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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.)"
What good is it sending a pencil to Mars?
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
"NASA is engaged in small-scale studies on manned flight to Mars but has no plans for a mission."
April Fool's was 2 weeks ago.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
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.
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).
The size of our own galaxy is measured in hundreds of light years and the farthest we have gone off this little rock is the far side of the Moon, just a little over 2 light seconds away. It is embarrasing
Free cell phone tracking
The participants, who will be given 3 tons of water and 5 tons of food, will undergo training on how to act in hazardous situations, the official said. Water and oxygen for the "flight" will be generated by means of the participants' own life processes.
I don't think I want to watch...
The six participants have not yet been chosen, and the selection process will be rigorous, Mr. Malashenkov went on, saying an all-male crew was likely.
Why not an all female crew? You could save a couple of kilos on the launch, and their energy requirements (i.e. food) are likely to be lower over the course of a long-term trip, since they don't have to maintain as much body mass.
Of course there's that whole Men are From Mars thing...
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Suggested launch years are 2014 or 2018.
I've checked my calendar and I'm free then. Sign me up.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Do not touch the pencils. It is a Zionist American trick. They are actually bombs.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
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.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
It makes sense. Combining two different nations in a space program might look good for the media, but from an efficiency and productivity point of view, it's very poor. You end up with compromises at every stage of the process, with the result that noone is truly satisfied with the outcome.
Bear in mind Russia has a huge advantage over the US in both long term space missions (Cosmonauts in Mir hold the endurance record for space 'flight'), and it also has far superior heavy lift capabilities. The Energia launch vehicle is capable of orbiting a payload of 100 tons - far more than than the 30 tons capable of being lifted by the shuttle. While there have been plans for US heavy lift systems (cf. the 'Shuttle-C' cargo container, or the Ares booster) which could increase payload weight to 121 tons, the Russians designed a system (Volcano) derived from Energia which could loft over 200 tons of cargo!
NASA is at serious risk of falling further and further behind, and becoming largely irrelevant in space exploration. Mars Express (from the ESA) is a clear example of how quality research can be performed at a fraction of the cost of a typical NASA mission. Pathfinder cost 'just' $200M - compare this to the British built 'Beagle' rover, which is more capable, and cost just £10M (~ $16M) to develop! Mars Express, the overall project of which Beagle is part, cost just 203M. Compare this to the $800M cost of the latest US mission to Mars.
If NASA is to succeed in the long term, and to shine at research, it has to learn hard lessons from several sources. Satellites can be optimally placed with cheap boosters, not expensive manned shuttle missions. Productivity needs to get back, at the very least, to Pathfinder mission standards. Using proven engineering, and modularity of design, you can massively reduce failures, and costs.
For more information on Mars Express, check here and the official ESA project page here.
again!!!! ARggh!!"
Mission Control: "Comrades, comrades, keep
in mind, when you are in orbit of mars, we will
not be able to resupply you with
constant 'squeeze cheese'"
*dramatic music*
Voice Over: Next week find out who gets
voted out of the training pod and thrown out of
the air lock. Will it be Ivan with his insatiable
appetite for squeezable cheese? or will it be
Ivana and her insistance on leaving tampons in
the engineering section???
From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob):
"There is no Mars! The red plannet does not exist! It is a trick by the coalition forces!"
More at 11.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
I think it would be very difficult to live in tight quarters with 5 other people for almost a year and a half, floating through space on a mission that would bring back all kinds of info that will be useful for humankind. "Just another few months with these freaks", you could think, "and we'll have accomplished something great. When we get home I'll be famous, and I'll have a pickup line that no one else in the bar can hope to match!" Besides, once you've launched, you can't really change your mind, so you just focus on managing the stress.
:)
Now imagine you're just one of the guinea pigs in the 500-day test. You're not going to be famous. You aren't exploring new frontiers. You're like a kid camping out in his backyard... except you promised your parent (Dr. and Mrs. Skinner?) that you wouldn't come inside for FIVE HUNDRED DAYS, even though you know that some days it's sunny outside the tent and you can hear the other kids playing in the park across the street. Sometimes a dog wanders by and urinates on the corner of the tent (days 3, 5, 16, 21, 23-twice, 28, 29...). Twice a day a scientist peers in through a porthole to see if you've cracked up yet. Can you imagine it? Wouldn't you just feel like you were pissing away a chunk of your life?
And just think -- to be realistic, their connection to the internet would start broadband, then go gradually down to dial-up and worse....
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
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.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
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
Um, the AP over exaggerated or misunderstood what the scientists said. Imagine that.
This one makes more sense.
by the way, that's my boss in the picture from the CNN article.
0xfeedface
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.