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[OBias]

http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html

If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said.

"We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost."

Instead, Aldrin said, NASA should continue to hand over activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private industry partners. Indeed, the space agency has been encouraging that move by awarding contracts to companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Boeing to ferry cargo and crew to and from the ISS.

Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space or other companies should build and operate LEO space stations that are independent of the ISS, he added. Ideally, the first of these commercial outposts would share key orbital parameters with the station that China plans to have up and running by the early 2020s, to encourage cooperation with the Chinese, Aldrin said.

Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" — spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth.

"The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."

Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said.

Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.

Aldrin foresees these various cycler iterations enabling a crewed mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2020 and a Venus flyby by 2024. If all goes well, the first future Mars settlers could launch in the early 2030s, he said.

And they will be settlers, not just visitors, if Aldrin's vision comes to pass.

"Let's be certain that we've developed a sustainable plan to stay on Mars," he said. "No flags and footprints this time."

The ISS is currently funded through 2024, and officials of NASA, the Russian federal space agency and other partners have floated the possibility of extending the $100 billion outpost's life through 2028. NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.

Get my ass to Mars if old.

 

[Ponn]

NASA to Buzz Aldrin - "Tell the fucking government to give us more money to do it instead of building a fucking wall"

 

[Regulus Tera]

Aldrin is getting mad at the wrong people.

 

[Beartruck]

Sadly, assuming NASA doesn't get more funding, this is probably the best use of their resources.

 

[TheLostBigBoss]

NASA to Buzz Aldrin - "Tell the fucking government to give us more money to do it instead of building a fucking wall"

His point is that retiring the ISS will allow for the reallocation of funds to getting to Mars

I say we just grow balls and do it, drift the ISS to Mars with everyone on board, we can make history if we want!

 

[Rentahamster]

I like his vision.

 

[WillyFive]

It super sucks we have to get rid of the biggest international achievement since the victory of WW2 just to do something new.

 

[Familienoberhauptvogel]

Where are we on a space elevator?

 

[Ponn]

His point is that retiring the ISS will allow for the reallocation of funds to getting to Mars

I say we just grow balls and do it, drift the ISS to Mars with everyone on board, we can make history if we want!

Retiring the ISS will not save them the money to afford a real program to go to Mars. Not in Buzz's wildest dreams.

 

[djkimothy]

3.5 billion$ a year to run ISS? That's a god damn bargain. How much is that fucking wall going to cost you guys?

 

[AstroNut325]

 

[benicillin]

This is a stupid idea. There are ways to fund NASA without dismantling our previous achievements. You give the government ideas like this and they'll just reduce NASA's funding, pull out of the ISS and shove more money into the defense budget.

 

[Bregor]

I'm sorry, but retiring capabilities we have today for ones we might have in the future is foolishness (IMO) when one considers the unreliability of congressional funding. New projects are far more likely to be cut than existing ones. I wouldn't want to retire the SSC until I was certain that the replacement program had reliable funding for 2 to 3 decades at least.

Edit: And to be honest there is no way you can be sure of that funding. That's the problem.

 

[sturmdogg]

I thought NASA was getting loads of money from Trump??

 

[Purkake4]

Where are we on a space elevator?

Inventing a material with enough tensile strength at a low weight.

 

[Always-honest]

En.. how about "no", Buzz?

 

[OBias]

I hope China will somehow provide the world another Sputnik crisis, stirring up both NASA and Roscosmos and forcing the governments to boost their budgets.

 

[DontBeThatGuy]

Retiring the ISS will not save them the money to afford a real program to go to Mars. Not in Buzz's wildest dreams.

Yeeeeeeeep. Aldrin is flinging shit at the wall here.

 

[Iksenpets]

Aldrin's ideas seem... ambitious. I just can't see anyone right now agreeing to set up the sort of long-term presence on the Moon that his plans require. Even if that is the most cost-effective way of launching missions deeper into space, I don't see us moving away from less frequent, more expensive one-shot missions anytime soon, until there is some larger economic incentive to establish that sort of infrastructure in space.

 

[NealMcCauley]

 

[BioHazard]

Buzz Aldrin to NASA: Retire (the ISS) bitch

 

[Staccat0]

Old Man Yells at Stars

 

[daveo42]

Crater the ISS. Build Moon Base. Set up as relay to Mars. Get ass to Mars.

 

[andythinkpad]

So I take it China will monopolize the space station and moon landing news in the next few years.

edit: for the entire Pissbaby administration, I am okay with it.

 

[theechrisfox]

I thought NASA was getting loads of money from Trump??

Mick Mulvaney is sitting in a dark room somewhere and softly chanting "we are just not wasting money on that anymore." NASA is science, so I assume a 100% budget cut is coming eventually.

 

[Parch]

I can understand his frustration. After the Apollo missions, the world was absolutely convinced that a man would walk on Mars before the turn of the century. Anybody from that generation is a bit disappointed that it didn't happen and that we're still not even close to making it happen.

 

[Ponn]

Yeeeeeeeep. Aldrin is flinging shit at the wall here.

Crater the ISS. Build Moon Base. Set up as relay to Mars. Get ass to Mars.

Imagine a NASA with the Military's budget.

 

[DrROBschiz]

Hes not wrong

in order to update everything we need to retire the old

Better to have that money pushed towards the future as intended. Maybe the ISS can be converted into an orbital tourist attraction/museum someday for future space travellers?

 

[yanipheonu]

Maybe they just want to find The Traveller as soon as possible.

Spoiler

I'd be down for some alien uplifting,
honestly.

 

[Dan]

The ISS is not a significant obstacle to implementing any of his suggestions.

 

[Rentahamster]

I thought NASA was getting loads of money from Trump??

It's the same amount of money (slightly more) than last year.

 

[Man-is-Obsolete]

Does NASA even have the autonomy to shut down ISS?

 

[daveo42]

Imagine a NASA with the Military's budget.

We'd be mining asteroids and setting up bases on moons around the solar system at this point.

 

[curls]

Imagine a NASA with the Military's budget.

Well the US Air Force has a sophisticated space program. Too bad its kept in the dark. 🙄

 

[Loxley]

FYI Buzz Aldrin is kind of a crazy person in his old age (he's 87). I went to a Q&A he did a few years ago and he would constantly go off on bizarre tangents whenever somebody asked him anything space-related.

One kid in the audience asked him a question about Mars' atmosphere, and somehow he ended up talking about how he shot a lot of Koreans in the Korean War and that he was convinced North Korea was going to nuke us. Bare in mind 70% of the audience were kids between the ages of 7 and 14. His handler (the most patient woman I've ever seen) quickly cut him off and got him back on topic - which was basically her entire job during the Q&A XD

 

[enzo_gt]

Frankly, I think there's an argument to be made that research done on the ISS is just as important, if not more important, than just getting feet on Mars ASAP in whatever limited capacity/knowledge we have (a lot of which we glean from the ISS, of course).

 

[KarmaCow]

Is that $3.5 Billion just maintenance or is that including current experiments and shuttling people/cargo back and forth? I'm still wary of private industries seriously shouldering the cost when space travel is still so expensive with little return.

 

[Mengy]

After reading that article I have the sudden and super compelling urge to play me some Kerbal Space Program. Time to build some Kerbal Interplanetary Cyclers of my own!!!

 

[Extra Sauce]

I say we just grow balls and do it, drift the ISS to Mars with everyone on board, we can make history if we want!

One small drift for man, one giant drift for the family.

 

[TheLostBigBoss]

After reading that article I have the sudden and super compelling urge to play me some Kerbal Space Program. Time to build some Kerbal Interplanetary Cyclers of my own!!!

Too expensive, just put put a thruster on a block of metal and fling it to Duna

 

[FantasticMrFoxdie]

NASA to Buzz:

 

[Jotaka]

 

[RyanardoDaVinci]

Imagine a NASA with the Military's budget.

We would've had a moon base in the late 70s-early 80s, on Mars and back in the early 90s, Mars base around the millennium, asteroid mining etc.

But nope, it's more important to kill each other.

 

[Averon]

Constantly shifting priorities from congress and new WH administrations is NASA's biggest problem. Congress, which controls NASA's budget, see the organization as a mere jobs program for their district/state. So congress saddle NASA with stuff like the SLS that is overpriced for what it does and gets constantly delayed due to using two dozen different contractors NASA is forced to use to make sure each congressman and each senator's district and state gets in on that.

Anything beyond Earth's orbit requires long-term planning with a well funded budget. Congress is the biggest roadblock to that.

 

[Imperfected]

Buzz Aldrin is a wonderful man and a national hero, but... he's just another engineer in terms of viability discussions, and not even that when it comes to financing. Does he have any other aerospace engineers backing him up on this roadmap?

I mean, it doesn't look terrible to me, but I'm not going to listen to him over other scientists and engineers in the field just because he went to the moon. For something like this, his doctoral work at MIT is more significant than his military exploits.

 

[Ether_Snake]

All this talk does is contribute to underfunding NASA.

 

[JordanN]

Imagine a NASA with the Military's budget.

"Who's ready to conquer Pluto?"

 

[SSPssp]

Its true, the ISS is a waste of money. If this money would actually be used for a better project then I'm all for it.

 

[SiegfriedFM]

But then we are fucked once the moon mysteriously explodes...

 

[Madness]

NASA to Buzz Aldrin - "Tell the fucking government to give us more money to do it instead of building a fucking wall"

Hell imagine if the $50 billion increase military spending got was sent to NASA. Eventually we'll get to a point where the nation that put a man on the moon will start saying that it was a hoax, the Earth is flat ala Interstellar.