Slashdot Mirror

People are better than robots at exploring a planet. We need to put people on Mars. Mars Direct will get them there. All we need is the will to do it.

And before you go arguing how it will be so expensive, bear in mind that it would only be a 7% increase in NASA's budget for the next 10 years, and that would give us 5 manned missions.

However, if there were manned Mars missions planned, we wouldn't have any money left for all this neat science.

Apparently someone hasnt kept up with Mars Direct which includes proposales that outline a viable real world plan for putting men on mars within a decade for a cost of less than $6B.

Read The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. Trust me! A manned Mars mission is much more feasible than you think.

Actually, the amount of radiation on Mars (according to Robert Zubrin in his book "The Case for Mars") isn't anything that can't be solved by simply putting some sandbags on the roof of the hab and a light amount of sheilding on the EVA suits.

And I don't know what you people are thinking when you say this will be expensive. We can have 5 manned missions, covering thousands of square miles over 10 years for under $60 billion. That's about 8% more than what NASA is spending right now on failed projects like SSTO and ISS projects. Read something.

If you're interested in Mars-Exploration, but "NASA estimated 300 billion dollars to do it" got you thinking, you might want to read these, as they come to a quite different estimate:
- The Mars-Society...
- ...and its german branch
- Robert Zubrin & Mars Direct
- Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars", a book I can absolutely recommend
- The german link again (I'm a german, so please bear with me, ok? :-)
I hope these may be of help...

PS: At least I wouldn't be wondering if Europe and Russia were to cooperate on this, but I sure don't hope for another "space race"... Would be one hell of sight though... Europe/Russia vs. China vs. USA? :-)

Here is a project I would love to support.

Massive amounts of numbers to be crunched, tons of routes to be discovered, and all by lowly computers with nothing better to do.

Proving that some ungodly number of ProcHours can figure out a RC-72 bit key is meaningless to me.

This is the sort of science humanity is interested in. Onward to Mars!

-Brett

The Case for Mars is a great read... and now much (all?) of it can be downloaded for free from here:

http://www.nw.net/mars/

Also, check out the Mars society.

A new spaceplane, designed for crew. See the Orbital Space Plane.

A new technology, reusable launch vehicle. See the Space Launch Initiative.

Continuing with the Prometheus Project. We fucked up when we stopped persuing NERVA/Rover.

Mars. Need I say more?

I'd also like to see a space elevator persued, but I don't know that we have the tech yet. Then again, I haven't looked into it that much either.

Yeah, so that's my wishlist. Only a few hundreds of billions of dollars in imaginary cash NASA doesn't have...

Don't sell your country short, friend. Those fellows at University of Queensland have as much or more expertise flying scramjets as anybody else in the world.

Me, I'm an aerospace engineer who's a lot more interested in the aero part than the space part. Maybe when we both get jobs, we can trade. : )

I think the ISS is cool for its gee-whiz factor, but I've come to view it as a) too expensive for what it does and b) not useful to get us to Mars, which I believe should be our A-1 short term goal. The book that crystallized my thinking on this is called The Case for Mars, and I never let a discussion about space travel go by without harping on how really really clever this plan is.

NASA has stated that ISS is necessary for, and will be used for, space exploration. I just no longer believe them. It's not necessary to get us to Mars, and I believe it's soaking up the funding that WOULD get us there. That, in a nutshell, is why I don't support the ISS program.

I don't believe that you are correct. The Moon is close to earth, and might be good for some industry in the medium term, but there's nothing you can do there that you can't do with a little bit more work on orbit.

Even if you can find oxygen on the moon, nobody's found convincing evidence of nitrogen, which means that you can't grow food there, unless you import nitrogen. Now, of course, you have the same problem on orbit, but the only advantage to the Moon is that you're in a gravity well. Apart from that, it's basically a desert.

My priest on this subject is Dr. Zubrin, who advocates (rather than doing a lot of on-orbit assembly for a Battlestar Galactica Mars mission) launching two rockets, one with the return vehicle and one with the crew hab module, directly to Mars from Earth. No rendezvous in orbit, no assembly required.

It's (obviously) a bit more involved, but I suggest you check out his web site and read his plans.

Incidentally, the habs that he is talking about for Mars would also work fine on the Moon. So there's no reason not to build a couple extra and dump some crews there to do some more exploration and some real science. But, I don't believe we should depend on Luna as some sort of waystation.

