Slashdot Mirror
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.
...In other news, Richard Stallman and Santa Clause are fat guys with beards.
Film at 11.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
From the article: "The crew will have to be specially selected to be able to cope. Should it be a mixed crew or all men, or all women? "
For some reason I think that it shouldn't be all women... Maybe one geek guy and the rest of the crew women?
I particularly like this one:
Yeah, it's a shame we have no ice here on Earth with which to test this system. Anyway, the rocket booster that lifted Armstrong and Aldrin off the moon had to "work the first time", and they still signed up.History is full of shortsighted people telling us what scientists can't possibly do, sometimes only months before they do it.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I don't really see us going there anytime soon. And even if we do send a crew there, what then? I would have expected that after getting someone to the moon, we would have followed that up with a permanent base, but we pretty much got bored with the whole thing and never went back. If we're going to ask a crew of people to risk their lives and spend a couple of years in a tin can, I'd want us to show a little more commitment to the whole endeavor.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
> Who should be the members of such a crew if it were to be launched?
Oh, too easy! The MPAA and the RIAA, of course!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Who should be the members of such a crew if it were to be launched?
Definately Keanu Reeves wearing some cool sunglasses. Definately not Tom Hanks crying and being sentimental like a big girl.
gak. sounds like a college professor.
but in any case, such considerations sound like something from the politically correct crowd, and tend to overlook the qualifications that such a person would have to have. It looks like to actually do something like this, you would have to preselect someone from the poorest nation on earth now, and groom them for the job 20 years from now. not very likely, considering how many administrations we'll have between now and then. Not very likely at all.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Most of the cost of sending people to Mars is the cost of getting them back again. The trip should be one way, with new people and supplies sent every few months. Eventually, after 10 - 20 years, there may be enough manufacturing capacity on Mars to send people back to Earth, but that wouldn't be guaranteed. I'm sure out the 5 Billion people on Earth we could find a few thousand settlers. Most of the people who settled the "New World" (Europians coming to North America) came on a one way trip.
Maybe the volunteers remaining families would receive money (a pittance compared to the savings). There might be enough demand to go, you could run a lottery, with the winners going and the money raised for paying part of the trip.
Obviously, the robots can't do everything themselves, but humans on earth can reasonably control them (it would take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes for a one-way communication from Earth to Mars, depending on their respective orbits around the sun).
Unless we're ready to start terraforming, I don't think it's cost-effective to send humans.
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...
Of course, the answer to who we send is obvious -- We should send an ethnically-diverse "Power Rangers" like team to Mars, because that way, we can sell action figures and color-changing cups at Burger King. We should send an African bush man that speaks in grunts and clicks, along with an Eskimo, an Aboriginie, and perhaps a midg^H^H^H^Hsmall person, because sending qualified engineers and scientists from the actual country footing the bill for all of this crap would be RACIST. So what if most of the engineers and scientists happen to be white. So's 80% of the country. How did they get to be such a big majority? Simple.. They're RACIST!!
For the humor impaired: The parent article dicusses the question of "who we should send".... In other words, "lets discriminate", which is a subtle form of racism in and of itself. It infers that the people who are going to be picked will NOT be picked for their qualifications, but rather, picked for their ethnicity or skin color, which is friggin retarded. I say, send the best people for the job. If they happen to be blacks, cool. If they happen to be hispanic, cool. If they happen to be white, cool. If they happen to be friggin purple, cool. The whole issue of picking an "ethnically diverse" crew is a crock of shit, because "ethnically diverse" may not mean the same thing as "best people for the mission". Neil Armstrong wasn't chosen to be the first guy to walk on the moon because he was white. He was chosen because he busted his ass in training for several years, training that anyone could have undergone, and many did.
Call it like you see it.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Also, the U.S. needs to establish a base before the Communist Chinese, space race style. We don't want Mars to become a Red planet.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
There's an urban legend or true story about the moon mission. They should bring the same message to mars.
---
About 1966 or so, a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took the astronauts near Tuba City. There the terrain of the Navajo Reservation looks very much like the lunar surface. Among all the trucks and large vehicles were two large figures that were dressed in full lunar spacesuits.
Nearby a Navajo sheep herder and his son were watching the strange creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by other NASA personnel. The two Navajo people were noticed and approached by the NASA personnel. Since the man did not know English, his son asked him who the strange creatures were. The NASA people told them that they were just men that were getting ready to go to the moon. The man became very excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.
The NASA personnel thought this was a great idea so they rustled up a tape recorder. After the man gave them his message, they asked his son to translate. His son would not.
Later, they tried a few more people on the reservation to translate and every person they asked would chuckle and then refuse to translate. Finally, with cash in hand someone translated the message,
"Watch out for these guys, they come to take your land."
