NASA Looking For Ideas To Explore Mars 176
ZeroExistenZ writes "NASA plans to make another trip to Mars in 2018 for which they want to devise a plan by this summer. To come up with ideas for this mission, they turn to the public to tackle a few challenge areas. Participants must submit a brief abstract (no more than two pages) outlining the idea, and indicating in which of the topical areas the idea belongs. Abstracts are due no later than 5:00 p.m. U.S. Central Daylight Time May 10, 2012."
If NASA really wants to go for space exploration.. (Score:5, Interesting)
... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm. We would be able to get a lot more accomplished, a lot quicker, if we drew upon the pool of astronauts and possible-astronauts who are willing to do a long-term mission in the name of science.
Pour as much money as they can into psychological screenings and legal documents making sure that they are absolutely not liable, and send them off. The real reason we've stayed on Earth and its orbiting bodies is that we've concentrated too much on packing enough fuel with them for a round-trip, and not enough on finding ways to allow Humans to live indefinitely in enclosed Martian settlements. The current model of "go to star, get data, come home, instant hero" is just not feasible for meaningful space travel beyond what we have today.
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It should be a minimum of a 6 year trip to justify the expense. They can send supplies on a regular schedule and the containers can be utilized on site. A regular base could be built and people could be rotated out after their 6 year stay or they could stay on if they wanted to. Imagine the exploration and discovery possible with a long term team on the ground.
Step by step. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. A cheap way to launch supplies into Earth orbit. No people will be shipped this way so even a huge cannon would be good.
2. Prep the supplies from #1 in orbit (need a space station or shuttle for this) and use cheap, slow engines to get them to Mars.
3. The supplies enter Mars orbit and stay there until they are signalled from the ground to come down.
Keep up a steady stream and roll any improvements into the system and you should be able to supply a mission for however long you want to keep them alive.
Getting them back to Earth will be a problem.
Are there any volunteers for a one-way mission?
At least until they can assemble their own launch pad to get their people back into orbit.
Re:Step by step. (Score:5, Informative)
A more complete step by step plan. Robotic/Automated/Remote controlled equipment is used throughout to prepare the way ahead of large numbers of humans:
(1) Advanced Manufacturing - Using modular automated systems that can bootstrap much of their own construction. This has a goal of lowering manufacturing cost by a large factor. It is first used on Earth to build the factories to build the first space systems, and then later used in space to leverage local energy and materials resources.
(2) Hypervelocity Launcher - This is a low development cost device for launching bulk cargo. Delicate cargo and humans still travel by conventional rockets. At the moment there is enough cost savings to justify such a launcher, but if other vehicles get cheap enough, it may not be needed.
(3) Orbital Assembly - Assemble larger space systems from smaller components launched from Earth, or later manufactured in space. Smaller components means you can use smaller launch systems from Earth, which have lower startup cost.
(4) Electric Thrusters - These have about 10 times the fuel efficiency of existing rockets, and enable highly leveraged mining and processing.
(5) Orbital Mining - Mining small asteroids in orbits close to the Earth for raw materials. The mass return ratio is so high, especially with getting fuel from the next step, it dramatically affects all subsequent cost.
(6) Processing Factory - Converts raw materials mined in space into useful inventory such as fuel, oxygen, structural parts, etc.
(7) Space Elevator - This allows using the highly efficient electric thrusters in place of rockets for much of the transport job in gravity wells, starting with the Earth's.
(8) Human Transport - This improves the methods for transporting humans and cargo which cannot withstand the high acceleration of the hypervelocity launcher.
(9) Lunar Development - With our in-space infrastructure well developed, we can now access the Moon in a robust fashion and start to use it's relatively large mass and surface area.
(10) Interplanetary Development - Transfer habitats in orbits between Earth and Mars. Since they don't move, they can have heavy shielding and greenhouses. Crews use small vehicles to get from habitat to planet orbit at each end of the trip
(11) Mars Development - Use materials from Phobos to build elevator to Mars surface, and start to build up Mars.