Mars Direct

I think any engineer that's interested in space travel should read Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars". He has an axe to grind, yes, but he's also got a kick-ass plan for exploring the solar system. I heartily recommend it.

Buy it here, not at Amazon! You can also read some papers he's published that are the real meat of his proposal.

Why isn't NASA interested in sending people to Mars?

NASA has plenty of stuff on the Mars menu as it is. Personally I hope they take a pass on sending humans, there's just so little point to it. Odds are Europe will come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, if they want to pay for it, go for it!

Send the robots, you don't even have to pay them and they can be programmed to say historic things like, "This is one small step for [a] man-bot, one giant leap for man-bot-kind." I just don't think it's cost-effective to send humans with all their frailties -- and send enough extra stuff to get them back.

These folks disagree and these guys are already colonizing Mars/Utah. Certainly the idea captures the imagination.

In the meantime, part of Mars has been conveniently discovered in Canada.

Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan -- which has been sort of adopted by NASA -- lets you do most of these things without first having a space station. The basic idea is to send a robot propellant factory/return vehicle to Mars ahead of the astronauts.

A solid understanding of the effect of long-duration (3+ years) exposure to space in closed habitation.

Zubrin argues that the psychological effects of close proximity for the length of the trip can be easily studied on Antarctica, or at sea. The plan calls for tethering the Earth-to-Mars spacecraft to a spent booster and spinning it for (faux) gravity, which should take care of zero-g health problems. The only outstanding issues then are radiation (for which he suggests basic shielding plus a shelter for solar flares) and medical emergencies (for which he suggests cross-training and luck).

Development of self-sustaining ecologies for said closed habitation.

Since the crew travel in a different craft each way, the Mars Direct plan simply replaces the mass fuel for a round trip with the equivalent mass of life support. He does the math in a 'The Case for Mars'.

Psychological and health studies to maintain crew safety and performance during said mission.

Can be done on the ground -- see above.

Development of technologies to allow us to construct large structures on-orbit (since no Mars-bound vessel will be small enough to fit on the end of an Energia booster).

Mars Direct is designed for Saturn Vs, but Zubrin has a variation using Energia in his book.

Your points five and six (about logistics and management) I'm not too sure about. Mars Direct is a lot closer to a Apollo mission than an ISS mission, but it's still novel territory that will require/spawn new techniques.

In his book Zubrin talks about objections to Mars missions because of the perception that a moon base (or in this case an ISS) is a pre-requisite. He fears that the space program will use up its tenuous goodwill with congress (and hence its funding) by screwing around in orbit when we could be getting started on Mars right now...

The above is a common misconception. Richard Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal shows how to send humans to mars without the ISS. Of course, ISS keeps earthbound contractors fat, and happy.

If you want to funnel huge quantities of money into the usual set of bloated aerospace companies, you build 'Oases in Space'.

In the '80's, President Bush said 'Let's go to Mars'. NASA said 'Gravy train!! The Space Exploration Initiative will give us a massive infrastructure, including a Moon base, all for less than a trillion dollars. And once we have that, we might go to Mars.'

Bush passed on that plan at that price. Perhaps he actually wanted people to go to Mars.

Zubrin's Mars Direct plan would cost $50 billion to get to Mars, but wouldn't build an empire. NASA has shown little interest.

I'm with Roberty Zubrin on this one: with the technology that Apollo produced, we should be going not to the moon, but to Mars. It would be completely doable, and there's far more interesting & useful things there than fuel for a mythical reactor that no one can even build yet. Just to pick two seemingly trivial examples: air & water. A martian base could cultivate what life support supplies are needed locally; a lunar base would have to import them -- expensively -- from earth. Any profit gained from He3 exploration would surely not be enough to counter those expenses, but a martian expedition could, for the most part live off the land and, once established, go on to more interesting things.

Anybody interested in a Mars mission would do well to use as a starting point Zubrin's Mars Direct plan...

Many of the technical questions being raised have proposed answers to them in Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" Plan..

Anyone with mod points, please mod up krswan's post.

The BBC article has completely out-of-date information corrected by Zubrin.

(1) Travel time is 180 days, *not* 300.

