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Canada Plans Mars Mission
TO-Mars writes: "Marc Garneau, first Canadian in space and current Executive Vice-President of the Agence Spatiale Canadienne, announced in Montréal that the CSA intends a major space exploration effort, including a $500 million Mars mission. For the good of Canada and the spacefarers of Earth, let us hope that the CSA does not again eat its own, and weathers any threats to this inspiring development. I wish to stand at Champ de Mars in Montréal in a few years looking upward with pride ..."
Churchill, Manitoba - a launch site in the making for about 40 years. Every once in awhile, someone (usually an amurikan) gets the idea that Churchill's latitude would make it excellent for launches... then a little later, they find out it's hard to get rocket scientists to live where it's freakishly cold. :)
In other news today NASA administrator Daniel "Hosehead" Goldin announced that
NASA will be the reviewing its plans for its Mars Missions. Goldin went on to
say "Heck, we just can't figure out this metric thing, so we've decided to pay
Canada 20 million (US$) to acquire space on their launch vehicle. We will
become the first nation in history to launch a space tourist rover, appropriatly the rover name will be TITO."
And you thought the metric/SAE screwup was bad.
The project aims to land a 30kg (pounds? hope not another ESA blunder) lander onto the surface of Mars.
For more informaiton see also the Mars Society site and space.com
That's just by the manned program. There are also a few firsts by the US in the unmanned arena, including the first flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. IIRC, the US was also the first to flyby Mercury, and to land on an asteroid.
I just wouldn't say the Soviets were ahead on every major score, especially after Gemini got going.
Yeah, CA$500 million. That's enough to buy.... let's see.... a burger, fries, and Coke!
The people from the north have bigger rockets than the people from south. Na na NA Na na
But that all changes with an Aussie Space Program, they might have the the biggest rockets of em all.
Could you picture the size of the rockets from Greenland :)
Lol :)
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
>Why do people in Ontario elect Mike Harris, the
:)
>most right-wing guy in the world, and then go and
>throw all their support for a left-wing federal
>party like the grits? What's up with that? People
>in Ontario need to get their collective head out
>of their ass. Can you tell I'm from the West?
The Liberals? They sure ain't left-wing.
But I appreciate the fact that you didn't call Ontarians "easterners". Us folks in the atlantic provinces really hate getting lumped in with those wackos in the middle.
Sadly, there is.
At least we made out better than Holland did. Poor bastards. Theirs looks like a rejected Go-Bot design.
Yeah, Baikonur Cosmodrome @ 45.9 N 63.3 E,
Plesetsk Cosmodrome @ 62.8 N 40.7 E,
Kapustin Yar @ 48.4 N 45.8 E,
Svobodny @ 5121'N 12808'E have all been total total party zones, kinda the Club-Meds of astronautics.
Names & coordinates from FAS
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I suspect most of us Canucks would hand you the knife, too. That guy is an asshole to no end.
Care to kill the people that keep making it possible for him to make movies? Surely some SOB in Hollywood should be taken 'round back and shot for letting Tom have a movie...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Betcha it's not Tom Green...
...it'll be Stockwell Day, and the whole project will be financed by disillusioned Alliance Party members!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Yea, I bet its no coincidence its shaped like a hockey stick....
Their unmanned probes also suffered from the Soviet's crappy electronics, IIRC, which meant that in a lot of cases they may have been first but the quality of the data was not great.
Not that I'm knocking the Soviet effort - they had a lot of chutzpah to pull of the stuff that they did, and they showed a lot of engineering ingenuity, but the way they did things would never have been possible in the west. And, of course, without the Soviet effort the US space program would still barely be off the ground :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What are you talking about? Canadian labour is cheap and plentiful. So that cuts down on cost, added to all of their natural resources...
:). (No, graphics cards don't count.)
On the off chance this isn't just sature:
Aerospace R&D costs about the same here as it does in the US. The same applies to most manufacturing.
This should be pretty obvious. Otherwise, we'd be exporting high-tech manufactured products like crazy to the US
I'd love to see Canadians set foot on Mars, but at $500M Cdn (around $300M US), it's going to be a probe, if anything, that's sent there. This is about the right price range.
A manned ship that could be self-sufficient for the required travel times would cost as much as a space station, because it would *be* a space station.
As for the latitude comment made by another poster, the article mentions that they're going to contract out for launch capability, which probably means using one of the commercial launch companies in the US. This is more or less standard practice for industry launches.
It'll still be nice if it happens, though.
Funny, we've had a Liberal gov't since 1993. What's this "every four years" rot?
