Congressional Testimony Says NASA Has No Plan For the Journey To Mars (blastingnews.com) 310
MarkWhittington writes: Testimony at a hearing before the House Science Committee's Subcommittee on Space suggested that NASA's Journey to Mars lacks a plan to achieve the first human landing on the Red Planet, almost six years after President Obama announced the goal on April 15, 2010. Moreover, two of the three witnesses argued that a more realistic near term goal for the space agency would be a return to the moon. The moon is not only a scientifically interesting and potentially commercially profitable place to go but access to lunar water, which can be refined into rocket fuel, would make the Journey to Mars easier and cheaper.
Common Sense (Score:2, Insightful)
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Meh, just pack a few sacks of potatoes - he'll be fine!
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Living on the moon isn't that interesting, because there is almost nothing useful up there except for solar energy. You have to take everything with you, the soil isn't good for growing stuff, there are few raw materials for you to use.
The goal should be to become self sufficient on Mars. If you can do that, you can make real progress towards colonizing the solar system because you don't have to bring everything from earth.
At most, you might go back to the moon to test some systems and perhaps establish a s
Moon colonization (Score:5, Interesting)
Living on the moon isn't that interesting, because there is almost nothing useful up there except for solar energy.
Think so? The moon has no atmosphere so it is potentially awesome for astronomy. The moon could provide a useful base for deep space exploration as its gravity well is much smaller than Earth's. It could be a source of raw materials. It may be possible to produce propellant on the moon. The moon consists of more than moon dust and reflected sunlight.
The goal should be to become self sufficient on Mars.
A fine goal but how do you get there? It's not hard to make a reasonable argument that colonizing the moon (which is much closer) could be a useful stepping stone to the goal of Mars and beyond. Putting an entire infrastructure to support human habitation on another planet is a monumental undertaking and we don't even have a fraction of a percent of the technology needed to do that. The Moon could be very useful in development of some of that technology.
If you can do that, you can make real progress towards colonizing the solar system because you don't have to bring everything from earth.
I could make the same argument regarding moon colonization.
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Assemble a building the astronauts can remove their helmet in, and sleep overnight in, prepare meals, have a place to shit and shower.
Come back a while later and do that again.
If you can't do that on the Moon, you have no hope in hell of doing it on Mars the first time.
There is no much foundation technology required it isn't funny. Trying it out for the first time on Mars would be reckless and stupid.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for NASA to say "screw you
Re:Common Sense (Score:4, Informative)
It's only common sense to someone who doesn't understand orbital mechanics very well. Mars is many times farther in terms of distance, but in terms of Delta-V it isn't much more difficult to reach. What's more, resources on Mars are much easier to take advantage of because we can pull them right out of the atmosphere, rather than having to process regolith or solid ice.
So, stopping at the moon as a cost-saving measure is completely misguided. There's also not a lot of scientific interest there. If Mars is where we want to be, the most efficient thing to do is go straight there. Building a base on the moon to go to Mars is like building an underwater city to cross the Atlantic.
Mars is impossible (Score:2, Insightful)
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Explosive do not remove debris (Score:3)
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So...we need legions of illegal aliens on Mars then?
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Eventually you will need the kitchen sink.
Literally.
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You are acting like the surface of Mars is Plutonium dust or something. It is not. And, it turns out we've spent a lot of time figuring out how to shield spacecraft from radiation.
I mean, we all know that every astronaut that has spent time in space is a cancer-riddled miserable person. Wait... no, they're healthier than you or me.
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While the risks can sometimes be overblown you seem to be swinging in the opposite extreme. The ISS and all shuttle flights have all been well within the Earth's magnetic field, which is our biggest radiation shield. The Apollo program is the only time we've sent humans beyond this shield.
Mars has a minimal magnetic field compared to Earth. Just about every plan for long-term habitation of Mars has involved spending the majority of the time underground due to the radiation exposure. As others have pointed o
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So your goal is to loosen up the ground with a couple (dozen? hundred?) tonnes of mining explosives? Okay, what's the next step?
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, if they can't tackle the problem of putting someone on the Moon for a week, or a month (or at all) ... they have no way in hell of trying to solve some of the problems with going to Mars.
Permanently living on the Moon isn't even a pipe dream, but the only way to start solving some of these problems is to actually try to do it there ... put up a structure and go back to it hasn't been achieved, establishing a "permanent" settlement anywhere? They don't have anything remotely resembling that.
Trying to even get people to Mars would be suicide at this point, let alone trying to have them live there. At least not without developing and proving an awful lot of technology under realistic conditions.
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:5, Informative)
Actually in a lot of ways Mars is much easier. Plenty of water and CO2 to support growth. Sand that has been worn smooth by millenia of dust storms so that it won't destroy your equipment and especially air seals. A day length within the range of human adaptablity.
You do need a slightly larger rocket to get stuff there, but for unmanned supply ships it really is only a small difference - the Moon is already most of the way out of the Earth's gravity well, and once you're out of the gravity well you can get anywhere in the solar system essentially for free, if you're willing to take your time. Even a relatively fast Hohmann transfer orbit isn't *that* much more energetically demanding. Yes, it needs a larger rocket, but we've got SpaceX already dedicated to having the necessary rockets within a decade. It's only the manned ships that need to cross the distance in a hurry for radiation reasons, and I'm reasonably confident that Musk isn't just blowing smoke when he says his planned rockets will be up to the job.
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Re:Mars is impossible (Score:4, Informative)
Perchlorate isn't all that toxic, it is water soluble, it's easy to counteract its effects, and the exposure would be limited (since you couldn't go outside without a suit anyway). It's also not very corrosive. http://smt.sandvik.com/en/mate... [sandvik.com] http://mykin.com/rubber-chemic... [mykin.com]
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You mean other than having the technology to get them there alive, build any settlements, feed them once they're there, and keep them alive long enough to get them back?
Sorry, but there is a stunning lack of proven technology which would be required to pull this off.
Acting like this is just a trivial extension of stuff people are already doing is pretty much wishful thinking.
Bigger rockets don't even begin to cover it.
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Not easy, just easier than the Moon. We don't quite have the rockets to credibly do either yet, but once we do the only difference is transportation times, and that's really only relevant to the ships actually carrying colonists.
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>Now prove we can do it on another planet under less ideal conditions.
That's kind of the point of attempting it, is it not? There's no other way to prove it.
I haven't heard any reason to believe ecosystem maintenance would be substantially different in low gravity. And it's not like we haven't done lots of biology research in microgravity on the ISS, which can cause certain problems but they should be non-issues with a gravitational field. We won't know for sure until we try it.
Mars-crete data - have
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You'd have to take all the same stuff to the moon. And why would you ship it in the same rocket as the people? Send your equipment on ahead on a more energy-efficient path so that you can have a much larger payload on the same sized rocket, and then send the colonists after it on a high-speed path once it arrives.
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It's true that water would likely require ice-mining, but that's not exactly high-tech, we've been doing it on Earth for centuries. And it wouldn't need to be a large scale operation unless you're growing quickly - it's not like you're using up water while your sealed ecosystem is in steady-state. The only real issue would be if it contains toxic contaminants that cause problems for simple a simple thawing and distillation process (assuming distillation is even necessary).
And you're way off on CO2 levels.
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Nobody knows if gravity will actually be a significant problem for Mars or even the moon. We know it's an issue for micro-gravity (though we've got people living in it over a year anyway), we don't know about 1/3 or 1/6 gravity.
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Indeed. Moreover, we can reasonably extrapolate that those issues, such as muscle degradation from lack of regular exertion, and skeletal degradation from lack of impact stresses from walking, should be dramatically reduced if not eliminated by the presence of *any* significant gravity.
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Initially, the way we have always done it: in caves. There are plenty of caves on Mars. The difference in gravity is a red herring.
People can never drive cars, the speed would kill them! People can never fly! People can never...! Cut the Luddite crap.
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P.S. are you guys going to send pizza soon? We are getting hungry up here.
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http://www.distancetomars.com/
Not just nothing on Mars, but people fail to understand the size of the Solar System.
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
-1 Stupid. Why is this modded "Insightful"? It's dumb.
It's absolutely realistic to have humans living on Mars, or the Moon. It's easy: you build underground.
The problem is, you have to have a lot of technology and capabilities in place to do that. You'll need excavators, and you're not going to do that with one little mission. That's why we need to go back to the Moon, and start working on our construction capabilities there first, before heading all the way to Mars. The Moon is only a few days away, so it's a great place to get started working on this stuff, plus there's still plenty of scientifically interesting stuff to do there. Don't forget how many people would pay a handsome sum to take a vacation on the Moon. Once we have the capabilities of building underground habitats on the Moon, building large ships in space for interplanetary missions, etc., **then** we can head over to Mars and start building there.
As for gravity, we don't know what the long-term effects of 1/3g or 1/6g are on humans. It's surely not as bad as zero-g, which the guys in the ISS put up with. Building on the Moon will help us find this out, and in a safe manner since it's only a few days' journey back home to Earth. Having people spend a month or two at a time on the Moon is probably fairly safe, once we deal with the radiation problem. Mars is more of a problem because it's so far away, so you can't just come home if the low gravity is affecting you. However, it's also double the gravity of the Moon, so it likely won't be such a problem.
Anyway, these things are all challenges which can be overcome, in time. Which is why your post is stupid, because you assert that these challenges can **never** be overcome.
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Re:Mars is impossible (Score:5, Informative)
We have literally ZERO evidence that humans need 1g to remain healthy. We know long-term microgravity causes problems, but we also know that the worst of those problems are related to the lack of exercise and impact stresses on the skeleton from walking, and any sizable fraction of Earth gravity will provide those. We won't know if there are problems with 40% until we actually do long-term experiments.
Radiation protection is an issue, but that's easy enough to provide with thick-roofed shelters. Not like there's any shortage of rock and sand on Mars. We won't be walking in the open air any time in the next many centuries, maybe never if we're unable to successfully terraform the planet (Venus would likely be a more appealing target for that anyway), but there's no reason to believe we can't survive in artificial habitats. Most people on Earth already spend most of their life cut off from nature in cities anyway, what difference does it make if the city is roofed over?
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We won't be walking in the open air any time in the next many centuries, maybe never if we're unable to successfully terraform the planet (Venus would likely be a more appealing target for that anyway), but there's no reason to believe we can't survive in artificial habitats.
Do you happen to have any insights to provide to us about terraforming Venus? It used to be called the twin planet of Earth when I was a child, but now all I can think if it is as a living hell.
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
There's lots of suggestions floating around, none within reach of current technology. The closest and most efficient is probably the idea of seeding the atmosphere with an engineered airborne algae or diatom that would convert the atmospheric carbon into a stable form that would precipitate to the surface as they died. Get rid of the CO2 and the planet will cool over the course of many centuries to something we can work with - without greenhouse gasses Venus would be colder than Earth. Lingering CO2 and water vapor would prevent that, but probably even a fair fraction of the water vapor would condense out as the atmosphere cools.
Of course there's still that ~117 earth-day day to deal with. And probably a fairly extreme air pressure even after we've removed around 1/3+ of its mass (presumably it's not just pure carbon that precipitates out). That's going to take some real creative genetic engineering if you want complex surface life to thrive, but hey maybe by the time the planet cools off enough to work with we'll be up to the challenge.
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey, it worked on Earth. All it takes is introducing one microbe capable of thriving to remake an ecosystem. On Earth it was the first blue-green algae to develop photosynthesis a couple billion years ago. It took over a billion years to saturate the oceans with oxygen, and another half-billion before the atmospheric oxygen built up to current levels, but it did the job. And heck - there's the evolution of cellulose as well. That wasn't microbes, but the 80(?) million years between the evolution of cellulose and the evolution of something capable of digesting it locked gigatons of carbon into woody materials that eventually became planet-wide coal deposits, in the process interrupting a runaway greenhouse effect that would likely have left Earth in a state not so very different than Venus.
Start with an intelligently designed microbe without any competition or predators and I'm willing to bet we could see similarly dramatic effects within only a few millenia. Not exactly fast in human terms, but we're talking about rebuilding an entire planet - patience is going to be required.
Well, either patience, or the application of godlike power, which is also not completely out of the question when we're talking about looking many centuries into the future.
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems to me most of the people people of the "well you just do this" persuation have never even put together an Ikea chair, never mind a building. They don't seem to have a clue of the effort involved. The ONLY way it could be done is to send equipment, fuel, food & water there via autonomous lander for years prior to any humans landing possibly with (as yet not technically possible) some sort of building robots that can construct shelters and then hope the stuff is still ok when the humans eventually get there.
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We have evolved to live on earth, because we have not had the opportunity to evolve while living elsewhere
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I'll be long dead and buried before I let you, good sir, besmirch the honourable name of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck! A giraffe's neck is long because of generations of neck-stretching to reach the branches of acacia trees, and I will hear no more of this prattle pretending otherwise. Good DAY, sir!
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
We haven't evolved to live outside of tropical climates by your argument, because we can't live in Northern latitudes without artificial clothing and shelter.
Technology is evolution. We now direct our own adaptation to the environment and use technology to live in places that couldn't otherwise sustain us. Living on another planet is no different.
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We know enough about Physics to know it isn't possible to go to other systems. Ever.
A la contrair. We know enough that we know it is possible. You simply seem to lack that knowledge.
Alpha Centauri is just 4 ly away. In a 30 ly radius we have over 100 systems.
We know how to build ships that can reach 0.2c
Problematic is it to scale that for humans ... however I'm pretty sure most of us will witness the first probe going to an other solar system.
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Fantasy versus reality (Score:3)
We know how to build ships that can reach 0.2c
Until we actually build one and it travels that fast that is not true.
Problematic is it to scale that for humans ... however I'm pretty sure most of us will witness the first probe going to an other solar system.
Not in my lifetime. Not in yours either.
Re:Mars is impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
The things preventing us from reaching other star systems isn't physics. It's economics, psychology, and sociology. Given the money and the will, generation ships are perfectly viable. That's not to say that they are likely, but to say interstellar travel is impossible due to physics is flat out wrong. Hell, use something like Project Orion and you might not even need a generation ship.
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"Reality is not pessimism. It just is reality". -- Me
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Re:Mars is impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
Step one, for any of this, is to build a "permanent" for real ship.
A Ship that you can point in a direction and go.
A Ship with a rotating section for artificial gravity.
A Ship with a multi mega watt power source
A Ship with several smaller vehicles for going to and from a planet
etc.
Shooting people up there in a tin can that will burn up or be turned into a hut just isn't viable. Take the time to do it correctly.
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Step one, for any of this, is to build a "permanent" for real ship.
A Ship that you can point in a direction and go. A Ship with a rotating section for artificial gravity. A Ship with a multi mega watt power source A Ship with several smaller vehicles for going to and from a planet etc.
Shooting people up there in a tin can that will burn up or be turned into a hut just isn't viable. Take the time to do it correctly.
Step zero: find a trillion dollar budget.
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Lost ability? (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like the technical ability to go to the moon has more or less been lost, and then someone wants them to leapfrog to Mars.
NASA spent a bunch of years putting stuff exclusively into low Earth orbit (which was always a criticism of the Shuttle), and then subsequently lost the ability to do that ... and to add insult to injury they need to rent lift capacity from Russia, or buy rocket engines from them.
How anybody could expect them to go to Mars when they've not demonstrated the ability to go to the moon in 43 years?
Of course they don't have a plan ... they have neither the budget for it, nor the technology at the moment.
Lost is a tricky word (Score:5, Informative)
The technical ability to go to the moon, or even low earth orbit, is at our finger tips. The practical ability to do so today does not exist in the NASA storehouses.
The mathematics required to go to the moon and return was at least half the battle. Anyone who has had to slog through Battin knows that pain. But we are, to a certain extent, beyond that now. Our ability to simulate orbital mechanics and transfers far exceeds anything imaginable back in the last 50s and early 60s. NASA didn't not land rockets back on earth like SpaceX because they didn't think it would be more convenient, they didn't do it because the entire computational infrastructure that existed couldn't handle the mechanics.
Just about everything that was done has been advanced since the Apollo era. Will we need to re-invent some things? Sure, but in many cases the materials, technologies, and capabilities we have today would make all but the lessons learned books* obsolete for new construction.
We haven't really "lost" anything but the will. And by will, I mean solid, long-term funding commitments.
*yes - they do exist. They have been written for many missions and you can browse through them at several NASA libraries.
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"How anybody could expect them to go to Mars when they've not demonstrated the ability to go to the moon in 43 years?"
NASA already demonstrated that *with a ton of money* and *limited political interference* can go from basically zero to the Moon in about ten years... on technology from the sixties.
It seems not such a big leap to think that NASA could send people to Mars in a decade on XXI century technology. The highlights above, on the other hand, are what seem to be lacking.
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subsequently lost the ability to do that
Well, had it taken away from them.
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The ability hasn't been lost, only the will to do so. We proved we could do it, and the thrill is gone. Meanwhile robots have advanced to the point that they can do basic science and surveying much cheaper than humans. At this point there's just not much point in sending humans to another world unless we plan to build a permanent base.
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The problem isn't "going to the moon" - the problem is staying there long enough to do something useful while you're there. What was done in the original Moon missions could be done much more efficiently with robots.
The things we need people for is much more long-term - and the Apollo technology couldn't do that.
I don't buy the argument that the moon is a good stepping stone to Mars - the difficulty of creating and maintaining all the infrastructure to manufacture rocket fuel and get it up into lunar orbit
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Because nobody is suggesting they suddenly do that on another planet.
Having no current technology to get to the moon pretty much means anything trying to jump straight to Mars is entirely unproven.
NASA can't put people into low orbit without help, how the hell do you expect them to send people to Mars? Wingardium fucking leviosa?
Venus (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not Venus?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Venus (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a big fan of Venus as a destination. Scientifically, it makes a lot more sense than Mars - we know far less about it, and there's a real benefit to the latency reduction provided by humans concerning Venus surface rovers (which can only tolerate the surface conditions for relatively short periods before they need to float back up) than to Mars rovers, which are fine just sitting around and letting their batteries charge while waiting for more instructions. A thorough Venus survey program requires "diving" rovers based on phase-change balloons to explore the surface, and an aerial base station to hold all of the power generation, coolant handling, sample analysis, high gain radio communication, etc hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions. The easiest way to get a lifting gas on Venus is to split CO2 into CO and O2 (the same technology being tested on the Mars 2020 rover); O2 is a lifting gas there. And there's already N2 in the atmosphere. So if you have an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station, you pretty much already have livable space. Combine this with how Venus is easy to get to with frequent launch windows, easy aerocapture/aerobraking, far lower dangerous ionizing radiation, dramatically more solar radiation, nearly Earthlike gravity, etc, and how the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike that a person might even be able to step outside with nothing more than a facemask on**... it's very easy to make the case for Venus rather than Mars.
** - The known SOx and CO levels are dangerous to human eyes, but it's not certain that they rise to the point that they'd be dangerous to bare or lightly shielded skin for reasonable exposure durations. Either way, no pressure suit, cooling, or heating would be required.
I think the main thing Mars has going for it over Venus is "romance" (ironically). If people go to another planet, they want to have their feet on the ground, touching alien soil, hiking in alien canyons, etc, rather than just floating in clouds above a hellscape. Then again, I'm sure Venus has its own beauty to it.
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The best you could do at Venus is a space station.
The pressure and heat at the surface is so great that we can't keep robotic landers alive for more than minutes.
Venus also has no magnetic shield so radiation will be worst than the moon.
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Moon has no magnetic field either.
And Venus has a suer thick atmosphere, so basically no radiation at all at heights that are interesting.
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Not a space station. A cloud station. I'm not sure how you missed that:
"and an aerial base"
" hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions."
"an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station"
"the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike"
"just floating in clouds above a hellscape
The Venusian cloudtops between about 51 and 55km are the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth. They're not hellish like the surface. There's bad "smog" and no ox
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Because colonizing Venus would require one of three things:
- Massive terraforming efforts well beyond our current technological abilities, and likely to take millenia even after we start.
- Giant floating cities capable of surviving sporadic acid baths and the strong chaotic winds of the upper atmosphere, also probably beyond our current technology
- Bases capable of surviving high acidity and temperatures that melt lead, while shedding enough heat to avoid cooking the inhabitants. Lowered from orbit because
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Martian dust? You mean the stuff that is believed to have killed Mars 3 through coronal discharge? That may have led to Pathfinder's battery failure? That did this [imgur.com] to Curiosity's coin?
Nasa says: [nasa.gov]
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For cargo delivery I'd expect an Earth gravity assist - no need to rush things, it's fine if it takes a few years.
As for humans, overall, between the reduced transfer times and the natural shielding while at the planet, you do make the radiation loads on people a lot lower. You're absolutely right that it's not an issue you can just ignore - but any benefit is still a benefit, and cutting your transit times by a third, that's a real benefit.
For some hard numbers I just crunched: for simplicity I assumed a
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Why not Venus?
Why not Zoidberg?
Realisitically, if anywhere... (Score:2, Insightful)
You wouldn't have a plan either (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a project at work that will take a year. You've been commissioned to do a study and you present it with the schematics. Good, now go do it.
Oh, I can only guarantee you that I will give you time to work on it for the next month, and in a month I'll tell you if you have time. I'll need you to develop a complete spec and fixed manpower pricing. But you won't have anyone to work on that, because I need all your people to be working on my other pet project.
Fast forward 6 months:
So why haven't you worked on this? Oh, and by the way, your boss is about to retire. His replacement almost certainly doesn't care about this project.
We'll call you in in 6 more months to yell at you for not being complete.
In the meantime: Mars-One (Score:2)
I had a look at the Mars-One website today. According to their roadmap, we'll be seeing astronauts entering the habitat simulations sometime this year.
Who needs NASA anyway?
(/sarc)
Enough of Mars! (Score:5, Interesting)
Here we go again... NASA is doomed to keep a single course to Mars.
I think only reason they talk about Mars is if talk about the Moon, then need to put up some real money now to build transfer stage and lander. But talk about Mars because you can always defer those costs of hardware 20 years into the future for some other smucks to deal with. Also why colonize Mars? I don't see a huge land rush to Gobi Desert even though that place is 1000 times easier to settle. Reason is that place is a terrible place to live, we only fantasize about Mars because it is so far away.
Matula posted this on NASAwatch:
I blame most of the destination argument on the creation of the Mars underground in the 1980's. Prior to that NASA was focused on using the Shuttle for industrialization in LEO with projects like demonstrating the repair and return of satellites, building structural items in orbit, tethers, etc., all logical starting points for building a Cislunar industrial capability that would have given us the Solar System. NASA didn't even have plans to send robots to Mars. By advocating that we needed to skip the Moon and go rushing off to Mars they started this entire useless destination debate that has paralyzed space policy ever since.
Although their arguments made no rational or economic sense, falling back on outdated ideas like "manifest destiny" and painting Mars like a second Earth, they struck some cord among a very vocal hard core group that has shouted down any rational space strategy ever since. We see it now with Senators force feeding the SLS with money it doesn't need while starving commercial crew because the SLS would, in theory, be able to take astronauts to Mars. As a result the ISS is only one Soyuz failure away from being abandoned.
We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that is already well mapped and explored.
end quote
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
We're pretty sure that - in particularly limited areas - there's water, in some form (ices, hydrated minerals, etc). The problem is not only that you have to set up large-scale offworld mining, melting, filtering, and storage (an engineering project of quite significant note, given the harsh environment and the cost of delivering hardware to the lunar surface), but you also have to create low-cost reusable rockets designed for repeat operation on the moon with little to no maintenance, fueled by materials from the lunar surface. Which is a vastly harder, more expensive task. After all, it makes no financial sense to mine a tonne of water from the surface of the moon and then deliver it into lunar orbit or beyond with 10 tonnes of hardware/propellant sent from Earth, which in turn took 100 tonnes to get off the surface of the Earth. Everything has to be long-term operable entirely in the lunar environment with lunar resources.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets. But, if your goal is to advance the tech of reusable rockets, space mining, in-situ propellant production, etc, then by all means go ahead. Just don't pretend like you're doing it as a "cost saving measure" for a Mars mission.
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Since sending materials to the moon is very expensive, sending robotic 3D printers that can build objects out of moon dust could significantly reduce the expense of such an operation. Some materials, no doubt, would need to come from earth.
I'm a big bag of water. (Score:3, Interesting)
And so are you. Humans are delicate blobs of protein, fat, and carbs in aqueous solution or suspension. Not the right stuff for space. The only good reason for humans to leave the Earth is to travel to another hospitable planetary surface to establish a permanent colony. All else is engineering ego.
There is little that a human can do in space that can't be done faster and cheaper (when you count life support costs) by an AI controlling robots. But NASA has become a very conservative and bureaucratic or
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a good analysis. Personally, I don't give a rip about having people walk around on Mars: I think it's far more important to advance technology of reusable rockets, space mining, etc., so I think going back to the Moon makes far more sense.
Think about it this way: we landed men on the Moon over 40 years ago. We haven't been back since. What good did it do us, besides having some neat photos and museum exhibits about our past greatness which we cannot replicate now (without a whole lot of money and effort--we can't just launch a Moon mission next month if we wanted to)? We've actually **lost** the capabilities we had back then: back in the early 70s, we had the ability to send men to the Moon, and we did, several times. Today, we simply don't. Going to Mars will be no different: we'll spend a bunch of money on some big-ass rockets and send a handful of people to Mars, they'll walk around, and then we'll have nothing to show for it besides some photos and rock samples, and we won't be able to easily do it again because it'll be too expensive (because we chose the most expensive method possible because we wanted to do it as quickly as possible).
If we develop technologies more, then trips to other planets and moons will be cheaper. No, a singular trip to Mars will not be cheaper than the slower method of going back to the Moon and developing a lot of tech and capabilities, but **lots** of trips to Mars, to Saturn, to Titan, etc., will be far, far cheaper if we develop the tech now, than just sending singular trips to each of these places.
So the important question is:
Do we want to just send some people to walk around on Mars, and then quit all manned space exploration after that?
Or do we want to be able to send manned missions all over the solar system?
If your answer is the former, then going straight to Mars is the correct choice. If your answer is the latter, then going to the Moon is.
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It's much too far away; it's even farther than Mars. It also doesn't have that much mass, and it's all spread out except for Vesta and Ceres. We should be sending probes there, for sure, but we're nowhere near ready to send people there. Even Mars makes more sense than that.
The Moon is right next door, has plenty of material (not sure how usable it is for construction, but from what I remember it is possible to make "lunar concrete" with the regolith), has some water at the poles, has some gravity for ma
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It's exactly that kind of congressional thinking that has left NASA with no ability to even get humans into space for the last 5 years.
SpaceX currently only has the ability for fairly light lift to orbit for satellites and ISS cargo runs. SNC and Blue Origin are working off NASA's old technology to get humans to low Earth orbit. And Virgin Galactic is suborbital flight only (so lets not even consider this one for anything other than a joyride for rich men at the moment). Ultimately none of these are pushing
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It took quite a lot of support from to get those colonies self sustainable, specially if it wasn't possible to enslave the natives to do their master's bidding.
The colonies were sold in Europe as way for riches, and to get more land, but mostly to get windfall riches after the Spanish stroke the motherload with the Aztecs and the Incas.
All other colonies had to endure several decades of very little growth and dependency
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Why? Mars is much easier. Moon is only slightly closer (energetically speaking).
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Care to offer a counter-argument then rather than just ad hominems?
The moon is almost outside the Earth's gravity well. For non-perishable shipping purposes that's all that really matters - once you've escaped Earth the rest of the solar system can be reached for almost zero additional delta-V. More rocket just reduces the shipping times. Obviously that's a big deal for shipping radiation-sensitive humans, but they're only a small fraction of the shipping weight of an outpost, and can be sent once the su
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That's physical distance, I'm talking energy distance, completely different thing. The energy difference is what's important for rocketry - as long as you're not standing still, physical distance can be crossed just by waiting to coast across it, no extra energy needed. Energy differences require the application of energy, no amount of time will cross it.
Look at this crude drawing of gravitational potential energy around the Earth and moon for reference.
http://www.cyberphysics.co.uk/... [cyberphysics.co.uk]
The
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Obama should get about the same amount of credit for future Mars missions as either Bush, who both proposed manned missions to Mars.
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I kind of like the idea, with some variations:
It shouldn't be Nevada, nor Antarctica like someone else mentioned. It should be somewhere with near-surface permafrost, with good road access to keep costs down. Mars isn't a dry desert, nor is it a glacier, it's ice mixed in with sand, dust, muck... honestly, I think the Icelandic highlands would be perfect. The last time I was out there I actually ran into some geologists who were studying a new volcano there to help better understand Mars ;)
The contest sh