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Space Science

Russians, NASA Meet to Discuss Manned Mars Mission 18

Posted by Roblimo from the doing-it-in-secret dept.
Buxley writes "CBSMarketWatch is reporting that NASA quietly concluded a three-day seminar with Russian space experts Friday, to discuss better ways to send humans to Mars. Right now, there are no official NASA plans to send people to Mars, but perhaps there are some unofficial plans?"
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Russians, NASA Meet to Discuss Manned Mars Mission More

Russians, NASA Meet to Discuss Manned Mars Mission

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  • The Russians and American space programs are working together to send a manned mission to Mars for the sole reason of holding it for ransom.

    How else are they supposed to get more money?

  • woop-dee-doo

    what's with all the slash topics here prompting virtually no reponse!?
  • Well, the Mars Society [marssociety.org], is all about Mars exploration and one of thier prime activists is Robert Zubrin, an engineer for Lockheed Martin who has written The Case for Mars, a book which outlines his ideas on Mars exploration. He makes a pretty convincing case, in my layman's opinion. I don't know if NASA is buying it, but its gotten a lot of grass roots support, as these things go.
  • It's on the science page instead of the main page. Most people don't read anything that doesn't make it to the front page.
  • IMHO, we should first have a permanent base on the moon, before we can even start thinking of going to Mars. The moon is relatively close, so if anything goes wrong, the astronauts are back in a few days.

    Yes, the moon is a few days away versus 18 months away, but how many scenarios are there that would make that difference important?

    Explosive decompression?

    "This is Houston, could you all hold your breath for a few days"

    Other than the loss of food or water, I think the Moon would be just as inaccessible as Mars would be, practically speaking.

    Plus I think Mars has better resources for getting back than the moon, ie. refining O2 out of the atmosphere and making methane with hydrogen shipped with the landing party.

    Check out the Mars Society [marssociety.org], they'll explain it better.

    George
  • Check out The Millennial Project by Marshall T. Savage. Arthur C. Clarke writes in the preface that he "is awe". That's impressive. The whole book has a kind of Open Source feel to it.

    The subtitle is Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, and that is not too far from the truth.

    The Millennial Project - Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
    Marshall T. Savage
    Little, Brown, and Co., 1992/1994
    ISBN 0-316-771-635 (Softcover -- $16.96)
    508 pages with color illustrations

  • While it's true that a lunar base would be very useful as an astronomical observatory (Aitkin crater on the South lunar pole, which is eternally dark, comes to mind) there are many reasons not to make a stop at the moon on the way to Mars. First, the moon is poor in usable resources. It does contain Silicon, Carbon, Oxygen and Iron and _maybe_ trace amounts of water in some of the craters like Aitkin, but lunar rock is mostly undifferentiated, there are no rich ore deposits to mine, like on Earth. In order to get any usable raw materials, you'd have to crush and melt tons of rock, requiring a huge investment in machinery (which can't be manufactured on the moon, initially, for obvious reasons) and energy. Second, if you include the cost of launching supplies, equipment and raw materials from Earth (or LEO, etc.) to the Moon, going to the Moon actually makes the mission _more_ expensive. In order to travel from any planet to any other planet or moon, your spacecraft must first accelerate to at least the escape velocity of the planet it's departing from (e.g. Earth ~10 km/s) and then decelerate below the escape velocity of the destination planet/moon when it arrives. Both Earth and Mars have atmospheres thick enough to allow your spacecraft to decelerate for free (no fuel burned to reduce your velocity) through aerobraking. However, if you're going to stop at the moon (or haul all of your mining equipment, factories and fuel there), you have to carry all of the fuel needed to brake into lunar orbit, soft-land, and take off again. Even if the moon provides the raw materials for enough fuel for your mission, it still doesn't justify a Lunar base as a "gas station" for a mission to Mars. See Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars for the physical arguments. Finally, as far as using the moon as a "training base for Mars," a far cheaper and safer training base would be Antarctica. Both Earth and Mars have atmospheres which allowed liquid water to flow on their surfaces, and were geologically active at some point in the past few tens of million years. As an added bonus, the Martian Day is only about 37 minutes longer than an Earth Day. In contrast, the moon is small, airless and takes about a month to rotate. Plus, it's been geologically inactive for about the last 3.5 to 4 billion years.
  • Actually, NASA has kinda bought it; their current plans are built around a "Mars Reference Mission", which is more grandiose than Zubrin's "Mars Direct" approach, but a great deal smaller than NASA's original "Battlestar Galactica" idea. (The fact that they originally wanted $150+ billion and the "Mars Reference" only runs $30 to $40 billion makes it a lot easier to sell. Too bad NASA is still trying to tie the mission down to the Shuttle program...)

    Zubrin's new book, Entering Space is also a good read, critically analyzing all the "Why bother?" type questions about missions to Mars and space exploration in general...

  • Who would try to go to mars in a space craft build by americans. Let's see, fire swept trough Apollo 1, Chalenger exploded.

    I hope you get the point.

  • IMHO, we should first have a permanent base on the moon, before we can even start thinking of going to Mars. The moon is relatively close, so if anything goes wrong, the astronauts are back in a few days.

    We could also use the experience gained on the moon for creating a 'better' base on Mars.

    The moon can also be used as an inexpensive launch base for missions to Mars, due to its lower gravity.

    And, last but not least: imagine what would happen when a super-hubble is placed on the moon!

  • Whose spaceship would you want to go in? Not the
    Russian's, surely. They have an even worse
    record than us. ALL their rocket boosters for
    missions to the moon either blew up or just plain
    didn't work. Considering that no one else ever
    launched a man, much less could launch an
    interplanetary spacecraft, you wouldn't have
    many better choices
  • Russia's poor performance on the ISS project should preclude it from any participation in a manned Mars mission. Manned space flight should not be funded as if it were a welfare project.
  • There's no way that the nazis could have sent a manned mission to Mars back in the 40s-50s because there wasn't the technology needed to accomplish it. I mean, we didn't develop the technology needed to just get the moon, a hell of a lot closer than Mars, until the 60s. I think the biggest problem is having enough fuel to get there and get back. That's never been accomplished before.

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