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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."
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
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
- 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.
Carbo ships would obviously orbit mars. Otherwise the landing spot would be set in stone. Furthermore the ships would stay in orbit while droping payload on specific cooordinents.
It's also likely mars would get it's own gps satelites to spare the expence of the containers carrying more sophisticated navigation equipment.
We can expect the first expedition to mars to be full of married geologists and engineers willing to stay there decades if not most of the rest of their lives. With laborers comming in on subsequent missions.
After they construct their preliminary shelter they first job will be to setup solar setup and then nuclear power since constructing a small city will require a lot more energy than solor can provide. They will setup a small reactor near their base and a much larger on will be setup miles from their base for a refinery.
After construction of alpha base they will start constructing a larger habitat, soil and hydroponics farms from a slow trickle of refined metals being produced. Everything will be very modular and all metal will be recycled. We can expect chicken and fish farms for mean. They will also have pressure and heating units to produce oil from human, animal and plant waste; this will provide the material to produce plastics and a limited amount of fossil fuel for miscilaneous applications such as rocket fuel.
But the main function of the base for years to come would be to produce massive amounts of metal and raw resources for construction of subsequent commercial colonies.
Who knows, decades later maybe a space elevator to make exporting quite profitable.
Mars' greatest strength is as an industrial supercenter to the solar system. We don't likely have to worry about contaminating the ground water there.
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
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.
Taking a cue from one of the most imaginative minds of the 20th century, Chuck Jones,I propose using a really, really big slingshot.
Einstein was an imaginitive man. It was his imagination that let jump right to true conlusions that no one else could see.
Richard Feynman was perhaps the most imaginative physicist ever. His notational systems alone are amazing.
However, both of these men had their imaginations and intuitions backed good, old fashioned, knowledge such as you might expect from man bearing the title "Doctor."
Einstein's statement is in no way to be interpreted as supporting the idea that "creative artistic types" are likely to come up with intuition based ideas of technical merit.
Arthur C. Clarke saw things in his stories few others could imagine.
But then Arthur C. Clarke had the knowledge to back that imagination up.
KFG
Mars Rover Sample Return (MRSR) has been in development since the 1980's. Initially the Pathfinder program, which eventually spawned the Pathfinder mission, was designed to demonstrate the technologies for the MRSR. MRSR is classic vaporware. It has gone through several complete revisions including one that had a 1100 pound rover and a cost of $10 - $13 billion. MRSR if it ever launches will probably take place after the Mars Science Laboratory mission (if it ever launches). While it sounds like a cool idea to bring back rocks to give intense scientific analysis, I think it is more practical on science earned per dollar cost to invest other technologies such as a rover or lander that can drill far beneath the surface for samples, multiple advance seismic detectors, or rovers with ground penetrating radar. Many of these mission could be done for the same cost and a fraction of the failure probability of MRSR.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
That's not true. The key trick with these plans is that you send the return vehicle first, and let it land and produce the propellant for the return trip before you ever launch the human crew. If you lose the return vehicle as it lands on Mars, it's a setback for the program, but nobody dies.
Solar storms are a real concern, but best as I understand things there's little risk of prompt radiation sickness from the cosmic ray dosage on a Mars mission. Zero-g is a concern, but they could always use artificial gravity by spinning the craft.
I dunno about oxygen and water, but as I understand they plan to take all their food with them. While on Mars, there will be surplus oxygen available from the propellant production, so air recycling shouldn't be an issue there, and you can take a little extra hydrogen along to make lots of water.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yeah. Besides being one of the only (the only?*) director able to really shoot something on/underwater that didn't go way over on budget and ambition... he actually has the patent on those full-face helmets from The Abyss, and a few other things. His brother is a big engineer type as well.
* Peter Weir's Master and Commander didn't go over budget I don't think, and that was on the water, but I think it stands alone with Cameron's Titanic and Abyss as water-movie successes. He just asks for an astronomical buget up front and gets it out of the way. :)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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.