The Cost of Landing on a Comet

[SiGiL]

I hate it when people complain saying it's too expensive doing, "pointless" and "expensive" space missions. The ignorance of people never ceases to amaze me. The US and some European allies have spent trillions of dollars on the so called, "war on terror" which is absolutely fundamentally flawed and immoral (and very,very expensive) and yet, people in Europe/US complain that their taxes are being wasted.

The truth is that this is the best investment mankind can make for himself.
Doing these missions creates innovation, and in return,creates new industries, which make jobs, which help the economy down the road. In addition, we move forward in the universe instead of killing ourselves for the sake of ideologies. Anyhoo, this data gives a good idea on the cost of the mission.

 

[Stagger Lee]

plus, we need to be able to land a nuke or two when a city sized space rock has earth in her sights.
We can't always rely on Bruce Willis to bail us out.

 

[Double Nought Spy]

I love it when people use the internet to complain about all the money spent on the space programs. IBM made calculating machines and giant mainframes about as powerful as a modern tablet before JFK started pumping money into it for Nasa. Going to the Moon transformed our world in ways no one imagined at the time.

 

[SiGiL]

plus, we need to be able to land a nuke or two when a city sized space rock has earth in her sights.
We can't always rely on Bruce Willis to bail us out.

Or Jupiter for that matter

 

[DaveM]

plus, we need to be able to land a nuke or two when a city sized space rock has earth in her sights.
We can't always rely on Bruce Willis to bail us out.

What makes you think that we don't already have technology to take out a meteor or other space object. Governments aren't going to reveal that kind of science unless forced to.

 

[Stagger Lee]

Can't say the tech isn't there to target and break up a meteor already, but we know for sure that the tech is there to land on one. Assuming a Jupiter miss, Bruce Willis retirement or course.

 

[Charlie Prime]

yet, people in Europe/US complain that their taxes are being wasted.

Complain, yet keep paying.

If they really cared, they would do something about it. They don't, so let's party!

 

[manxman]

Technically it costs peanuts to land on a comet, cost around 2 billion dollars to get there tho over 20 years.

What i mean is, they could of landed on any old comet many times cheaper than this one, this one stood out, it had/has a signal.

 

[mike]

hough frequently beautiful, comets traditionally have stricken terror as often as they have generated wonder as they arc across the sky during their passages around the Sun. Astrologers interpreted the sudden appearances of the glowing visitors as ill omens presaging famine, flood or the death of kings. Even as recently as the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet, entrepreneurs did a brisk business selling gas masks to people who feared Earth's passage through the comet's tail.
In the 4th century B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle concluded that comets were some kind of emission from Earth that rose into the sky. The heavens, he maintained, were perfect and orderly; a phenomenon as unexpected and erratic as a comet surely could not be part of the celestial vault

Now we have landed on one.................

The apex sophonts of Sol 3 have made history again.

And thats how i see it, why wouldnt you want some small portion of your subscription to civilisation ie tax go towards such historical greatness.
That contribution makes you part of history.

Anyone who complains about it has no sense of wonder, no spark of adventure and discovery that is what it is to be human.

Ive see men walk on the moon, landers on mars and now this. What a wonderful era to have lived in

 

[Charlie Prime]

Anyone who complains about it has no sense of wonder, no spark of adventure and discovery that is what it is to be human.

Wrong. Some people have an excellent sense of wonder, but have developed better morals than to hold a gun to someone else's head in order to force them to pay for someone else's hobbies and entertainment.

 

[junius]

The Rosetta mission to Comet 67P is remarkable. Did you know that all the Gold, Iron, Nickel, Platinum and other precious metals we mine from the Earths crust originally came from the rain of Asteroids that hit our Earths crust as it cooled?

With the seemingly successful mission to Comet 67P Asteroid mining comes one step closer, in essence this will mean future missions like Rosetta will attach a lander to a suitable Asteroid and by using thrusters, change its trajectory so it moves into a closer orbit around the Earth. Further missions can then be sent to place other lander's on the Asteroid for the purposes of mining precious metals and bringing them back to Earth.

It is estimated that Gold, Silver, Copper, Zinc, Tin, Lead reserves on Earth will be exhausted within the next 50-60 years...

 

[manxman]

If they are electrically charged, as this one is [singing] then they can be repelled or attracted, just depends how good we get at pushing or pulling them.

 

[Charlie Prime]

With the seemingly successful mission to Comet 67P...

Only in Bizzaro World could a lander bouncing a kilometer off the target and then dying be called "successful".

This "mining asteroids" nonsense is too silly to even talk about.

There are a thousands of 12 year-old girls dying of lymphatic cancer who could have really benefited from the Two Billion Dollars spent on this publicity stunt.

 

[manxman]

He is right ofcourse, controversial but right, but in the same sense, if all the money spent on heart transplants in the west was spent on third world sanitation, 100s of 1000s of peoples lives would be saved, mainly children.

See controversial or not its hypocritical coming from a native of a country whose ammunitions kill 100s of 1000s of people a year around the globe for profit, again mainly women and children, ofcourse its a triple whammy, over a decade loss of life in the millions, wasted money, trillions, enough to cure all cancers 10 times over.

So i think he can/should stop fretting about how we Europeans spend OUR money, just thinking out loud.

 

[exo_doc]

Naysayers and visionless critics would have us think this is all we get, the Earth. Space exploration, or even the space sciences are a total waste of money and resources according to them.
Asteroids and comets, even planets and moons, will be mined. The economic incentive is there, and growing daily. Earths resources are dwindling, especially rare earth elements. The only place to get more is out there.
The cost in money and lives will be high of course, but building the infrastructure and the new technologies for man to leave the planet and live elsewhere is a priceless endeavor.
Man will get to the stars, kicking and screaming if necessary, but we will get there.

I would like to say "Shame on you" to those who poopoo mans destiny in the stars, but if they do not already understand what's at stake and their minds are made up, what's the use?

 

[Charlie Prime]

I would like to say "Shame on you" to those who poopoo mans destiny in the stars

I say shame on YOU for perpetuating this nonsense by mindlessly regurgitating the poetic sophist tripe you consume in aerospace press releases.

I mean Get Real. Your country is 18 TRILLION dollars in debt, with crumbling infrastructure, a vanishing middle class, being run by vicious military corporations, and you sit around sanctimoniously spouting airy-fairy nonsense about"destinies in the stars" fed to you by those very military corporations.

This behavior is infantile, disgusting to behold, and you should be ashamed it.

 

[exo_doc]

I say shame on YOU for perpetuating this nonsense by mindlessly regurgitating the poetic sophist tripe you consume in aerospace press releases.

I mean Get Real. Your country is 18 TRILLION dollars in debt, with crumbling infrastructure, a vanishing middle class, being run by vicious military corporations, and you sit around sanctimoniously spouting airy-fairy nonsense about"destinies in the stars" fed to you by those very military corporations.

This behavior is infantile, disgusting to behold, and you should be ashamed it.

Wow dude, get a grip. Just because you want to see mankind go extinct doesn't mean the rest of us do.
...."This behavior is infantile, disgusting to behold, and you should be ashamed"..... I do believe many inventors and visionaries of the past have been told exactly that, such as the Wright Brothers, Tesla, Edison, Steve Jobs, and Darwin just to name a few.
I stand proudly non-ashamed and very mature for wanting to see mankind live on. I guess you won't want your seat on the interstellar express then?

 

[Charlie Prime]

Three logical fallacies in a row.

I expected no less. 'Derp'

 

[exo_doc]

Whatever Senior Prime. I agree to disagree. Live long and prosper.

 

[junius]

'Rockets, moonshots, spend it on the have-nots'...Yes of course there are so many needy people who may have benefited from money being spent on Cancer treatment and so on. But how do we know cures for illnesses such as cancer may not be found by pushing the boundaries in Space exploration?