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Bill In U.S. House Plans Manned Mars Mission
maddogsparky writes "Spaceref.com has a copy of a bill laying out a roadmap for NASA to send a manned mission to Mars by 2022. Highlights include an manned asteroid landing, building a research outpost on one of Mars' moons and actually providing funds to start mission planning."
I call shotgun!
Sounds good, very reminicent of the National Space Commission report except that had more emphasis on return to the moon versus Lagrange points.
e r.html,
(Of course I know a little bit about Lagrange points,
http://www.finds-space.org/thomasneuraut
We do have some stuff to publish soon.)
Well, as always, I'd like to believe.
-Jay Thomas
http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2
but this will probably turn out like that manned space station we were going to be using in 1980. Plans for it were drawn in what, '64? The logistics of this are unreasonable and currently impracticle. Self-sufficient environments on other planets will remain the realm of science fiction for years to come. The largest problem to overcome IMO is distance. The distance between Mars and Earth is phenominal. Like the English who first came to America, this would be almost doomed to failure. There will be many Roanokes before one Jamestown.
Just my $0.02.
P.S. First post?
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
One of the problems with these various large scale concept/projects is that things can flounder forever in the planning stages.
For those of you familiar with large bureaucracies, everything lies in the funding. By forcing the funding of something and laying out a defined timetable, this bill would IMHO stand a good chance of actually causing this to become a reality. (Technical delays notwithstanding.)
I agree, this probably won't pass... but it would a very clear signal, a strident first step, and a more exciting two decades if it did.
So write your Congressmen, damnit! =)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
In general the /. community is interested in the Space Program and the benefits it provides to the technology community.
/. crowd is numerous enough to put some good pressure on Congress to do something right.
As this Bill progresses it will be important to have the Slashdot (dare I say "geek" crowd) write their representatives and encourage the support of this bill.
Please keep the Slashdot editors informed on news regarding this Bill so that more people can read about it on Slashdot and in turn write their Senators to support it.
Seriously, the
Read the bill, it makes note of some serious issues facing the Country's space program and it's future years down the road... such as no MAJOR challenging missions after the ISS "Alpha" is assembled.
Ever need an online dictionary?
As much as I long to see a person set foot on mars within my lifetime, I feel like we shouldn't even bother unless we're going to give a compelling reason to go. We went to the moon long before we had any plan or reason (other than "beat the russians"), and look how far that's gotten us.
Personally, I consider "research terraforming" to be the best of all possible reasons, and I think now is as good a time as any, but I don't see a bulk of the population realizing anytime soon how valuable another livable planet would be to the future of the human race.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
If the U.S. had a competitor in this race for Mars like they did for the moon in the late 60s, they would have a man there in a few short, focussed years. So, um, can we maybe pretend there's a competitive nation and get on with it?!
Personally, I would like to see space exploration start happening, and continue happening. Let's be honest: The moon missions, while probably the most significant and arguably the most complex engineering feat in human history, basically was "Wow! We made it! Now what??".
Instead of throwing all this government money into the sh**hold where we know it will probably never come out, let's give tax incentives to get private companies into space. First company to mine an asteroid gets a 20 year tax moritorium! Same deal for space-based factories!
The key is that space has to pay for itself. If we depend on the government to put men into space, then men in space depends on the whims of budgets and politicians. The only way to get there and stay there is to have an economic incentive to stay there.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Good bill. It's always refreshing to see politicians work toward dreams in science, technology and exploration. The time table for this bill may need to slow down a bit to be realistic, but what is really needed to make the human Mars exploration and the further exploration of the solar system after Mars practical and economical is the development of nuclear propulsion, something that has always been a political hot potato.
Without nuclear propulsion, a manned mission anywhere farther than the moon will always take too long be too costly and have a much too small margin of error to be acceptable.
In this day and age we need to be thinking about things like making sure there is enough money going into welfare, war on drugs, war on terrorism, enforcement of gun laws, etc and not on crazy stuff like going to mars.
Yeah, alright, we'll just put science on the backburner until every other problem is completely solved. Gees. I got news for you: we're always going to have big problems here on Earth. You need to watch a little less Star Trek. I'm all in favor of social programs but we need to fund science as well.
Now, I'm not an expert on space and, to be honest, I didn't even read the Mars proposal, but the idea of "hold off on the space stuff until we fix problems on Earth" is one of those things that really grates on my nerves. This bill should be judged by the scientific benefits of the Mars trip alone. The fact that there are so many other needy non-space causes shouldn't enter into this.
GMD
watch this
Redundant: In 1969, Vice-President Spiro Agnew committed the United States to a manned Mars mission by the year 2000. That beats this bill by 22 years. [As a side note, the Vice-President has traditionally been the administration's point person for space activity. That is why Apollo mission responsibility shifted from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Mission Control in Texas (Lyndon Johnson's home state) as soon as the Saturn V cleared the launch tower.]
Toothless: There are no penalties for failure to execute. If the mission is not completed on schedule, NASA bosses should be looking at some hard prison time. Otherwise, what's the point?
