Trump Has Grand Plan For Mission To Mars But Nasa Advises: Cool Your Jets (theguardian.com) 444
Donald Trump would like to see Americans walk on Mars during his presidency. Nasa would love to get there that quickly, too. The reality of space travel is slightly more complicated, however. From a report: On Monday, during a call with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who was aboard the International Space Station, Trump pressed her for a timeline on a crewed mission to Mars, one of Nasa's longest standing and most daunting goals. "Tell me, Mars," he asked her from the Oval Office, "what do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?" Whitson answered by pointing out that Trump, by signing a Nasa funding bill last month, had already approved a timeline for a mission in the 2030s. She added that Nasa was building a new heavy-launch rocket, which would need testing. "Unfortunately space flight takes a lot of time and money," she said. "But it is so worthwhile doing." Trump replied: "Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed that up a little bit, OK?" It was not clear whether the president meant the remark as a quip or something more serious.
My advice (Score:5, Funny)
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Trump was probably flipping TV channels when he came across a documentary about Kennedy's speech for putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. What worked for Kennedy should work for Trump, right?
What made Kennedy a "great" president was the fact that he got assassinated. If had lived, he might have washed out like the future Kennedy in Red Dwarf [wikipedia.org] who goes back in time to assassinate himself.
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Re: My advice (Score:2, Funny)
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Sure with hindsight we can say that.
Re: My advice (Score:4, Funny)
That idea doesn't really excite me. It just makes me Pence-ive.
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Hey, the test flight is gonna need a co-pilot, as well! Hopefully they can cram Paul Ryan aboard too....
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Even if there is no suitable launch window in a decade, put him in the rocket and let him test it anyway. It could make America great again!
Or find a way to get the funding out of him that would be necessary to hit Mars during his one (please?) term of president.
Outer space: A place where he actually belongs? (Score:2)
Bump the Trump!
Second term? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Second term? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as unlikely as him ever getting elected President.
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It's almost as unlikely as him ever getting elected President.
Trump's electoral victory was probably a statistical fluke. Maybe Biden will have better luck than Hillary in 2020, assuming that Kasich doesn't knock Trump out in the primaries.
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Not really. The POTUS swings between the parties a lot.
Re:Second term? (Score:4, Funny)
As a sometimes-Republican with a folder full of Creepy Uncle Joe memes, I beg you, Please, please, nominate Biden.
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As a sometimes-Republican with a folder full of Creepy Uncle Joe memes, I beg you, Please, please, nominate Biden.
Forget about the Uncle Joe memes. The Onion articles will be hysterical.
http://theweek.com/articles/468552/6-best-onion-parodies-joe-biden [theweek.com]
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Seeing how things are going, he'll likely get a 4th term, or more.
Congress will have to vote to repeal or modify the 22nd Amendment, which is unlikely as the Republicans can't negotiate among themselves and gave the Democrats everything they wanted in the budget deal to avoid a government shutdown.
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"Sure we can send you to Mars President Trump".
FTFY
(Voted for the guy but couldn't help)
Re:Second term? (Score:5, Funny)
You underestimate the stupidity of humanity. Have you ever met people?
I work in IT support. Are people as bad as users?
Re:Second term? (Score:5, Interesting)
You underestimate the stupidity of humanity. Have you ever met people?
I work in IT support. Are people as bad as users?
Worse, and there is some overlap. Some users are people as well.
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I walked outside once. There was some weird looks coming my way. I decided it best to stay indoors in case it was contagious.
I heard a better speech in a KFC commercial (Score:3)
You know that it's a bad time when you can get more inspiring sounding space speeches from Rob Lowe dressed in a Colonel Sanders costume than you get from the president:
http://www.adweek.com/agencysp... [adweek.com]
Sadly, we can be pretty sure that KFC is going to get that friggin sandwich into space on time. Trump's Mars rocket? Forget about it.
Ego vs Science (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a suspicion this is Ego vs Science.
He wants to cut all sorts of science and research budgets, so he's obviously not in favor of public money being spend on science. In Trump's eyes science is a private enterprise thing, not a government thing.
