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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
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
Bill Clinton authorized NASA to launch missions to mars every 20 months when Mars is in an opportune window. It is actually cheaper to launch a $300 million probe every other year than wait every 5 years and launch a $500 million one (my cornell profs, who run the current MERs explains it) - sitting around w/no payoff loses you money. Sucessful missions like pathfinder and MERs 2003 get you science and grants. The 20-month (or whatever the window is) has been followed pretty closely:
1997: Pathfinder/Mars Global Surveyor
1999: Mars Climate Orbiter/Mars Polar Lander (both lost)
2001: Mars Oddessey/Mars 2001 Lander (Code name: Apex - cancelled after the 1999 failures)
2003: "Athena:" A lander that was planned back in the late 90's, then cancelled after the 1999 failures(much of Athena became incorporated into the current MERs). Spirit/Opporunity (also Japan and ESA took advantage of the opportune planetary alignment).
Also, before the 1999 failures, there was an amazingly complex Mars Sample Return mission in it's initial stages planned for 2008. Professor Squyres (Spirit/Opportunity leader) was also to have been involved in that. It was a sort of "Rube-Goldberg" trick that would have had a lander on the surface, scoop up some soil, put it in a rocket not much bigger than a model rocket, launch it into Mars orbit, rendezevous with an orbitting satellite, launch it back to earth and finally be snapped up by a helicopter as it paracheutted down over the American desert (this parachutte technique happens to be how StarDust's sample will be retrieved). That mission woulda been so cool though. Honestly, making it work sounds even cooler than the actual specimen we woulda gotten back!
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
... or is it just one of those memory implant holidays??
I interviewed Cameron last year, and flat-out asked him why he hasn't made a film (as opposed to a documentary) since 1997. His answer was, "I'm having too much fun." Well, lucky bastard on the one hand, but on the other, all credit to him!
Still, looks like he's going ahead with Battle Angel now. And in 3D, to boot!
You must think in Russian.
- 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.
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
- 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.
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.
Finally a DRM we don't need to attack.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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
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.
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
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.
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?)
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?)
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...
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."
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.