In a Major New Report, Scientists Build Rationale For Sending Astronauts To Mars (arstechnica.com) 67
A major scientific report published Tuesday argues that sending astronauts to Mars is justified by the quest to find life and conduct research that robots alone can't achieve. "We're searching for life on Mars," said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. "The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes." Ars Technica reports: The report, two years in the making and encompassing more than 200 pages, was published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Essentially, the committee co-chaired by Newman and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, was asked to identify the highest-priority science objectives for the first human missions to Mars. [...] "There's no turning back," Newman said. "Everyone is inspired by this because it's becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn't have the technologies. This would have been a study report."
The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. [...] The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms.
Notably, the report also addresses the issue of planetary protection, a principle that aims to protect both celestial bodies (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. [...] In recent years, NASA has been working with the International Committee on Space Research to design a plan in which human landings might occur in some areas of the planet, while other parts of Mars are left in "pristine" condition. The committee said this work should be prioritized to reach a resolution that will further the design of human missions to Mars. "NASA should continue to collaborate on the evolution of planetary protection guidelines, with the goal of enabling human explorers to perform research in regions that could possibly support, or even harbor, life," the report states.
The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. [...] The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms.
Notably, the report also addresses the issue of planetary protection, a principle that aims to protect both celestial bodies (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. [...] In recent years, NASA has been working with the International Committee on Space Research to design a plan in which human landings might occur in some areas of the planet, while other parts of Mars are left in "pristine" condition. The committee said this work should be prioritized to reach a resolution that will further the design of human missions to Mars. "NASA should continue to collaborate on the evolution of planetary protection guidelines, with the goal of enabling human explorers to perform research in regions that could possibly support, or even harbor, life," the report states.
Re: Send the billionaires please, one way (Score:4, Funny)
I'm cool with also sending anyone else who trusts their vision and wants to be a part of this great experiment. Meanwhile I'll re-play BioShock to remind myself of how this plays out.
Re: (Score:2)
Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Informative)
What's wrong with spending $100 billion to do something cool as shit?
Heck, Americans have spent that much this year paying for Trump's tariffs!
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:4, Informative)
At least $100 Billion. The tariffs have raised "As of August 2025, tariff revenues since January 2025 totaled $149 billion" (https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff-revenue-tracker-how-much-us-collecting-which-imports-are).
This is much less than la Presidenta's claim of $22 Trillion (last we heard, inflation tends to raise his estimate week after week). For comparison, the entire U.S. GDP for 2024 is $29.184 trillion (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp). We cannot trust any numbers put out by la Presidenta's regime, they are likely "massaged".
For the continuing damage: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/res... [yale.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He's listed like a dozen things that he wants to pay for with the tariff money, each of which would individually consume anywhere from "a large minority of it" to "more than all of it".
Re: (Score:2)
last i heard, the check is in the mail
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That $100 would be better spent on probes to planets, not attempting to cram people into a tin can and sending it to Mars....unless.....if they promise to cram Elmo in, then I might support it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a historic boondoggle where he makes trillions of dollars.
Spending the funds on climate change mitigation, population sustainability, and curing the assets gap ought to come first. That's a problem that "scientists" need to chained to solve before dubious excursions to other planets.
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, this report reeks of the people promoting Lunar exploration in order to mine Helium 3: a solution in search of a problem. They already have the thing in mind that they want to happen (in this case, settle Mars) and are searching backwards for a means to justify it.
In no way, if the actual goal is "studying life", will $100B buy you more results by sending humans than by sending robots, and nor will it shorten the schedule.When you put humans into the mix, suddenly all of the resources for your project end up going to delivering, sustaining, and retrieving that "smart hammer" you're sending, rather than the actual scientific equipment.
I'm not saying that there can't be good justifications for settling other planets - their can be. Musk's is the most defensible, IMHO (that it's a long, slow, expensive project, but is needed to learn how to make this rare thing (consciousness) redundant against natural and manmade disasters (the latter risk of which grows every year), and we never know how much time we'll have left to do the very-long project needed to do so. Though Musk IMHO grossly downplays the timescales and costs for true resource-independence (or rather, independence to the degree that *if necessary*, it could develop full resource independence on its own, even if shipments of key supplies from Earth are more efficient), and his "quick terraforming" notions are fantasy.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the promotion of a Lunar mission is more to give NASA some $ to spread around to their long term partners.
And the NASA-derived mission is just flailing in the dark, what a mess.
