Bill In U.S. House Plans Manned Mars Mission 399
maddogsparky writes "Spaceref.com has a copy of a bill laying out a roadmap for NASA to send a manned mission to Mars by 2022. Highlights include an manned asteroid landing, building a research outpost on one of Mars' moons and actually providing funds to start mission planning."
Heard this before (Score:5, Interesting)
(Of course I know a little bit about Lagrange points,
http://www.finds-space.org/thomasneuraut
We do have some stuff to publish soon.)
Well, as always, I'd like to believe.
-Jay Thomas
http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2
"It would take an act of Congress to ..." (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the problems with these various large scale concept/projects is that things can flounder forever in the planning stages.
For those of you familiar with large bureaucracies, everything lies in the funding. By forcing the funding of something and laying out a defined timetable, this bill would IMHO stand a good chance of actually causing this to become a reality. (Technical delays notwithstanding.)
I agree, this probably won't pass... but it would a very clear signal, a strident first step, and a more exciting two decades if it did.
So write your Congressmen, damnit! =)
Re:10 Bucks... (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, that couldn't happen in the House because of rules about the germaneness of amendments. A Senate version could have all sorts of "Christmas tree ornaments" (as Bush-41 sometimes called them) because they have no rule about amendments being germane.
What's really needed is nuclear propulsion (Score:3, Interesting)
Good bill. It's always refreshing to see politicians work toward dreams in science, technology and exploration. The time table for this bill may need to slow down a bit to be realistic, but what is really needed to make the human Mars exploration and the further exploration of the solar system after Mars practical and economical is the development of nuclear propulsion, something that has always been a political hot potato.
Without nuclear propulsion, a manned mission anywhere farther than the moon will always take too long be too costly and have a much too small margin of error to be acceptable.
Re:Not to be cynical..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to say I disagree that the logistics are unreasonable. We made it to the moon 33 years ago - a third of a century - before we even had modern computers. Getting to and from mars is simply a matter of scale... it takes longer and takes more thrust to get back off the surface. But that doesn't remotely mean it can't be done. The distance is phenomenal, yes, but in space distance just becomes time. Possibly the biggest logistical problem is medicine ... in the apollo program there was a maximum return time of about 4 days... if someone gets sick you can get them home to go to a doctor. For Mars, that's not an option because you're 6 months away with limited opportunities for orbital transition. But there are a *lot* of people working on this very problem, even while NASA hasn't yet made concrete plans for a mars mission.
Take a look at some of the plans invented by groups outside of NASA, most notably Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct [nw.net] concept. I'll spare you going into detail but this plan has so many fail-safes it's ridiculous. The entire thing uses more-or-less existing technology.
Meanwhile, there are two experiments already running to study the difficulties of having people live isolated on Mars for an extended mission (many months until the next launch window floats around). Check out the Mars Arctic Research Station [yorku.ca] and the Mars Desert Research Station [marssociety.org] (site temporarily down?). All this research and work is already being done, independantly of NASA. (usually marssociety.org is a great reference... at the moment it seems to be undergoing maintenance or something. Bad timing.)
Technologically, it can be done; I think there's little question about that. As for the policital will and the money, that's a different issue. But maybe this bill shows that there is some interest after all.
Personally, I put my money on commercialization of space being the primary driving force in the next 20 years. The profit motives and the opportunities of space tourism and potentially near-earth asteroid mining will outstrip anything the US government will deliver in the near future.
Redundant, and toothless (Score:3, Interesting)
Toothless: There are no penalties for failure to execute. If the mission is not completed on schedule, NASA bosses should be looking at some hard prison time. Otherwise, what's the point?
'Nuff said.
Re:Not to be cynical..... (Score:5, Interesting)
The same boon we received by sending humans to the moon - huge technological advances being made in short amounts of time. As a species, we need to do this. With one self sustained dome will come another, and another. It would be less of a giant leap and more of a 3 1/2 second Wright Flyer hop.
But there needs to be competition involved. The reason the Apollo missions were so successful is because you Americans were obsessed with beating the Russians. Perhaps a multi country backed privatised race?
Reduce the time to 2007 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mars isn't the question (Score:2, Interesting)
The result: total unity of the world's population. At least for that moment, but the reprocussions could be far reaching.
Granted, the project may not have the practical uses that you seem to require, but the cultural ramifications would be massive. I wasn't alive for the moon landing, but I can assume what all of america felt when watching those first steps. I know i would be glued to the tv during those first moments and would never forget those first grainy images of the surface of mars. I know i'm not alone.
Of course, making the world's population "feel good" isn't always an important requirement for most projects. Who knows what the next step in human evolution (reaching and colinizing other plants) will lead to down here?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What's really needed is nuclear propulsion (Score:4, Interesting)
Election year pork for Lampson re-election (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mars isn't the question (Score:5, Interesting)
Columbus stumbled across the New World in 1492. How many permanent European settlements were established between and the end of the 15th century? Heck, let me be generous: Between then and the end of the 16th century?
We got to the moon and back six times in a span of half a decade or so. Starting from 1492, when's the first time that there were six expeditions to the New World in such a small time frame?
"it's a vacuum"
For a planet with no atmosphere, it sure seems to have a lot of dust storms. Not to mention all the erosion that's apparent on the surface...
"We need to mine something that isn't at the bottom of a gravity well."
As I recall from my physics courses, if it's something, by definition it's in the bottom of a gravity well.
And while we're on the subject of asteroid mining, sure they tend to have lots of heavy elements, but if you're looking for light stuff (say, oh, I dunno... reaction mass!?!), you need a heavy duty gravity well to hang on to it and collect it.
"Phobos or Deimos- yes."
After expelling enough reaction mass to get to Mars in a reasonable amount of time (ie. before the crew gets microwaved into crispy critters), you honestly think bringing enough fuel to reach Martian escape velocity (remember, 1/3 G) is really going to make that much of a difference? Heck, landing on Mars has the advantage over its satellites in that it at least has SOME atmosphere, so you don't need near as much shielding once you get there. Especially when you consider how long you're going to have to be there until Earth catches up with you again (even if you're using nuclear rockets).
"a NEA or a comet, yes"
Instead of going on a manned interplanetary expedition to someplace we run into once or twice a year or so, you're in favor of trying to catch up with and land on something that doesn't come anywhere near here for a few centuries or millenia? And what will the crew do when they get there? Start digging their own graves?
"Mars? Later."
"If not now, when? If not us, who?"
Curiously strong mints (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:-1:Uninformed (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not that the Saturn V blueprints are missing, more that all those 1960s components are no longer in production, and all those engineers are retired... NASA are having to scour eBay for 8086 processors for the Shuttle, so finding the parts for a Saturn (which last flew six years before the first Shuttle) would be a nightmare!
The Russian Energia rocket is much more recent, but it would still be difficult to reactivate. It's heartbreaking to see Buran as a lawn ornament... But realistically our best bet for a BFB is the US Magnum, which is basically Energia built out of Shuttle technology. Shuttle tanks, engines and SRBs *are* still in service, and the components and engineers are readily available.
The Russians would be a key partner though for anyone else. In particular they still have the most expertise for long-term missions, in particular of building stuff that is maintainable.
Yep, that's their big advantage. You'd want the Mars ship to be Russian-built. They kept Mir alive through disaster after disaster, seven years after it was supposed to be replaced. That sort of durability is an absolute must for interplanetary work.
Question: could we supply a Mars ship by leaving a string of Progress drones along its path, and let it collect 'em along the way?
A joint US/Europe/Japan effort (Score:2, Interesting)