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The Real Mission to Mars
The Mars Society is looking for "anyone in good physical condition between 18 and 60 years of age... Scientific, engineering, practical mechanical, wilderness, and literary skills are all considered a plus." Only the passionate need apply: "conditions are likely to be tough and the job will be very trying." And that's before the robot switches into hunter-killer mode.
If you prefer roasting to freezing, there's a mission somewhere in the Australian Outback next year as well. Either way, go visit the Mars Society homepage and check it out.
I spoke with a friend of mine, Daniel Slosberg, who coordinated Mission Support for the Michigan Mars Society during two similar, less-audacious experiments this year. His was the easy job of sitting at home, coordinating communications (chiefly email, with simulated 20-minute round-trip delay), answering questions from the field, and giving advice.
Daniel happens to be working on an idea for distributed mission support; if you're interested in being part of the ground crew, drop him a line.
For the team that actually goes into the wilderness and lives in the "hab," you'll be simulating Mars isolation as accurately as possible. You'll be brutally far north, for one thing. You'll wear a mock-spacesuit every time you go outside, which will help identify where the problems are in e.g. mobility or hygiene. You'll also spend an hour in the airlock when you enter or leave, which will help remind you not to forget your hammer.
The excursions get more sophisticated each year: next year will be the first with an already-completed hab and the first with more than one mock-suit. Your chance to be part of history.
In related news, Odyssey continues aerobraking, and its mission looks good -- if you've read Robinson's Red Mars series, you know how delicate orbital insertion is. Great work, JPL.
And just for kicks, here's a New Scientist article about synthesizing fuel from the Martian atmosphere to power a "hopper"-lander. If you find the practical chemistry of planetary travel interesting, go read Robert Zubrin who is just all about using whatever resources already exist outside Earth's gravity well.
Opps, ok... worked in the preview. lets try this again... :)
forma3
Nowhere better than Canada to do that!
What I don't understand about this "mission" is what it's supposed to accomplish. It's a great publicity stunt, but it's surely expensive (even if the Mars Society does have Discovery Channel and some company called Flashline sponsoring it). The science and technology are fairly lacking (is there anything about testing a "space suit" that can't be done in a lab, as opposed to hauling it to the middle of nowhere - I mean, Canada, at much less cost?)
One would think that developing cheaper ways to send rockets to Mars and the like would have a lot more long term benefit considering the Mars Society's goals.
OTOH, riding around on ATVs carrying shotguns (in case of polar bears) for a month sounds like fun.
Sadly, the opinion of most at JSC is that we are at the sunset of manned space travel. The astronaut program has all but finished (no new astronaut selection). The ISS is effectively atrophying (it's basically just Mir 2 at the moment).
Fortunately, companies like Xcor Aerospace are developing reusable propulsion technology at a fraction of the price that governments do - so maybe there's a chance that space exploration will continue once NASA throws in the towel and reverts to being NACA.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Exploration and Discovery
We fight and spend to discover the earth around us, and ourselves. And yes, we fight and spend also to discover what is beyond our puny world. We have spent billons of dollars exploring the wonder that is ourselves, and the world around us. We have spent billions of dollars on space exploration. But space exploration has not yet gained a momentum that makes the world comfortable, and I find this very sad. Just as our own DNA is still a mystery unfolding, so also is the Universe that surrounds us. If we don't bother to set up groups to prepare for space missions, if our scientists didn't run simulation after simulation, how are we to succeed at this momentous, and necessary task?
And why do we care anyway? Some don't, it's obvious by the comments made by users here. But what about those of us who don't care about how it's done, or how long it takes. We care because, like medical research and hi-tech research, space exploration is just another form of exploration and discovery that we, as humans, are driven to do.
Just because this type of research doesn't include a box lunch and a dedicated T1 connection doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. So please...let's have a little respect for the groups of people devoting their time and resources to something that has not yet gained the momentum we need for results,.
As usual, the people here on Slashdot are more inclined to nitpick at the smallest detail, then they to indicate any actual serious interest in our space program. And my god, yes there are so many millions of details about any space mission. So go ahead, nitpick as many as you can. But as I'm starting to realize, my voice on Slashdot has never been one of detail. It's an emotional voice that usually fades away in the background, as thousands of Slashdot users post details that were missed in the original post, arguments about who is right or wrong, and the usual lower threshold posts involving sexual innuendo. So feel free to mod me down, or flame me. I really could care less.
I would've thought a far more appropriate place for a simulated Mars mission would've been one of the Antarctic Dry Valleys, and for a lot longer than the month they suggest.
... go figure!
I mean, get real - Mars is going to be out of touch for a good nine or more months, except for the radio communications. Or much longer - how many flights/cruises/tours of duty will be able to be sent in such a short space of time?
Kind of like Antarctica, I would've thought.
I'd jump if they were offering it in Antarctica, cause that's right next door to where I'm living - NZ itself - but I suspect Deep Freeze would have fits
"I his bow, and spun and wove, likes you." Vere de Vere out of my mould's mouth dragged me of the voluntary apes.
For the time being anyway, I believe that human exploration of space is a waste of money.
