Visiting Our Red Space Neighbor

Enthusiasm for visiting our red space neighbor seems to be growing. m4dm4n writes "A study carried out by MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics department has concluded that getting men to Mars in the 2020 timeframe is possible. The intelligent re-use of crew habitat modules, propulsion stages, and engines in various missions will enable NASA to significantly reduce their initial timeline which was well past 2030." Relatedly, ErikPeterson wrote to mention a Space.com article where Neil Armstrong says getting to Mars may be easier than getting to the Moon was back in the day, because of the hurdles they had to overcome. From the article: "It will be expensive, it will take a lot of energy and a complex spacecraft. But I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo (space program) in 1961." We're starting to understand more about the red planet as well, as madstork2000 writes "The BBC is reporting on the possibility of active volcanoes on Mars. So now there is water, heat, and soon big business when 4Frontiers gets there. Hopefully we'll get a Google Mars soon to check it out up close."

Business on Mars

[geomon]

So now there is water, heat, and soon big business when 4Frontiers gets there.

What will they make and who are they going to sell it too? I'm open for making money on Mars, but I haven't read one proposal that looks like it would make money.

I can see why a country would want to go to Mars. There is always the national honor, staking territorial claims, etc. for a Mars landing. I just can't see spending billions of dollars for no financial return at all.

How much money has a business made from the US landing on the Moon?

Sure, if they get the budget

[Cerdic]

Considering that the government has severely increased spending (Iraq, Katrina) while decreasing money input (less taxes taken in), something is going to suffer.

Education is almost always at the front, and I'd say that NASA is second in line for the big axe.

Armstrong is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't be easier to get to Mars than to the Moon because the US manned space program is no longer run by engineers, but by greedy defense contractors, paper-pushers, and ass-covering PHBs. In short: NASA no longer has the Right Stuff.

And this talk of "the" CEV is disturbing. Sounds like the same "let's-make-one-spaceship-that-can-do-it-all" approach that gave us the Shuttle.

PS - Am I the only person in this country who thinks putting a manned spacecraft (the new CEV) atop a solid rocket (Thiokol SRB; as used by Shuttle) is a really bad idea?

Re:Armstrongs comments sounded familiar

[CynicalGuy]

Do you think you might be taking all of this a bit too seriously?

Re:Business on Mars

[arbitraryaardvark]

How much money has a business made from the US landing on the Moon?

About 16 billion? The company is known as Halliburton, aka Brown and Root.
See also Mohole, Vietnam, TVA nukes, Iraq...

Re:Fossils

[Rakishi]

I like human space travel however humans are inferior to robots in one important area: cleanliness. You simply can't sterilize a human you send onto another planet like you can a robot, unless they never leave their habitat/lander (if nothing else then because dragging such sterilization equipment to mars isn't feasible).

The only "fossils" we're likely to find on Mars are microbes, and even those are probably rare which means w need every advantage in finding them. Humans simply increase the risk of contamination orders of magnitude which makes finding such microbe remains a much greater challenge.

Re:Business on Mars

[nunchux]

I can see why a country would want to go to Mars. There is always the national honor, staking territorial claims, etc. for a Mars landing. I just can't see spending billions of dollars for no financial return at all.

The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military. And that company would hold the patents. This would also establish that organization as the premier space exploration/transport company... Think what it would mean to their earth-based enterprises.

The second answer is marketing. This company would be in the news every day for years, and they would certainly be in every schoolchild's history books for centuries to come. Doesn't Coke have a roughly $1.5 billion advertising budget? Not saying they'd be the one to do it (though Virgin does have a cola, too...) Putting this kind of money into the greatest technological accomplishment in history may be worth it...
   

Only half the problem

[MontyApollo]

The other part of the problem is maintaining public interest. The mission would last a minimum of a year, and the general public would get their fill of Mars coverage. Trying to fund the *2nd mission* to Mars would be just about impossible.

I can imagine the public response: "It costs a billion dollars, and we've had people already spend a year there. Why spend any more?"

I personally don't think it is worth the effort to go to Mars unless we already have the technology and infrastructure in place to maintain a permament settlement. Otherwise it will be the Moon program all over again: Plant the flag, hit some golf balls, come home, cancel the follow-up missions.

Re:Why is the return trip always ignored?

[A non-mouse Cow Herd]

Huh ? Your claim that "the return trip always ignored" is completely bogus. Any serious mission study deals with ascent and return (well, a few people have proposed 1 way missions, but they tend to not be taken very seriously). If you haven't seen it discussed, it is because you are reading fluff pieces in the popular press, rather than the actual studies.

Getting off mars is harder than getting off the moon, but it's a lot easier than getting off earth. Like any other part of a mars mission, it presents technical challenges...

Re:Business on Mars

[flyingsquid]

The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military.

You could do the same thing far more efficiently by directly funding research through the National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, the NSF has seen its budget cut while funding for NASA has been increased.

I think that NASA's unmanned programs do some valuable research and they should continue, or even be expanded, but the manned program is just a publicity stunt. I mean what did the Shuttle program ever discover, other than a bunch of science-fair projects along the lines of "does classical music make plants grow better... in SPACE?" Their biggest single contribution to research has been repairing a robot- the Hubble Space Telescope. I think that says something about where space exploration is going. The sooner we get humans out of space exploration entirely, the more progress we'll make. Likewise, if there really is any way to make money from going to Mars, it will doubtless be cheaper to send robots to do it, instead of sending humans.