How about Cuba?
What better way to tweak the noses of those pesky Americans then to deal with Castro & Co.?
With the help of the Canadians, the Cubans could fix their economy, get into space... and eventually rule the world!
Reality has a liberal bias
It's about time we started spending money on things not so local. Canadians in general (and maybe people in Quebec more so - Living here gives me a right to that comment IHMO) seem to have an intense focus on internal issues. It's a nice change to focus on something with a little more importance to the planet as a whole, instead of who lives next to who, and what language they happen to speak. Finally - something I'm happy to have my tax dollars pay. I think it's been a long time coming, and I only hope this is just the beginning!
FYI CDN$500M ~= US$340M
:)
I like to think of the exchange rate as a "THANK FUCKING GOD I AM NOT AMERICAN" tax. I gladly pay it.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Beating a dead horse dept:
;)
>that didn't make any sense at all, but whatever. We've come to expect such nonsense from y'all.
Uh, I mean I have no problem paying more for goods since this also means I am not American.
- Just so you know most of the world doesn't like you a whole lot.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
FYI, the Russian space shuttle Buran was basically a 2/3 scale copy of the American space shuttle design. From the outside, they're almost indistinguishable (apart from size and markings). It's possible that the Russians simply mimicked the US design, but I suspect that they were able to obtain some handy engineering schematics to help out with the complicated bits.
Also, the Tu-144 supersonic transport developed in the late 60's was a dead ringer for the Concorde. Russian engineers never seemed to have much of a problem with the "Not Invented Here" syndrome. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0300issue/0300zubrin.htm l
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan goes you one step better. It produces breathable atmosphere (pure low-pressure oxygen, just like in most of the manned spaceflights thusfar), rocket fuel, and even some water from the Martian atmosphere. Shoot your Earth Return Vehicle ahead of the crew, land it, and have it fuel itself up, and lay in a stockpile of fuel, water, and O2 before the crew even leaves Earth. It's a brilliant, elegant plan. If you're interested, check out the marssociety.org web page, and Dr. Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars". Great reading.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What an incredible waste of money. The idea that America can do anything meaningful on its own in space is, well, really stupid is the best thing I can say about it. Better to put our money into a bigger pot with other countries and actually accomplish more than make work for downsized DND scientists.
What do you want to bet the hq of this effort will be downtown Florida?
I'll be writing to my senator straightaway on this one.
Aside from that crazy arm?
You'd better hope no Scientologists are working at any of those locations whose coordinates you just published or they might sue your ass in California.
I'd have to ask what's the value in doing the launch vehicle ourselves? All the preexisting developed launch sites will have their 'home' vehicle, which the site will be designed to handle. You can't (easily) launch a Ariane from Vandenberg for example. Therefore you'd have to either design a lookalike, or also build all the infrastructure. Either way, it's going to be a lot cheaper to just buy a ride on the existing vehicle.
Additionally, the farther you are from the equator, the harder it is to launch into orbit.
:)
We could build our own launch vehicle, but it would have to be:
1) Not launched from Canada
or
2) Really Really Big.
Easier to piggyback for now... At least for the first mission...
Why do you think those Russian Proton rockets are so big?
Isn't that the shuttle-clone they produced (kinda like their condorde-clone, which is now available for purchase... linked off Metafilter a week or two ago)?
IIRC, It's now sitting in downtown Moscow, in a public square, open to the public.
-- "Is this death or is this Ohio?"
Perhaps you mean referendi?
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Competition!? This isn't a space race. We are not in a cold war with Canada. Nasa has already successfully reached Mars. There was a probe called the Pathfinder. It was a probe that had a remote controlled car that was controlled from earth. It was really cool. Remember we crashed the car into a rock!??!
Then there are other successful missions. The Mars Global surveyor. It is there right now taking pictures of Mars. It recently sent back pictures of the face on Mars with high-res images that detail what the mountain actually looks like and why it looks like a face with its peaks and valleys.
Currently the Mars Odessey is on its way to Mars. It launched in April and its expected to arrive in October.
Nasa has had it failures. But you can not learn without making failures. I am surprised at how much we have accomplished with so few failures. I was intrigued in what the polar lander could of told us about the polar cap on Mars. Is there water there? Maybe on another mission we will find out.
But back on topic with Canada and their plans to reach Mars. I am all for it. Space exploration is a collaborative effort. It is in the benefit of all man-kind to explore space. We as a planet should be working together to explore space. Look at the International Space Station. We as a planet are working together to build a huge science lab in space. Why should we do this you ask? Well the answer is clear. The knowledge we gain from working together and from the knowledge we gain from the experiments will be used in getting Man/women to step foot on Mars.