(2) The BBC article says: "Our current recycling technology
is good -- but not good enough." Wrong. The technology
is well-proven... a century old in some cases.

The BBC article also has mythology as information, like the idea that if it did take 300 days that this is a great psychological hardship and we'll need to have a "specially selected" crew.

Finally, there is some sort of politics going on, with the discussion of which nationality should get to place the first footprint on Mars. Quick answer: none of them. A human will be the first to set foot on Mars. (I wish there were Earth citizenships, for civilized people.)

I second krswan's pointer to the Mars Direct site, and add a plug for Zubrin's book, _The Case For Mars_. Zubrin's book is a detailed outline of Mars Direct and will give precision to what is only summarized above.

Ellen

The gravity issue can be solved by attaching the crew module to a supply module by a long cable and "orbiting" them around each other, creating a simulated gravity. Mars Gravity is about 1/3 of Earth's and they would probably spin the modules fast enough to simulate Mars on the trip there, and faster on the trip back to get the astronauts ready for Earth.

Many of the technical questions being raised have proposed answers to them in Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" Plan. Many questions remain, but it is a good start, and interesting reading.

LOL! You mustn't get out much... :)

Did you bother checking what is now the NASA reference mission? I am quoting it. I presume the (kind) folk who modded my little post did. They would have seen that this is EXACTLY the configuration recommended by the experts.

Here it is for you: Mars Direct. For information directly relating to cosmic radiation go to this pdf

LOL! You mustn't get out much... :)

Did you bother checking what is now the NASA reference mission? I am quoting it. I presume the (kind) folk who modded my little post did. They would have seen that this is EXACTLY the configuration recommended by the experts.

Here it is for you: Mars Direct. For information directly relating to cosmic radiation go to this pdf

Pure oxygen at normal air pressure creates health problems after about 24-30 hours; at higher pressures pure oxygen becomes toxic. You can breathe pure oxygen at lower pressures without any major health effects, but then you run into fire safety issues (i.e., Apollo I).

I neglected to include the link to the Mars Direct Home Page in my original article, so here it is now. Needless to say they've thought of these things in their proposal.

I have to say I disagree that the logistics are unreasonable. We made it to the moon 33 years ago - a third of a century - before we even had modern computers. Getting to and from mars is simply a matter of scale... it takes longer and takes more thrust to get back off the surface. But that doesn't remotely mean it can't be done. The distance is phenomenal, yes, but in space distance just becomes time. Possibly the biggest logistical problem is medicine ... in the apollo program there was a maximum return time of about 4 days... if someone gets sick you can get them home to go to a doctor. For Mars, that's not an option because you're 6 months away with limited opportunities for orbital transition. But there are a *lot* of people working on this very problem, even while NASA hasn't yet made concrete plans for a mars mission.

Take a look at some of the plans invented by groups outside of NASA, most notably Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct concept. I'll spare you going into detail but this plan has so many fail-safes it's ridiculous. The entire thing uses more-or-less existing technology.

Meanwhile, there are two experiments already running to study the difficulties of having people live isolated on Mars for an extended mission (many months until the next launch window floats around). Check out the Mars Arctic Research Station and the Mars Desert Research Station (site temporarily down?). All this research and work is already being done, independantly of NASA. (usually marssociety.org is a great reference... at the moment it seems to be undergoing maintenance or something. Bad timing.)

Technologically, it can be done; I think there's little question about that. As for the policital will and the money, that's a different issue. But maybe this bill shows that there is some interest after all.

Personally, I put my money on commercialization of space being the primary driving force in the next 20 years. The profit motives and the opportunities of space tourism and potentially near-earth asteroid mining will outstrip anything the US government will deliver in the near future.

Dr. Robert Zurbin, lockheed martin engineer and NASA affiliate, has actually designed a mars mission (for NASA through lockheed martin) that will only cost about US$10B and does only use (martian) air, gravity, and a small nuclear reactor.

As for pole stations that DO use only resources "naturally" available, he has established one and another is in the works.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-base-01h.html
Basically, the idea is to send an unmanned rocket to mars (no larger than conventional rockets used in large sattelite launches) with lots of hydrogen and a small nuclear reactor. The hydrogen can be combined with things in the martian atmosphere to produce methane, oxygen and water. The reaction has carbon monoxide leftover, which is vented to the atmosphere. After the unmanned rocket with the H2 completes, a manned rocket is sent to mars. The first rocket will have generated all the fuel to return home (something like 800 tons of methane from 40 tons of H2), water and oxygen for the arriving astronaughts.