So why does he want to go to Mars, and specifically why does he want to go during his presidency?
The answer is Ego.
He wants to be known as the President who got man to another planet. He wants the capital city on some long-in-the-future Mars to be called Trump Town.
He doesn't want to go to look for signs of life, he doesn't want to go to advance science, he doesn't want to go to see if there is any long-term investment strategy.
He wants to go for the ego-boost.
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I don't care much about his motivation for it. I'd just like to see some serious effort to get us there. Like it or not, the next frontier is space. It's there to explore and I'd love it if I could live long enough to see humans walk on Mars.
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You should care about his motivation if you care at all. If his motivation is purely ego driven, then the minute it sinks in that he really isn't going to be around to take the credit, and no amount of executive orders is going to change that, the funding is going to disappear.
Indeed. The funding isn't there now. Did Trump propose a massive increase in the NASA budget in his announced budget plans? No, what he proposed for 2018 was slightly less than the House and Senate plans for 2017. If he had "go to Mars" as a priority, he would have proposed a massive NASA increase in his budget plans announced six weeks ago.
What? You are telling me that this is a new priority for Trump, a major change in thinking over the last six weeks? Well, how likely is it that will still be a priority
Re:Ego vs Science (Score:5, Interesting)
For the record: I am very pro humans going to Mars. I realize the hurdles, I realize the dangers. I realize we can't economically achieve it right now. I believe in the Buzz Aldrin model of an initially one way trip, I'm aware there is a high risk of life in the early days, (so should any applicant to go).
With all that said, if it takes Trump's ego to get us to Mars, I am all for that. He might actually be one of the very few men at the top willing to risk the political backlash of failure.
Even if we're going for the wrong reasons, I would be glad if we took the steps.
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He might actually be one of the very few men at the top willing to risk the political backlash of failure.
Oh I'm pretty sure we've already established that.
Re:Ego vs Science (Score:4, Insightful)
With all that said, if it takes Trump's ego to get us to Mars, I am all for that. He might actually be one of the very few men at the top willing to risk the political backlash of failure.
For me it's not just Trump's ego; it's his cognitive dissonance. There are practical problems that need to be solved to go to Mars. When he advocates cutting the research that will be needed at the same time as pushing for a result, I can only see many failures and dead astronauts as a result. He's the PHB that doesn't understand why the servers are slow after he's cut the budget for new servers for 5 years straight.
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Two words: "Mars casino".
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Two words: "Mars casino".
I didn't realize the Wongs were related to Trump...
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Who cares? Let's go to Mars! (Score:2, Funny)
I have a suspicion this is Ego vs Science.
Who cares? If that's what it takes, let's go to Mars!
He wants to cut all sorts of science and research budgets, so he's obviously not in favor of public money being spend on science. In Trump's eyes science is a private enterprise thing, not a government thing.
So why does he want to go to Mars, and specifically why does he want to go during his presidency?
The answer is Ego.
Who cares? If that's what it takes, let's go to Mars!
He wants to be known as the President who got man to another planet. He wants the capital city on some long-in-the-future Mars to be called Trump Town.
He doesn't want to go to look for signs of life, he doesn't want to go to advance science, he doesn't want to go to see if there is any long-term investment strategy.
Who cares? If that's what it takes, let's go to Mars!
He wants to go for the ego-boost.
Who cares? If that's what it takes, let's go to Mars!
Re:Ego vs Science (Score:5, Funny)
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He wants to cut all sorts of science and research budgets
The EPA isn't science, it's a Liberal and Bureaucratic propaganda and shakedown racket.
I disagree with EPA not being science. However, just for the sake of argument you are right.
As an example; Trump's Budget also calls for a 20% cut in R&D for the National Institute of Health research. 44% cut in R&D for Department of Energy.
It is not incorrect to say that Trump wants to cut science and R&D spending by the government. It is also not incorrect to say he believes Private Enterprise should be responsible for it.
You can make a political statement that he is correct politically to
Who knew? (Score:5, Funny)
"Interplanetary travel is more complicated than I thought it would be."