'Nuff said.
All of these add up to very very little money for Mars.
I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect that this bill will not see much debate.
shouldn't we be planning a mission to Venus instead?
Not enough votes on Mars.
No farmers, no steelworkers, no Cuban immigrants, no nothin'. It ain't a key "swing planet", it has no electoral votes, no representation, no key industries, and it isn't even a decent vacation spot.
What we need is a lobby. First make land grants on Mars. Slip it in as a rider on some military spending bill. Then, we can start complaining about how transportation is lousy there; maybe divert some funds from Amtrak, grease a few palms here and there. The first rocket needs to be loaded with representatives for welfare mothers, schoolchildren, teachers, steelworkers, farmers, union members, and other key constituency groups who know how to lobby. The scientists can come later.
If the rocket makes it we'll get one helluva Mars lobby. If it blows up, that'll be fine too. It's a win-win situation.
Hey, don't blame me. You were the ones who brought Congress into the picture.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe if the government didn't give $180 billion to farmers then a mission to Mars would be possible. I know let's send the farmers to Mars.
At the very least some very strong basic science (with applications) in MEMs and nanotech, not only for the machinery needed to get to Mars, but for construction and terraforming. To make a large scale settlement there, we will have no choice but to build with local materials.
Second, major advances in space travel need to happen. We could possibly cobble together something that would get there and back but it would be of little lasting value. We need to understand more about alternative propolsion and energy adaption.
Third, we have very little useful information on human spaceflight, other than it is harmful. We need another twenty years for biotech to help offset the effects of space travel on our muscle and bones.
Fourth, some major advances in environmental science need to happen. We can barely keep the garden of paradise from turning into a sewage pit, so there's a lot of work to be done if we hope to take something as fragile as Mars and make it liveable.
Lastly computing still has a ways to go insofar as creating robust systems that can operate autonomously, although consumer applications from blenders to driveless monorail cars seem to be making progress.
We'll get there, but right now we just don't have what it takes to make the trip worthwhile.
"It's a bit like Columbus discovered America and now we've been to American 6 times"
Columbus stumbled across the New World in 1492. How many permanent European settlements were established between and the end of the 15th century? Heck, let me be generous: Between then and the end of the 16th century?
We got to the moon and back six times in a span of half a decade or so. Starting from 1492, when's the first time that there were six expeditions to the New World in such a small time frame?
"it's a vacuum"
For a planet with no atmosphere, it sure seems to have a lot of dust storms. Not to mention all the erosion that's apparent on the surface...
"We need to mine something that isn't at the bottom of a gravity well."
As I recall from my physics courses, if it's something, by definition it's in the bottom of a gravity well.
And while we're on the subject of asteroid mining, sure they tend to have lots of heavy elements, but if you're looking for light stuff (say, oh, I dunno... reaction mass!?!), you need a heavy duty gravity well to hang on to it and collect it.
"Phobos or Deimos- yes."
After expelling enough reaction mass to get to Mars in a reasonable amount of time (ie. before the crew gets microwaved into crispy critters), you honestly think bringing enough fuel to reach Martian escape velocity (remember, 1/3 G) is really going to make that much of a difference? Heck, landing on Mars has the advantage over its satellites in that it at least has SOME atmosphere, so you don't need near as much shielding once you get there. Especially when you consider how long you're going to have to be there until Earth catches up with you again (even if you're using nuclear rockets).
"a NEA or a comet, yes"
Instead of going on a manned interplanetary expedition to someplace we run into once or twice a year or so, you're in favor of trying to catch up with and land on something that doesn't come anywhere near here for a few centuries or millenia? And what will the crew do when they get there? Start digging their own graves?
"Mars? Later."
"If not now, when? If not us, who?"
For geeks going to Mars is a technological achievement, a cool thing to do with no material benefit returned to the people (taxpayers) investing in it. Even the lowest estimates for a Mars mission run in the tens of billions for a single mission. Tens of billions of dollars to...plant a flag, take some measurements, and shoot some pictures? Apollo was a similar sort of mission though they actually had some nice returns on the investment because the technology to accomplish the mission didn't exist. The universities and contractors that designed and built equipment or just worked the numbers for the Gemini and Apollo missions gained immense amounts of knowlage about working in space. Had Apollo not needed small powerful computer systems which didn't exist at the time, slashdot probably would not exist and neither would your PC. The problem with a Mars mission is we have much of the technology needed to get there meaning putting an investment into the project isn't going to give you much of a return. It is inefficient and wasteful to mine Mars or even fabricate materials there for export. Say you had a Mars colony with a space launch infrastructure, it would cost them about as much to send something to Earth as it would cost us to send something to Mars. It is much more efficient to send a self sufficient manufacturing/refinment system to a much less massive body like an asteroid and have it send material back down to Earth. It's like mining the top of a mountain and rolling stuff downhill. As long as you've got a method to stop stuff it requires much less effort than trying to send your material up hill.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Creating jobs is always popular. A manned mission to mars would create millions of jobs on earth.