There is also a discovery program about this. He has had good success using this method elsewhere.. and a full scale, self-contained simulation started this month. A plug for his book about this and some useful text on the subject can be found at http://www.nw.net/mars/


Wendell

I've wanted to go to Mars ever since I read The Case for Mars, by the aforementioned Robert Zubrin. Check it out- a little dated, but still exciting.

Mars is absolutly within our grasp. We can get there with Apollo era rocketry and when we get there we can live off the land. Robert Zubrin has been writing about this for years and has built prototypes of the equipment we'll need to generate rocket fuel, oxygen, and water out of native materials.
The big issue is that we can't go for a month. For a Mars trip to be worthwhile, in scientific terms, we've got to stay for a year.
For anyone that needs convicing check out the The Mars Scociety. Mars awaits us. Its our next step.
There is nothing for us on the Moon. It's not a good lauch pad for future missions, or fuel depot. It might be a good place to put a telescope but we could do that with an unmanned mission. Save the moon for the tourist, at least not until we can build fusion reactors that depend on all the helium-3 up there.

Actually, I am very much in favor of using extraterrestrial resources to enable vastly cheaper spaceflight efforts. Again, the near-term concept farthest along in this vein is Mars Direct. See also Gerrold K. O'Neill's work, The High Frontier...dated, but not refuted. America's and NASA's political interests have diverged from these paths, and I hope they or someone else will return to them.

This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!

What about using two Soyuz capsules? That's the obvious solution but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...

When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.

Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....

I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.

As a former Boeing Space Station engineer, I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this - leasing a module as a movie set. To get the obvious out of the way, there aren't enough scenes needing zero G in sci-fi dramas to justify it, which leaves sports and sex as the only things that would keep people's attention for continuing and repeated use. My God, we're on the verge of seeing the dawn of the 24-hour weightless smut channel, just when I thought I had seen everything...

What's even worse is that the real rationale for the Space Station is virtually dead, if it's not totally dead already. The ONLY reason for the space station is to do life science in zero G (or reduced G, like growing plants in a Martian level centrifuge) - EVERYTHING else (earth resources photography, astronomical observations, you name it) is going to be done cheaper and better from unmanned platforms that don't have the expense of an extraneous life support system.

The Space Station is SO big that the current crew of three is run ragged trying to keep the systems maintenance going - there is NO TIME for ANY life science at present. That won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle. (If modifying a hollow can of air into a movie studio costs $100M, you can imagine what a new reentry vehicle with heat shielding, comm, nav, propulsion and all the rest would cost, starting from scratch...)

When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.

Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....

I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.

(I would propose establishing a permanent presence on the Moon or Mars, but I'm trying to be at least slightly realistic :) )

Oddly enough, it would probably be cheaper to establish a permanent presence on Mars than to conduct a there-and-back mission. The logistics involved in returning to orbit from the Martian surface and boosting back to Earth get hairy. If you can find volunteers willing to go to Mars with virtually no hope of returning in their lifetimes, you can massively reduce the size (and hence cost) of the vehicle(s) required. What's more, using a scheme like Zubrin's Mars Direct, you can robotically land supplies, power and atmosphere generation gear, and the like before the colonists arrive, and supplementary supplies afterward on a continuing basis.

I'm not sure the public is ready to support a one-way Mars colony project, but I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers.

--

I'm not a huge Goldin fan, but you can't blame him for talking about Mars while stuck monitoring coffee. Those priorities are set by Congress, and Congress is very suspicious of any program NASA funds that even slightly resembles preparation for Mars exploration by humans. For one thing, back under Bush, when Dan Quayle headed the Space Council, they delivered an Apollo-style to-Mars-in-20-years program that would have cost half a trillion dollars. Bush had called for the Mars plan, but when he saw the pricetag he didn't know anybody that had their names on it. Congress saw the pricetag and ever since they have believed that NASA is secretly lusting after a twenty-year pork barrel, and they'll try to get it by stealth if Congress doesn't watch carefully.

