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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."
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."
In other words, Notgonnahappen. 8(
Moo.
Because you cannot take woman into space.
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The way primary and secondary education is going these days, women will be leading the mission to Mars. Quite a role reversal from the times when that movie was made.
If we do get a solid private space industry I can see this number being as low as 10 years.
Ok, you have 10 years to think of a way to actually make money by going to Mars, and extraneous randomness like inventing Velcro doesn't count. We can invent stuff like that without leaving Earth.
And 1,000 US soldiers and 10,000 Iraqis still alive.
Think about it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
The mooon flight happened for ME. I was 13 then, and glued to the TV that whole day watching the coverage. Position the rapid progress of the Lunar mission against the-pop culture like "2001: ASO," and I actually thought I might, as an ordinary person, be able to make an admittedly expensive vacation into orbit during my lifetime.
YOU want it during YOUR lifetime? I'd like to see us not have dropped the ball completely, during MY lifetime, which is about half-over. Hopes for middle-class-afordable orbital access are pretty much shot. Heck, hopes for continuing existence of the middle class seem to be going down the drain, too.
As for a ark? For Mars, I favor the "Pork Chop Express," (with a wink'n'nod to Kurt Russell, in "Big Trouble In Little China") named after the so-called pork-chop plot of Earth/Mars transit orbits. Picture a habitat (or several) of some sort remaining in the Earth/Mars transition orbit.
When the right time comes around, boost from Earth and match speed with the habitat. Get in and ride to Mars. At Mars, get out and de-boost in another vehicle into Mars orbit.
The key is to boost your Earth/Mars transfer vehicle (the habitat) into that orbit *once*. Thereafter, you only boost people and supplies. That lets the habitat become more spacious and better shielded, since its recurring costs are lowered. The trip is supposed to be the worst part, after all. There's only an opportunity for Mars every two years or so, but the window is a few months wide. Eventually it would be nice to have several transfer habitats.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I seriously doubt that we'd face extinction, short of a world-wide climatic effect. Yes, we'd have dead and dying people everywhere, and there would be plagues.
However, humans are quite versatile. Our life expectancy might be shot down to the 40's, but we'd still be able to find food if there was any such thing left to be found. Unlike many animals, we can eat both meat and plants, and we're not really hindered like many species by regional boundries or climates.
Short of world-wide universal extinction of all bugs, plants, and animals, I think we'll survive as a species. There would be regions where growing things would still be possible, and small groups of people would re-start society from the ground up. There's a fair amount of evidence that such world-wide catastrophies occured in the past (such as the supposed "atlantean distruction"), resulting in many deaths, but still people survived, formed new cultures, and 'progressed' to where we are now. They kept parts of their culture and beliefs - not necessarily in the same state that they were originally - and formed the cultures of our ancestors.
I could see it all happening again. The western world could go to war with the east, and annihilate the large power centers of the world. The butterfly effect would take out all the other societies, wars would errupt, and disease and famine would strike. Enterprising individuals would store up goods, go into what is left of the wilderness and survive, while the lesser, weaker humans would simply try to perpetuate their futile existence and die.
I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Furthermore since when does capitalism display dignity and display wisdom?
All the time, provided there are no artificial limits placed on it.
The forced economic classes that it creates can only be called dignifying to the rich and the quickly shrinking remnants of the middle class.
Wasn't always that way. There actually used to be a middle class back when people had careers instead of temp jobs. Almost anyone who put in a day's work could earn an honest wage and afford a home. Now, the median price for a home is almost a half million dollars and the average job lasts less than 18 months.
There will be no further significant space exploration because business decides everything and there are no money grabs available.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Didn't NASA say that people would be on Mars in 20 years 10 years ago? They keep on pushing back their timetables. And with all of the recent, TRIVIAL, screw-ups that they've been having, would you trust them with your life? What about the women? Please won't somebody think of the WOMEN!
If not created solely for warfare, many of our technological advances (metalugry, steel, plastic, computers, the internet, jet aviation, canned food) were promoted and mass produced to support a war effort.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I think it will definetly be president dependent. I once had the opportunity of lunching with Robert Zubrin and he talked about his Mars Direct plan. Part of what makes his plan doable is the cost (50 billion, I think?), but when asked what it would take for us to actually visit Mars, he said it would take a president, at the beginning of his first term of office, to announce that going to mars would be a priority, and then for him to be re-elected. I think the timeline he said it would take would be about 10 years, and he explained that by the time the first 7 or 8 were through (because of a presidential directive), the next president wouldn't scrap all that effort and money when we were so close. It will definetly depend on who is president, but not who is elected on Nov. 2. Bush is all talk about making space a priority (he probably thinks there are WMD on the moon), and Kerry is not as pro-space as Bush (from the Nature article posted earlier today). Maybe in 2008?
