The Case For Going To Phobos Before Going To Mars 150
MarkWhittington writes: The current NASA thinking concerning the Journey to Mars program envisions a visit to the Martian moon Phobos in the early 2030s before attempting a landing on the Martian surface in the late 2030s, as Popular Mechanics noted. The idea of a practice run that takes astronauts almost but not quite to Mars is similar to what the space agency did during the 1960s Apollo program. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 each orbited the moon but did not land on it before the Apollo 11 mission went all the way to the lunar surface, fulfilling President John. F. Kennedy's challenge.
if this is the spearhead of human colonization (Score:1)
than Phobos would be 'just the tip'
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With Phobos being so close to Mars, setting up a station there could be useful beyond just a stepping stone onto Mars.
We could send robots onto the surface that could be directly and nearly instantaneously piloted by humans that are stationed on Phobos. Essentially it could be a form of telepresence without the dangers and difficulties associated with actually landing on Mars.
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We could send robots onto the surface that could be directly and nearly instantaneously piloted by humans that are stationed on Phobos.
An automated car can drive 30 miles on US Highway 101, avoiding thousands of other moving objects going between 0mph and 65mph. Do we really need a human driver for the Mars robots, which only have to steer around some rocks, and are thousand of miles from any other vehicle? Especially as this would be the most expensive human driver ever.
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We're not sending a manned mission to Mars to explore Mars. We want to send human guinea pigs to Mars and back, to see if they'll survive the trip.
An interesting option (Score:2)
I think that it's an interesting option, and establishing a base on Phobos could be used as a starting point for other expeditions as well.
Of course the surface of Mars is the primary goal, but a nearby base could provide advantages.
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If we can't build a sustainable habitat on the Moon, then we forget about Mars.
Re: An interesting option (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't build a sustainable habitat in Antarctica or in the middle of a desert, why bother with the Moon? :)
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Who said we can't? We should aim the Moon. It shouldn't be fully manned, an automated base which can sustain visitors like the ISS, would be enough as starters.
The Moon has smaller gravity than Earth, yet it has gravity, so people can live there for a long time without various problems, it makes sense to have a base there if we plan longer journeys in space. The Moon could have a fuel station and probably also an automated spaceship factory. If water / metal resources could be brought there from extra terre
Re: An interesting option (Score:5, Informative)
We can build a base that is resupplied, and it would be a much cheaper to experiment with base building technology on the moon than it would be on Mars. The Moon is a couple of days away in a space capsule, Mars is two years away at best. Keeping humans alive is the hardest and most expensive part of space exploration and Earth is by far the most livable planet in the solar system, so why bother sending people? Why not spend that money understanding and repairing the incredibly sophisticated life support systems of the space ship we are all riding on now? We won't be making any interstellar trips until we do understand it enough to replicate it on a small scale.
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We really cannot build a "sustainable habitat" anywhere, "biosphere 2" has the longest record of about 2 years, the experiment ended when they ran out of oxygen, food, and patience with each other.
We can build a base that is resupplied, and it would be a much cheaper to experiment with base building technology on the moon than it would be on Mars. The Moon is a couple of days away in a space capsule, Mars is two years away at best. Keeping humans alive is the hardest and most expensive part of space exploration and Earth is by far the most livable planet in the solar system, so why bother sending people? Why not spend that money understanding and repairing the incredibly sophisticated life support systems of the space ship we are all riding on now? We won't be making any interstellar trips until we do understand it enough to replicate it on a small scale.
We need robots for now, and humans later. Basically we should have a two-pronged approach, one aimed at developing the technologies for working in space and one aimed at the biological engineering side of eventually terraforming a self-sustainable world. That will be an undertaking of centuries, but it is our best bet for having humanity survive.
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We really cannot build a "sustainable habitat" anywhere, "biosphere 2" has the longest record of about 2 years, the experiment ended when they ran out of oxygen, food, and patience with each other.
Biosphere2 failed for many reasons, including the fact that they didn't take into account the fact that curing concrete sequestered CO2 at a high enough rate that the plants were unable to survive, and that in not surviving, they failed to produce O2 from the CO2 they were getting, which made it harder on the animals (including humans).