Let's not knock Canada's acheivments in space exploration either. The "Arm" is one of the biggest contributions to the space shuttle as well as the space station. I am still in awe of the "Arm" on the space station. The "Arm" is by far the coolest addition to the station.
The "Arm" just doesn't pivot from a base point on the station. It has two hands on either end. One to hold on to the station and the other to perform the task at hand. But because the station is so big the "Arm" can "walk" end over end to the other side by the use of it hands. And that is Canadian innovation.
I would like to see what Canadian innovation will be developed in the mission to Mars. I hope they do "wipe their faces in it" it will benefit all of us.
Dictionary.com defines exploration as:
exploration \Ex`plo*ra"tion\, n. [L. exploratio: cf. F. exploration.] The act of exploring, penetrating, or ranging over for purposes of discovery, especially of geographical discovery;
Is not the sending of these "robots" (aka probes) the act of penetrating or ranging over? Yes! So that means sending "robots" is exploration. Robots and unmanned probes can gather a lot of great information for the purposes of discovery again apart of the definition of exploration.
What do you call the results we get from telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra? Those telescopes are in earth's orbit. Do they not explore the far reaches of space? Yes. Not all of what is done in Earth's orbit is developmental.
As for the Appollo 17 comment...in your terms of exploration wouldn't the last exploration have been Appollo 11 because by Appollo 17 we have had already been to the moon.
This is too bad. Canada gets teased like all the time. They last thing they need is their space program making a statement that sounds like a 5-year-old saying, "I'm going to drive a truck like daddy!" and pulling out a small plastic toy.
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
You just described a lot of amateur or volunteer software projects I've looked into.
Could this be the first space program hosted on sourceforge?
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
I am Dyslexic of Borg
Resemblance is fertile
Your ass will be laminated
...our congress is now being run by Democrats who will block everything Bush tries to do, and Bush in turn will squash any democratic bills whatsoever.
And that's a problem how?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
What an incredible waste of money. The idea that Canada can do anything meaningful on its own in space is, well, really stupid is the best thing I can say about it. Better to put our money into a bigger pot with other countries and actually accomplish more than make work for downsized DND scientists.
What do you want to bet the hq of this effort will be downtown Shawinigan?
I'll be writing to my MP straightaway on this one.
Seems somewhat farfetched. Sure we have people, we have technology, but we don't have the government backing. Every four years, when we change from liberal to ...whatever, programs get squashed and the money dissappears. As a fine example, take a look at our rescue helicopters. They were on order and being built. We had an election and the order was cancelled, costing us millions in cancellation fees. For no reason other than that the new government didn't want to carry on a project from the old. About a year later the new government made a new order for cheaper and less capable choppers, at almost the same price!
So if this happens to the mars mission, we'll be lucky to get to the moon.
Hmm... two arms, now. I wonder if there's a giant Canadian robot on the way! Oooooh. Sneaky!
Also, another erratum: My disclaimer should have said "This is humour."
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Whichever poster made the comment that the Canadian Mars program would be based in Shawinigan (our Prime Minister's home constituency) hit the nail on the head. The reasons we have not landed on Mars yet are primarily a) politics, and b) the small minded greed of our leaders.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Actually, they have an spaceport that you can read about here:/ tr ans_infrastructure/spaceportcanada.html
http://www.gov.mb.ca/itt/trade/invest/bus_facts
It's in Churchill, Manitoba, it's still low enough latitude to be able to launch to the ISS, it's in a remote location incase they have an "oopsie", and there is a major port and rail link to Churchill. And as a bonus, Churchill is the polar bear capital of Canada, so no pesky tourists!
Bork!
- The preferred drink will be Labbat's Fifty
- TV will broadcast 24 hours of Red Green, old Hockey Broadcasts and Beachcomber episodes
- The mission will definitively prove that duct tape is a universal adhesive
- Hockey hair/mullets will be the hairstyle of choice
And the inhabitants will bore the tears out of Americans by staging some silly referendum every 6 years.---
Copyright © 2002 me
This was covered in our local paper (The Ottawa Citizen; sorry, couldn't find an on-line article).
Garneau had said that the only thing we couldn't do ourselves ("we" meaning Canada of course) is the launch vehicle. I don't quite see why.
(And for those who were wondering, of course this is unmanned!! A manned mission would be totally cool, but Canada? All by herself? Not for a long while yet.)
