sure. The two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, had an initial cost of $820 million (that includes building, launching, landing and operating the rovers for the first 90 days) with over $120 million in extensions for the past 5 years. The next Mars Rover, the Mars Science Laboratory is up to $2.3 billion for it's budget so far. It's a much bigger rover though, powered by an RTG.

And a 12" telescope isn't going to get you images similar to a 2.4m telescope like Hubble. A telescope wouldn't be of much use on a Lunar rover anyway really.

Hmm...$79,000,000 / 1,000 = $79,000.
Housing must be a lot cheaper where you are than it is in Arizona...or, for that matter, Missouri, Arkansas, or Tennessee.

Another way to look at that is "If people has used any common sense at all regarding their ability to pay off their mortgages before entering into contracts, we'd have saved enough money on mortgage bailouts to finance an extensive space program".

I dont believe it was about water to begin with.

I believe it was a weapons test first, and to send a message to the beings there secondly. Could it be that the reason we have not built anything on the moon since the first space walk is because we were told not to come back??? Common sence tells me that in the past 40 years we could have colonized the whole moon by now had it been feasable. Think long and hard people. Why havent we been back?
What better place to test powerful weapons that off earth? Rest assured that nasa knows every molecule of damage that bombing the moon caused.

Our space brothers visit the earth regularly so why couldnt they also be camped out on the moon? Especially the dark side.

About water???? I dont think so. Maybe Nasa will send me $79.00 towards my electric bill. They could have sent a million of us a check for $79.00 and made a real difference. I'm just sayin................

Stop whining.
The Obama gave 700 billion to the space cadets in the banks. They all have their own rocketships now.

At least you saw your money going up in NASA moon dust smoke.

79 million is small fries as far as NASA missions go. Neil Armstrong once cost NASA
$2 million dollars on a trip Vegas. Where did you think "Buzz" got his nick name from. Ask the nation of Columbia, half of it went up his nose- another cool million NASA blew(literally).


(all characters in this post are entirely fictitious for entertainment reasons).

I wish, just once, that NASA would spend $79M on DECENT DIGITAL CAMERAS. That would be money well spent.

reply to post by Flighty

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How are you going to download your "decent digital camera" in realtime with a ping of 2600 and only 2-3 minutes before everything about your spacecraft is reduced to confetti? With my digital camera, they would have had to use every last ounce of bandwidth to download 1-2 images at full resolution before the spacecraft crashed. And that leaves no room for other science instruments (the important part), telemetry, or other commands.

reply to post by zombiemann

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If we mine Helium 3, won't that pay for the water?
How much is Helium 3 worth?
The moon doesn't have an atmosphere so a parachute won't work.
How do we slow it down?
Car air bags? Bounce......bounce......bounce.....drive the rover out?

reply to post by ngchunter

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Surely 79 Million would buy the technology to make decent images in some way possible though wouldn't it?

reply to post by jra

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The images from my 12 inch Meade telescope would be crystal
clear. - No atmosphere on the moon - No distortion -
I think i could build a rover that would work great for $2 Million.
Maybe I could drive it around?
For life support i could have a cool NASA greenhouse.
Dwarf wheat - strawberries - marijuana?
I'm bringing frozen pizza with me! + Fiji Water Bottles!

reply to post by Flighty

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79 million is dirt cheap for a mission of this nature. My point is that it may seem simple to you, but getting HD images and video from a probe in an interplanetary orbit is quite complicated. As I stated, bandwidth is a major limitation, and 79 million for the whole mission just isn't enough to cover the big expensive camera you want (which must also be modified to survive launch and the thermal conditions of the probe), which in means big expensive transmitting equipment is required to get the kind of bandwidth you're demanding, which in turn needs even more electrical power, which in turn needs even better thermal control and energy storage, which in turn requires even more payload space as well as extensive evaluation and testing... on and on and on. Just changing that one "simple" thing makes this mission unfeasible as an add-on to fill a little extra payload space left by LRO.

[edit on 11-10-2009 by ngchunter]

reply to post by ngchunter

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Why is bandwidth a problem?
Direct TV works pretty well.
The satellite is 23,000 miles away from Earth.
The moon is only 238,000 miles away.
Maybe we could use a new and improved Direct TV satellite
to act as a relay station.


As a matter of fact, i'm going to need Direct TV if i'm living on
the moon running my Helium 3 mining operation so you better
think of something. I'm not watching Blu-Ray DVD movies all
day!

Oh good grief, direct tv is a DEDICATED COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE. Those things have a mass of about 6000kg. LCROSS had a mass of less than 1000kg. That's a perfect illustration of what I was saying in my last post; getting the kind of bandwidth you're demanding requires much more equipment which is both expensive and heavy. That means LCROSS would require its own rocket if it had a directtv level of equipment.

Yeah, roughly 10% the distance, that means 90% faster communications are possible.

The problem is not line of sight and signal strength would be unaffected due to the fact that the signal would still have to cover 90% of the distance before being amplified. Worse yet, you're adding an extra multimillion dollar satellite and an extra complication to what was supposed to be a simple add-on mission.

[edit on 11-10-2009 by ngchunter]

reply to post by ngchunter

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You seem to have a lot of information about satellites.
6,000 kg?
Why does it have to be so heavy?
Don't we have the technology to make things smaller and lighter?
Lightweight polyalloys?
Miniaturization?
Have you seen a HD Cam recently?
I think we can bring the costs and weight down if we think about it.
Instead of a dedicated Comm Satellite, how about a small
space station 22,300 miles away that is manned by NASA
personnel? We are going to retire the Space Shuttles soon.
Here is an idea. Think with me.
We launch Discovery. In the payload area we put small booster
rockets. Rendezvous with the ISS.
Attach/install small boosters rockets. Head out to the
small space station 22,000 miles away and dock.
Leave it there and as an emergency escape vehicle for
the NASA personnel.

I understand that, but it would not be as good as Hubble. A small telescope on the Moon would be pointless, since we already have Hubble and other space based telescopes.



Go for it. Google Lunar X-Prize

If you can build one for $2 million, you can make a $28 million profit.

[edit on 11-10-2009 by jra]