More details here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Combined_Systems [wikibooks.org]
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Advanced manufacturing pays for itself on Earth, regardless of if you do anything in space, by being more efficient.
Bulk cargo delivery is a cheaper way to deliver supplies to Low Earth Orbit. Customers at first would be places like Space Station, and communications satellites (which need a lot of fuel to get to GEO). Those are existing markets.
Steps 3-6 work together. They both make it cheaper to go anywhere past LEO (electric thrusters), and provide their own fuel (mining and processing), so it's self-
Re:Step by step. (Score:5, Interesting)
Step one is a VanNeuman machine. Go ahead and dream, but realize that it's tougher then you think. Historically, it took lathes and surface grinders to build mills and rotary grinders, if that helps your thinking. All those presuppose metal mining, refining, casting, heat treating etc etc. I'd pre-assume cutting tools and the like come from earth.
You might also get some real world manufacturing experience. Check that, it would contaminate your purity. Maker bots can do anything or will be able to soon.
I think they need to start with metal processing in space: In the asteroid belt, using robotic vacuum processes, large reflectors and solar sail powered tugs (that pre-heat the ore asteroids on the way to the metal sputtering sight. Useless on earth; start with mission one. Purpose: capture a nickle iron asteroid with solar sail probe and heat using sail, optional: melt it. Final option. Blow a bubble with it. Second final option: Sputter a beam onto a thin wire starter, see how long you can get it to grow, continuous process, feeding out the wire. Hot metal plus solar wind should sputter. Might have to be very hot metal.
Then again I might want to get some real world space experience. Check that...
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No, maybe I should.
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Steps 3-6 work together.
They can also not work together. For example, you have yet to describe a market for bulk cargo delivery. Neither of your examples could exploit it.
My view is that things are going to move slowly because of the chicken and egg problem of providing services that really only cheapen in the presence of significant, but nonexistent demand. For example, what's going drive demand for a space elevator? It'll take much cheaper versions of current sorts of launch vehicles to encourage the demand that supports the
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At least until they can assemble their own launch pad to get their people back into orbit.
No small task on a planet that has 38% our gravity, an inhospitable atmosphere, and no large scale mining, manufacturing, or fabrication plant. It would take many years and many missions to make the colonies self sustaining. Currently, our closest attempt at living in a closed ecosystem (biosphere-2) resulted in 2 years, with O2 dropping and CO2 rising heavily towards the end of the experiment. Worse yet, the experiment spawned a movie staring Pauly Shore. It's not that I don't believe that we will ha
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2. Prep the supplies from #1 in orbit (need a space station or shuttle for this) and use cheap, slow engines to get them to Mars.
Yup, you're more than half-way to Mars in terms of delta-v just by getting into LEO.
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Only if we can mine unobtanium without getting our asses kicked by blue aliens.
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And, of course, some magic technology so the kiloRads of radiation dose during the trips don't kill the astronauts. 1-2 kRad/year in round numbers.. 600 Rad is a fairly quick death, 300 Rad lets you linger in pain a bit.
We call it "mass". Throw enough protons in the way and you've mitigated the radiation problem well enough.
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That's why I have orbital mining and transfer habitats in the step-by-step approach above. They are in orbits between Earth and Mars, and don't move once set up. They have mass shielding and greenhouses for life support. You get the raw materials for that from asteroids already in orbits between the two planets, so the delta v to move stuff to the desired orbits is not that much.
Crew and supplies meet up with the transfer habitats when they are close to Earth, and drop off when they are close to Mars, so
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Really, they just need to RTFM [wikipedia.org] (and cough up a metric shitload of money).
Easy peasy.
Re:If NASA really wants to go for space exploratio (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuel for a return trip is mostly an excuse. You just need to do the return trip in two hops: bring enough fuel in the lander to get yourself to orbit, then dock with a giant tanker that carries enough fuel for the rest of the trip. Mars gravity is only about twice that of the Moon, and we got a lander into lunar orbit over fifty years ago, so I can't imagine a Mars ascent being that much of a leap.