In the second series of experiments, it was also very common for the door alarms to be bypassed, and they would order out for pizza. The pizza delivery guy who used to go ou
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That's sort of the point. There will be unforeseen problems, mistakes, etc and recovery from those will be almost impossible. Even the James town colony died off and it was in a much more hospitable climate.
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If we wanted to start building a permanent moon base today, we could do it. We have the technology. But it would be catastrophically expensive and there would be little for the people to do once they got there. Ideas about building spaceships on the moon are utter fan
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The moon has one interesting feature, and it's not colonization.
Aluminum has about the same concentration there as on Earth, but the gravity is significantly lower.
Iron has a slightly higher concentration than aluminum.
A railgun can achieve lunar orbital speed (2.4km/sec).
We have the technology. General Dynamics [gizmag.com] has a gun that can shoot at 2.55 km/sec.
This technology is more commonly known as a mass driver [wikipedia.org].
The thought is that a mining operation could use the 14-day light cycle to orbit refined metal or cons
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Actually that sounds like the moon is ripe for colonization. A factory colony building the ships and equipment needed for a Mars mission. All we need is a large water source.
Sure it will be highly automated mining, refining, and construction. But if you built the iss there it would take a fraction of the power to get it into orbit. A short flight back to earth for food transfer and sling shot to Mars. Where you stop at Phobos. Switch to a Mars lander/ take vehicle there for landing leaving your carrier in o
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The moon has one interesting feature, and it's not colonization. Aluminum has about the same concentration there as on Earth, but the gravity is significantly lower. Iron has a slightly higher concentration than aluminum.
A railgun can achieve lunar orbital speed (2.4km/sec). We have the technology. General Dynamics [gizmag.com] has a gun that can shoot at 2.55 km/sec.
This technology is more commonly known as a mass driver [wikipedia.org].
The thought is that a mining operation could use the 14-day light cycle to orbit refined metal or construction components. Since very little propellant would be necessary, a lot of material is attainable. Metal is the heaviest and therefore costliest material to move out of a gravity well.
Proposals like this show a profound misunderstanding of space flight costs. The two principal costs in space flight are the costs of making the space flight hardware, and the cost of maintaining and managing the vast ground-based infrastructure of a space flight program. Launch costs are relatively unimportant, and the focus on launch and orbital velocity changes is completely misplaced.
Currently, with SpaceX, we are at point where we can project $1000/lb launch costs. At that price point, space exploration
Re: An interesting option (Score:5, Interesting)
We can't build a sustainable habitat in Antarctica or in the middle of a desert
Can't or won't? I would have thought that it would be possible to create a habitat in either that would require nothing incoming. Not easy, but not impossible. It would just cost a fuck of a lot to build and would probably require a very large area (either above or below ground) to support just a few people.
Both locations, however, have the immeasurable benefit of being on a planet with a breathable atmosphere and getting the huge amount of resources required to set up this habitat to the location would not involve climbing a gravity well.
It's definitely a "won't" for anywhere on Earth and likely a "can't" for anywhere else in the solar system.
Haven't figured out biospheres - yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't or won't? I would have thought that it would be possible to create a habitat in either that would require nothing incoming.
So far we cannot. We've tried several times and haven't cracked the problem yet. That's not to say we won't figure it out or that the problem is intractable but so far we haven't even figured it out on Earth much less in zero-G. I have some confidence that with enough resources applied we can solve the problem but to date that hasn't happened.
Incorrect. (Score:3, Informative)
Can't or won't? I would have thought that it would be possible to create a habitat in either that would require nothing incoming.
So far we cannot. We've tried several times and haven't cracked the problem yet.
We can and we did. It was euphemistically called "The U.S. Government Relocation Facility", but it's code name was "Project Greek Island", and it was capable of sustaining a fairly large population and support staff for 30 years, in the event of a nuclear war.
"The Raven Rock Mountain Complex" was built as a similar "relocation facility" intended for the Pentagon.
"The Cheyenne Mountain Complex" was another facility, for SAC/NORAD.
