[NEWS] nasa eyes urstar fish for missions in 2030s

[Drydess]

You misunderstand, urstar fish consumes all, and besides, by the time it means anything, we'll all be dead.

maybe urstar fish you fat forget but not mine

[Ad Bot]

[thegoodperry]

a waste of money that's going to give us billions in gaseous resources to mine for (hopefully) hundreds of years, along with boosting technological advancements
it's a bit of a trek to get there but it's worth it definitely in the long run

the methane we harvest from urstar fish could be used for kitchen stoves and that's it. It's nowhere near complex enough to make a fuel that cars can run on

[Master Matthew²]

maybe urstar fish you fat forget but not mine

#NotMystar fish
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[Magus]

Let's go to Titan instead.
It has literal oceans of oil.

[SeventhSandwich]

How about we just let NASA direct their own scientific inquiries and not worry about the economic return of an agency which creates hundreds of billions of dollars in spin-off technologies and research?

[Nonnel]

Very neat. I'm always down to learn more about our Solar System and what we can do with it.

the methane we harvest from urstar fish could be used for kitchen stoves and that's it. It's nowhere near complex enough to make a fuel that cars can run on

You don't gotta comment if you have no idea what you're talking about

[Conan]

[news] tail butt plug found in urstar fish probe prior to launch

[Juncoph]

the methane we harvest from urstar fish could be used for kitchen stoves and that's it. It's nowhere near complex enough to make a fuel that cars can run on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle

literally anything that's combustible can be made into a fuel

combustible fluids are inherently excellent fuels because they can be fed by fuel lines

even gaseous hydrogen - the simplest molecule in the universe - can and has been used in internal combustion engines. it was actually used in some of the first ICE prototypes.


anyway, space exploration is only a waste of money if scientific progress in general is a waste of money.

[Insert Name Here²]

that's just going to be a waste of money.

lolol

[SeventhSandwich]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle

literally anything that's combustible can be made into a fuel

it's also virtually impossible, in terms of engineering, to make a vehicle that goes to Urstar fish and captures methane from the atmosphere, escapes the planet's gravity well, and then returns back to Earth, having gathered enough fuel to make the entire trip economically worthwhile.

asteroid mining and stuff seems cool but I have virtually no faith that we will ever see commercial resource gathering in space. It is simply too expensive to put things in space, and there's no known way to take things super heavy and return them to the surface without them exploding.

[Insert Name Here²]

it's also virtually impossible, in terms of engineering, to make a vehicle that goes to Urstar fish and captures methane from the atmosphere, escapes the planet's gravity well, and then returns back to Earth, having gathered enough fuel to make the entire trip economically worthwhile.

wouldn't it be possible for the spaceship to be engineered to run on both rocket fuel and methane? That way when it gets to urstar fish, it could re-fuel its tanks and collect a full load of methane or whatever and fly off?

[thegoodperry]

anyway, space exploration is only a waste of money if scientific progress in general is a waste of money.

WW2 brought several new technologies, including nuclear power and aircraft technology, but that doesn't mean that the war was a good thing. Spending billions of dollars to build spacecraft and fuel for it to fly around and gather information is a waste of money. It'd be better spent actually building the new technologies like the list of things NASA built, not funding a useless mission that will sprout technologies as an accidental biproduct

I guess in the name of discovery, checking out urstar fish is a good thing, but at this exact moment we don't have any need for methane or anything urstar fish can provide. Even though it can fuel things like cars, the combustion isn't complete enough for it to be sustainable, and that money that could be spent on gathering methane can be better spent on developing more sustainable and cleaner energy options. In the end, it's an objective waste of money. It does provide some profit and gain, but the amount spent on gathering it is far greater than what's being returned

[SeventhSandwich]

wouldn't it be possible for the spaceship to be engineered to run on both rocket fuel and methane?

I don't know how far you'd have to go down into Urstar fish' atmosphere to find a decent concentration of methane, but the amount of energy you'd have to expend to escape the gravity well would be ridiculous. Consider also the fact that any methane you collect adds mass which requires additional fuel to reach escape velocity. Basically, you'd need a ship bigger than anything humanity has ever built, and it would still burn up the vast majority of the fuel just getting out of the planet.

On the other hand, we have vast stores of methane sitting right under us which can be pumped up with far less waste.

Spending billions of dollars to build spacecraft and fuel for it to fly around and gather information is a waste of money. It'd be better spent actually building the new technologies like the list of things NASA built, not funding a useless mission that will sprout technologies as an accidental biproduct

That's the thing you're missing here. These technologies sprout as a byproduct of sending probes to do scientific research. If you aren't sending probes to do scientific research, then you aren't getting spin-off technologies. It's not a waste.

[Nonnel]

That's why it's called "R&D" and not "D"

[SeventhSandwich]

That's why it's called "R&D" and not "D"

Indeed, no truer words have been spoken than everyone wants the D.