Of course he's serious (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't understand this. Every single time he says something idiotic, there are always people who try to claim that he isn't serious. "Oh, he's not serious about the wall" "Oh, he's not serious about his vendetta against immigrants." And then he will do, or at least try to do, exactly what he said. Anyone who, at this point, honestly believes that he doesn't mean what he says, is either stupid, deluded, or both.
So yes, I think he's entirely serious that he wants to have people walking on Mars within his term. The only question is, what will he do when he finds out that it's impossible? Will he throw craptons of money at NASA, thinking that he just throw money at the problem? Will he just get pissed off and "fire" NASA?
The man is so completely divorced from reality that there's really no way to anticipate what he will do.
Re:Of course he's serious (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars is one of the few problems that 'throwing money at it' would actually solve.
It would just take a LOT of it. Ridiculous amounts.
But, in principle, we could launch fleets of rockets at Mars with life support and other modules until we have enough to keep a crew alive for a while. And while we're doing that, we could be paying Musk to develop his tail-landing tech on a faster timeline, even throwing test rockets at Mars.
And then, in a few years, we could throw a bunch of astronaut-carrying rockets at the red planet and hope to have a high percentage of successful landings.
You have to ask yourself if accelerating the timeline is worth the cost, and if in doing so you'd actually achieve anything useful that couldn't be done better and for less money with a bit more patience - and I think the answer is 'no'.
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Re:Of course he's serious (Score:5, Interesting)
>There's absolutely no guarantee that money will actually make it to people capable and willing to accomplish this.
We can get rockets to Mars now, and have done so several times. We've seen Musk's tail landing tech coming along nicely, and the math works out so we know it's possible to get it right for Mars.
>Not to mention it takes forever for a rocket to make it to Mars
Most estimates are in the 150-300 day range. It depends on how much fuel you want to burn. Mars and Earth align every 25 months or so, but you don't worry about that unless you're sending humans. Longer trips are OK for 'stuff'.
>Even communications with Earth will be subject to several minutes of delay due to speed of light being finite.
4-24 minutes speed-of-light delay, assuming a direct line of sight. If you're bouncing a signal off a Sun-orbiting satellite to get around our star, then it'll be a bit longer. That's not really a problem for sending 'stuff', and the reason to send humans is they don't need live remote control.
The problem would be manufacturing and testing. Which is where the money comes in. The next decent Mars launch window is in April of 2018, then there's another in July of 2020. So you make a metric fuckton of rockets for 2018 and mount your payloads and shoot 'em off, then you follow up with humans a couple of years later.
Money. LOTS of money. Ludicrous amounts of money. But it would make a difference, and it could be done.
And the point would be to figure out how to live there, and to more efficiently do scientific research. If you could keep a geologist alive on Mars, they could do more in a week than the rovers have done since the first one landed. Humans are very flexible tools.
And ultimately, we'd want to see if we could live there. Because why not? The same reason we migrated out of the trees and then eventually out of Africa. Because it's a new place to go and make more humans.
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With enough money (read:energy, materials, and personnel) anything is possible. Not sure how you can make sure that the money is actually being spent to achieve your goals? Set up two separate entities competing with each other. Yes, it's twice the money, but your goals get accomplished.
I'm not going to get into whether that would be worth it or not, but it would be possible.
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He slashing the DOE budget to the point where ARPA-E has suspended future funding announcements because they aren't sure they will have the money to fund any research. Expect the same in all the other departments that do any kind of research, EPA, DARPA, etc. There is NO chance of us getting to Mars during the next 4 years. In fact I'd lay a higher probability that Elon Musk will make it Mars before the US does.
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I certainly won't defend many of the statements you list, but on this one, it sounds like dry New York City humor.
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Here's a video. [washingtonpost.com]
I know I'm from the Northeast and so have relatively decent sarcasm detection, but this is not even an edge case - he's got a huge "I just made a funny" grin on his face, and everyone in the room is laughing.
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That's an excellent way of hedging against looking like an idiot, and something Scott Adams does all the time. Just have enough plausible deniability that you can claim it was a joke. But you never know, people might give the answer you want in which case of course it was serious.
