Planetary Society Pushes For Mars Orbital Mission Before NASA Landing 58
MarkWhittington writes The Planetary Society announced Thursday the results of the "Humans Orbiting Mars" workshop that brought in a number of space experts to develop helpful suggestions for how NASA can fulfill its mandate to send humans to Mars in the 2030s and return them safely to the Earth. The plan is to send a mission to orbit Mars in 2033 in advance of the landing mission in the late 2030s. The workshop believes that this could be done for a NASA budget that increases about two percent a year after the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2024.
Because thats clearly what NASA wants to do (Score:3)
ISS2 will do a single transit to and from Mars, possibly with time spent in a highly eccentric orbit around Mars, waiting for the return launch window. Russia will have to built their own space station which will presumably be MIR2.
The second mission may deploy a small vehicle to test aero-braking at Mars, and a landing on one of the moons. Maybe landing on the third mission?
Go all that way and don't get out of the car? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Go all that way and don't get out of the car? (Score:5, Informative)
Really? You go all the damn way to Mars and then stay in the car when you get there?
Because going to the surface, living on the surface, and launching off the surface is really hard, and really expensive, and requires a lot of engineering and solving a lot of problems that we haven't yet solved. We don't know how to land something on Mars that's as large as a human habitat. This will take some work. Landing on Mars is going to be a very expensive mission.
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing... that might be a very powerful incentive to try to get that technology made and actually land on the next mission.
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Mars would be the ONE place that is safe for a space elevators.
No nut job wanting to asplode the base or sever the cable mid-length.
It would make landing cargo and people trivial, including return trip.
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0.38g really makes this a lot simpler than on Terra.
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The one where a space elevator on Mars could be made with regular high tensile strength steel like we have today?
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Making a space elevator on Mars makes as much sense as building a luxury resort in the middle of the Gobi desert.
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Taking the first step gets you one step closer (Score:2)
The money you spend on a Mars orbit mission sets you up for landing on Mars by developing and testing a critical portion of the technology, the part that gets humans to Mars orbit and back.
Taking the first step gets you one step closer to Mars.
If you waited to take you first step until you were ready to run a marathon, you'd never stand up at all.
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But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing...
...it would be a stupid waste of billions of dollars. Humans can't do anything from Mars orbit a machine (specially a 2030s machine) can't do much better. Actually, I'm not a big believer on Mars missions at all. I think the Moon is a better near-term target, and asteroid mining a much better long-term approach. We don't need more gravity wells.
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If we send people to Mars orbit and back, we get a real-life test of our ability to send people on a long mission, which will help in getting to asteroids.
I'd like to see a Moon base before we start on a Mars base, also. Many of the same challenges, and if something goes wrong we can get help there, or evacuate, a lot faster.
I'm in favor of taking this a step at a time. The steps are awfully big ones in any case.
Watch out, puny human, robots are getting better (Score:2)
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing...
...it would be a stupid waste of billions of dollars. Humans can't do anything from Mars orbit a machine
[can't do much better.]
Actually, right at the moment, that's not true-- humans are vastly more capable than robots. I'm quite supportive of robots, but a human geologist could do in a day what it takes the Mars rovers a month to do.
(specially a 2030s machine)
Ah, now that's the question. Robots are evolving much more quickly than humans. What will the machines be able to do in 2030?
(will they need us at all? for anything?)
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At least in the car I can turn and pee into a cup. Try that locked up tight inside a space suit. It's no *walk in the park*...
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At least in the car I can turn and pee into a cup. Try that locked up tight inside a space suit. It's no *walk in the park*...
And this, ladies and gentlemen, should be the end of the car analogies today.
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Like going to the Grand Canyon and then staying in the car in the parking lot
If the other choice is to drive down into the canyon, staying in the parking lot may not be so bad.
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Yes, because Apollo 8, 9, and 10 were all a complete waste...
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Based on that logic, the whole Apollo program was a waste. My point is that each of those missions were tests of procedures needed to actually land a man on the moon. It's not a waste to go there, orbit, conduct mission critical tests, and return to ensure the success of a future landing.