It's been said once in this thread, but I'll say it again: we can do this faster -- i.e. in 10 years -- with the Mars Direct program, on a pretty reasonable budget (closer to $30B than the $50B mentioned elsewhere, actually). That's a snap, considering that NASA's annual budget is currently $15B -- we'd be talking about 1/5 of current funding levels (not to mention only 16% of pre-Columbia shuttle launch capacity, given 2 flights every 2 years).
Get out there and pester your Congresscritters on this. Mars in 1/3 of this time is acheivable if enough people press for it!
How To Get Humans To Mars
Remember how George was saying how we were going to go to Mars. Well I agree. I vote to send Bush to Mars.
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I wouldn't call it short sighted thinking. I think that they too are thinking in the long term, but thinking from a different angle. Consider for instance if the Europe had decided to explore the Atlantic more then they had in 1,000 AD. Conceivably, they could have crossed the Atlantic and hit the Americas. With a great loss of life they might even have been able to colonize the Americas, but they certainly would not have been able to get anything back for a few hundred years. They just didn't have the technology.
The real question is whether or not our technology is the 1,000 AD equivalent or the 1492 AD equivalent when it comes to mars. Is Mars just a waste of human life and money to achieve, or are we on the cusp of doing something tangible on Mars? If we just wait another 30 years will we have the technology to conquer Mars quickly and relatively painlessly? Perhaps the money would be better spent on working on our problems here right now, and waiting a little while long before going for Mars.
I am not claiming that I know the answer to these questions. That said, it might not matter in the end. Watching the developments in the X-Prize you tend to get the feeling that perhaps it is 1492 again for exploration (minus the natives to slaughter and oppress). I personally think that the best course at this point might simply to loose our grip on the private sector and let willing men and woman pave the way. Our government might not be willing to let a few people die in order to get there, but there are plenty of private individuals willing to take that risk and say to hell with public opinion. I say just let the private sector run free. If the government really wants to do something productive in this field, I would offer more X-prize like competitions.
Now, let's get into some rebuttal:
" As far as the incremental approach, it's crap. The complexities of trans-planetary flight are a quantum leap above that of orbital flight. "
A perfect contradiction in just two sentences. You claim the incremental approach is "crap," and then proceed to point out the (very true) fact that trans-planetary flight is orders of magnitude harder to pull off than orbital. So, would you have us just build an interplanetary shuttle and send it off someplace w/o first sending all the sattelites, then orbiters, then landers/rovers that we have over the years? That makes no sense. If you aim directly for your goal in such a massive undertaking you're going to miss. Period.
The biggest argument one can give in favor of a step-wise path to Mars is that we know there are going to be unaccounted-for problems along the way, without a doubt it's a lot faster, easier, and cheaper to solve those problems running prep missions between here and the moon than between here and Mars. For one, signal delay is shorter, we'll know within 3 seconds if something goes wrong, rather than 6 minutes, that gives us time to react, study, and correct a problem before it possibly ruins the entire mission. Also, it takes 5 days to get to the moon, on closest orbit we're at least IIRC 5 months from Mars. If something goes wrong, or a design needs correction you'll know in a week instead of half a year, which cuts down development time.
" What incremental development gives you is an illusion of progress. Just look at the shuttle. We have dumped 30 years and countless billions into it's development. We have nothing to show for it. It has fewer capabilities than the Apollo program. It costs more to launch. "
Your points about the shuttle are valid, but they do not prove incremental development gives only the illusion of progress. For one, the shuttle program was designed to be our answer to space flight, not a first step in some greater space vehicle program. It was created as a one-stop-shop for getting payloads and people to and from space, nothing more. NASA dropped the ball on creating second generation designs that used the first shuttle as a learning experience. Yes they created some, but none of them have been pursued to the point of being viable replacements for the current fleet. So here there has been no illusion of progress (or any progress really) and there has been no incremental plan, just make the shuttles and use them.
" Most of the conditions in orbit can be re-created on the ground. (Ok, maybe not zero-g. But certainly the sealed environment.) "
Who cares about orbit? Orbit is the least of our worries in going to Mars, what about transporting humans through the radiation sea of interplanetary space? What about maintaining a habitat on another planet? We can do it in the space station, but even that is only technically a simulation of the conditions for a planet-based habitat. Simulations do not explore all possible failure modes, they can't by definition since there is no way to create a simulation that matches the real thing 100%. We have a lot of experience with orbital living, and we have a lot of experience with simulated ET habitats that have been done in extreme environments like the dessert and Antarctica, but we have no real experience with manning an actual ET habitat on another planet (or moon). You don't think that might be a valuable experience? There's no knowledge to be gained from building a base on the moon and staffing it? There are thousands of issues never before encountered that
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --