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James Cameron's Illustrated Mars Reference Design
An anonymous reader writes "Terminator Director James Cameron commissioned renderings of the NASA Mars Reference Design [HTML, 4 PDFs]. The mission profile calls for a cargo ship sent ahead of a crew, a huge (Terminator-like?) rover, and inflatable habitats. It's not clear where Skynet and the T-800's hyper-alloy combat chassis fit in yet. Between now and then, the 5 Mars missions: 2005 Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, 2007 Phoenix and Netlanders, 2009 Science Lab Rover, and 2011 Scout. Skynet comes in 2026."
What part of Arnold going to Mars do you not understand?
I personally don't mind him going to Mars, just as long as This Terminator stays and becomes my personal bed buddy.
Of course, since I browse Slashdot, that's never going to happen. Thank you OSDN! You've ruined not only my life, but my odds of scoring with her.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I thought Phoenix wasn't supposed to launch until 2063.
Also, wouldn't it get to Mars a whole lot faster than three years?
James is well qualified to work with NASA on these planetary explorations. From viewing Terminator 3, it's quite clear it was written in Uranus.
What, Magrathea built Mars too?
Cheers,
Ian
Mightn't such a schedule be rushing it a bit? I don't think the necessary technology would have time to mature by 2011.
Instead of setting a deadline to reach Mars, I say we go when we're good and ready.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. I think it is a great idea to get some of the most imaginative minds to offer ideas to scientists on how to send humans to mars. My only question is, if they will send some large cargo container/ship ahead of a manned mission, how will the manned mission be able to land near enough to the cargo/habitat ship?? Or will this just orbit Mars? I hope I get to see a manned station on Mars in my lifetime.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Those pictures are famous, and there's even an animated Disney documentary from the period.
The "Collier's space program" was far more ambitious than what's been done to date, or even what Cameron had drawn. The Collier's program had a big rotating space station in Earth orbit, a Mars rocket under construction in orbit, and heavy industrial traffic to and from orbit. Cameron has much lower ambitions.
Cameron gets more realistic looking images for his movie, NASA gets some more money for things they were doing anyway, and we get better movies, a better space program, and more public interest in going to Mars.
I'm 33, and I damn well better see a person on Mars in my lifetime! And a moon colony. And those flying cars are LONG overdue...
I'd love to be sitting in my little cabin on mars in my old age, doddering on about "In my day, we had to live in inflatable huts, and we had an oxygen ration. We were only allowed to breathe ten times a minute. You kids have it lucky!"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
back in 1997!
How we know is more important than what we know.
For a really excellent read on sending humans to Mars, read "Mars On Earth" by Zubrin which is about the "Mars Underground" effort at building and running prototype martian research stations on earth, but also has much more on thoughts about details of how a manned mission to mars would be run (including history of the various proposals for how to go about such an effort).
The short answer though is that long-range navigation would get the ship to around the right area of Mars, then a human pilot could help the ship land in a good nearby location, moon lander style. As Zubrin notes, there is nothing like having a trained pilot actually doing the landing. i don't think humans landing on Mars will be dropping down in giant Jackie Chan style human hamster balls!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This guy basically haven't made a blockbuster hit since the titanic. He has gone from being a good director who can mix technology/screenplays to just some documentary director.
It's like seeing shaq leaving the lakers at the top of his game to play for a charity league for good will.
It's "Get yoh azz to mahz!"
... or is it just one of those memory implant holidays??
Fahk yoo, azzhoal..
Ya dead Quaid!
Screw you Vinnie!!!
- Very high-performance hydrogen-oxygen rocket motors, courtesy of the Space Shuttle program.
- Two different final descent and landing systems:
- In-situ propellant production has already been demonstrated using simulated Mars inputs.
- We've had most of the other necessary re-entry heat shield, space suit, rover and other technology since Apollo, and the rest (mostly space suits and bigger rovers) are either relatively straightforward or outgrowths of things like the Shuttle EVA suit.
The technology is ready for us. The problem is that we are fearful and refuse to take the idea seriously enough to put real effort into it. This is largely due to people (like the idiot BBC commentator this morning) who see Mars as a sideshow or even an immoral waste of resources. Their goals are served by pushing any real mission ever-further into the future, so that it never gets done. If you really DO want it done, you have to get to Mars before the political will to do it has been sapped by the obstructionists. This means that you cannot get to Mars in 20 years, you only have a hope of doing it if you do it in 10 or even 8.- Rocket-assisted, descended via the Surveyor (Luna) and Viking (Mars) landers.