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Unfortunately, his logic is that the Apollo program was a waste, with which I disagree. It wasn't as much of a waste as most things that currently attract our attentions.
That is how we approached the Moon with Apollo... (Score:4, Insightful)
But this is a lot longer trip and a much greater up front cost.
At the very least they should should have a remote-controlled lander to execute a land, launch and recover exercise to verify that they can pull somebody back out of the gravity well
And, perhaps a series of launches with a 6 month separation so that they can create a Mars orbiting space station
Oh, and just in case you didn't see this POS from Wired
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/b... [wired.com]
Bill Nye is no Leslie Knope, he rocks much harder!
because math... (Score:1)
So by my math that would not be 2% (which is the 'small' amount they want you to see). That is ~35% increase in 15 years. That seems reasonable if inflation holds and priorities are the same. However, it is a bit disingenuous...
The real problem is not NASA. It is them being jerked around over and over. Then outsourcing everything to other companies that only have 1 customer of NASA.
Cool Beans (Score:3)
Send an Unmanned Habitat (Score:3)
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Why not send an unmanned habitat lander? Something that lands, deploys a habitat, then monitors the performance of that habitat and the health of the return vehicle *before* committing a crew? Knowing that they have a safe and established home base on Mars and a ride ready to take them back home would add some redundancy and encouragement to the crew. If a meteorite crashes into the habitat or an Exogorth eats it, the crew aborts the landing and returns home.
We probably will, but that is still far in the future. Besides testing any Mars lander on the scale needed to land people, it is usually part of most plans to land additional supplies including something to extract needed gases for survival and launch from the surface before hand. Probably need at least two as we'll need to not only test ability to land large crafts on the surface of Mars but also ability to land them very close to each other as astronauts won't be able to make use of supplies kilometers aw
HERRO (Score:2)
Cool. I've been proposing this for years.
http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa.... [nasa.gov]
http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa.... [nasa.gov]
Wave hello to Elon's colony (Score:2)
By 2030 Elon and SpaceX may have already landed people on the surface. Maybe not a huge settlement or anything, but an outpost. Going all the way without landing is kinda silly.
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Yeah, Apollo 8, 9, and 10 were such a waste. Should have landed the first time we went to the moon.
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Sure. That's what Real Men(tm) do! Haven't you read "The First Men in the Moon". That's how explorers roll!
Elon Musk (Score:2)
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Musk needs a customer. Even his massive wealth can't cover a joy ride to Mars.
Do or Do Not... (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no half way. There are no viable one way missions. If you're going to send humans to Mars, then send humans to Mars and bring them back.
It's hard enough for any project to live more than 2 years at NASA -- "a second mission sometime in the mid 2030s" is likely to be just as canceled as the previous visions of getting to Mars which would have had us there last decade.
As NASA is publicly funded, and as the public is fickle, NOTHING less than a human walking on Mars within our lifetimes, with further trips to follow is going to convince us, the taxpayers, to not begrudge the 50 cents a day we spend on NASA's budget.
Nothing short of an inspired public (and leaders brave enough to inspire the public) will get us funded to bootstrap ourselves into space, if this is to be done by a public agency.
Simple solution (Score:3)
Declare war on Mars! All of a sudden, the budget will be 40x larger!
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The international rivalries and tensions that result in large defense budgets will ultimately boost the pace of space exploration. If China was looking to establish a presence on the Moon or Mars the US would do everything in it's power to get there first. The US Apollo missions to the Moon were the direct result of the cold war animosity between the US and the USSR. The Russians sent up the first satellite and put the first man in orbit so the US one upped them by going to the Moon.
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The case for now, the case for later (Score:2)
There are a lot of different pieces required to go to Mars, land, and return. Some of these, like a habitat that humans can live in for the required transit to Mars and back, we have, or at least, we can make with only small modifications to what has been developed (the Space Station). Some of them, like landers and habitats and space suits for use on the Martian surface, we don't have. Every one of these pieces is a potential bottleneck for a human mission.
What you are basically saying is, we should del