People on Mars in 30 Years?

lucabrasi999 writes "Yahoo is running a Reuters story in which Arthur Thompson, the head of the NASA 'rover' missions, says that people could be landing on Mars in the next twenty or thirty years. If that is true, I estimate that within 50 years, Mars will need women."

Comments

Detail left out

[StevenHenderson]

There was a detail left out of the submission. The FA reads:

Asked how long it could be before astronauts land on Mars, Arthur Thompson, mission manager for MER surface operations, told Reuters in an interview in Lima, "My best guess is 20 to 30 years, if that becomes our primary priority."

If it is primary priority. Which I doubt it will be. And depending on who is our next president might affect how much funding NASA gets.

Nuclear Propulsion

[frank249]

The smallest feasible Mars expedition requires 150 or so tons in Earth orbit, which takes 5 trips on the most powerful rocket flying today, the Space Shuttle. A large nuclear powered booster could put six times that mass in orbit in one flight. According to this article, an Apollo size rocket with gas core engines would be safe, economical and would even get rid of excess nuclear waste.

This is not new. NASA tested Nuke engines in the 60's. If we are serious about going to Mars, we have to start building nuke engines.

Re:We need flying cars!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

There are a lot of problems with flying cars as a concept, before you even work out the implementations. Are you going to trust an aircraft to a population that can't be bothered to change the oil? Where are they going to take off and land from? How are you going to coordinate millions of these things trying to get back and forth from work?

For your information, stability and poor power/weight is the START of problems. And they haven't been solved. A stable aircraft is very fuel inefficient and slow. A fast and fuel efficient design isn't very stable. It's a fact of life. Power requires fuel. What good is a thrust to weight ratio greater than one if you can't make it past the end of the driveway without a top-off?

Hiller's car demonstrated 2 critical facts that doom any subsequent attempts to wed a car and a plane. First: for all the trouble of getting a pilot's license, most people opt for the real thing. Second: design properties for a good car are almost mutually exclusive with the design requirements of a good airplane.