"The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center" was intended for use by FEMA;
Fallout shelters are not biospheres (Score:5, Informative)
We can and we did. It was euphemistically called "The U.S. Government Relocation Facility", but it's code name was "Project Greek Island", and it was capable of sustaining a fairly large population and support staff for 30 years, in the event of a nuclear war.
Project Greek Island [wikipedia.org] was a fallout bunker at the Greenbriar Hotel. It was NOT a biosphere or even close to one. It was a fallout shelter, nothing more. I have personally been in that particular bunker myself now that it is open to the public. I stayed at the hotel a few years back. It certainly wasn't designed or equipped to operate for 30 years. The facility EXISTED for 30 years of operation but it was only designed to be occupied for a relatively short time. It had enough space to have congress and the senate plus a few of the white house staff and not much more. A few hundred people maximum.
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Can't or won't?
Won't. The Antarctic Treaty restricts what you can do down there, and building a self-sustaining colony would be too much like "claiming" territory. A friend who spent a couple of summers there in the 80's said you're not allowed to build "permanent" structures. Of course they do anyway, but they have to be built in such a way that they can be completely (and cleanly) torn down and hauled away, to leave the land in pristine condition.
I'm sure it would be possible to build such a colony, but it's much easier
Re: An interesting option (Score:4, Interesting)
If the goal is to build a habitat in extreme cold conditions, I'm sure Alaska has plenty of places to build it. Before we likely spend trillions of dollars sending a body to mars, I'd like to see a self sustaining habitat on Earth last for at least 10 years. And have it be one that is the same size and contents as would be buildable off planet. And it would be even better if they were able to do more than just survive.
As I've said before, even if we totally trashed the earth, it would still likely be more habitable than the moon or mars or anywhere else we could go to. I suspect a post-nuked earth would be more human friendly than dwelling on another planet.
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Extreme cold is not the show-stopper here, we've been dealing with that for decades already. Sustainability is the goal, and even that is a "soft" target. Any serious colonization effort, such as Musk is proposing, will send many tons of fresh supplies at every launch opportunity, giving the colonists a buffer toward self reliance.
Do we know how to grow food in a greenhouse? Check.
Do we know how to recycle the vast majority of air and water in a closed system like ISS? Check.
Do we know how to build machines
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In terms of a closer Mars equivalent, something in the ocean would be more useful as a comparison, i.e. you can't go outside without a suit to let you breathe.
But of course that's not as cool and sexy as putting a couple of men on the surface of Mars for a few months.
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Going to Phobos is not a better option than going to Mars - it's the same damn thing.
Re: An interesting option (Score:5, Insightful)
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He said "going to", and not "returning from".....
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Obligatory XKCD
http://xkcd.com/681_large/ [xkcd.com]
It's not the same. But starting off the moon spares you only some 20% energy.
So i't probably not worth the trouble of setting up an extremely complex factory up there, even if that 20% gets worse due to the rocket equations.
Re: An interesting option (Score:2)
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Private space will do it
Yeah, just like it did with the Apollo missions, that sure showed those commies the benefits of free market capitalism.
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BUT, new private space is doing things differently and making it cheap.
Natural space station (Score:5, Interesting)
If we were inclined to go to Mars (which we don't appear to be) Phobos would be a natural choice because it's a ready-made space station. Probably mostly hollow, built-in radiation protection. You could probably pressurise some natural caverns in there.
But we won't do any of that, because we prefer aircraft carriers and strategic nukes.
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Don't forget the scandalous one and a half trillion dollar F-35 program. It's just shocking. One BAD light fighter-bomber jet ends up costing almost like the entire Pentagon budget for three years. If this is not the proof that Pentagon exists these days to enrich the shareholders of the military-industrial complex, rather than protect our country, I don't know what what else could be..
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Re:Natural space station (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw Robert Zubrin talk at a recent conference (via YouTube) and he said the delta-V between Phobos's orbit and the orbits you'd want to use for landing on Mars is very costly, making it an unnecessary and wasteful detour on the way to our real destination. The only reason you'd go there would be to tele-robotically build your Mars base before you land, and Phobos would provide radiation shielding for that long process.