- Airbag, descended from the Mars Pathfinder system.
(I note that Cameron's proposal is to use both, with the crew landing via rocket and cargo bouncing down inside inflated habs.)Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If ahm not me, who da hell am I?!
Table of Contents Section 1 Section 2 Section 3
Natural-Selection Be
Which, quite frankly, is difficult to refute.
Just to play a devil's advocate: what business do we have throwing our limited resources to other planets when we have so many problems already down here?
I've never figured out an answer to that question without sounding like a cold-hearted bastard.
There's a whole bunch of unnecessary Terminator references that make it annoyingly difficult to read. But not impossible--that's the fault of the alcohol. Or maybe I'm just fucked up too.
...I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning...
Maybe he finally got his ass in gear and is really making that Gunnm (aka Battle Angel Alita) movie he bought the rights to years ago - there's quite a few flashbacks to the main character's life on mars, especially in the sequel (or rather, the rewriting of the ending) called "Battle Angel Alita: Last Order" that's currently being released...
np: Ulrich Schnauss - Clear Day (A Strangely Isolated Place)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
If Skynet is scheduled to appear in 2026 (and we all know from T3 that it will become self-aware almost immediately after being activated), and Bush's plans for Mars don't call for a manned mission until 2030. then we're all doomed!
Oh well, we had a good run.
There's 10 kinds of people in this world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
(stolen from someone else's sig)
- Throwing resources? What's a few tons of aluminum to the Earth? All the money stays right here.
- We are not throwing resources, we are exercising imagination and initiative. These are not limited resources, they are amplified by being used... and they are the same things needed to solve problems on earth.
- "When there is no vision, the people perish." Giving people a reason to look up from their petty squabbles to see a possible future on another world might solve some of those problems. Crime fell drastically during the first Moon landings, because most everyone was glued to the story unfolding on live television. We should try to do this again.
- Shouldn't we consider it a general religious imperative to learn what we can about where we came from and what else there is, starting with the history of other planets (including the life on them, if any)?
That's hardly an exhaustive list, and it won't convince anybody who doesn't want to be convinced. But something along those lines might persuade even the moralists that they don't have the high ground all to themselves.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I think that any kind of exploration should always try to acquire the highest level of imaging. That's how you engage people -- you can put them there, give them the sense that they're standing there on the surface of Mars. But that's just my personal opinion.
HTML my Aunt FANNYs ass! That "HTML" link is just the entire document converted into Macromedia FLASH and embedded in a webpage.
DUMBASSES! What about people who don't have a graphical browser? Clicking on that HTML link is just a waste of their time.
I know it's asking a lot expecting Journalistic Integrity on Slashdot, but EDITORS PLEASE don't link to a bazillion pages of bandwidth hogging useless for anything worthwhile FLASH and then call it HTML.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
That is the weirdest HTML formatted article I have ever seen. Let me guess... they converted a DOC file to PDF, printed it, faxed it to themselves, scanned it and then ran it through a OCR to HTML conversion program using a Microsoft designed XML parser (Patented of course!)
Gees whatever happened to content oriented plain old HTML.
*shakes head*
I'll read the friggin thing when I have a couple of hours to wait for the pages to load.
PS: for anyone else having trouble: you have to click on those microscopic VCR style buttons at the top of the page to get the page transitions. Then go get a cup of coffee.
From the HTML page of the PDFs
Stephen J. Hoffman, Editor
David L. Kaplan, Editor
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
July 1997
And this is NEWs how exactly?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Are you implying that this article shouldn't have been posted? If it were up to you would you have it removed? If not, then why the hell are you bitching about it?
somebody hurry up and get this guy a box of tissues. make sure they're the really soft ones with aloe, otherwise we'll have to hear him whine about that too.
Finally a DRM we don't need to attack.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
... yes, yes, you're an intelligent, thoughtful, and caring man, James Cameron, you have interests outside of directing Hollywood blockbusters, you have a hand in some very important work... etc, ad infinitum, and so on...
Now PLEASE PLEASE! make us a great big shiny, blow-your-socks-OFF, good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster...!
You can even set it in space, or underwater if you'd like... just make it shiny.
That's all we're asking dude...
Peace
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Mars is a very windy and cold place. Hard-shell from composite pieces - the kind of they use in Antarctica - seem more appropriate habitat. The weight of shell is not that big - compared to the weight of all the necessery food, air, water and life-support equipment. (They can place inflatable tent inside the shell - to keep the leaks down).
