Can The Martian Give NASA's Mars Efforts a Hollywood Bump? 131
Flash Modin writes: NASA has poured considerable time and resources into Ridley Scott's The Martian — perhaps more than any other movie in history — going so far as to time a Mars human landing site selection workshop to coincide with the film. Jim Green, NASA's head of planetary sciences, was one of the consultants, with other astronomers fact checking every aspect of the set and script. The rockets, modules, and space suits were built — and 3-D printed — with heavy guidance from NASA. The filmmakers even hired Rudi Schmidt, former project manager of the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, to test the experiments done in the movie, including turning water into rocket fuel — which works. And, on the eve of The Martian's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, some of those scientists believe that this obsessive adherence to science fact will be enough to make NASA's Journey to Mars real for Americans. The space agency needs a Hail Mary because, in truth, the real program is nowhere near ready for prime time.
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Not only that; but "exploration" no longer requires heroic bare-chested men going out there with swords and stealing treasure from the natives.
You send a camera on wheels, and sit on your computer chair to analyze the data coming back.
There's nothing for us out there, unless you are unusually attracted to radiation-blasted vacuum.
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There's nothing for us out there, unless you are unusually attracted to radiation-blasted vacuum.
Oh yeah, very attracted.
I'm trying to get the gear together to blast it with something else, do my part for panspermia if you catch my drift (or maybe Eris will).
< * waves to Elon * >
Re:No one cares anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, Nothing. Just essentially inexhaustible natural resources, defeating our civilization's all-eggs-in-one-basket issue, endless non-polluting-of-living-environment industrial space, low-grav environments for the disabled and elderly, low and zero-grav industrial environments, endless storage and manufacturing space, CHON, no, nothing at all "out there." Whatever are those "scientists" thinking?!?!?!?
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Re:No one cares anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you suggesting we'll get to the low energy + material cost state by sitting on our thumbs? There's a huge learning curve here. We either climb it to get to the honey, or we don't get the honey.
Again, are you suggesting we'll get to the "resources, energy and know-how" state by sitting on our thumbs?
First of all, "out there" is not just mars. Second of all, no. The ocean floor has almost none of the benefits space provides.
ok, fine, endless vacuum. It's a challenge. It's not an impossible to breach barrier. And learning to do it, particularly learning to do it space-to-space instead of ground-to-space -- is part of the process. Once we get an industrial base established -- and that's the key here, make no mistake -- costs will drop precipitously. Robotics will drive that too, but there are all manner of advantages for humans "out there."
Yes, creating a viable presence off-planet / in space is very challenging. But no, it isn't something we should -- or really, can afford to -- ignore.
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I presume, then, that you know rockets.
You demonstrate some serious shortsightedness in other areas, though.
Backing up to your rocket-ness, as it were, you know that the energy budget is almost the entire problem. In space, there is an unlimited energy supply 24/7. Gathering can be done on any scale, and once the scale becomes automated, surplus energy is a guaranteed result.
This is the end game: Manufacturing problems: material supply: near infinite. Material costs: extremely low, essentially whatever it
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Making rockets isn't hard. Development cost
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The real problem though is identifying the weaknesses in the technology and improving it. We have identified the main weaknesses of current rocket technology - The main one is that 90% + of what goes up is merely fuel, the system only works once and then is destroyed, only being used once limits the safety and reliability of rockets, the fuels are highly dangerous volatile & corrosive.
It all comes down to the fact that rockets are still a pretty marginal technology and the core problem is the rocket eng
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Re:No one cares anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
> There's nothing for us out there, unless you are unusually attracted to radiation-blasted vacuum.
One could have said something similar about the American west, or Australian outback. Not vacuum, but a hostile environment. In fact, 80% of the Earth is inhospitable without the help of technology (the oceans, deserts, and ice caps). Slightly better technology will allow us to live anywhere in the Solar System.
Perhaps you see nothing out there, but I've done some real estate development in the past, and all I see are opportunities.
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Antarctica is millions of times more hospitable than space or even the surface of mars.
