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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.
You have to be pretty inane to htink that a mere 500 days will drive people insane. Members of several sailing expeditions have travelled well over 1 year together without that kind of problem. Yes if they choose a black man and a member of the KKK they will have a problem, but we are not stupid enough to do that.
As to why we are going to mars, there are lots of GREAT reasons. Here area few:
Because it is there.
To further develop our manned space craft, so that eventually we will know enough to get a ship to Alpha Centauri.
To further develop our medical science so that we no longer have ANY problem with space travel.
To pay the smart people a ton of money to build something positive, instead of having them be unemployed and jobless when the terrorist asks them to use their rocket science to build something.
To give money to SMART people letting them leave lesser jobs. Where upon, slighlty less smart people will be hired to fill those jobs, (after they quit their old jobs - so even less capable people are hired to fill those old jobs etc. etc. etc) Trickle down does work when you are talking about JOBS, (as opposed to money.)
You see, when you spend money on a Science project, the money is spent on EARTH, even if the science is off Earth. This means you are WRONG, trips to mars DOES feed, clothe and house people and it DOES work it's way down to the guy on 32nd and Main under a box, if he is at least willing to try and work.
Mars is a good target because it is just barely within our reach. Once we get there, then we can try for the moons of Jupiter. After that Pluto. Then Alpha Centauri here we come!
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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.