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
To inspire people. Especially people those who lack the creativity or courage to imagine such things. People like politicians, and the masses who vote for them.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
None of the components you listed in your message do us much good for a manned Mars exploration program. Take the Shuttle engines you list as one component. Only they aren't. They're needed in the (remaining) Shuttles. We'd have to build more of them to make a Mars mission possible before the end of the next decade - many, many more of them. It would take several launches just to get the gadgets to Mars to make liquid water and oxygen and hydrogen and everything else for the astronauts to use once they finally arrived. It would take still more engines to get the astronauts and their giant spaceship into earth orbit. And more still to get their fuel and supplies for the outbound trip into orbit. The whole project would probably require boosting into orbit about as much mass as the ISS project - a project that'll end up costing us in excess of $100 billion.
And how do you get those Shuttle-derived engines back to earth after launch? Or do you just throw them away at X-million dollars a pop? That's gonna add up fast. Maybe you design and build a new Shuttle to haul stuff into orbit, so you can get your $100 million engines back. But whoops - it costs $10 billion to design and build a new Shuttle, and billions more to operate it.
As for landing on the Red Planet, we've had trouble with that ourselves recently (Mars Polar Lander), and we'd been doing it successfully since the mid-'70s. Designing and building a man-rated lander for Mars (one that cannot fail) could easily run up a billion in design costs. Then there are the cargo / habitat landers, which also cannot fail. Chuck in another billion. Plus a billion more to design and build the habitats, and another couple of billion to get them all to Mars. That's a LOT of mass to haul into earth orbit and then blast out to Mars.
In-situ propellant production may have been demonstrated in the lab here on earth, but we don't know yet if it would even work on Mars. Right now we're having trouble getting simple robot rovers to function correctly, at $400 million a pop. What you're proposing is that we drop a small chemical factory on Mars, along with an automated tractor and bulldozer to haul it icy rock for processing. It could easily cost $10 billion to design and build such a setup, plus a billion more to get it to Mars.
The heat shields would also have to be pretty heavy-duty, since unlike Apollo or the Shuttles, these Mars vehicles are going to be traveling at interplanetary velocities. Because we'll want to minimize the astronauts' exposure to lethal doses of interplanetary radiation, as well as the amount of food and water needed to sustain them (costs a fortune to haul that stuff into orbit), their spacecraft is going to have to be traveling fast, and their landers are going to have to rely on the Martian atmosphere to slow them down.
Their rovers would also need to be far more durable than the moonbuggy used by the Apollo astronauts, since most plans call for the astronauts to remain on Mars for weeks at least, if not a year or more. The Marsbuggy could itself cost in excess of a billion to design, and another billion to build.
And since these guys are going to be there longer, in the hard radiation environment of Mars, they're going to need spacesuits that are far more durable, far better shielded against radiation, and far less susceptible to damage (from abrasive or chemically-reactive dust in particular) than the Apollo or Shuttle-era suits. Again, you could be talking a billion or more just to design and develop such suits, and heaven knows how much to build them. And with all that radiation shielding they're likely to be heavy as heck, too. Add millions more just to transport them to Mars.
I haven't even touched on all the other tech needed to get the astronauts there and back again safely and quickly. Large, powerful nuclear reactors will be needed to supply them with electrical power and probably power their engines. I can't see doing this practically or reliably with chemical rockets
Those rovers look like they could be fun, I wanna go to mars.
My ghEtt0 webpage.
nt
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
A more complete study of a different approach is available online for anyone to view at Explore Mars Now. It's a flash tour of a possible first manned mars landing environment that is based on the virtual tour of the actual Mars Arctic Research Station.
But apparently nobody cares because it wasn't commisioned by a well known director with a fetish for explosions.
Since kinetic energy is equal to one half the mass times the square of the velocity, the upper limit in the speed at which propellant is ejected puts a lower limit on the amount of propellant a spacecraft must carry. This sets a limitation in the amount of actual cargo that could be carried to Mars and the speed at which the cargo could get there.
Chemical rockets eject propellant at relatively low speed that gives rise to three crucial problems.
1. A mission will take at least one and a half years.
2. The spacecraft cannot carry and adequate amount of water for radiation shielding.
3. The spacecraft must make propellant and fuel for the return trip ON MARS.
As the Mars Reference Mission shows, such plans so exist, but are they really doable. They have a host of problems that may not be surmountable.