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Not only that; but "exploration" no longer requires heroic bare-chested men going out there with swords and stealing treasure from the natives.
OTOH, heroic, bare chested women would make great reality TV, swords and treasure optional. Probably the best funding angle NASA could ever devise.
(And, you can have your bare chested men there as well for those special SJW type folk).
Re: No one cares anymore (Score:1)
Re: No one cares anymore (Score:1)
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Re: No one cares anymore (Score:1)
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Re: No one cares anymore (Score:1)
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Re: No one cares anymore (Score:1)
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Going bare chested on Mars might not be a good idea. The atmosphere there is basically a (slightly thick) vacuum.
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How dumb. The first man on Mars is someone who will be remembered forever.
Thankfully, small-minded cretins like yourself are in a minority.
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How did you get from the Youtube comments section to Slashdot?
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No one cares for Mars. It's a frikin dead rock. There are so much better exploration targets out there.
You presume too much.
Free Mars! (Score:1)
Re:Water as rocket fuel (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. Water as rocket fuel is separating out water into H and O, turning them into liquid, and burning them as rocket fuel.
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Um, no. Water as rocket fuel is separating out water into H and O, turning them into liquid, and burning them as rocket fuel.
Or you can separate the H and O and super-heat the H to a fusion reaction. Or you could pass the water through a hot nuclear core so it shoots out the nozzle at high speed (although in that case it is technically a propellant, not fuel.)
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Well yeah, but in the case of this book/movie, they used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engines like NASA uses currently.
Looking through Up Goer Five, it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
https://xkcd.com/1133/ [xkcd.com]
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it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
Well apart from the first stage of the Saturn V which burned kerosene and liquid oxygen, about half the total all-up weight of the entire stack, in rather crude inefficient engines.
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LH2/LOX engine technology is very well-developed and modern versions like the Vulcain 2, the RS-25 and RS-68/RS-68A produce close to the maximum possible Isp given the reaction chemistry involved absent a slight loss of efficiency due to the need to throttle up and down. The bad news is the amount of mass they throw out the back to provide thrust is low because hydrogen is a very light gas. Most LH2 engines run oxygen-rich to improve their total thrust by increasing the mass of the exhaust.
LH2-fuelled engin
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You are correct, I missed that.
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Or feeding it directly to a plasma thruster (basically a 200 kW microwave oven with a nozzle). Much higher exhaust velocity = higher fuel efficiency, but lower thrust.
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Um, no. Water as rocket fuel is separating out water into H and O, turning them into liquid, and burning them as rocket fuel.
Even better than that, if you start off with H and O, then you have rocket fuel which you can turn into water and energy. The energy can be used to power an ion drive or preheat the rocket fuel.
The "real program" is absurd (Score:2)
Propulsion science is just too primitive at this time. This is where the bulk of the money needs to be spent.
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Maybe we should look for alternatives to keeping all seven billion of our eggs in one fragile and increasingly overburdened basket.
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How is a planet, the largest thing we are all in contact with, "fragile", and how is anything we could build not be fragile???
Truly, the way you space fanbois think is baffling.
Ask the dinosaurs about how fragile the ecosystem is and a sysadmin about the value of offsite backups even though the datacenter is a big sturdy building.
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You know, boring stuff like figuring out living arrangements for 7 billion people right here on this planet?
Being strictly a political/psychological problem created by choice, we can fix that in an instant. There are no technical impediments. Propulsion-wise we have hardly progressed past the horse and carriage.
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The only way I can see us going to Mars is if we use nuclear rockets. [wikipedia.org]
Chemical rockets a bit bigger than the Saturn V would do the trick well enough. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Propulsion science is just too primitive at this time. This is where the bulk of the money needs to be spent.
What do you mean? We've already developed the propulsion means, chemical propulsion engines, that's going to get stuff off of Earth for the first half of this century, perhaps longer. And we've developed several means such as electric propulsion, vacuum-optimized chemical propulsion, and solar sails for moving things in free fall in space. Current means are sufficiently advanced for what we want to do with it. And we'll have plenty of time to develop more advanced propulsion for when we'll need that.