OTOH, building your base would go a lot quicker if done by astronauts on the surface, and radiation shielding wouldn't be that hard to improvise with Martian regolith. Granted, you would probably get less shielding that way than you would on Phobos, but you'd have far less effects from long-term microgravity too, so... pick your poison.
Zubrin's point is, if your long-term goal is to have a colony on Phobos, then go to Phobos. If your goal is a colony on Mars, just go there and do that.
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If your goal is a colony on Mars, just go there and do that.
Which would be pretty dumb, colonization wise, because we know the same said Phobos is falling on Mars. Any civilization established there will be wiped out when it happens. Mars is not our long term Ark.
Since it won't hit for 50 million years (according to Wikipedia), you're talking "impossibly far in the future" long term.
Low Specific Impulse requirements (Score:2)
Low Specific Impulse requirements make the Martian moons a good place for permanent basing, but not so good for staging a Mars mission, and not so great an idea if we are just going to go there to go there, rather than go there to stay there.
Mostly, they are a great staging area for asteroid missions, given that the escape velocity is generally achievable with spring-loaded catapults and electric winches, rather than the more expensive and hard to construct mass drivers that you'd have to build to get mass
That's not a moon... (Score:1)
It's a spacestation!
Makes sense (Score:3)
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
It doesn't take nearly as much fuel getting off a mun as it does a planet.
I think you meant to write:
"It doesn't take nearly as much fuel getting off a nun as it does a planet."
But I am not certain.
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The KSP player is spotted.
This happened once before. (Score:5, Funny)
The aliens will shot down all space probes again (Score:2)
I don't think it's wise to try to visit Phobos because the aliens have already disabled two Soviet probes [wikipedia.org] en route to it. Can't we stick with less dangerous space exploration missions?
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You can land there, but bring with you a rocket launcher, a shotgun, a chainsaw etc. and thousand of ammo crates and medical supplies just to be sure.
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You can land there, but bring with you a rocket launcher, a shotgun, a chainsaw etc. and thousand of ammo crates and medical supplies just to be sure.
Duh, they're already there just lying around waiting to be found.
Build canals (Score:2)
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"I think we need to send robotic machines to Mars to build railways to bring the ice to the more habitable regions. Hey, if the Martians won't do it, why not us?"
Corrected that for you.
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"I think we need to send robotic machines to Mars to build railways to bring the ice to the regions where the cold is a bit less extreme. Hey, if the Martians won't do it, why not us?"
Sorry, I forgot to correct that other error...
Phobos proposal is retarded... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, a budget padding enthusiasts wet dream.
It suggests 3 (three) separate trips for what can be achieved by 1 (one). Namely, getting astronauts to Mars surface for a prolonged stay and an extensive scientific mission.
First, send astronauts to hop around on Phobos in 2033.
Then, send astronauts to land on Mars in 2039 - and fuck off back to Earth almost immediately.
Then, in 2043, send astronauts for a year-long stay on Mars.
Supposedly, (paper is paywalled) "each mission campaign would build on previous campaigns, leaving a legacy and new capabilities for those that follow."
Except the cost of all three missions is in getting to Mars orbit and back.
And if the last mission is supposed to last a whole year on Mars, a full DECADE after the first mission, and 4 years after the second one - they are NOT carrying ANY supplies or building ANY infrastructure on or near Mars surface.
For a simple reason that you can't rely on anything still being there in working order 10 years in the future.
Or 6. Or 4.
You can't even use the SAME FUCKING PEOPLE as they will be a decade older and maybe dead or maybe doing another job.
Astronauts have to eat too, you know.
Further, anything done on Phobos has fuck all to do with any following mission. They are not gonna build a base there or store supplies - it's a hop-around mission.
And should a second mission happen, only reason why not to stay there for a whole year is - SUPPLIES! Or the lack there of.
Which won't be there because... "Meh... not this time. We'll bring it the next time. Not right now. Later."
This is NOTHING like an Apollo missions to the Moon.
