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Private Mars Mission Planned For 2009
Enkidu writes "Spiegel and other German media are reporting that a complete private Mars mission (automated translation) is planned for 2009. Organizations behind are AMSAT and Mars Society Germany."
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I am surprised that a company like Boeing has not attempted to break into the privatized space arena. It seems like the government regulations/costs are too constricting to focus on space travel from a government perspective. Maybe we'll have an X-Prize to mars within the next 25 years!
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artlu.net
Wouldn't that be hilarious of the Martians "plans a research flight up to the year 2009 to" Earth.
No private organization has even been to the moon, and NASA is going pretty great lengths to ensure they understand all effects and implications from staying in space a very long time.
:-)
Seems overly ambitious to me, although the goal sounds honorable.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'll send some lucky volunteer in 2008, if you all send me enough money to pack a tube full of dynamite.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"As slave station the observatory in Bochum will serve." and other Yodaish lines this translation contains...
Seriously, they can't even get to *Earth's* orbit, and they are planning to go to Mars?
I wonder what kind of case mods they will have on board...
> Wow! First post! You guys are really slow, I've been waiting for someone to post for several minutes now.
Maybe I should go read the article while I wait....
To read the article or try for first post: that is the question!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Powered by cold fusion and manned by Ewoks.
What is with germans and space lately...first they report on a missing russian space shuttle...which some german wants to buy...and now they want to go to mars...
Goatse has funded several probes to Uranus.
How can a private group raise the money for a mission like this? I would think the cost would easily be in the hundreds of millions of dollars range, maybe the billion dollar range. What will they get back, what return? I am thinking government has to back them somehow for this to really happen.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
Maybe they plan to use the shuttle form the Bahrain deseret.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Private Mars Mission isn't kinky in itself, but if you couple it with the two subheadings in the article:
500 Kilos heavy probe
and
Favorable Mars position
Suddeny, "Private" takes on a whole new meaning...
do you really think it can be done for ten million euros as they say in the article?
This trip to mars brought to you by McDonalds: I'm Lovin' It!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
While I applaud attempts like this, if governments couldn't get it right with Beagle then private orgs are certainly going to face some very difficult work to make this happen.
Here is a PDF with some discussion on the planned Phase 5-A mission, or a amateur satelite to Mars
:-)
http://www.amsat-dl.org/p5a/p5a-to-mars.pdf
And here is the main Phase 5-A website on AMSAT-DL, with text in both German and English:
http://www.amsat-dl.org/p5a/
Stuff like this makes you proud of holding a HAM license
73s
I imagine the sub-etha communication system will be provided by WorldCom and the fusion propulsion unit by Enron. Once it launches and hasn't been heard from for a while, Arthur Andersen will certify that the craft did, in fact, land on Mars as projected, steered there by the invisible hand.
A few quarters later, the taxpayer will bail out the investors.
Is the fact that the company formed for the mission is named The Union Aerospace Corporation.
Are they asking for volunteers yet?
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I'm not a native speaker, mind, but should be a little less incomprehensible than what the fish churns out ;)
--
Marburg Consortium plans mars mission before 2009
A German consortium of scientists, engineers, and technicians wants to prove that private groups are also in the race for interplanetary flights. By 2009, the group plans to send a probe and a satellite to Mars.
The Amsat consortium has approximately 1200 members working largely as volunteers on the rpoject. The mission of exploration will cost around 700 million Euros, according to Amsat in Bochum, Saturday.
The goal of the mission is to prove that private organizations can make space flights within the solar system possible, according to Karl Meinzer, professor of Space Flight Technology at the University of Stuttgart. The 500 kilogram probe will be put into earth orbit on board an Arianne rocket.
The space flight organization intends to purchase spare capacity on a rocket that would not be filled enitrely by other satellites. Later the probe would be brought into an orbit around Mars where it would serve as a communications relay.