Re:Of course he's serious (Score:5, Interesting)
"The man is so completely divorced from reality that there's really no way to anticipate what he will do." One constant is that everything he does is about himself. Another constant is that he destroys everything he touches. He loves "strong leaders", i.e., moral degenerates that will step on anyone...errr...like him. The only exceptions are the ones where he thinks he can aggrandize perception of himself by going against a "strong leader" as in Lil'Kimmy and Assad.
Another thing to realize is that he's lost control of his administration, although that is putting it euphemistically. The Defense Dept. is doing things he doesn't understand. His own EPA administrator was exhorting the coal wackos to lobby Trump against the climate accords, as though EPA wasn't really part of the Cabinet. The Cabinet has gone off on their own, even his ghost minders have been sidelined. Treasury's minder got shunted off to a basement office. The rest are being "reassigned" by the Cabinet secretaries. How could they do that if that asshole was in charge? Even his "tax plan" was joke. It was written on a single piece of paper because his attention span won't allow him to comprehend any more. The people writing it know it is crap, but they also know giving him a sheet of talking points makes him feel like he's the President.
He's in charge of nothing except screwing things up.
Re:Of course he's serious (Score:4, Interesting)
- it keeps opponents on their toes since they're never quite sure when he is exaggerating or not.
- it plays well into "dog whistle" politics because supporters can outwardly claim that some appalling statement wasn't really serious, while secretly convincing themselves that it really was.
- makes it easy to get rid of underlings. You failed to accomplish the task I gave you? You don't know me well enough to know that I was serious about it this one time? You're fired!
- allows him to shirk responsibility for failure. Oh, that plan didn't actually work out? I never meant for it to anyway.
I used to work under a boss who had this same leadership style, and I'll say this: as an employee, it sucked.
God Help Us (Score:5, Insightful)
"or, at worst, during my second term" ... Please... No...
JFK (Score:2, Insightful)
Coal powered (Score:5, Funny)
And the rockets will coal powered. Beautiful, clean coal. That's the secret to making America great again.
I think some of you need to be more flexible (Score:3, Interesting)
I was a bit surprised by some of my fellow slashdotter's negative comments on this.
I've really hated the lack of focus on science and ignoring of scientific facts in the current administration. While I'd love to sell science funding for science's own sake, it is just not working well with a lot of our population and government representatives.
As the same time, we know putting a man on the moon generated a huge amount of scientific research and learning. So if the current administration wants to characterize funding as helping "go to Mars", I'm glad to live with it given the scientific work that will be generated because of it.
Might be what we need (Score:3)
I'm not a big fan of Trump, but if it takes his ego and bully power to get us back into space exploration, then that's a good thing. The thing I know he doesn't understand is how much effort and resources it takes to untertake a mission like this. I'm sure SpaceX has also been whispering in a few well-placed ears about taking over NASA's role as well -- that would definitely appeal to the conservative, small government, privatization always works crowd.
The problem I see is that no one would ever be willing to just dump the amount of money required into this. I'm a firm believer of the idea that throwing enough money and resources at a problem will solve it, but no one's willing to do that. We were willing back in the 60s when the Soviet Union beat us into space -- and we also poured uncountable sums of money into nuclear weapons and espionage technology as well with virtually zero limits. No one complained one bit back then, but they sure do now. Or, go back a few years and look at the Manhattan Project -- again, bags of money were just lit on fire and forgotten about because the goal of winning a war that was consuming huge numbers of men was possible if you paid for it. If you read about it, it was a massive project -- not just the bomb design, but the mining and refining of radioactive material that consumed vast amounts of resources.
The only way we could ever do something like this again is to have China plant a flag on Mars first...then all bets would be off.
pretty sad (Score:2, Interesting)
It's downright pathetic that NASA - formerly the epitome of America's can-do and forward-looking approach - is "oh wait, slow down, that's dangerous, that's expensive..."
Fuck you NASA, you hidebound, overbureaucratic, topheavy, ass-covering bunch of time-servers. (And by that I don't mean the people at the program levels - they're still rocket scientists: I mean the admins and the politicals at the top.)
Look, I get it: Trump's a boob. An ignoramus. If you're one of the literati, then you *have* to reflex
Take the money stupid (Score:3)
It's amazing that hating Trump and point out what a "dummy" he is, is more important than using this opportunity to convince him to give NASA more money and resources to implement his vision.
The deadline is irrelevant. If in 4 years NASA has made significant progress the funding increase will continue.
No wonder NASA has such a limited budget. They're too dumb to know when to shut up and take the money.
11% isn't a "plan" (Score:2)
It's a hunch with scaffolding. :D
scientific merits (Score:4)
Seems the comments have de-evolved into its normal Trump bashing. I'm going to start a new thread to debate the actual scientific merits of going to Mars.
While I'm pro space I don't see much need at this point for us to be focusing on a maned mission to Mars. I think we will eventually go to Mars but I think we should focus our time and resources on near Earth activity right now.
By near Earth, I mean Earth and Moon. We have been tossing up crap in to near Earth orbit for decades. We should return to the moon first, build a base there, maybe a colony, and focus on getting our crap together first.
We should get more actual space experience and pull the theoretical technology off the shelf and put it to use. I don't believe we will be ready for a manned mission to Mars till we have perfect space based building, artificial gravity, close to 100% recyclable life-support systems as we can get, magnetic radiation shielding, and nuclear propulsion.
I don't believe we should aim for Mars till we can make flights to the moon as routine as jet travel across the world is today. Once we have mastered these technologies and routine travel to the moon then we should be ready for Mars. An as a bonus if we are ready for Mars then we should be ready to go any where in the solar system.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Living on Mars is not the same as a discussion about visiting Mars.
But, "we can't do XX. Ever." has been said a million times about a million different things and every time, when there was the will and the money to do XX the person making the statement came down as a short-sighted idiot.
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But will and money could get you to Mars.
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What, you want like a guarantee or something? I can't even give you that for the moon, and that is demonstrably possible. You are moving the bar.
Tin Cans (Score:3)
Shooting people to Mars in a tin can is a useless exercise.
It would not really advance space travel technology all that much, it's dangerous as hell, and we really wouldn't learn much more (if any more) than we know now.
In fact, I expect that the spectacle of people dying during the attempt would do more damage to the Space Program than you can imagine.
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It's not useless if one of your goals is to advance the art of keeping people alive in deep space. Is that a useless goal? Sure. But so is practically every other human endeavor not directly related to survival. We spend money on art and on making our neighborhoods pretty. I just came back from a vacation where I packed my whole family into an aluminum tube with wings and we flew to England just to see shit that we haven't seen before. Utterly useless, but hey, it was fun. Just for fun, I make little projec
Re: Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mars (Score:5, Funny)
Enough with this migrating to Asia thing. We cannot live in Asia. Ever. The difference in temperature will guarantee that. You can't fix biology and evolution. And don't say "take the skins off animals" or "build fires". Give us all a break.
Re:Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
What you are really saying is that we should colonize Venus first. I agree. Floating colonies on (above) Venus sounds so much better than living in tin cans on a cold dead rusty world.
This is my island in the Stratosphere.
I got a place for sunshine and my freeze dried beer.
No need to freeze as it's warm and clear.
Don't look down now, there is nothing to fear.
Just a Venetian sunset such a lovely view.
I can't believe we thought it was something new!
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Already have those in the form of Blimps and hot air balloons. Also, air for humans is much less denser than Venetian air making breathable air for humans a lifting gas on Venus. No need for hydrogen or helium as a lifting gas just use a Nitrogen/Oxygen mixture that we breathe.
Re:Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
The sulfuric acid is more of a resource than a problem, and it'd be easier to colonize Venus if the sulfuric acid was denser. It's actually pretty sparse - a couple to a couple dozen milligrams per cubic meter. Standards for breathing sulfuric acid on Earth for an 8-hour shift are between one and a couple milligrams per cubic meter, if that puts it into perspective. It's like a bad smog (or more accurately, vog) than being like a bath in sulfuric acid. There are many polymers with excellent sulfuric acid compatibility.
The reason sulfuric acid is a resource is, first off, it's not 100% sulfuric acid, so there's the water content that can first be dehydrated. After further heating, you decompose H2SO4 to SO3 + H2O. Further heating, plus catalysts, can also decompose SO3 to SO2 + O2. Alternatively you can use the SO3 as a scrubber conditioning agent to help capture more moisture from the atmosphere. There's also the sulfur-iodine cycle for the generation of hydrogen.
Not so, the sunlight in the middle cloud layer is rather earthlike (depending on your latitude). The cloud decks have absorbed only about a third of the light by the time it reaches the middle cloud layer at the equator (more toward the poles), and Venus's solar constant is higher than Earth's, so it roughly equals out. Except that light comes from all sides.
Solar power has even been shown to be possible to use at the surface, albeit with extremely low power density. But enough to run, say, a seismic or weather station.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Informative)
Already been done [wikipedia.org] :)
(But it's long since time for a followup, that was just a very simple, short-term pair of probes)
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Residual propellant (+ stored gas) inflation of a (repackable) ballute or lifting body envelope, which doubles as both the entry system and as lift balloon when in the atmosphere. Ascent stages are very light on return, so it doesn't take a huge lift envelope to keep it buoyant in the atmosphere. Ballutes are already being well investigated as reentry systems alone for Venus, as it makes for a much lighter-weight entry s
Re:Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
So, Venus's middle cloud layer [staticflickr.com], then?
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Well, Venus does have (a) magnetosphere(s). More importantly, Venus is as close (in terms to mass and orbit) to Earth's twin as we are going to get.
Granted the atmosphere, in terms of pressure alone, will kill you; however, if we can devise a runaway method for trapping some of those gases into a more solid form...we could have a new planet to play with in a relatively short period of time. So ask yourself, what reusable catalyst would we need to create to transform that atmosphere into something a little m
Re:Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
It only has an induced magnetosphere, like Mars (although about twice as powerful). But it's big defense against radiation is the thickness of its atmosphere; radiation has to pass through a lot of mass to get to habitable areas. The radiation levels within Venus's middle cloud layer are perfectly acceptable without extra shielding.
Not in the middle cloud layer. Actually it's just the opposite, the pressure / temperature relation in the middle cloud layer means somewhat low (but still acceptable) pressures at normal Earth temperatures. But it's still by far the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth.
The unfortunate thing for Venus is that people think only in terms of surfaces; if Venus's atmosphere had stopped at its middle cloud layer, nobody would be talking about Mars today. But because Venus's atmosphere is carbon dioxide, almost any common gas can be used as a lifting gas. Including nitrogen and oxygen - ordinary Earth air is a lifting gas, offering about half as much lift as helium does on Earth. Meaning you can actually live inside your lift envelope. And airship envelopes are not particularly heavy, despite their large sizes. Your entire habitat is this completely mobile, constantly exploring new ground, accessing the surface as needed with bellows and/or phase-change balloons.
Now you're talking about terraforming, which we're nowhere near doing for any planet (not Mars either - Mars's biggest problem is that isotopic ratios indicate that almost all of the planet's nitrogen has been lost to space). Carl Sagan famously, before Venus's conditions were known, proposed seeding Venus's clouds with phototrophs in order to sequester carbon and create an oxygenated atmosphere. He later changed his mind, saying that you'd end up with a huge deep layer of carbon and a dense, hot oxygen atmosphere, and the whole planetary surface would explode. Further dampers were put on the concept when it was pointed out that, depending on what assumptions you make, it'd take tens of thousands to millions of years to sequester regardless.
Many, many different proposals for terraforming Venus have been made over the years, but honestly I think Sagan had the right idea, for the wrong reason. Namely, because we've seen this situation before. Earth used to be a world with a CO2-rich atmosphere, no oxygen, ferric oxide on its surface (well, more accurately, Fe+2 ions in the oceans), etc. Did Earth explode once microbes developed photosynthesis? Of course not. As fast as they could produce oxygen, the iron oxidized to ferric oxyhydroxide to magnetite and hematite, laying down bands of iron oxides (interspersed with sequestered carbon), which we now know as the banded iron formations. There was no "thick layer of graphite" or "dense explosive oxygen atmosphere being made" on Earth, and there's all the less reason to expect it on Venus, because in Venus's hot, dense surface conditions the abundant ferric oxide (and other species) will be even more reactive. Oxygen will be consumed as fast as it's created, until you've exhausted all available surface ferric oxide, which will take quite a long time. Indeed, if you took some of the "atmospheric ejection" or "atmosphere freezing" terraforming proposals, you'd be faced with a problem when you actually started producing oxygen in Venus - you'd be fighting against the rusting of the planet.
The low levels of hydrogen are IMHO more challenging; I don't like most of the proposals for getting more
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There is a reason why Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere and the bulk of the water is gone, until you can fix that issue, no possible amount of generating atmosphere gasses will fix this.
The issue is Mars has a very weak magnetic field to shield it from the solar wind which is stripping the atmosphere from the planet faster than it's generated. Now if you come up with a solution to that issue, you will go a long way to making the place habitable.
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Nonsense. We need to increase the mass of Mars. That will make trapping an atmosphere there much easier.
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One proposal is to deflect the solar wind with a magnetic shield. [phys.org]
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Re: Mars (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, no. How many times have we told you not to try out your code on the production server?
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it would get eroded away just as quickly as it was generated.
Citation needed. Mars had liquid oceans at one point. Clearly it once had a much denser atmosphere that lasted for geological time spans.
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Re: Mars (Score:2)
Re: Mars (Score:2)
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Well, then get his ass to Mars. . . .
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Re:Mars (Score:4, Informative)
Re:We went to the moon in under 8 years (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not interested in space travel, he's interested in himself.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Right, Obama (or Clinton) makes the same pronouncement and you're all for it, Trump makes it and it is "EVIL!!!!!"
Keep it up, and the Democrats will never get back in power. Which is fine by me. The Republicans too are proving just as inept. Which is fine by me. Perhaps we'll actually get a viable third party that doesn't whine like a bitch when they aren't in power, and actually is constructive when they are.
Re:We went to the moon in under 8 years (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that he's evil (at least in this context), it's that he's making everything about himself.
Re:We went to the moon in under 8 years (Score:5, Insightful)
If that gets us a mission to Mars sooner, so what?
Re: (Score:2)
No one's saying it's a bad thing for NASA or science. Just pointing out the reasons for it.
Re: (Score:2)
Wasn't everyone already aware he's a thing skinned narcissist? Everything has always been about him. Everything. Why do you think his wife doesn't want to live with him in DC?
Re: (Score:3)
Right, Obama (or Clinton) makes the same pronouncement and you're all for it, Trump makes it and it is "EVIL!!!!!"
No, neither of them made it about themselves. At no point did you hear them say, "Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term. Me! Me! Me!" [emphasis mine] Rather, they deferred to the experts to come up with a reasonable schedule to maximize success and safety.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, to make things as simplistic as possible, Mars at its closest is over at thousand times farther away.
Now I don't have much of a throwing arm -- you might say I'm starting with nothing -- but I'm pretty certain if you gave me a few years I could manage to throw a football twenty yards. It doesn't follow that given a few more years I could somehow throw a football twenty kilometers.
Re: (Score:3)
Unless in that time you developed a catapult to throw it for you. :)
Do the math. To achieve a range of 20km, the catapult would have to launch the football at 990 miles per hour -- and that's in a vacuum.
Re: (Score:3)
See, you are well on your way to get that football twenty kilometers with your catap... contraption. ^_^
Re: (Score:2)
Something tells me his time in office won't last long enough to even pick the mission logo.
If he does, how much do you want to bet the logo has a lot of gold and has his name on it?
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with his statement is the timeline is just not realistic. There are some parts of the puzzle that have yet to be solved such as the radiation exposure and long term physical physical effects of long term deep space travel. A suicide trip to mars is not any sort of achievement and would only add to his list of failures.
Re: National Aeronautics And Space Administration (Score:2)