Meanwhile NASA operational costs are eaten up by a ridiculously expensive launch vehicle and a circular-reasoning space station that, while it has its benefits, doesn't really deliver for the dollar. Science and exploration suffer. NASA is frustrated, but Congress's point of view is that back in 1970 they promised a shuttle that would do A through Z for a dollar, and NASA delivered a shuttle that does A through maybe G for ten dollars.

Short answer: Congress does not trust NASA with money.

The $4B accounting overages in the station program this year are just one more example.

Again, I'm not a Goldin fan, but he does show creativity, as when he persuaded the Italians to maybe come on board the station program as full partners, not just as part of the ESA, by building the US a habitat module, maybe even the CRV. We'll see how that works in terms of actual funding.

For those who aren't aware, there's a nifty Mars explroation proposal called Mars Direct, which would cost a fraction of the NASA proposal -- perhaps $20 to 40 billion. NASA modified it into a $50-100 billion proposal dubbed Mars Semi-Direct. In any case, Congress still thinks a lower figure is a lowball figure and the taxpayer will get screwed in the end.
----
lake effect weblog

I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by Robert Zubrin when he was on my campus about 3 months ago. He provides a compelling argument for a direct-to-Mars project, utilizing technology which currently exists. We could be on Mars in under 10 years. Specs are located here. Zubrin, a succesful author, is also one of the leading supporters of the Mars Society. The most fascinating aspect of their proposal, is that they want to use "private" funding (ie not governmental funds). I really don't know of a cooler open source project. This could be the next SETI@Home.
----

It would be meaningful only if ISS would be self-supporting and would not require any shipments from Earth to sustain its crew. As we all know this is not the case - in fact ISS isn't that different from MIR or Skylab - it is just bigger. In fact its significance is not as big as one could judge from all the media attention it gets.

Read Zubrin's book about his project of Mars exploration - that's just one example of something that would be really innovative and meaningful. There were other ideas of this kind, but none was implemented so far.

Devil Ducky wrote:
You seem to have forgotten the other major project that NASA has been working on: The Mars landings. All of these probes (that keep crashing) are being sent there to explore for a hopeful manned mission. I read somewhere (I think on /.) about a time schedule for the manned mission being soon after the space station nears completion.

Take a deep breath.

There is no timetable. There is no realistic plan for a manned mission. There is, at this writing, no hope of Congress authorizing any funds for one.

The people at NASA would obviously love to be planning one, and they stretch every thin dime they're given in order to sneak in useful research in that direction. But the reality is that Congress has been led to believe that a Mars mission would cost between one and five hundred billion dollars, per proposals presented during the Bush administration, and they're all looking at the next election thinking they'd be lynched for approving it.

The Mars Direct proposals take a different approach, ditching the orbital launching platform, ditching the enormous crew, ditching the orbiter+lander approach that mimics Apollo, forgetting about a three-year journey with six weeks on surface, and achieving all its necessary redundancy in other ways. The budget is a far more realistic FORTY billion, and places skilled human scientists on the Martian surface for an entire year.

But it isn't NASA's plan, and while they've come close (Mars Semi-Direct), they are for all practical purposes enjoined by Congress from spending any taxpayer dollars on any planning for a Mars mission.

They even tried to get authorization for a TransHab module for ISS that would serve as a proving ground for Mars vehicle and habitat technology, but that was turned down.
----

For the a fraction of the price of a manned mission that could easily approach several hundred billion dollars...

The number you're quoting, originally estimated at some $400 billion in the early 90's, is seriously out of date. That number was based on sending a massive interplanetary-cruiser style vehicle, capable of hauling along enough fuel to get to Mars and back. Ship construction would all be done in LEO (low Earth orbit), and the vehicle would only be in Mars orbit for about 30 days. A brief surface mission would be included (flags and footprint), and then it would be back to Earth for another 6+ months in zero-G. If this is the style of mission you're talking about, then your absolutely correct, it makes no sense. Politically, economically, scientifically, and rationally, it's just plain stupid. What you get out of it is probably less science than a combination robotic lander and orbiter.

Fortunately for everyone (tax payers especially), this is not the mission NASA is currently purposing. NASA has a Mars reference Mission somewhere on it's web site (can't find it right now). The reference mission, is very similar to the Mars Direct mission. Mars Direct was designed to be done for less than $50 billion (indeed some estimates as low as $15 - 25 billion), spread out over about 4 years.

