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."

Comments

Good for Cameron, NASA, and us

[spun]

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!"

The technology is not the problem. Will is.

[Tau Zero]

If we had to develop something really new and different to do this, it might take the 8 years that Apollo required to put people on the Moon. But look at what we've got on the shelf already:

1. Very high-performance hydrogen-oxygen rocket motors, courtesy of the Space Shuttle program.
2. Two different final descent and landing systems:
   • 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.)
3. In-situ propellant production has already been demonstrated using simulated Mars inputs.
4. 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.