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Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
Its somewhere around 30/1.
For that price yea do it! Find us a place to go with a manned mission with those 30 probes!  |
Oh, I think it will take more probes than that to find somewhere worth possibly maybe considering going any time in the forseeable future....
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But think of it this way as well... one manned mission can do the work of 30 unmanned missions. 
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What makes you think so? Anything worth learning about any planet(oid) we can get to with a manned mission can be discerned via probe flybys for a fraction of the cost required to build a manned spacecraft.
Sadly, even Eros is very far away (it will be around 70 times as far away as the moon at it's closest approach) and it is travelling very quickly. How, exactly, are we going to get to it and extract enough resources to recoup the cost of getting the damn ship into space in the first place, and then get the damn thing back on the ground with its payload? Methinks we are better off just waiting for a resource-rich asteroid to actually
hit the planet for the time being if we want to extract resources.
I'm not saying that it can't or shouldn't be done, just that we're not even close to ready yet.
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Its very cheap, I was mistaken when I said they don't need fueling just energy; they do need fuel (a gas). Xenon is a common propellant but they are doing experiments using Argon as a propellant. If you remember chemistry Argon is the 3rd most common gas found on Earth after Nitrogen and Oxygen.
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I figured it would need some kind of reaction mass. I'm actually pleased to know that noble gases can be used; that's extremely convenient and practical for more reasons than availability.
Unfortunately, even with ion stabilization thrusters, there's still the small matter of getting the damn thing into orbit in the first place and maintaining/upgrading/replacing it, at the cost of millions of dollars per pound, so whatever it's doing up there had damn well better be worth it. Looming above our enemies with a payload of death does not fit that criteria, especially given the ease with which a satelite can be brought down by a developed nation.
Thus far, only the private sector has managed to recoup the investment on just getting stuff into orbit, though they have taken government help where it was available. It will be they who push space exploration and exploitation to the next level, and they'll do it profitably at exactly the right moment because they are governed by profit motive and highly replaceable.