1. The missions are incredibly complex. If any part of the mission fails, the chances of survival for the crew will be slim. Given the 50% success rate of Mars missions to date, this doesn't look so good.
2. The combined effects of low gravity and inadequate radiation shielding (space craft can't carry the extra mass requred) may mean that astronauts will be physically very weak or even ill by the time they reach Mars.
3. A two year mission to Mars will require that astronauts recycle almost all of the resources aboard, including oxygen, food, and human waste. To date, such technology has never worked well enough for a two year mission. Biosphere 2, for example didn't work for still undetermined reason and it was right here on Earth.
Going to Mars using chemical rockets is a Hail Mary mission. Even if it worked once, it would not lead to any thing like the sort of routine exploratory activity that we want to see happen. What we need to do is develop nuclear propulsion, which promises an order of magnitude increase in spacecraft speed and cargo capacity.
You said: "Just to play a devil's advocate: what business do we have throwing our limited resources to other planets when we have so many problems already down here?"
I can answer that with a simple quote from Larry Niven: The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program.
Its a silly quote but its very true. The probability of humanity being destroyed or anhillating itself will drop dramatically once we have a self-sustaining colony on an extraterrestial object. Its like insurance for humanity in a way.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Whilst Mars can apparently get windy, it's hardly likely to blow the tent over. The atmosphere is only about 1% as dense as our own, so the force on the dome will be correspondingly reduced.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
anyone noticed the similarity between certain areas of iraq and the recently shown "footage of mars"??
yea....until the martians eat our faces!! :)
To inspire people. Especially people those who lack the creativity or courage to imagine such things. People like politicians, and the masses who vote for them.
good point. I was blinded by my obsession with the movie Aliens for a minute there. I almost forgot it's Bush who wants to take us to mars.
He who fights with Monkeys must take it upon himself not to become a Monkey.
James Cameron owns the screen adaptation rights to Kim Stanley Robinsons Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars Trilogy.
This probably means that at last the books are being adapted for the screen...
Hey! With James Cameron designing the spaceships, we're well on our way to faking a Mars landing - in just the same kind of way that the original moon landings were faked.
And it gets around the budget deficit problem too.
Some years ago Cameron toured the NASA simulator facility at Ames Research Center. He was interested in seeing the Mars database that was installed on the airline grade flight sims. SOunds like interest is picking up again. Gee, I wonder why that could be :)
billion here billion there, shit that could start adding up to real money!
with some Arnie fun
Good idea.. those 128kbit/s to mars isn't exactely top notch.
I think NASA would frown on bringing blow-up dolls on a major mission such as this. I mean, sure we're human and there are some idiosyncrasies that come along with that, but couldn't they hook up with each other and
oh. nevermind then.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Maybe some of you should RTFA, and see just how much work Cameron put into his research. And check out the hardware designs and mission framework he came up with.
"The thing I found about human mission architectures for going to Mars is that if you change one piece or one assumption, it has a ripple effect through the whole thing, and it looks different coming out the other end. You do things differently, your spacecraft are configured differently, your surface mission looks different, the time you spend on the planet looks different. So a certain set of fundamental assumptions had to be made and then we had to design everything for what it was going to look like."
It is easy to refute every assertion you made (and yes I love lists):
Look around you. Are you blind? Have you failed to notice that one of the complaints on Slashdot is that creative jobs are hard to find, and creative technical people are unemployed? There are millions of sharp people entering the technical labor force in places like China and India. When companies are chasing lower wages by opening new supplies, it makes excellent sense to add a bit to the demand and stop wasting that talent in unemployment lines.
Finally, it's ridiculous to think that smart people are "consumed" in such pursuits. Everything they produce has multiple uses, and one of the most easily multiplied is hope. If people believe that any technical problem can be solved, and many more of them have the education and expertise to do it, you're not going to convince many serious thinkers that the problem becomes harder rather than easier to attack. (People who are mindlessly repeating the position adopted by their political in-group, or who find it harder to break ranks with their friends than to follow reason, will not be convinced regardless. I suspect you are in this group.)
I suspect that you find much of this out-of-the-box thinking to be heretical, especially that last. That would say a lot about you.
How do you motivate them? People are motivated by images and ideas; m
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Gah, we should go already... We, as a tiny country, didn't balk at wasting $10 billion on two utterly useless railroads. I really, really wish that we would give the same $10 billion to a mission that may well be the hardest thing we as a species have ever done. A mission that, one century from now, may be seen as the most significant endeavour of our age. People living in space and on Mars will remember this and say "that is when it all began". And we can be a part of all that! We may yet live to see it happen!
