US & Russia Pencil in Mars Launch by 2018

snilloc writes "The Washington Times is reporting that the US and Russia (and the Europeans are mentioned too) are planning for an eventual manned Mars trip. Suggested launch years are 2014 or 2018. The article discusses unmanned probes at greater length than the manned plans, but check out the Russian isolation experiment where 6 people will spend 500 days in a simulated spacecraft environment. (Sounds like a good reality TV show to me.)"

Comments

ESA anyone?

[rastakid]

I thought the ESA was going to do the same thing, around 2009? Why not co-operate a little, and share the costs?

Need some good old fashioned talking

[0x00000dcc]

I think what we need, in addition to the usual "announcements", is a leader somewhere, presumable the president of the united states or russia, to just come out and tell the world it's gonna happen. People are held accountable when this happens (sometimes at least). Think about JFK's speech. People really latched on to that announcement. Bush/Putin or sucesssors should follow suit. It's time to put people on that frigging planet, people!

Re:Need some good old fashioned talking

[FatherOfONe]

While I would love to see someone land on Mars, I have to ask the questions.

1. Who will pay for it? Look how much the moon landings cost the U.S.

2. What will the benifit be?

3. After Russia backstabbed the U.S. in the Iraq war, do you think that we will still work together?

Given what is going on in the world I don't see Bush or anyone approving the HUGE budget needed to start this type of thing.

Again, I would love to see this happen, but it all depends on the cost. ~60% of my income goes to taxes now, given that I have to compete with near slave labor from India and Russia for jobs, I don't want to see taxes go up at all. Well that isn't totally true, I think that there needs to be an import tax on all software development done outside the country! Perhaps that could help fund this thing!!!

Good idea, bad company?

[Trevalyx]

I am all for space exploration, and taking a closer look at Mars is wonderful and all, I'm glad someone is scouting out area for my future apartment, but don't we remember what happened LAST time we partnered with Russia on something outside of our atmosphere? The wretched travesty of the ISS is now loping along in a slowly descending orbit, is years and years behind what it was supposed to be, and will, more than likely, never live up to the high aspirations that were originally held for the Freedom, the space station that the United States planned for years before the global consortium got together on the ISS.
Russia is simply not a viable partner, not due to their science (they were in the cold war too, after all) but their financial instability. It's not their fault, but it shouldn't become our space program's problem (again).

Re:Yeah, Right...

[SpinyNorman]

You seem to forget that the US doesn't even have a reliable way of getting men into orbit right now, let alone anything more ambitious.

The only thing from stopping the ISS from dropping out of orbit is Russian robot supply craft that are also nudging it higher, and the only way US astronauts will get to/from the ISS before the Shuttle design is fixed (without risking their lives) is via Russian spacecraft.

Don't get too excited...

[CommieLib]

Fifteen years may as well be fifty in terms of Russian economic and political stability, not to mention international relations.

The article is light on logistical details, but assuming that we're more Robert Zubrin than we are BattleStar Galactica, the mission will involve a long period of technological development followed by deployments of resources in advance of human explorers. That's a long time for a lot of factors to remain "in the window", IMHO. Even the ISS didn't manage to remain entirely in that window, and that was far more flexible in terms of planets lining up and such.

I'm pleased at least to see that it's on the TODO list at NASA, but I don't take this too seriously.

Somewhat overoptimistic

[PhysicsExpert]

The simple fact is that we're probably not going to get to Mars in the next 20 years, it simply isn't as simple as people would like to think. Most of the problems revolve around the fact that any expedition to mars would last up to 3 years(apollo 11 took around a week) and for the great majority of this the team would have to cope with problems unaided. Consider this: The CLOSEST that mars gets to earth is 86.5 million KM which means that any communication with the earth is going to take 5 minutes to get there and the response 5 minutes to get back. That means that for any problem that can't be solved in 10 minutes you're completely on your own. The astronauts on Apollo 13 would have been doomed had they had a 10 minute communication lag with ground control. other problems include sickness (its going to happen if you're away for months and illness that are trivial to cure on earth would be major problems halfway to mars, not to mention the degeneration of muscles, bones and the heart caused by being weightless for long periods of time), nutrition(how do we keep our astronauts in tip top shape for months on end when we have no way of getting food to them), radiation and pyschological problems (think being couped up in a space the size of your living room with 5 people for a couple of years). Yes, most of these problems are solvable (especially if we develop a technology considerably faster than chemically fuelled rockets) but the fact is almost everything that a manned mission would achieve can be done for less money and risk by robots. Its just not going to happen.