The harder part is actually landing a pod big enough to provide long-term living quarters. You could probably do it with inflatable buildings and large air compressors, but you'd still need a supplemental oxygen supply and either a steady supply of food and oxygen or a means of producing your own.
The ideal solution would require landing somewhere with water ice. Water can provide oxygen by electrolysis. Sure, there are other ways to get oxygen (using CO2 electrolysis, for example), but that won't provide them with the water they'll need for other things like cooking, bathing, etc., so landing somewhere with an ample supply of water would be a big plus.
So combine some very powerful air compressors with oxygen generators, lots of heating coils, some inflatable buildings, some disassembled airtight greenhouses, two or three shipments containing large, rolled-up solar panel sheets, etc. and it might actually be feasible to create a long-term habitat on Mars for not a lot more than the cost of a few rover missions. Remember to provide at least three of everything so that they won't be screwed if one of them doesn't work, preferably in separate bundles within reasonable walking distance of a single drop zone. Then provide a small lander with enough reserve oxygen and power to last them a month or two just in case it takes them longer than expected to get things set up.
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Not to mention free radiation... how healthy is it to be that close to RTGs for extended periods of time? How much shielding do you need?
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You need to be able to handle a temperature gradient of almost three hundred degrees between the outdoors and the indoors, and if you're using inflatable housing, I doubt it will insulate particularly well. You think your power bill in the winter is high.... I think it might be pushing the limits of at least the RTGs that are readily available.
Now my quick back-of-the-envelope math says that with resistance heat, some of the larger RTGs could readily handle heating a decent size structure, but that's bef
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Electrolysis means splitting using electricity, so no, they don't. More to the point, plants don't convert CO2 to O2 at all. The oxygen released by plants comes from the water that they consume, not the carbon dioxide (source: HowPlantsWork.com [howplantswork.com]).
Also, using plants to produce oxygen is a good idea in theory, but would likely require a relatively large enclosure relative to the number of people who live in it. It might be feasible once you have established a temporary base, but until you have built/assemb
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... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm.
Agreed, but an unmanned mission will accomplish much more than wasting time and resources trying to keep a person alive. Of all the fantastic space exploration that has happened over the years, the one that impressed me the most was when Huygens landed on Saturn's moon Titan. That was the most unworldly thing I've ever seen.
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Yes, because that makes much more sense than spending hundreds of times more on fuel and boosters to send enough material for them to build a settlement. Plus the tens of times more on fuel and boosters per year to keep the settlement running. Plus the increase
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What the hell are they playing at? (Score:2, Informative)
Given that they only recently pulled funding for ExoMars, nearly screwing over a lot of people in Europe (thanks, Russia, by the way) it's a bit hard to believe they're just saying "eh, we want to do our own thing again".
Sort it out, NASA.
Re:What the hell are they playing at? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd not blame NASA for this but rather congress, which tends to try to exert strong control over NASA, which in many areas really amounts to micro-managing projects, without Congress really understanding what it is doing...
Send some TSA screeners (Score:4)
That way we'll get a short period of actual usefulness out of them for once.
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Is this like the joke about using lawyers for scientific research because the researchers got too attached to the rats?
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I actually doubt its a joke. In this case, its more likely that he really would like TSA screeners to be blasted into orbit with no return.
We have a winner!
Go there. (Score:2)
Remember when NASA was composed of engineers ... (Score:2)
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I work at NASA Goddard. I can assure you of this: "engineers" at NASA are looked down upon. At NASA you are nothing unless you are "scientist."
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Here's a thought, look for life! (Score:2)
Why bother (Score:2, Interesting)
And spare me the Spacex stuff. Unless they are immune from liability, and bankruptcy. A few mishaps, some dead space tourists, and we're permanently grounded.
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Unless they are immune from liability, and bankruptcy. A few mishaps, some dead space tourists, and we're permanently grounded.
