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Buzz Aldrin Blazing a Trail to Mars
techmaven writes: "In an exclusive, two-part article,
Special Report: Buzz Aldrin Blazing a Trail to Mars and Buzz Aldrin's Mars Vision: There and Back Again, the legendary astronaut, whose footprints still dot the windless surface of the moon, describes his vision of the next step in space exploration. Cruise ships to Mars, but not with shuffleboard or bad lounge entertainers ..."
A couple of comments. First, this is an old idea - cyclers have been proposed for over 20 years and Aldrin's seminal addition to the concept was made in 1985 - see here for details. My question is, why is this meme back in the public consciousness NOW? It can't be because Aldrin thinks Bush will support the concept now that he's Prez; the new Bush NASA is going exactly the opposite route than cyclers with their sudden support of nuclear propulsion. Second question, where did the sudden push for NASA nukes come from? Especially at the expense of previously planned missions to Pluto and Europa? And my third question, why is space so passe to Slashdotters and by extension tech oriented fans in general? All the space articles on Slashdot get one-tenth to one-quarter the postings of just about any other topic; if even the geeks don't care about space that much any more, how can we ever hope to have a stable space program instead of this outer plane probes / no wait, nuke rockets / no wait, cyclers mass confusion?
Buzz Alrin's idea of a hotel travelling to mars and back is not nuts. No more nuts than Christopher Columbus trying to sail to India.
What is nuts, is spending over 2 TRILLION dollars on bombs and warplanes. That much money could easily fund a space colony, and move humanity's constructive technology to the level of its destructive technology.
One thing that bugs me about how people understand space is they think of it as enormous distances of emptiness speckled by dots of dust. This view is ignorant and limited. Though by earth standards the distances between the planets is astonomical, the idea is rendered meaningless by the astronomical speeds reached. Spaceships could travel between the planets in shorter times than ships cross the ocean with engines designed for it. Thinking of the planets and asteroids as lifeless dustballs is also off the mark; do you think of a field as a lifeless patch of dirt? Probably so. But, with vision, those lifeless dustballs could be turned into power and food generating plants that could power the earth and solve world hunger. All it takes is imagination and ingenuity.
Cosmic rays are not a problem on journeys of less than half a year - a round trip to Mars and back exposes an astronaut to less radiation from cosmic rays than people living in Aspen, CO, will recieve in their lifetime.
The biggest radiation hazard comes not in the form of cosmic rays but gamma and x-rays from large solar flares. The prompt does from a solar flare could exceed 100 rem total, which would kill a crew in a cycler such as Aldrin seems to advocate.
As for the muscular degeneration problem, there isn't one. Yes, in microgravity astronauts experience muscule and bone loss. However, there is a lot of things that can be done to slow this process, without resorting to centrifuges to simulate gravity (which is probably the easiest solution...). Soviet cosmonauts who spent between 6 and 18 months in orbit have shown rapid recovery from the effects of microgravity exposure.
The greatest problem facing a manned mission to Mars seems to be public apathy and lack of focus at NASA. This is why heroic figures like Buzz Aldrin are getting involved, to bring the discussion to the public view, and motivate the appointed officals who oversee the manned space program.
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Vpered na Mars!