This style of mission involves sending an empty ERV (Earth Return Vehicle) and developing propellant on planet for a period of approximately 2 years. At this point a manned mission, as well as a second ERV can be launched, after it's been verified that the first ERV has produced fuel for the return mission. Even if something goes wrong with the first ERV, the second ERV is being sent, which will begin fueling itself, while people are on-planet. Ideally, the second ERV will not be necessary, and 2 years following, it will be ready for a second crew, along with a third ERV.

This Mars Direct style mission is designed to establish a permanent human-presence on Mars. It's also far cheaper than sending an inter-planetary cruiser, with all the necessary provisions to brute-force it. The Mars Direct mission will allow for real science to get accomplished by people. In fact, it would be hard not to get science accomplished, with a surface stay of about 2 years. Additionally, the voyage out and back, will be accomplished in a 1/3 artificial gravity environment, created by rotating the HAB end-over-end with a burnt-out upper-stage engine. This will help to minimize the problems associated with long-term exposure to zero-g.

"...more likely that life started once on one of the two planets..."

True if and only if the development of life is a rare, freak occurance. It's entirely possible, however, that it is a natural and even likely result of a series of reactions that occur constantly in primordial type conditions.

Amino acids, for example, seem to be abundant in the cosmos. They have been found in comets, for example, as well as dispersed in the interstellar gases. The late Dr Sidney Fox did an experiment in the fifties in which he showed that various mixtures of amino acids would, when gently heated in solution, gradually (minutes) coalesce into what he called "proteinoid microspheres" -- structures that in many ways resemble bacterial fossils found in precambrian rocks in Australia and northern Canada and Greenland.

These spheres may not count as life, of course, but they show many properties of it -- they grow, metabolize materials from their environment, reproduce, respond to stimuli, etc. The main thing that divides them from life forms as we know them today is the lack of RNA -- it just isn't present here. But otherwise, these spheres seem, to me at least, to be a very likely precursor to life as we know it.

What's really interesting to me is that these spheres are really easy to produce -- mix, dissolve, bunsen burner for a minute or so (a catalyst only -- heat isn't required but it speeds things up considerably), then go get some lunch. By the time you get back, the solution will be filled with the things. The only reason that these structures aren't found today is that, being protein, they're food to other organisms so they never last long enough to fossilize. But, I think there's ever reason to believe that they can and probably will be found in abundance wherever the conditions are right. All that's needed is a pool of brackish water and time; Mars has had plenty of time, and now it seems like it has the water as well. My guess is that structures of at least this complexity are going to be found in abundance when we get there.

Maybe now we'll finally see some progress towards getting people up there, and on a semi-permanent basis at that. This kind of exploration is going to take a lot longer than the "footprints & photos" type stuff we did on the Moon...

Of course, now London alone has a population greater than that.

The problem is that this sort of thinking doesn't properly account for the march of technology. Higher agricultural yields, among other advances, have allowed the population of the UK and indeed the entire planet to bloom over the last few centuries, and while there are obvious problems to deal with & I'm not disregarding those problems, the problem isn't nearly as bad as Malthus expected it would be. Not by a long shot.

I agree with this poster's point, but not his rationale. We *do* need to explore space, but not because the onlysalvation for earth is by terraforming other planets. That sounds like a worthy & ambitious goal, but one that would be centuries at best to realize. We need something a little more immediate than that go get people motivated.

No, the real reason we need to get out into space and onto Mars is because exploration of new areas has been one of the biggest engines of development over the last 500 years or so. Consider for example the famed American Frontiersman, the men & women that went out into the west and had to use their ingenuity & determination to survive & build a new nation. This character takes every form from Lewis & Clark and Davy Crockett to the gold prospectors & modern day Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- all of whom went out on the edge of society -- literally -- to find their fortune and build a new world.

This is the sort of thing we need to be encouraging. Consider that, for the most part, the old world was stagnating 500 years ago (Renaissance notwithstanding), and the exploration & settlement of the Americas & Far East, with the accompanying cross pollination of cultures, technologies, and resources, as well as the explorers need to innovate to persist, brought about greater advances in the span of a few hundred years than was seen over the course of the previous couple of thousand.