What's the point?

[PhysSurfer]

Before we get to Mars, we need to stop and ask why we want to go. As far as I can see, our reason is pure conceit. We want to say that people have reached Mars. What does reaching Mars accomplish? Mars is an inhospitable desert. We can't do much research there that wouldn't be better done here, except for investigating Mars itself. Aside from research, why go? It's not profitable, and earth is still inhabitable enough so that establishing colonies on Mars isn't necessary.

All the money spent on making Mars spaceships and reasearching how to protect the astronauts, etc, would be better spent on improving our earthships (cars) and figuring out ways to make civilization much more energy efficient. This HAS to get done in the near future with Peak Oil and the end of cheap energy approaching. Unfortunately, we definately don't have enough money to do both types of research. With the current trends, we could be even a lot worse off by 2030.

Real estate

[SuperKendall]

Anyone with even a half of ounce of vision knows the real (and very profitible) reason to go to Mars - first dibs at real estate.

Funny or insightful? Your choice!

Re:Sure, if they get the budget

[hvatum]

RETARDED CANADIAN ALERT - MAKE WAY!

Do you realize that United States consumers also suffer from increased lumber prices caused by those tariffs?

Instead of buying high quality cheap lumber it must be imported from Brazil and Africa which costs an arm and a leg. So Kanuck softwood clear cutters might be losing 5 billion - but American consumers are probably losing 10 through imported prices.

In other words: YOU should be paying US 5 billion you damn greedy Canadian.

BTW: Please smash your computer with a hockey puck so we don't have to deal with your retarded postings anymore.

Re:Business on Mars

[patternjuggler]

The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military.

I think this is a very frequently overstated benefit of space projects for several reasons:

Surely there are serendipitous inventions that may reduce costs and increase reliability, but ideally you would want to avoid having to invent something to finish a project you are starting right now- newly created or discovered things are typically much more expensive, are difficult to schedule around, and are more unreliable than tried-and-true materials and machines.

The second thing is about the ability to transfer the technology to other industries- this is very difficult to do, even assuming that the technology serves any purpose in other industries at all and would be cost-effective in those industries.

For instance, there are very significant divides between space electronics vs. consumer electronics- if I invent a chip that can withstand all sorts of solar radiation, will run for 20 years without error, withstands 10s or 100s of g's of shock, and tolerates an extraordinary temperature range- nobody is going to care in the consumer electronics world because my chip is going to cost 100 times as much as theirs and all those benefits are useless to them.

Going to Mars now would be stupid

[Elrac]

I submit that sending people to Mars at this point in time would be a most illogical thing to do. Here are some reasons:

• We've barely been to the moon. Went there a long time ago, stayed there a day or two each time, ran back and were happy not to have had too many casualties. That's like saying you've been to Iraq, when you take a flight to Baghdad airport, stay at the airport and take the next flight back out.
• We barely manage near-Earth space. These days, missions to terrestrial orbit are knuckle-gnawing adventures. If we have trouble getting people above the atmosphere and back, we have no business trying for other celestial bodies. Technology and procedure need to be improved to the point where near targets are routine.
• We need more practice. I feel this kind of thing needs to be done in stages. We need to set up a permanent base at the Lagrange point between the Moon and Earth, we need to set up a permanent base on the Moon and commute there routinely and safely (with possible attendant benefits like mining for spaceship-building materials there). Before we've "conquered" the Moon in those terms, it makes no sense to shoot further - a Mars mission becomes nothing more than a daring publicity stunt.
• We need better technology. Especially in terms of energy efficiency. At the moment, putting a spacecraft into space involves burning the monthly energy budget of a small country in a big, controlled, chemical explosion. That works, but is decidedly inelegant in a Flash-Gordon-y way. We need to develop better alternatives for getting out of Earth's gravity field, such as
  • a space elevator
  • a railgun space cannon
  • fission or fusion powered propulsion
  • anti gravity (if it can be done)
  • some other, as yet undiscovered tech
  
  Of these alternatives, I consider the space elevator the most realistic, but I could be proven wrong by future developments. But regardless of the method, something needs to be done to improve on the current process.
• We need to make the process safe and idiot-proof. I'm not talking about idiot astronauts, I'm talking about idiots in the specification, management and implementation of the whole enterprise. We need a process that doesn't result in purchasing O-rings from the cheapest bidder, in safety tests being short-circuited, in plans being altered without proper signoff, in political or budgetary compromises that threaten mission safety, etc. In other words, we need to move away from the way things are currently being done at NASA.

Only when all those prerequisites are met - and this might be in 2010, 2020 or later - are we really ready to send humans to Mars. Before then, whatever is done will be reckless grandstanding.

My personal opinion, which may or may not meet with agreement, is that Bush has no real interest in getting people to Mars. I think this project is just a bid for getting his name into a possible future history book. In other words, a long-view PR stunt. I hope humans don't end up being sacrificed for the glory of the President.