Counterexamples for the liability claim: skydiving, deep sea diving, and expeditions to Mt. Everest. We've figured out liability else these tourist industries wouldn't exist.
The bankruptcy issue is still there, but I think of that as a feature not a bug. If SpaceX can't pay the bills, then I want them out of the way efficiently. Bankruptcy court provides such a means.
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the end is near.... (Score:2)
I read the challenge areas, basically it's all the things that the guys working at NASA should be doing, if the Federal Government hadn't slashed their already inadequate budget to the point where it is now nothing more than a bunch of bureaucrats doing time.... So now some organization called the "Lunar and Planetary Institute" a division of "Universities Space Research Association" - to quote: "USRA engages the creativity and authoritative expertise of the research community to develop and deliver so
Ok, doesn't sound hard. (Score:4, Informative)
Surface and sub-surface mapping is easy. LADAR gives you the surface map, thermal imaging (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13518143 and http://thermal-imaging-blog.com/index.php/2011/06/06/finding-pyramids/#.T4tWe9Xe4tY [thermal-imaging-blog.com]) gives you subsurface structures and a good idea of what the composition is.
Triage is more complex but doable. Different materials allow radio through at different velocities and refract at different angles, so a simple system is to use a GPR setup with multiple receivers. If you know the difference in time it takes to transmit a signal from A to B through one medium versus another, plus what appears to be behind what when you look at one point versus another, then you know enough. (This is because we can reproduce the minerals we do know are on Mars and can therefore know what those look like using such technology in advance. The stuff you'd want to triage is stuff that doesn't fit with behaviours we'd expect to see.)
But GPR is energy-intensive. No big deal - if it's a triage, you know the general area, you're wanting specifics. Since moving to a location is going to take days by rover, you can afford to triage by any process that consumes as much power as your solar cells can gather in that time. You can afford for it to be wasteful, because you don't have to carry more than one target area's worth of power at any one time and can recharge the batteries between runs.
The original scans have to be a lot more conservative, since you need to perform an unknown amount of surveying and therefore cannot use more power than you can gather in the same amount of time, but isolating a point out of a fixed, small area is going to be a brief, infrequent task. The quality therefore matters far more than the power requirements, when you're working that way round.
Identifying organics will be hard without some sort of spectral analysis. The detection of methane in the past is only significant if that methane was produced by biochemical process rather than an inorganic process, and that is currently unknown. Further, it's only important if the organic found is ALSO an organic relating to such methane production. Terrestrial biochemistry is highly diverse, so there's no such guarantee. Assuming you were looking for those specific organisms, however, life operates with a negative feedback system. Thus, if a process produces X then as the concentration of X increases the production must decrease. X will eventually become toxic to the process. Since we've seen methane and the Viking landers saw CO2 production, you might want to take methane and CO2 along. By repeating the Viking experiment with differing, controlled levels of initial CO2 and methane, you should determine if a negative feedback loop exists. If you saturate, run the experiment then return to a known previous unsaturated state an inorganic system -might- produce the same response as it did in that same state previously. An organic system is guaranteed not to, since you created an environment that was toxic.
There's one catch. This requires spectral analysis and the requirement said you can't do that. True, all chemical responses (organic or inorganic) will also produce a heat signature (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) but ALL the chemistry will be producing heat and you will have NO idea what fraction might be biochemical and therefore NO means of predicting what level of reduction in activity is significant. (If 1% of the activity might be biochemical, you're looking at a very different level of difference being significant than if 90% might be biochemical.) If you can't construct a hypothesis H1 in the first place, you cannot establish how likely it is if what you are seeing is H1 or H0.
There are techniques for extracting proteins in biochemistry. IIRC, you need them to be in a solution, you add various solvents and reagents and then you filter. Then you're just measuring the mass of that part of the filter vs. the expected
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If you know the difference in time it takes to transmit a signal from A to B through one medium versus another, plus what appears to be behind what when you look at one point versus another, then you know enough
That sounds like a knapsack problem. If your signal travels through unknown distances of materials with a known signal propagation time, how do you know what combination of what amount of different materials you're transmitting through?