This is like swimming to America from Scotland, getting to Liberty Island, eating a sandwich brought with you, then swimming back home.
Then, 6 years later, do the same thing - only climbing out of the water in New York Harbor, sleeping over night in Central Park, eating another sandwich in the morning (again brought from back home) and swimming back to Europe.
THEN, 4 more years later, you take another swim across the ocean, only instead of taking a sandwich, this time you take a credit card and you spend a year living in USA.
Oh and yeah... Each trip there is a team of thousands of people and dozens of boats sailing right next to you and keeping you safe from the sharks and tigers (You don't know... maybe there are tigers along the way... better safe than sorry.), tweetering your progress online and whatnot.
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Except the cost of all three missions is in getting to Mars orbit and back.
Getting from low Earth orbit to Mars orbit and back costs you 9.4 km/s ( ref [wikipedia.org]). Adding a landing on Phobos while you're there costs you an extra 2.0 km/s. Adding a landing on Mars costs you an extra 11.0 km/s. Planets are annoyingly unwilling to let visitors go.
And remember, those delta-v costs aren't additive: they're exponential, with a constant of your exhaust velocity (~4.5 km/s). So the extra 9 km/s to touch down on Mars rather than Phobos makes your launch mass, and your cost, increase by a factor o
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I know they're trying to talk up Mars, but at this point its debatable whether its even worth sending more probes.
It's a waste of money and we've found out its just another rock in space with no special chemistry and nothing we can't study here on earth.
I'm not sure what "Mars" you are thinking of, but it isn't the one in THIS solar system.
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Getting into Phobos orbit would be prohibitively expensive. How will you decelerate?
Crashing into Phobos should decelerate you nicely.
The Tortoise and the Hare (Score:2)
landing on the Martian surface in the late 2030s
The US being the Hare, who is the tortoise? Hint: they all live in China.
Re:The Tortoise and the Hare (Score:4, Funny)
landing on the Martian surface in the late 2030s
The US being the Hare, who is the tortoise? Hint: they all live in China.
. . but . . the Chinese live in China!
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Leather Goddesses? (Score:4, Funny)
Fess up... it's for all the leather goddesses, right?
>lewd
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>Fess up... it's for all the leather goddesses, right?
Came here for this, wasn't disappointed.
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>Fess up... it's for all the leather goddesses, right?
Came here for this, wasn't disappointed.
Heh... had to be done. ;-) At least someone remember's the reference.
>tame
Do what you wish.. (Score:1)
Send a bunch more robots first (Score:1)
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Realistic (Score:2)
Our objective shouldn't be to live on planets (Score:2)
The only natural place Mankind can live properly is on Earth. Other places can be made survivable, if you're willing to live under domes or in tunnels like frail, albino morlocks. But gravity is one thing we can never make right. And it's
Shamelessly stolen joke... (Score:2)
Shamelessly stolen joke... I thought it was funny enough to steal, and this discussion needs to lighten up anyway. Wish I could credit the original source.
Intercepted text conversation:
Mars: Come over
NASA: But you're 33.9 million miles away
Mars: I'm wet
NASA: I'm coming over
Re:We've been to Mars already (Score:4, Insightful)
So why would we send people?
Because it'd be cool as fuck. Mind you, I ain't going.
Re: We've been to Mars already (Score:1)
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Re: We've been to Mars already (Score:2, Insightful)
Why invest in coaches and roads when we have horses? Why build electricity infrastructure when we have oil lamps? Why build research flight when we have trains? All of these started off as a silly research project/experiment. Why perform any research when we have functional tech now?
You're short sighted. Researching interplanetary travel costs a miniscule percent of our budget, and the potential rewards are well with the risk. R&D is fascinating because you never know what, if anything, it w
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Why build a coach and horse when you can have 100 electric robot vehicles for the same price ?
" Researching interplanetary travel costs a miniscule percent of our budget,"
We traveled there already, even India did, we know whats there.
Trying to relive the glory days of the moon landings by landing on a different rock we already went to is just sad. You resorted to insults because you don't have a counter argument.