Thirty years ago man walked on the moon and the whole world watched in awe. It was a great accomplishment, both in its sheer difficulty and its scientific value. Making goals and managing the missions of NASA is a complicated task. It is a government organization with no income, and no clear objective, yet 14 billion dollars of the entire federal budget is dedicated to it each year1. Although sending a man to the moon was an appropriate goal in the 1960's, I believe that because of many conditions that have changed in the past thirty years all human space travel should be suspended for the time being in light of other, equally exciting robotic missions.
Missions to space can have many positive outcomes besides the immediate and direct objectives of the mission and all of these must be considered when determining the value of a mission. In the 1960's there was a huge race for the first nation to land a man on the moon. When the Russians beat the United states to launching a satellite, "it seemed that everyone[In the United States] from school children to newspaper reporters to politicians was bemoaning national failure."2 The space race was a huge unifying force within the nation and so space missions to land on a moon had huge political purpose as well as their scientific purpose. In the 1960's not very much was known about the surface of the moon and human observation and collection of samples, including 384 kg of moon rocks3 provided a great deal of scientific data. There was also a lot of discovery about the effects of space on humans. In that era of time, human exploration of the local space around the Earth and of the moon provided huge amounts of scientific information while also having large political uses.
It is thirty years later and NASA has come a long way in its scientific discovery of the moon and its superiority over other nations in space travel. The United States is now the predominant force in space, and after twelve men on the moon and thirty years of humans living in space the human race has discovered huge amounts of information about the moon and living in space. Instruments have been placed on the moon, we have maps of its complete surface and we are still doing analysis on samples of its rocks. National pride, although still an aspect of the space mission is not nearly as huge an aspect as it was in the 1960's and there is no longer a race with any other nation. Because of changes in our understanding of space and the technology available to us today's space missions have the opportunity to make new discoveries about the many other planets in our solar system and many other things about the expansive space beyond it. We should be focussing our energy on exploring other planets as we have the moon, as well as performing experiments on the nature of the universe and on how the Earth is changing. Missions along these lines are the exploration of Mars, advanced biological and physical experiments in microgravity situations, the satellites and space telescopes which collect information about outerspace as well as many other missions that have not yet come to light. NASA is in a situation in which they have a huge potential that is currently not being utilized.
Currently NASA is making some progress in the exploration of mars with robots but they are spending huge amounts of money and time on the International Space Station (ISS) which is an orbiting laboratory designed to perform experiments in low gravity conditions.4 Performing these kinds of experiments is a good idea, but due to advances in robotic technology, this mission does not need to be performed by humans.
In the 1960's robots were very primitive, basically non-existent. The computer brains that powered them were only a fraction as powerful as today's computers. If any dynamic task were to be achieved it had to be done by a human, so sending humans to space was a given for planetary exploration and in space experiments. Today humans have the exact same capabilities as they did in the 60's, but their robotic colleagues have matured greatly. Robots are good in space because they do not need life support systems and they can detect many more things than humans. A robot can have 10 different kinds of cameras detecting 10 different kinds of information and recording it all perfectly whereas a human can only see one kind of information, visible light, and has no perfect memory of the encounter. A robot is also reproducible and it would be feasible to design one robot and then send 20 to a planet instead of just sending one human. Quote on success of mars pathfinder mission. The robots of today are different than the robots of the 60's, and are much better suited to space travel.
When sending a human into space there is a large amount of effort spent on life support systems. The cost and design time to provide a human with oxygen, food, water, heat and to return the human to Earth is incredibly huge compared to the cost of installing a solar panel on a robot which can meet all of its needs, and if the robot mission fails, no lives are lost so the amount of safety precautions and over-engineering is greatly reduced. The cost of the ISS is being estimated to run over $100 billion5, whereas the cost of the mars pathfinder mission was only $264 million6.
In the 1960's due to the hype surrounding the space race, the US government was giving basically unlimited funds to NASA to sponsor the space race 7 This gave the huge amount of monetary resources required for the development and deployment of many manned missions. Whatever was needed to get a man on the moon was given to NASA.
In the beginning of the 21st century the budget for NASA is much tighter, less than 1% of the federal budget or about $14 B. The developments of new technologies have opened the possibilities for many new kinds of missions so the reduced funding is spread more thinly and the full potential of the space program is not being realized. The best way for NASA to deal with this is to take funding away from very inefficient missions such as human space flight, which can not compete with robotics for the amount of scientific discovery per dollar spent, and to spend that money on the robotic and electronic discovery sectors. The human space flight division currently uses up $5.5 billion of the $14 billion in the NASA budget. That would be enough money for 21 complete Mars Pathfinder missions, each year or if applied to a robotic ISS the number of experiments could increase.
Due to shifts in the goals of space exploration, the monetary resources available, and the technical resources available, a dramatic shift towards robotic exploration in space should be made. In the future the variables will shift again and we will be faced with this question again, but if the program is to remain successful it must be able to adapt to these changing conditions.
I'd have to disagree. I work at JSC, bldg 30 to be exact. No one here talks about "the sunset of manned space travel." Actually, I'd say the general consensus is that the ISS serves as research and an intermediate step in the mission to Mars.
No new astronauts? They don't have a new class every year, so just because there's not a 2001 class does not mean they're not selecting.
Mir 2? I hardly think so. Why don't you give Culbertson a call next month after he gets back and ask him if he thinks it's anything like Mir. Sure, they've cut the hab module and crew return vehicle, which severely limits the capabilities (from crew of 7 to 3), but I wouldn't be surprised to see those return after completion.