Put another way: How many combinations of coins (materials) can you use to add up to a dollar (total propagation time)?
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Assuming that any given material is relatively uniform (or can be approximated as such), you can treat the problem as a set of unknowns in a set of linear equations. You need one linear equation per unknown in order to solve for all unknowns. In my example, five receivers "should" solve five unknowns for one transmission - though not really, since you're drawing lines through media you can't guarantee being the same. So you'd want to perform a number of tests at differing places in order to know how many un
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The chemistry kit, like I said, likely wouldn't fit or survive the journey, even if you had some guarantee it would be applicable (which you don't). Since I've already said that, it would be stupid of you to be complaining about the very problems I said it had.
The GPR can certainly fit in that space, no problem, and be absolutely flawless. Battery is taken care of, since you DON'T have to run the thing for months - a GPR is something you only use for a few seconds every month, and you can certainly recharge
For any long term manned mission anywhere... (Score:3)
...some obstacles need to be dealt with:
- Energy: The theory is there, as is a practically unlimited supply of helium-3 on the Moon. That's a stopover just to refuel and the ready technology for controlled nuclear fusion. Step n-1: permanent lunar base.
- Food/water: OK, the water bit is easy: pretty much the simplest polyatomic compound in existence, it has many uses including oxygen generation (photoelectrics/hydroponics?), and it can be recycled to an infinite degree. It's also pretty dense, so storage isn't much of a problem. Food is a simple matter of growing your own, for which a garden needs to be built and the necessary skills present to maintain it to the point where it is a constantly replenishable source of chemical energy and other essential nutrients. Such gardens can be located on the lunar colony, in orbit around Earth, the Moon or Mars (better yet, all three), with a limited supply onboard to be replenished during stopovers during the trip.
- Psychological studies: impacts on long-term enclosure in tin can environments (ask the Russians), in small groups of less than half a dozen (ask the Russians or any political prisoner), and application of these studies to determine the suitability of any candidate for the mission as to their likely responses to such conditions and steps that can be taken to mitigate any negative effects such as cabin fever - wouldn't do the mission any good to have someone suddenly decide they're going for a walk without a spacesuit on. Strike that, it'd be an End-Of-Mission event.
- Damage control. We're talking about micrometeoroid strikes, radiation surges, orbital anomalies, structural failures, electronic failures, and the training required to recover from those.
There's just a few. There's a lot more, probably even more that I wouldn't think of if I wrote a thousand pages on it, never mind two. I think the eggheads are talking about a robotic mission here. For which I would suggest a small, semi-autonomous probe with the ability to cover large distances rapidly (neutrally buoyant craft with fan engines?) and the ability to take and analyse samples with the equipment it has onboard. So, some serious miniaturisation technology, probably some endlessly renewable power source (printed PV array?), redundant systems (or more than one probe)... it could be done with technology we have now, the question is how to utilise what we have, or how to adapt what we have to do what we want?
Send congress to Mars (Score:2)
its all around a winner ... we get people on mars, clean house, and I doubt anyone would bitch about the cost
How to get funding for Mars (Score:2, Funny)
(2) oil
(3) lower taxes
(4) god
(5) fighting terrorism
No accompanying explanations, rational arguments will only blunt the force of these compelling interests.
Advanced manufacturing no human lives (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's think of a realistic plan and what its purpose is. I submit the purpose should be meaningful exploration toward expansion of the human race to the stars in order to:
- understand our environment,
- increase survivability of catastrophes, and
- grow our technical capabilities to a scale necessary to meet the challenges this endeavor presents.
The purpose is not to waste human lives, or waste time, or make political basketball.
We gain the hearts of the populace by making solid progress on the timescales of everyday lives, building momentum, and teaching science so that the populace understands why space is important.
Incidentally nobody wants to go die on Mars or to make a mission that will require dying so let's just stop talking about getting volunteers.
If we try to make a manned mission to Mars in the near future, it is going to be extremely risky and in the best case will end up like the manned moon mission: a success after many years but then a long hiatus of no exploration after that, since we have "gone there". I recommend we do not waste resources on manned travel to Mars yet, at least not without a much faster engine, and proceed with the following:
First of all we need funded projects immediately covering:
- develop a robust, automated, semi-intelligent manufacturing capability able to mine, create parallel worker bots, build smelter and factory, develop energy sources such as solar and heat gradient, etc.
- develop an ultra-high velocity launcher
- develop high speed space engines, whether this is nuclear or ion-based remains to be seen
- develop micro-size exploration craft
The manufacturing technology will be built for use on our own planet and perfect here for many uses and climes. It will work underwater, on arid mountain slopes, in antarctica, in the steamy tropics. It will survive attacks by wild animals, tornadoes, floods and monsoons. This project will revolutionize the human realities and economies of Africa and will turn our deserts into solar energy farms. It can be approached as if an alien space exploration and exploitation mission to Earth, which will might help its promotion.
The high-speed space engine will allow us to explore moon, asteroids and Mars on a time-scale that allows many missions during our lifetimes. Do it in months and years not decades.
The launcher will launch seed of this technology to the moon and will be perfected there with astronauts going there for a specific purpose, not just "to go" and make everyone feel good. In other words, the next time we go to the Moon we will take with us a superior technology and feel we can easily set up shop anywhere on the Moon we want.
The exploration craft will be useable on the Earth, Moon, Mars and anywhere else we want to go. Ultimately we want to be able to add capabilities so these semi-autonomous agents can roll, jump, fly, swim, climb etc. as needed and take advantage of local energy sources. Use on the Moon, Mars, Europa and the asteroid belt will be the goals. Before we get there, we can use them on Earth for exploration underwater or in jungles, and for search and rescue, and response to natural disasters like forest fires and tsunamis. Certainly such a capability would have been useful in the Fukushima disaster.
Realistically, our current technology is not high enough at the present moment to sustain a human presence on Mars or the Moon. Ideally from the perspective of someone going there, we would like to have an intelligent, autonomous nanotechnology that could somehow go there ahead of us and build us an entire self-contained, self-repairing station while allowing us to decide what we want to do with the planet. For example whether to leave it as-is, bombard it with ice, seed it with hardy lifeforms, etc.
However an advanced semi-automated manufacturing technology that can slash at the costs and time scales required to develop and maintain this machinery would be very useful, both on Earth and on Mars. If we can better marshal our resources through superior technology it will make life better on Earth as well as bring us a step closer to meaningful exploitation of space.
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Have you been reading the book I've been working on?
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods [wikibooks.org]
If not, you may want to, and even contribute. It's a wiki project, so help is welcome, as long as you know what you are talking about.
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Hi,
No I haven't read it but will check it out. Thanks.
Matt
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This has to be one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot in years. Ever since the "web" became popular, /. has become somewhat less nerdy as more and more "normal" folks polluted it with their crap. /. used to be like, "back in the day" (and me a 6-digiter as well! I bow before my betters!).
Thanks for reminding me what
Now, in order of importance;
1) Sorry I don't have any mod privs. left. Used them up yesterday, otherwise I'd have made this +5 and not commented.
2) Submit this to NASA as par
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Thank you very much. I will look at the site.
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Dude, they can find volunteers that will strap a large hunk of C4 under their ballsack, get on a plane, and detonate it.
I bet finding folks for a one way trip to explore Mars would be easy in comparison, considering that we are all essentially on a one way trip down a birth canal to explore Earth.
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Thanks for your comment. Yes I know there are actually individuals who would go. But, politically it would be a big downer. And I am not so sure it would be a good way to enthuse the next generation with space flight. I could of course be wrong but I would much rather see a nuclear powered space fleet that could send people to Mars and back, instead of seeing a one way trip. Presumably anyone fit enough to get to Mars and do something useful on the planet, has plenty of years left to their natural span but
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You are welcome to go then.
