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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.)"
As somebody who has been in on the Space Station debacle from the beginning, let me just say that there's NO WAY that NASA could get to Mars by 2014, and trying to do it with the Russians only ADDS to the problem, not makes it easier. The most important thing the US can do to get to Mars is make it an American-only mission. The waste in effort to include other countries is phenomenal and unnecessary. The US space program has got to believe in itself instead of being a branch of the State Department if we are going to go anywhere.
Unfortunately there'll likely be an all male crew according to the article. This means less likelyhood of romance, sex, and the usual stuff that makes reality TV interesting. A bunch of stressed out military high-flyers trapped in a house sized environment for 500 days is probably going to be terribly boring.
Having said that, it's a great experiment and I hope it goes well and they learn lots and repeat the experiment a couple of times to compare how a mixed sex crew or all female crew works in comparison.
What would be good would be to provide the mission with enough exit power to bring back enough ore to pay for a chunk of the return visits.
People are viewing human life as more sacred than they normally do, and know the risks of this ambitious project. It also comes during a serious global depression of the economy, and will of course cost a sh*tload.
That said, I hope it goes ahead and proves more successful than we could imagine.
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Has anyone solved the "lethal radiation that will kill everyone aboard long before they get there" problem yet? Or the problems with the human body breaking down after extended weighlessness? Or of simply putting any more than 1 person in the same place for more than a month or two and not kill each other? Unlike the space station, if someone's causing a ruckus, you can't just haul the person out...and to make matters worse, everyone, including any potential troublemakers, will be well aware of this.
Furthermore, has anyone explained to us WHY we're going to Mars? Look what the Moon got us. Zippo. Zilch. Nada...and it was a cakewalk compared to Mars. Next to no gravity(making landing pretty easy), pretty close. Wait, let me guess...there are 'signs of life', right? I think it's high time we had someone from NASA on Ask Slashdot to explain what the big shit is about Mars, and why it ranks above providing the basic services expected in a modern civilized society.
Lastly, couldn't help but notice that all the comments questioning the mission and/or space exploration got modded to "Flamebait", and those were just the ones modded UP to 1 and 2. Why is it that on slashdot, Thou Shalt Not Speak Against Space "Exploration"? It was rather telling that those comments, while modded "Flamebait", were also modded UP; maybe the rest of us are sick of space-weenies with moderation who just can't take a little old fashioned "Why?", or the viewpoint that maybe we ought to have other priorities(like, social/human services. Trip to mars doesn't feed, clothe, and house the guy on 32nd and Main under a box.)
You can see the lights from space, but you can't see the starving children.
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A very amusing story. It not that unbelievable, but I don't think it is quite true. I recived a Fisher Space Pen for a gift and it had a short history in it. I belive it said that the pen and design was given to Nasa pretty much free of charge. Of course who knows what they paid for before this pen was created. This link will tell a bit of the history: http://spaceflightnow.com/store/collectibles/penas tro.html
"Another day with Parasites!"
Now there's a pork barrel project if I've ever seen one. Creating new problems for the sake of making government bigger is quite the high-profile job nowadays.
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1. You'll pay for it with your 60% taxes (where did you get that figure from BTW?).
2. What will the benefit be? Your grandchildren will grow up to be geeks in the same way you grew up to be a geeks. Except they'll be terraforming geeks instead of programming geeks. A push to Mars will require technological development. The thing you're writing (computer) on is a direct result of warfare and space research.
3. They also had missiles pointed at your house for thirty years. doesn't mean you can't work with them. Who would have thought that France and Germany could work together in 1945? By the 1950's they were great economic and diplomatic buddies. As far as backstabbing is concerned, France threatened veto, Russia said no but was counting on abstaining in return for a further free hand in Chechnya.
As far as costs are concerned, even an enormous sum like $100 billion over 10 years is $10 billion a year which comes to $30 per inhabitant of the US, which comes to 10cents a day which comes to about a second of your daily work if you're complaining about paying the highest bracket of taxes. How long did it take to complain about the cost?
Or would you rather have the Indians send somebody to Mars so that their grandchildren own your grandchildren as you own the Indians ('own' in the broadest possible sense - i.e. are 1000 times richer, 3 times as well fed and live 2 longer).
Besides, anyone who thinks that a Mars mission is feasible hasn't really thought it through. Here's the deal - Mars is not like the Moon. It is much bigger and has atmosphere. It is also really, really far away.
So there are several design challenges. First, lets imagine the smallest earth->orbit launch vehicle we can make. Shrink it down a bit to accomodate the Martian gravity and atmosphere. So, we have a decently small rocket. That rocket is still friggin' huge by any standards but its own.
Now, consider that rocket is the *payload* - that rocket must be transported across millions of miles of space, and then *landed* on the Martian surface. How do you suggest they get it down? Expend precious fuel thrusting upwards, Moon-trip style? Or use the thin atmosphere for a parachute to splashdown in non-existent oceans? Or maybe try and build some sort of airplane-like vehicle to glide in on the too-thin atmosphere, and hope it doesn't burn up like Columbia did.
So, our payload gets bigger - we need our mars liftoff vehicle, and our mars lander system to attach to the liftoff vehicle. I imagine that must be about the size of the space shuttle, total.