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Does nobody else remember how ludicruous a moonshot was in 1962? We didn't know how to do it, we didn't know if we could figure out how to do it, and JFK might as well have signed the death warrants of the Apollo 11 crew.
And yet we did it, and got them there and back safely. We did it because one man said we would do it, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
Every time I read this pussyfooting around a manned Mars mission, it turns my stomach. We are now so petty and adverse to risk that I cannot see that we will ever launch a Mars mission. There are too many negatives and not enough positives. There's too much that we don't know, and that we think - assert vehemently even - that we can't learn or fix. It's too hard, we complain, it's too dangerous, we might fail. We can't afford the risk, we have to wait until we can make it safe. We have to wait, and wait and wait.
What we need is for one man - hell, even Dubya - to stand up say "This country commits itself to putting a man on Mars and bringing him back safely by the end of this decade. Make it happen."
Then we can turn some of our horrifying arms budget to something a little less self destructive, we can find volunteers, brave men and women who understand the risks and choose to go anyway, and we can stop nay-saying and do our damndest to get them there and back safely.
And we might fail. That's not an option, but it is a possibility. But to not try for fear of failure means we're already defeated, and we should weep not for a lost crew of astronauts but for the loss of all astronauts. Buzz Aldrin - a man who has walked on the surface of another planet - laments that he never thought space exploration would mean shuttling cargo around in low Earth orbit. Perhaps we'd just become so used to watching stage managed, post-produced heroes on film and TV that we'd forgotten that the real thing still exists, until September 11th reminded us. We wept for the emergency services men and women who died, but nobody - nobody - cheapened their memory by suggesting that it would have been more prudent, more sensible, for them not to have put themselves in harm's way.
If our reach no longer exceeds our grasp then we might as well gear up to manufacture parts for the Chinese Mars mission, because if we don't go, then they will. Because they seem to understand (as we've forgotten) that constantly striving to achieve more than we believed ourselves capable of is the defining trait of being human.
I've heard talk that we'll rebuild the twin towers, just to show that our spirit isn't broken. Great, but why stop there? Why not keep going up, and up? Why not stop saying "We'll go when it's achievable" and say "We are going. Achieve it."?
Let's got to Mars, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Who should be the members of such a crew if it were to be launched?
A mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician.
I agree with your sentiments despite your pejorative header. :-)
Look, the technology is mostly in place to attempt the so-called Mars Direct mission that has been espoused for a number of years.
We really need to bring back the spirit that brought Apollo to the Moon; imagine the possibility with the right funding that we could have a manned mission to Mars and it will be done in time to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence (2016).
Besides the obvious boon of what we'll learn once we get manned missions there, what science we learn developing the spacecraft and landing systems for the Mars Direct mission could have huge benefits here on Earth; after all, the technology developed for the Apollo program is a major reason why I can type this message on Slashdot.org. ^_^
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
It may seem somewhat comical, but this is a serious hinderance.
Consider the following: If you were on the first trip to Mars, barring some radical breakthrough in propulsion technology that violates Newtonian physics (the only way we'll see decent high speeds on such long trips), you would spend:
-18 months going out in a tin can the size of a two bedroom apartment with four or five other people in microgravity
-after you lose some bone and muscle mass, several months on a planet which you can only experience in a fully-encloesd suit
-another 18 months to three years coming home in the same tin can with the same people
...and that's assuming things go smoothly! What happens if someone has appendicitis or develops some other codition? Operating in zero-g is at the least damned hard, and at most impossible!
The people also have to be of a certain sort. Unlike the original moonshot pilots, who were psychologically stable hotshot pilots with an excess of personality, the Mars crew would have to be able to tolerate each other for up to FIVE YEARS. And these five would be the only real human contact that they'd have.. considering that, at furthest, there's something like a twenty to thirty light-minute gap between Earth and Mars. You could play chess, do the occasional interview, but you couldn't surf the Web (real well).
So, the people involved on the craft have to be extremely intelligent, genial, and self-deprecating. Not too likely to find a couple of hackers that have those characteristics. (Of course, they'd not discuss it too much if they did. Part and parcel, you know.)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Balanced people are a *liability*, not a strength. They make too many safe decisions and aren't willing to take the kinds of risks necessary for a "one-way" trip to Mars to work.
Admittedly you don't want psychotic people, and a military-type discipline would probably be essential to maintain supplies, but at the same time a bunch of conservative, highly rational people aren't going to experiement and try edgy things that might be really successful.
Look at the profile of successful people in business, sports, etc -- how many of them are sane, stable, follow-the-rules kinds of people? They're mostly not unstable, but they're also the kinds of people willing to take huge risks for huge rewards. Guys like you and I take tiny risks for tiny rewards, which is why we couldn't do the one-way to mars.