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Insightful)
well, we have spent more than that on the iss, and last experiment i saw was a zero-grav bot trying to find a rubik's cube in a module. much of the research done there isn't really worth the cost and could be done much, much cheaper on earth. but since we have it we gotta use it. it's was way overhyped. freeman dyson pointed out the clear distinction between "space science" and "space adventure, or sporting events in space": https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
he was also very sceptic about the purpose of the iss itself at that point in time, he was part of the commitee tasked to examine space projects and the iss was the last one he would recommend, but his advice was completely ignored. sadly, i can't find the talk where he explains that story in detail.
however, in the long run we definitely should learn about humans living in space and space travel. after all, what we spend on that, including this mars project, is but a tiny fraction of what we spend on eternal wars and all sorts of megalomaniac projects, or just amass the wealth on a tiny 1% of people who could probably fund this entire trip on his/her own.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:4, Insightful)
Realistically the two things that will make it happen are
1. China is doing it
3. Billionaire joyrides
Re: (Score:2)
Not to say that spending money to do "cool things" is inherently wrong, but just as a reminder: the Trump administration cut $8B from USAID's annual budget and it's projected to lead to 14 million extra deaths by 2030, 4,5m of them children [ucla.edu].
Re: (Score:1)
Yes. Let's do this. (Score:2)
Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Uhh,, are you crazy?? It's got an atmosphere with clouds of pure acid that snows lead sulfide on a surface that'll melt you face in 5 seconds. That said, we ought to do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Still more friendly than Mars, with more usable local resources
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno, balloon cities .. how stable is the atmospheric layering? We may be better off inhabiting space itself in modular space stations built from asteroid minerals. I would not be opposed to trying it though.
Re: (Score:2)
Venus's middle cloud layer is quite similar in most properties to Earth's troposphere, with convection cells, wind speeds, etc seemingly having a similar distribution to that on Earth. There's also lighting, seemingly at roughly Earth levels (though a lot of uncertainty), although we know very little about it, including even where it occurs (incl. whether it's in the middle layer), and why. Because Mars hogs most of the planetary exploration budget :P
Aerostats generally deal better with turbulence than fi
Re: Venus is orders of magnitude easier to coloniz (Score:5, Informative)
Recent studies suggest that it does not have anywhere near as much acid in its atmosphere as we thought, especially in the upper atmosphere where heâ(TM)s talking about.
Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score:5, Interesting)
Where are you going to live on Mars? You need meters of concrete above you if you don't want to die from the radiation.
You need an insulated, radiation proof pressure suit to do anything outside on Mars. An acid resistant suit is all you need in my cloud city on Venus. Temperature is perfect, pressure is fine and no radiation.
How will you generate electricity or get power on Mars? Solar is plenitiful on Venus.
Mining for carbon, water and all the elements of life sucks. Percipitating it out of the atmosphere is easier.
A big balloon is a relatively easy thing to transport to Venus compared to what you need to take to Mars to set yourself up. Especially when you don't even need your balloon to be perfectly sealed. There will be no pressure difference with this floating colony. So holes will smell awful and make your eyes water if you don't fix them fast but a large hole on Mars is going to literally suck.
Re: (Score:2)
Temperature is perfect, pressure is fine and no radiation.
This caught my eye so I looked it up. Here is a quote I found in relation to your claim: "Intense at the Top: Venus is closer to the Sun and receives intense solar energy, especially ultraviolet (UV) radiation, at its cloud tops."
Explain your position here please.
Re: (Score:3)
So, this is not only wrong, but it'd actually be more convenient if it were true ;)
Venus's middle cloud layer (the one in question) is actually more like vog (volcanic fog) on Earth. It's not an acid bath, it's a sparse aerosol, with visibility measured in kilometers. The particulates are higher molar than on Earth, but otherwise, it's not a very aggressive environ
Re: (Score:2)
(To elaborate about PELs: Venus's middle cloud layer is ~1-10mg/m3, depending on altitude, latitude, and what study you trust (our existing data isn't great). OSHA PELs are 1mg/m3 for an 8-hour shift. NIOSH's RELs are also 1mg/m3 for a 10-hour shift, with IDLH of 15mg/m3. Now, this has the two aforementioned caveats. On the downside, Venus's aerosols are higher molarity - 75-85% concentrated vs. ~20% on Earth. On the upside, the vast majority of the PEL/REL/IDLH risk is from inhalation, which obviously, yo
Re: Venus is orders of magnitude easier to coloniz (Score:1)
Seriously? (Score:2)
"The Venetian atmosphere is corrosive to many materials but it isn't toxic"
Oh really? Go suck on some SO2 and see how you get on.
"On Venus there is no need for radiation shielding"
BS. There's no ozone and at the height these balloons would float the UV and assorted stuff from the sun would fry you in seconds.
"holes in your balloon are not fatal"
Wtf re you smoking? Archimedes principle holds on Venus just as on Earth. Lose your lifting gas and you sink and on Venus you'll soon start to cook.
Re: (Score:2)
They are, however, correct. Venus has no (innate) magnetic field, only a weak induced one (about 2x that of Mars's induced field), but it has a massive atmosphere. The mass of matter over your head at a reasonable habitat altitude/latitude combination is equivalent to that of about 5 meters of water. Way more shielding than is necessary for human life. Of course, having even
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure I can take you seriously on the topic of space travel when you're talking about Venetian conditions.