Now, consider that is still payload. We need a system to get that whole huge mass to and from mars on a tighter schedule then any other interplanetary vehicle ever made. We have to transport a freaking enourmous payload at high speed across an interplanetary gap. That is one huge amount of fuel. Returning could be cheaper - the lander/liftoff system can be discarded, plus it's downhill.
And, hardest of all, we have to get this humoungous interplanetary craft off the earth and into orbit. It could probably be launched in sections and assembled there, but still that's no small order - for one thing, you wouldn't want to perform in-orbit assembly on the lander/liftoff component - that's just asking for another Columbia. If you look at any space vehicle, probably 80-90% of its mass is just launch equipment (this is just a guess, not an exact figure). Imagine the size of a rocket designed to lift up a B52. Pleasent, eh?
And, last but not least, we've got to get our intrepid astronauts back down onto earth. For that, just send the shuttle to pick them up from their vehicle.
So, we have to launch the most tremendous space vehicle ever made off the earth, and get a few scraps of it that can be carried in the shuttle back to earth.
yay.
I don't see this happening any time soon.
Why is it embarassing to live in a vast Galaxy? I could understand your embarassment if we had the capability to travel 70,000 light-years (diameter of Milky Way) and simply chose not to. However, since it's physically impossible for us to do it, why should we feel embarassed that we haven't?
Besides, why stop at the scale of the Galaxy? The Local Group is a mere megaparsec across, yet we've never traversed it! For crying out loud, that's our galactic backyard. And how can we know for sure if that redshift=6 quasar is really a supermassive black hole, if we haven't actually gone to check it out? It's only a few billion light-years away. Come on, mankind, get on it already!
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It's a triumph that we have traveled 1 light-second from Earth. 1 light-second is a very long distance, on the scale of human endeavors.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Why not venus?
Some scientists say it is as probable as on mars to find life there...
Admitted, the surface of venus is just too hot, but wouldn't a balloon floating through venus' athmosphere (at temperatures comparable to earth's) an idea?
I often thought about that, I just don't know why noone is considering it yet. Seems to be an easier goal for human space travel.
And, venus is nearer to earth than mars.
First of all, we could send unmanned balloons.
And on CNN:
"Our noble and beloved US military has begun the process of liberating the poor downtrodden martians from their fascist oppressors. Casualties are in the tens of thousands, but they're only poor third-planet non-Americans who don't even speak english, so they don't really count."
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
That is a damn good idea. I'm not sure whether Mars is the right destination just yet though. An ore rich asteroid would be much more profitable.
The thing with Mars is, you can land on it. It has predictable motion, a well-photographed surface, and gravity. It has enough of an atmosphere and a magnetic field to shield you from radiation if you want to stay a while. You can very easily manufacture rocket fuel from the atmosphere itself, so you don't have to cart enough for a return trip with you (Zubrin IIRC suggests sending an automated fuel factory, then waiting 'til you were sure it worked before sending a manned mission). If you are willing to invest a little energy, Mars has plenty of ice that you can melt into water. If you have energy and water, you have oxygen. With water and various readily-available nitrogen compounds, you might even be able to grow plants in a greenhouse in Martian soil. Glass and steel will both be very simple to manufacture on Mars, the raw materials are abundant, you can "mine" them on the surface with a shovel! In short, Mars is a pretty good place, and if you were planning to establish a colony it would be a lot easier to do so on Mars than it would be on the moon.
Asteroid mining isn't remotely feasible at the moment. You would have to arrive at an asteroid, which may be interacting with other nearby objects in hard-to-predict ways, then land on it and start drilling, or stand off from it and break it up with explosives then collect the pieces, then you have to ship it all the way back to Earth. Asteroid mining won't be feasible until there's a self-sustaining colony on Mars to act as an ore processing station, and refuelling and repairing (and most likely construction) facility for mining vehicles. Colonizing Mars in the 21st century is going to be like colonizing Antarctica in the 19th - but with the bonus that you will actually be allowed to extract minerals, which changes the game radically, both for construction/manufacturing on Mars itself, and for getting funding from Earth. There is no technological reason (as Zubrin demonstrates in The Case For Mars) tha there couldn't be a fully self-sustaining colony on Mars within 50-100 years.
One summer, years ago now, maybe 10 or more, I worked at a research lab at Brandeis Univesity (high school summer program). They did research into the perception of motion and had a grant from NASA. They had a large room, about 10' in diameter that rotated. At the time I left, they were planning an experiment that would put several people into this room for something like 100 or more days while it rotated contantly to see what the long term effect of this would be for a trip to Mars. I have not idea of they did this experiment, though I have no reason to think not. I wonder now, if the results are published and available on the net.
I don't trust Snopes, because often they make out as if they have the authoritive answer when they are just speculating themselves, or using the facts selectively.
For instance, they say that it is false to say that Bush made the comment that "the French don't have a word for entrepreneur" because Alistair Cambell (Tony Blair's "spin doctor") said that he didn't. Of course he would say that. His job is to protect Blair and it would look bad if Blair told someone that. Ari Fleischer would say the same thing, but who would believe him? To say that the story is definately false because of that is just dumb.