I can totally understand needing to secure a good (equatorial) launch site, but the vehicle? That's not really all that high-tech, is it?
Anyone have any ideas why Garneau said this?
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Part of the reason that we haven't invested a lot of national effort into the space program during the past couple of decades is that there is no perceived reason to do so. The vast amount of innovation that took place during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs was primarily due to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. If the USSR had never existed, there would never have been moon landings, because the "godless commies" would not have been our competition. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the circumstances that motivated the US political right to invest heavily in space exploration ceased to exist.
.. it's time to jump back into it.
But if Canada begins to aggressively pursue space, this might change. Already, you are seeing conservative publications such as WorldNetDaily and commentators such as Rush Limbaugh lash out at Canada. If you turn on AM talk radio, you don't have to scan far to hear these people lecture their followers about the high incidence of atheism, homosexuality, feminism, Islam, etc. in our Neighbor to the North. Canada's socialist policies (and in particular, its national healthcare system) are constantly under attack from the right.
So we find ourselves coming back full-circle. A nation, that is perceived by many to have Communist leanings, is starting to pursue space exploration. Couple that with the forays that the Chinese government is making into space, and you've got a political environment that might cause people to bump up NASA's budget and make its agenda more aggressive. It's unfortunate that we have to find ourselves in situations like this before we take space exploration seriously, but I am of the opinion that if that is what it takes, then so be it. We've neglected space for way too long
I'll believe it when I see it.
Your sig says:
Anything that can possibly happen, will eventually happen
I love irony.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
"Cosmocanucks" or "Canadanauts"?
"Ehstronauts."
--Blair
A McPizza.
--Blair
"You think I'm kidding."
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
It might just be talk, but then again, people thought that Kennedy was crazy when he promised a man on the moon.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
There is nothing of substance in the article - no mission plans, no dates, no nothing - just a catchy (and bilingual) slogan: Allons-y! Let's go to Mars, followed by a wish-list planning session. There's little about this to suggest that the maple leaf will be flying on Mars anytime soon. I'll believe it when I see it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
There is very little vapor between here and Mars. However, the sheer amount of nothing is a major obstacle. A little vapor might be just the thing to sustain astronauts in transit.
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10. Figure out how to make a space suit out of a hockey goalie uniform
9. Decision: "Cosmocanucks" or "Canadanauts"?
8. Have R&D figure out how to dehydrate beer and doughnuts
7. Finally get around to renting "Mission to Mars"
6. Find out if the Expos are willing to relocate to the Martian League
5. Be the first to design a canoe-shaped space vehicle
4. Screw it, eh? Let's go skiing at Whistler.
3. Make sure the vending machines on Mars don't take American quarters
2. Put Bob and Doug McKenzie into orbit
1. Finish exploring Canada!
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
Reasons:
1) It averages 40 below on Mars, that's a Canadian temperature if nothing else.
2) The US wouldn't laugh at them so much if they beat us to a standard. I'm not so sure why we do now, but that's another issue.
3) Send Tom Green there, damn I'd like to kill that guy.
spacefem.com
If you've ever been to these sort of workshops, you know what that means. A lot of people got to talk to other, mostly interesting people, and share a their enthusiasm for space, Canada, and (let's see, not Apple Pie, so probably hockey). I'll pet people wrote key points on over-sized post-it-notes. At the end they read their notes to each other, and clapped. I doubt if anyone did any math (or, if someone did, they did it quietly in a corner, while shaking their head).
-- MarkusQ
They'll get all bogged down with referendums about how and when each rocket stage will seperate.
Uh, we have the same problem in the USA. In fact, we have it worse. Our president looks suspiciously like a chimpanzeee (take a look at www.bushorchimp.com) and our congress is now being run by Democrats who will block everything Bush tries to do, and Bush in turn will squash any democratic bills whatsoever.
You think you have it bad because you can't decide on a space program. We're lucky if we can all agree on what "space" is! You think the idea of Canada as a spacefaring nation is laughable - I say that it's the idea of the US as a serious space power that is laughable. We're just coasting, not innovating.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I just had a thought...why not send resupply flights after a manned Mars spacecraft? If the manned ship didn't have to carry all its consumables, it could be made cheaper and smaller. Could they launch unmanned supply ships after the manned vessel? Some of those could be designed to go faster than the manned ship and overtake it every few months, while others could be sent on a different orbit to meet the manned vessel at Mars. We already have the technology to send fairly large payloads such as probes to Mars - could we do this?
I'm the stranger...posting to
That's a good point. Nice sig, by the way. :-)
I'm the stranger...posting to