Re: (Score:2)
Say, looks like somebody's reading my papers!
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Re: (Score:3)
What you're describing is definitely very cool - and likely something humans will do one day. However, the stated reasons for going into space at all are "to find life", and we're pretty sure there's none on Venus. We think there's at least the chance it might once have been on Mars, so coolness aside, Mars is the only* place worth visiting if you're looking for life.
* yes, moons of Jupiter may also have life, but that's even more theoretical than life-once-existed-on-Mars. We'll get there eventually too, b
Re: (Score:2)
Disagree. Venus had good conditions for life to emerge and also is a chemistry pot. Not seeing that on present day Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
If for some reason we actually run out of space on Earth, a floating raft on the ocean would be much easier than Mars or Venus or the moon.
There is no logical reason for humans to ever live on another planet.
Rationale (Score:2)
If you need a rationale, you already failed. Going to Mars if fucking cool, next level amazing. It's another fucking planet. A wandering point of red light in the sky our ancestors could only wonder about. How the F can any "rationale" be more compelling than that?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Rationale (Score:2)
Seems like having a friendly chat with your fellow human being is akin to interstellar travel for some.
Meh. We find life on Mars so what. (Score:2)
Being able to live on Mars is the cool target. Our descendants need that. Doomsday is just around the corner on the cosmic clock.
Re: (Score:2)
1. We take a long, long, long, time doing it.
2. A massi
Re: (Score:1)
to be honest, I'm not sure a Martian biosphere would survive more than a few generations with all the in-breeding.
When everybody's great-great-great grandfather is Elon Musk, you're going to find Earth women not exactly banging down the door to become breeding vessels of the aristocracy on an alien world.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity
Re: (Score:2)
Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.
Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet wit
Beware of advice from one who confuses yes with no (Score:4, Insightful)
If that quote is correct
> "The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes."
we can probably disregard the advice of that professor, who can't use yes and no properly.
The answer to the question 'are we alone' is 'maybe' until we find proof of other life, and then it becomes 'no', not 'yes'.
Re: Beware of advice from one who confuses yes wit (Score:2)
Yep!
Thatâ(TM)s what I noticed and was going to post about, but thankfully you also spotted that bass ackward logic.
Seriously, you probably should not have any responsibility in a scientific field if you get this wrong. Sadly the current American administration seems to prefer those who fail basic logic.
Food (Score:2)
I keep saying it:
We have not fed one human for one entire day using food produced independently of Earth.
Not one day. Sure, we've played and grown cress on the ISS and all sorts of other nonsense but we've never made FOOD in FOOD quantities to FEED even a single human for a single day.
If you go to Mars, you have to send a regular, consistent, constant stream of food up to them. As well as all the other materials and any experiments you want to do... like soils and hydroponics.
But even with all the kit, we
Re: (Score:2)
That's IMHO really overplaying it. I don't want to downplay food production effort difficulty, but saying "because we've never done it we can't" is like saying "Because we've never built a 5-meter-tall statue of a puffin made of glued-together Elvis dolls, we can't". We absolutely can, it's just a question of whether one thinks the investment is worth it. And I'm not talking out my arse, I have a degree in horticulture with a specialty in greenhouse cultivation. So much of the "keep the plants alive" sy
I bet I know who is behind this (Score:2)
The nature of uncertainty (Score:2)
Article:
Reality:
The answer to the question "Are we alone?" is always going to be "maybe" unless it becomes "no".
Hindsight is 20-20, but... (Score:2)
If there ever was an economic time to justify the a Mission to Mars, it was the early 80's. National Debt to GDP ratio was at an all-time low, space program was at its peak, and the Space Shuttle program had just begun.
Instead, Reagan decided to cut taxes for the rich.
Now, with a national debt of $38 trillion dollars and China taking over the world, the penultimate thing America can afford right now is a Mission to Mars. (I would have said "the last thing...", but honestly, the last thing America can affo
Try the moon 1st, at least they can return (Score:2)
Scientists who are bad at science (Score:2)
"The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes."
As a null hypothesis, the question "are we alone" can only scientifically be answered in two ways:
A) We don't know. OR
B) No (and here's the evidence).
Personally, I believe there is life out in the universe somewhere, but we'll never make meaningful contact because of the challenges of time and distance. We will likely find evidence of DNA or even DNA-based life having existed in other places in our Solar System (although nothing complex or intelligent in any sense of the word).
Nope (Score:2)
Sending people to Mars to see if there is life merely contaminates the surface so we will never be sure.
$100B? (Score:2)
Gee, years ago, Apple, alone, had $79B IN CASH. We can afford to go to the Moon, and Mars, and elsewhere.
That is, once we tax the wealthy at 72% (as it was in 1972), not 14%.
Or in other Words (Score:2)