This is the sort of advance that I think space exploration -- specifically but not exclusively of Mars -- can bring. The propulsion technologies that cna get us there are only the tip of a very large iceberg, and no one alive today can really grasp what a few decades of living out in space will bring. Consider that the settlers are going to have to find creative ways of supporting themselves in a land with no plant or animal life, very little water or oxygen, limited direct human contact, etc. Their one big asset will be their brains, and I can't wait to see what those pioneers will come up with.

Apply that to the old Malthusian argument. It isn't the physical space that another continent or so worth of land is going to provide that will make room for further comfortable population blooming. It's going to be the way we taught ourselves to live on almost nothing out in space, knowledge that will surely make its way back home, that is going to be the protector of future generations. And it won't take centuries to achieve -- just a few years out on our own...

Personally, I'm still hoping to be one of the first to go :)

________________________

Ho hum. Since I've gone this far, I might as well mention the Mars Direct Plan, which can get us there now with current non-exotic technology, on an affordable budget, quickly and safely. The plan is well thought out and fully executable -- all we need is the will to do so. If government (NASA) won't help, then perhaps private concerns can guide us to the stars. Any takers?

Robert Zubrin has been pushing for the use of this and related technologies for YEARS. His plan for exploring Mars, called Mars Direct, consists of launching a series of unmanned, robotic lander stations. Each station would carry a powerplant, an earth-return vehicle with empty tanks, and a supply of hydrogen. Using a Sabatier reactor (which is presumably what they were talking about in the NASA article), the lander station uses the hydrogren to produce methane (propellant for the Marsrover and the earth-return vehicle) and water (and of course oxygen).
The idea is, you let this unit run for a year or so, then you send people, and you have a fully fueled, supplied earth return vehicle and base station waiting for you when you arrive. The crew cruises around, explores, and gets to live in a nice, comfy habitat with all the water and air they can use. When they are ready, they launch the earth-return portion and go home, leaving the powerplant and a portion of the lifesystem behind for the next wave.
If you send each crew to Mars in another lander station, then you can repeat this cycle endlessly. The ultimate goal would be to build up a network of these stations, each within Marsrover distance of the other, allowing for relatively safe exploration of large portions of the martian surface.

You can read more about this here. The discussion of in-situ resource production can be had here.

Robert Zubrin has been pushing for the use of this and related technologies for YEARS. His plan for exploring Mars, called Mars Direct, consists of launching a series of unmanned, robotic lander stations. Each station would carry a powerplant, an earth-return vehicle with empty tanks, and a supply of hydrogen. Using a Sabatier reactor (which is presumably what they were talking about in the NASA article), the lander station uses the hydrogren to produce methane (propellant for the Marsrover and the earth-return vehicle) and water (and of course oxygen).
The idea is, you let this unit run for a year or so, then you send people, and you have a fully fueled, supplied earth return vehicle and base station waiting for you when you arrive. The crew cruises around, explores, and gets to live in a nice, comfy habitat with all the water and air they can use. When they are ready, they launch the earth-return portion and go home, leaving the powerplant and a portion of the lifesystem behind for the next wave.
If you send each crew to Mars in another lander station, then you can repeat this cycle endlessly. The ultimate goal would be to build up a network of these stations, each within Marsrover distance of the other, allowing for relatively safe exploration of large portions of the martian surface.

You can read more about this here. The discussion of in-situ resource production can be had here.

--

I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.

If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"

It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.

It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.

On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.

On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.

And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.

Here is a better link for Mars Direct. I suggest that people concerned about how this actually works study up on the in-situ propellant production.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,

It's similar in approach to the Artemis Project, but at last hearing, wasn't a commercial venture. Still, I'd pony up cash for pay-per-view of a manned Mars landing, and I'd bet a lot of fellow geeks would as well...

As Arthur C. Clarke also demonstrated in his classic 2001, you can easily synthesize gravity using a rotating spacecraft. If you do this, justifying further fruitless research into microgravity is just putting people's health in jeopardy.

In his excellent book, The Case For Mars, Robert Zubrin advocates a well-researched and complete plan for the exploration of Mars. It avoids extended travel through microgravity, does not require any on-orbit assembly, and could be launched with a slightly modified shuttle or even by starting up the Saturn V production line again! For not much more than we are going to waste on the space station, we could go to Mars within 10 years.

Check out Mars Direct for more information on Robert Zubrin's excellent arguments, and The Mars Society to get involved.