What NASA needs is a new idea and a new direction to discover and invent new things. Not vague M
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Why build electricity infrastructure when we have oil lamps? Because electrical lighting will be cheaper and safer, and tons of money were wasted on candles and piping lighting gas across town. Or so that there will be less many theater fires.
Researching travel to Mars?
You might have a few useful side results but what it will really enable is more travel to Mars.
Things like better solar panels, fuel cells, materials etc. are already researched because they're useful on their own.
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The primary technology is nuclear rockets. To further your analogy not to use nuclear rockets is the equivalent of refusing modern jets and trying to cross the Atlantic with a 1930's biplane.
Radiation is the primary problem in space.
Nuclear rockets have increased power and this reduces journey times plus allows (requires) better shielding, and so reduces total cumulative radiation exposure.
Pulse nuclear propulsion theoretically does even better and allows a ship to carry heavy radiation shields, and so shou
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Why invest in coaches and roads when we have horses? Why build electricity infrastructure when we have oil lamps? Why build research flight when we have trains? All of these started off as a silly research project/experiment. Why perform any research when we have functional tech now?
They resulted in quantifiable benefits.
Researching interplanetary travel costs a miniscule percent of our budget
If this was true, there wouldn't be a problem.
R&D is fascinating because you never know what, if anything, it will yield. Not knowing what we might learn is utterly stupid reason not to invest in a project.
R&D is not the same thing as the massive engineering project needed to land people on Mars, which seems (like the Moon landings last century) to be primarily a dick-waving exercise with no obvious long term benefits. (Yeah, I know, Teflon, because we'd never have come up with that otherwise).
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A Mars probe - or a space probe to any other place - has to be designed with sensors to detect what you're looking for. That means that you can ONLY find the stuff you EXPECTED to find - or not find it at all, which the first Mars lander did. A person on the scene can try other things and build new sensors in near-real-time. In order to discover the truly unknown, we have to GO THERE for ourselves, or at least be close enough to learn from our mistakes.
A Phobos base makes perfect sense; minimal gravity
Re:We've been to Mars already (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod it to -1 if you like, people will never *be* on Mars. The closest they'll get is to see it through a visor or a monitor.
And if that's the case, a monitor on a different planet is more convenient.
You are obviously not a geologist. A person, even in a suit, and wielding a rock hammer, and equipped with a rather small lab can do more geology in one day than all of the Mars probes ever sent have done, combined.
Not to mention the fricking communications latency of using RPVs, or depending on the cleverness of remotely targeted semi-autonomous robots.
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Besides, NASA scientists have made statements contradicting [nasa.gov] what you just said. Robots are slower, but can operate nonstop indefinitely where humans need long rest periods.
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What if for half the cost of a single person, you could instead have 500 martian probes distributed across the planet?
Besides, NASA scientists have made statements contradicting [nasa.gov] what you just said. Robots are slower, but can operate nonstop indefinitely where humans need long rest periods.
Humans advocate humans; roboticists advocate robots. Film at 11.
You'd need 1,500 people on Earth working 8 hour shifts, for a much longer period of time, analyzing visual data, and saying "Hmmm... that rock that the probe passed 4 hours of analysis, and 24 minutes ago looked interesting; let's send a command now to the probe, which it will receive in 24 minutes, to go back and look at it. The elapsed time to deciding if it was 'just a shadow' should only be another time to compose command + 24 minutes +
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A probe might be able to collect more data if it knows what it is looking for.
Humans are resilient and given enough arbitrary tools can often adapt and figure out how to collect data that was not originally built to do. A combination of a human and a probe will allow a mission much more resiliency. A human mission would likely place high value on the human returning to Earth, so bringing samples back home is more likely. It would also provide the opportunity to do medical research about living under cond
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Neither are you if you think a probe can't collect more information than a human.
Oh, it can collect *terabytes* of data. No one would argue that. It's just that most of it won't be *interesting* or *relevant* data.
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I'll go, even if it's one way, and even though I have a family -- someone just needs to make sure my kids get into college.and I end up in the history books they'll study.
Yeah, your imaginary kids will be able to read about how their father was a psychotic asshole.