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Sorry. The concept is that a mechanical or biological machine can, given the necessary elements oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and so on, build human scale structures, devices, food, plants, etc. including all necessary compounds. Sounds like a magic wand since we are not close yet to such an assembler technology. Until we have magic seeds you can plant that will send down roots and grow a house for you, we will need factories.
looking for ideas? u mean money and steady vision (Score:2)
with money and a steady vision (not changing every few years), it should be a straight forward
Strange timing by NASA (Score:2)
Strange timing on this one. They should at least wait for the Mars Science Lab to touchdown - it won't even be too long until it does, since it's already on its way. That way, media attention on Mars and public awareness/interest in Mars missions will be far greater.
Send Ron Paul (Score:2)
Because it would be ironic.
I'll need three ships and fifty stout men! (Score:2)
~ We're looking for plans for a trip to Mars...
~ Arrrr....Could you give me five minutes?
.
ARES? (Score:2)
Doesn't NASA already have a great idea for a Mars exploration mission? ARES [nasa.gov]?
Re:Send criminals (Score:5, Insightful)
You could probably send volunteers. But sending criminals is pointless. Survival on a mars mission will require an extreme level of technical skill that just isn't plausible to develop in that population. Sending criminals is just a ludicrously expensive way to implement the death penalty (and existing systems are egregiously expensive enough).
Re:Send criminals (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pointless for another reason, given a chance to go to mars, even if ostensibly a "one way trip" NASA would have far more volunteers than they need, including many many fit and technically competent candidates.
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Phobos and Deimos barely even qualify as "moons", and are really just small rocks in orbit around Mars. They have no significant gravity, and aren't even round. You can't shape them into living habitats, because they have no gravity; people don't do well in microgravity over long periods. If you're going to build any living habitats anywhere, they have to be in a gravity well, unless you can figure out how to keep peoples' bones from deteriorating in microgravity. This is why a Moon base make sense: it'
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Ok, that sounds great and all, but we have to be realistic. All we've done so far is send some humans to the Moon to hit some golf balls and drive around in a buggy. Hollowing out a very small moon and spinning it (requiring some massive engines) is well beyond our capabilities at this point. In fact, we'd have a much easier time skipping the moons and sending people straight to Mars and having them build underground living habitats there. At least that wouldn't require some kind of massive engines big
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Luna is a moon named Moon.
Don't name something by its role,
Or you'll sound like a complete buffoon.
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Are you stupid? We're destroying our environment mining here on Earth. How'd you like to live next to an open-pit mine? You're an absolute moron; you probably think we should spend resources conquering other nations.
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In a game of survival on earth, absolutely. On mars, give me someone with a pretty advanced education, because weapons development counts for little when you can't breathe.
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I think given that mars life is at best microscopic, there actually isn't a whole lot of caring whether or not we wipe them out in the process of exploring mars.
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It's not that sterilization wouldn't be desirable for human exploration, it's that it's impossible. We are symbiotic with a lot of flora, we cannot survive without them. Any manned mission is, of necessity, not sterile. Mars' surface is so actively hostile, though, that the spreading contagion theory isn't much of a threat. The real reason we sterilize is to help rule out the possibility that we delivered life in the event that we find it in the future.
Re:Send criminals (Score:5, Funny)
Send criminals, the way the British used Australia. Either they make it or they don't, but you don't have to worry about packing fuel for the return trip. Ship them supplies and see what happens.
All right! Whom do I have to kill to get a slot?
Re:Send criminals (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a flaw in your metaphor: timeline.
The European discovery of Australia was in 1606 - this is about equivalent to "sending a small, Apollo-like exploration mission to Mars". More and more exploratory missions went on from various countries, but colonization was effectively unattempted until the late 1700s, nearly two centuries later (and driven, at least in part, by the American Revolution cutting off the outflow of "transported" criminals to America).
