Manned Mars Mission Some Way Off

10,9,8,7... Count Down Aborted writes "The BBC brings some perspective to the manned mission to Mars debate recently reinvigorated by the discovery of vast H2O ice reserves on Mars. Basically, they list many of the reasons (e.g. psychological, political, monetary, and technological) why we must proceed very carefully and slowly despite the significance of such a mission if it were successful. They also raised the interesting question, "Who should be the members of such a crew if it were to be launched?"" Update: 05/28 14:28 GMT by H : Another good link is on USA Today.

Comments

Radiation Determines the Crew

[cybrpnk2]

The crew of a Mars mission will be 50-somethings who will die of natural causes before they have a chance to develop cancer from radiation exposure during a Mars trip. Send somebody in their late 20s or early 30s like Apollo/Shuttle and they are going to have some obvious and serious health problems from the trip before they live out their lives. Most people don'r realize how serious radiation in space is. The biggest problems are cosmic rays and solar flares. During the Apollo program there was an August 1972 flare which could have subjected an astronaut to 20,000 REM in 14 hours - 20 to 40 times the lethal dose. Luckily Apollo 16 was back and Apollo 17 was still on the pad. On a Mars mission there won't be any such luck. It lasts YEARS instead of a week and radiation exposure is UNAVOIDABLE. Once you get outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, you are literally on your own in the unknown...

Re:Why come back?

[jesser]

This is an old problem.

With existing IRBM hardware we could put a man into orbit in a year. But don't ask me how we'd get him back. If a man would be ready to sacrifice his life by being fired into orbit it would answer some of the questions about space flight, but even if one volunteered we probably couldn't find anybody willing to shoot him up there.

Interview with Wernher von Braun, missile development specialist, after Sputnik II was launched into space by the Russian government in 1957.

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