Yeah, I'm a dreamer. But it's dreams like this that make us a great species, despite our many problems.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Easy answer: there are enormous resources in space. Over the long haul (say two centuries) we can solve a lot of problems on Earth by going to space.
Tired of stripmining mountains? There are plenty of asteroids. Sick of chipfabs spewing pollutants? Put em on the moon. Atmospheric CO2 getting you down? Solar power satellites can fix that for you. May sound outlandish at the moment, but our current aviation industry would have sounded outlandish when the Wright brothers flew.
If you want to mine asteroids, with humans onsite, you need Mars, which has good dirt and is the only place in the solar system besides Earth where you can grow food without artificial lighting. Much cheaper to get to the asteroids from Mars than from Earth, so the trade triangle works like this: high-tech goods from Earth to Mars, bulk goods such as food from Mars to asteroids, mineral resources from asteroids to Earth.
Or, you can just bitch that we won't get these benefits within the next couple decades, and not even start, even though there's no other way we're going to solve these kinds of problems in that timeframe, either.
(Wont't somebody please think of the Martians?)
Designing and building a man-rated lander for Mars (one that cannot fail) could easily run up a billion in design costs
The development costs for all the landers was in the engineering of the computers and programs to do what was required in advance of any specific knowledge. In other words, we were trying to build software to do something when we had incomplete information about the operating environment, resorting to simulation and over-engineering.
On a manned mission, we don't need that. We're sending along human beings, who are infintely more adaptable than automated probes.
The Mars failures were not structural or engineering failures. They were programming errors. With a manned mission, we're sending along the programmers, or simply resorting to manual control and common sense.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
President Clinton had an excessive sexual appetite, and lied about it to the American people. Clinton was nearly impeached for this.
President Bush 2 put together a crack group of White House staffers to clarify the confusing and contradictory facts about Iraq's posession of WMD that the CIA had been providing them. After several sessions of "cutting this and emphasizing that", they realized the CIA was wrong, and an immediate invasion of Iraq was necessary to prevent a preemptive stike on the USA by Iraq. This had an entirely unforeseen consequence of giving the administation's highest level administrators (all of whom are Texas oil millionaires) access to huge amounts of foreign oil. Hundreds of US soldiers have died, as well as thousands of Iraqis, and the USA is looked upon with a high level of suspicion by the international community. This makes Bush a Hero of the Nation.
Any questions?
>A good 80% of all humans live in poverty, with no hope of ever working their way out of it, and they probably don't care about what's on Mars.
80% of the world may be poor, by some definition of the word "poor", but certainly nothing like that percentage are so stricken by hunger that they aren't capable of thinking philosophically about the universe and the future of humanity. I think it's a bit insulting to characterize the people of the world that way.
to finish my concrete bunker and fill it with AM radios and canned dogfood.
:)
And guns. We need lots of guns!
Let's see, 1 launch window every 2 years, 2 vehicles per launch window, 4 engines per vehicle = 4 engines per year. Manufacture of High Pressure Fuel Turbopumps: "Production rate > 1 unit / month since first flight in July 2001 (STS-104)[1]. At the rate of 1 unit per month, you could have enough engines to fly a Shuttle every month and replace engines every 5 flights, send 4 vehicles to Mars every launch window instead of 2, and have about 3 brand-spanking new engines left over.
It would take one launch, carrying about 50 tons on a trans-Mars orbit.[2] The Shuttle orbiter weighs about 100 tons fully loaded; its engines are around 10 tons, leaving 90 tons for vehicle, payload and trans-Mars injection fuel. The required delta-V to get from LEO to TMI is roughly 4.3 km/sec. [3] Vacuum-specific impulse of an SSME is 452 seconds [4], or exhaust velocity of 4430 m/sec; the required TMI mass-ratio is 2.64 by the rocket equation. If you retained one SSME (modified to be restartable in flight) for the trans-Mars injection, you would need to start with ~53 tons * 2.64, or roughly 140 tons. This appears to be well within the capacity of a vehicle using 4 SSMEs and 3 SRBs to put into LEO.
Yes they can. You send them first, perhaps several of them, one launch window before you send people. If they don't land and work correctly, you hold the manned mission off for another launch window. If you send 3 and only 1 of them lands and works, you have one usable landing site; if 2 or 3 of them land and work, you have your choice of options. You can use the unused landers later, or for supply depots for long surveys.