The benefits are huge (Score:4, Insightful)
We've been to Mars already, we've sent probes and robots.
WE haven't been to Mars. We've sent tools there. Huge difference.
So why would we send people?
Lots of reasons. We'd learn a ton by doing it. We'd develop a lot of amazing technology. The economic benefits would be enormous. It would advance our knowledge faster than almost anything else we could do including sending more probes. It would be the greatest exploration in human history. It would inspire generations of scientists and engineers.
Need I go on?
The real question is why wouldn't we go there? The only answer to that is because we lack vision or courage or political will. The likely benefits of going greatly outweigh the likely benefits of staying on Earth.
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You know, by now, Mars is completely inhospitable --- to complex forms of life, at least ---, but there are those talks about terraformation, of building hab
Re:The benefits are huge (Score:4, Insightful)
Why Americans went to the moon? to prove that they were better at building ICBMs than Russians.
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I always thought it was part of a plan to colonize Mars. My colonization hypothesis explains:
You know, by now, Mars is completely inhospitable --- to complex forms of life, at least ---, but there are those talks about terraformation, of building habitats, of getting raw materials there. And look who are leading the space exploration: the Americans, a people who holds a long tradition of being descended from explorers, from settlers who came across the dangerous sea to an inhospitable land. Of course, going to Mars is too far fetched because of the actual reality, but culture is not more about reality than a representation of it.
Meh!
We could have pulled off a mars mission in the 1970s or 80s if we had the political will.. It was technically feasible. There were also plans to send up a second Skylab type of craft and use it in a manned mission to orbit Venus and take readings and return. That mission had it's funding cut off too.. but It is not like humans cannot survive in space for the few years on end that it would take to pull off such a trip to either of our neighboring planets.
Simple answer is we lack the political will and m
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The poor need communication, weather reports and satellite TV too (ok satellite TV is full of crap lol but it's not like 3rd world rural poors have something else)
There was a man called Gadhafi that set up some panafrican fund that led up to the first African-operated satellite, which made satellite comms vastly cheaper. But a foreign policy independant of that of the United States isn't to be tolerated, so the US decided to fight a civil war with death from above at a time convenient to get away with it.
I
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Mars isn't entirely inhospitable. Surface air temps in the shade can be as high as 95F, the daily temperature change can be as high as 180 degrees. Source [nasa.gov]
Er, you appear to be forgetting the fact that it doesn't have a breathable atmosphere.
The Arctic is hard to survive in, but people do live there. That's because they can breathe the air.
Mars is impossible without a lot of technological backup.
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Fuck off you troll.
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Any amazing technology we developed in sending people to Mars would be countered by the amazing stuff that didn't get done because of it. Since we can point to what side benefits we've gotten from the space programs, and not what would have happened if the scientific and engineering effort had been devoted to something else, it's easy to make bad arguments in favor of technology spinoffs.
The scientific benefits wouldn't be all that great. We'd learn stuff, sure, but probably not anything of really grea
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Re:We've been to Mars already (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been to Mars already, we've sent probes and robots.
Yes. And I've been to Paris, because one time I saw a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
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Yes. And I've been to Paris, because one time I saw a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
Well, 99.999999% of us aren't going to Mars anyway. Of all the reasons we sent Neil Armstrong and friends to the Moon, giving them the "authentic Moon experience" wasn't one of them. With the budgets for a manned mission to Mars we could do way more unmanned science than today, quite possibly more than with a manned mission. What it really boils down to, which is perhaps hard for many to swallow is whether sending humans will be pioneers exploring and settling new land or just an annoying radiation sensitiv
Re: We've been to Mars already (Score:2)
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No. Cows cannot say MOO on Phobos, there is no atmosphere there. So shut up :)
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The core technology needed for a realistic manned trip to Mars is nuclear rockets. The technology absolutely needed for a manned trip out to Titan is high energy nuclear rockets.
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Cloud cities on other planets might be possible, if enormously expensive. (Avoid Jupiter). We might see them after the US-Russia tunnel/bridge, the dam on the Mediterranean and the giant mirror of death space station that can cook people with reflected sunlight.