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We literally have the cart before the horse. It's a very unstable relationship. We need to learn the force of attraction, aside from the local sling shotting we do now. Radiation is fast and furious. Gravity is stable and enduring, hot or cold. If we can concentrate one, I don't understand why we can't the other, other than we're just not there yet. You know, a good 'old fashion' tractor beam to draw two masses towards each other. And a side benefit is that you won't get lost. Gravity is vastly underrated.
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Gravity is stable and enduring, hot or cold. If we can concentrate one, I don't understand why we can't the other, other than we're just not there yet.
The problem is that gravity is a weak force. When you try to concentrate it, by packing a bunch of matter in one place, then electromagnetic repulsion pushes stuff apart.
Well, there's another problem. Concentrating gravity doesn't actually get you anywhere. For example, your tractor beam would work, but it would require lugging a considerable amount of mass around to pull the smaller mass that you really want to move. That's much harder than merely moving the smaller mass around with chemical rocket engi
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Actually, too much focus on transportation, and not enough on habitation and local production is why we have a problem. Use local resources, make stuff on-location. Then you don't have to haul everything from Earth.
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Propulsion science is just too primitive at this time. This is where the bulk of the money needs to be spent.
No, it's not. Barring catastrophes, future technology will always be better, but current chemical rocket technology is good enough or close to good enough. And has the advantage of existing or being a refinement of what already exists.
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Wouldn't you swear if you were just left behind on freaking Mars with no way home?
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So, is this your example of the swearing that is done in the book "The Martian"? Cause I am not sure what exactly you are even talking about now.
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Lol, sure, show me proof of any time I have "run away".
Google often proves me right, and often I provide links, so provide your links to prove me wrong oh wise one.
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No. (Score:2)
No.
In defiance of Betteridge (Score:2)
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The movie starts off as sort of a disaster flick, doesn't it? How does that make a Mars mission look attractive? Then it has Damon almost magically managing to do the impossible, alone, to survive, because.. Hollywood.
No (Score:3)
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African, or European?
I hope not (Score:2)
The last big bump NASA got was the moon. I really wish that program had follow up instead of being just a giant publicity stunt.
Currently there are plenty of arguments for and against man in space, either way I would like the decision not to be one of which looks the coolest.
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After Apollo, NASA's next big goal was finding a sellable justification for itself.
blame Nixon the stupid fwit pres (Score:2)
after the moon landings they had the earth rise photo on the wall on the oval office.
a year later they replaced it with a stupid tree painting, that's the true level of commitment to space by dumb fucks in office that are nothing more than high school jocks in a suit.
nasa also got a retard looser for a head that didn't want to be there.
fact is, USA and corporations would rather spend $20 trillion dollars over 40 years on wars and military, while nasa gets a few crumbs. Criminals they all are in office, utte
NASA likes this movie because nerds work there (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you seen the usual Mars movie from Hollywood? This movie is FAR more realistic than almost any other ones out there. And for true space geeks (of which NASA is full of), the book is fantastic.
The movie isn't some ultra-clever attempt to kickstart public support, although that doesn't hurt. NASA's funding has shrunk as a portion of GDP, as a portion of government spending, and even when just adjusted for inflation even while NASA now is tasked with a far more ambitious mission (to send people to Mars), such that NASA makes up less one half of one percent of the federal budget (this while the public either think NASA has a much larger portion of the federal budget or has been utterly shut down). A little public support wouldn't hurt, though what NASA really needs is the political freedom to rationalize some of their programs (like being freed by Congress to use existing launch vehicles for exploration, like from ULA or SpaceX, instead of spending so much of their budget on SLS) so they can afford to build things like landers and the like instead of things the private/military sectors already have built (like launch vehicles).
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We could have had permanent bases on the Moon and Mars for the cost of the war on terror. The money would have gone to the same contractors for the most part just different hardware.
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The money would have gone to the same contractors for the most part just different hardware.
Yeah, but that hardware would have been useless for oppressing people, you could only use it for science
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It would really help if NASA was allowed to cooperate with China and the EU more. Especially China.
At this point it's 50/50 if the first person on Mars will be Chinese out American. Not that that's a bad thing, but it would be better if they both stepped out of the same capsule at the same time.
I can't even calculate the odds of the first American being Elon Musk, or his employee.
Or else it will "validate" the Moon deniers. (Score:2)
Money should go towards (Score:2, Informative)
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Having said that, dumping a bunch of money on NASA so that they can go to Mars may be a poor use of the money.
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I read that we scanned less than 1% of the sky with any regularity, if at all.
We already have 100% coverage of the sky, just not at the desired resolution and light sensitivity. Further, asteroids don't spontaneously spring into existence or jump around. Once you have nailed down the position of an asteroid, it's not going to disappear on you. And you don't need to look at the entire sky to find all inner Solar System asteroids. They have to pass through certain regions of the sky as viewed from Earth.
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And yet the fireball that hit russia a few years ago was spontaneous? Further, finding them is one thing, deflecting is a whole nuther problem.
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And yet the fireball that hit russia a few years ago was spontaneous?
It just hadn't been spotted yet. And I don't recall saying that we knew where everything was in 2014, but rather that we would in 2035.
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Thanks for providing that authoritative cite.
You can look up my quote yourself, which is opinion and hence, self-citing by definition. You can look up the year of the meteor yourself. There's no further need for you to waste your time wasting my time.
Re:Money should go towards (Score:4, Insightful)
I've said before to underwhelming response, we need to spend on protecting this gorgeous planet of ours from big rocks coming at us. It has happened before, so instead of trying to get off this really nice planet on to a crappy cold rock, we should first make sure we can defend the nice home with air, water and food before trying to build on a long shot.
The two are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, they are complementary efforts. And given that there are 7 billion humans, we can actually focus on more than one goal.
*Sigh* (Score:2)
The public isn't interested in space, period.
The past N media spectaculars (fiction or non) didn't change that, the N+1th won't either. There's no camel's back for the straw to break.
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> The public isn't interested in space, period.
Nope, they have no interest in DirecTV, Dish, Sirius, On-Star, GPS, hurricane forecasts, Google Earth, or any of that space stuff. They just use it daily.
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This is actually an interesting point.
If you'll excuse the analogy, I like to eat meat, but I don't really want to know about the slaughterhouse. One could easily argue that one of the things that killed the Space Shuttle was that it made access to LEO too easy, too mundane, too boring. Most of us are interested in the end-result of science--the part where it gets turned into something useful to our every day lives or helps us in extraordinary ways. We don't want to know about the years of research and d
Water as Rocket Fuel? (Score:2)
I think the book's key point was the other way around: He took Hydrazine [wikipedia.org] (rocket fuel) and converted it to water.
A bump? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, for about 30 days. Then we'll have BlackFriday, Xmas, etc. All will be forgotten, while waiting for the next Survivor/Dancing/Bachelor/whatever.
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Underrated. Sadly. But still.
Re: A bump? (Score:1)
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Hmmm... Dancing with the Surviving Bachelor Idols on Mars!... Dammit, somebody call my agent!
In truth... (Score:2)
...the entire country needs a hail mary, never mind NASA. It's constantly being fucked over by politicians. It's sad that I've gone my entire 40 year life now without seeing a single good US president.
Johanssen (Score:2)
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Things go absolutely fucking wrong in space. (Score:2)
Gravity and Apollo 13 and [haven't seen it yet] The Martian and others are stunning visions... intricately crafted works of awe-inspiring wonder. Some people working on these films, some folks going to see them, actually desire to explore space. So they must see these films, because they have some space in them. Many see these as space movies. I see them differently.
GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong.
SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong in space.
We love those 'things go absolutely fucking w
Say no to forever pages! (Score:2)
Seriously, my mousewheel starts smoking whenever one of these new web 3.0 pages come up. Scrolling scrolling scrolling forever. Who the hell likes these things>? Is there something so wrong with embeded images? does every page have to be some downward scrolling adventure? its just supposed to be a god damn article!!!
Excellent Article (Score:1)