You have some serious misconceptions about price tags here. The cost is almost entirely for research, development and engineering; manufacturing is a drop in the bucket. You could probably crank out rovers for a few million apiece now that we have the design.
A small chemical plant is much, much simpler than a rover. The biggest issue might be filtering dust to keep it out of the machinery, and you would have a lot of trouble claiming that we don't have any applicable experience with filters.
No, that's your proposal. I'm proposing Zubrin's scheme of carrying LH2 to the site and processing it into methane and LOX via the reactions
Note that the methane-production reaction is e
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
While I have found other references to Cameron's involvement in this, why do none of the documents mention his name at all? Am I being dense in missing the link here?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
On the Mars Surface Time Allocation chart, they have the available man-hours of labor per day listed as 8 X 24 = 200. Are they allocating 8 hours that don't exist? Is the martian day even close to 24 hours long?
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
Okay, this I don't get. James Cameron is a film director. This is basically the same thing as asking an artist to concieve a ship design. This, to me, is looking at the wrong solution to the problem.
The problem is not one of aesthetics or "believability" or even film-making. It is one of keeping people alive and for providing a living environment. What stresses a particular structure will need to tolerate, what safety limits, what shape this kind of structure will take on... those are engineering issues, not film-making issues.
Film making and directing is about control of the vision of the film. Part of this ability is to pick the right cast member for the right role. Choosing a film director for the role of ship designer is, in my opinion, a poor choice. It will lead to the preference of form over function and result in horrendous "mishaps" and basically a waste of human life when the idea fails because the necessary precautions were not taken.
Originally, I had thought, "Why not Steve Jobs?" He has designed well interfacing hardware that works and looks good. But with the iPod and some of the design choices made, I fear the same problem exists: preference of form over function.
I'm as eager to get out into space and colonize and build the first fast food joint in orbit as the next space cadet. But like any other rational human being, I want to do it safely and not risk my life doing so.
I don't care if the ship looks like crap. I want a ship that will WORK. Ie, safely carry people+cargo to and from a destination in space.
What I would want is an engineer with artistic vision to concieve ship designs based on practical and workable systems as opposed to building a ship with a certain "look" based on assumptions of how the system should work.
We lost Columbia, Challenger, and pre apollo crews to poor decisions which over-rided sane safety concerns. Who bolts the escape hatch from the outside so you can't get out from the inside!? Who in their right mind would push for a flight window when there are concerns about the ships systems with abnormal icing present? We're talking about human lives here! We aren't living in the stone age. A piece of protective shielding(on an ablative shielding system, ALL pieces of the shielding are critical), was knocked off. Deemed "safe".
We have super computers to run simulations on "what-ifs". Why bother having them if we use them to only simulate and predict weather and bomb effects and not on whether a ship can survive re-entry with x-piece of it's system damaged?
I fear the recent "successes" at NASA/JPL is once again starting to inflate the egos which will lead to loss of lives.
The situation of where timelines, politics, cost-effectiveness, and bottom-lines will take priority over human lives.
If such is the case, then why bother sending humans out there at all if we are not intending to safeguard them from start to finish!?
Winged Power Photography
Actually that was his other book, "The Case For Mars" (which I have not yet read). "Mars On Earth" is much less political and more straightforward in that regard...
What I found impressive is the very practical nature of the research they are doing on these earth stations. They really are getting a lot of practocal experience and I found myself agreeing with all of the points at the end of the book summarizing what works and what does not with crews going to mars.
To tie back into my subject, probably a lot of his political ideas were at least heavily influences by Kim Stanley Robinon's "Red Mars" series, which are great books (I think) and follow the same line of thought (Mars breaking free of Earth). Myself, I try to stay out of the political side and focus on examining the technical issues. Not that I am thinking there won't be some weird politics onvolved at some point if a private effort really does get together the resources to send a manned mission to Mars (I am not sure yet if that will happen before or after the government gets around to it).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
(And remarkably frightening?)
The people I tell Larry Niven's explanation of why we need a space program to (not in those words, but the same general idea) who aren't enthusiastic about space say more or less the same thing in response.
Their counter-argument goes something along the lines of, "well, why are we so great that we think we should be preserved? If we destroy ourselves or if an asteroid comes along and takes us out, why should we be so arrogant to think we should try and stop that?"
I get a LOT of responses like this.
Does it frighten the shit out of anyone else that there seems to be so many people who think this way?
+++ATH0