In short, sending a large number of unskilled and unmotivated colonists to a new land won't work until at least decades after initial, small-scale exploration is possible. You need at least hundreds (the first British Australian colony was over a thousand settlers) to have a sustainable colony - right now, we can't send tens, much less hundreds or thousands, of people to Mars, even one-way. Sending prisoners, half a dozen at a time, to Mars, at the cost of billions per trip, would get us nothing but a pile of skeletons on a distant planet and a national deficit that will require new fields of mathematics just to calculate.
The Moon might be a more plausible location (and by "more plausible" I mean "slightly closer to physically possible"). But even then, the metaphorical timescale doesn't look to good - we probably won't have a permanent Moon colony until 2150, by your analogy.
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you are aware that the recent bank bailout was larger than the entire operational budget of NASA to date?
Re:Send criminals (Score:4, Interesting)
Or how about Mars big brother
it should be fun to watch the 'astronauts' or contestants slowly lose they're sanity while trapped in a metal can on the way to mars
being watched on camera everywhere they go
of course you'd have to dedicate a large chunk of the craft to the cameras and the big chair
and to keep those supplies coming, we need ratings
send a couple of bots called Huey Dewey And Louie (see Silent running), or for a bit more deranged fun how about that bot from Saturn 3
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...or the one from The Black hole? Not the orange one that looked like Zax [sharetv.org] fucked a dustbin (B.O.B. LF 28 [slipperybrick.com]), the huge red one [tumblr.com].
Re:Your Mom (Score:4, Insightful)
really.
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Well it's worse than that. You make a comment that get's voted up, and now I'm wondering what you replied to that got you voted up, so now I am forced to read the parent who'd been filtered out at -1.
Thanks for ruining my lunch.
Re:Here is my idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
Re:Here is my idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
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As long as your district gets enough pork you can cut as much as you want.
Re:Here is my idea: (Score:5, Funny)
Send the elderly to Mars?
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It's a good idea, but in terms of price per euthanasia it's just not cost effective.
That's not a bad idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a good idea, but in terms of price per euthanasia it's just not cost effective.
Aside from that, the elderly could be great astronauts. It'll be a long voyage to Mars and back and the elderly would have the wisdom and the coping skills for such a long, monotonous, and boring trip. And logistically, they're a better pick: they need as much food to support their bodies.
And considering the danger involved, well I think most elderly people I know have come to peace with the idea that they don't have much longer. In addition, I think we don't give old people enough credit and in turn it cre
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This may or may not work. But worth a try, right?
Re:Here is my idea: (Score:5, Funny)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay [wikipedia.org].
Unfortunately, apparently NASA are looking for input for *new* ideas for Mars exploration, and this idea has been looked at already, I presume.
This is nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should anyone waste their time sending NASA anything? We already have enough goddamn ideas already. What we need now is someone to put them into action, not more meetings to plan more meetings.
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Yes, because there's tons of companies with hundreds of billions willing to invest that money even though they won't get a return on it in 20+ years.
Moron.
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It doesn't take "tons." All it takes is ONE company, ONE person with vision.
Re:Here is my idea: (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is my idea: Soylent Green (Score:2)
Then we'll have the money to go to mars. Oh, wait! I forgot. I'm freaking elderly!
Keep yer filthy Govmnt hands off'n my Medicare!
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This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
And of course, morons like the guy above complaining about too much spending will say that the military shouldn't be cut at all.
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until the next tool gains office, puts in a new lap-dog and claims that visiting mars is against gods will, but we should pour billions into state lobbied pork funds for it anyway
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Idea's place. " To come to idea's for the mission"
Silly rabbit, ideas can't explore mars, We can send monkeys, they're expendible. Failing that we have far more politicians than we can handle. Expendible as well. They may even have compatible genes, so colonization isn't out of the question. I'd do something about that atmosphere first or it will only be a MOSTLY good idea. Well, either way...
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is there anything useful to mine on the moon?
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