Ground Control in Bochum
Meinzer says, We'd be able to receive signals from transmitters already on Mars". The Observatory in Bochum would serve as ground control. Before the actual flight to Mars could commence, the probe will have to be placed into orbit around the Earth. "We can't set a term for the rocket launch, but we must begin the flight to Mars within a limited timeframe." In 2007 and 2009 Mars will be in a beneficial location for the flight.
After the nine month flight to the neighbouring planet the probe will begin sending signals from Mars to Earth. The signals will be broadcast on amateur radio frequencies, so that anybody with a transceiver will be able to receive them.
Another goal of the mission will be investigation of the Martian atmosphere. To achieve this, the Munich Mars Society, also an organization of scholars and technicians, wants to send along the "Archimedes" probe on the mission to the red planet. "Once in Martian orbit, a 14 meter diameter balloon will inflate above the probe", said Hannes Gabriel of the Mars Society. The balloon will slow down substantially as it glides through the atmosphere towards the surface of the planet with its landing craft. The researchers hope this will yield better opportunities to collect data.
The 30 year old Amsat consortium has succesfully lanched satellites into space, according to Meinzer. Since the eightiies they have participated in a total of nine missions.
I want the fire back.
...missed or almost missed practically every single major turn of the computer industry, such as the Internet? Has anyone told you that Chicago (MS-Windows-95) almost shipped without a web browser because of that? Have you ever read "The Road Behind^WAhead"? Pile of money? Check. Vision...? Anyone...?
If anyone from Microsoft did such a thing, it would be Paul Allen - who IPOF is funding Bert Rutan - but I think he'd require more signs of life on Mars before he cut a cheque for it, since he seems to be an evangelist for materialism.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...a kind of open source for space hardware?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
offcourse they will be pulled by flyang pigs to get there ...
Siropel
Just how stupid does an announcement have to be before working journalists decide not to report it? A private mission to Mars by 2009?
Okay fine, in that same spirit:
"Dear Speigel:
I plan to evolve into a being composed entirely of ionized gas and electromagnetic energy by 2009. I realize this is an ambitious timeframe, but with recent advances in genetic engineering and non-CFC spray bottle technology I believe it's achievable.
Please call me if you have any questions, or I'll be happy to seep into your offices in five years."
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
Not that this isn't an extremely impressive move, but seriously - they're going to spend all this money trying to compete with NASA to get to Mars? Yes, the fulfilment of human greatness, scientific forethought and everything, but c'mon - I could think of a thousand better ways of spending that money. This is sad.
You know what sucks? Seeing this headline and reading "Planned" as "Manned". I was getting all excited.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Going out on a limb here, but I'd be willing to bet that a private mission to Mars wouldn't return several years later and bring along with it some astronauts infected by a poorly sealed sample of alien biological material that vented into the cabin on the return trip and infected the crew, thus ensuring the end of humanity via a viral infection of massive proportions, including infected people whose heads re-grow after being blown off.
Instead, a private venture would ensure that such biological material remained on the planet, cultivating it to see what sorts of special biological weapons or beings it could engineer from the material. The profits from the sale of such weapons would be tantalizing, and the desire to keep it secure would negate any real concerns about an infection as I mentioned above.
Unless someone gets power hungry within the private organization, performs self-experimentation on him or herself, and evolves into a destructive, monstrous being that inadvertently infects the rest of the private mission personnel on Mars, thus requiring the deployment of a specialized Marine force from Earth who undoubtedly would get its ass kicked, save for one chick who goes head to head with the mother being and, in a daring attack, destroys the entire private mission colony by overloading the atmospheric processor power core.
So, as long as that chick is in the pipeline, like I said, a private mission would avoid the NASA mistakes that we've all seen explored on TV and in movies.
Right?
IronChefMorimoto
You may be shocked by what I just described, but this information comes from a "60 Minutes" interview with Boeing management. The interview was aired several years ago. Boeing management figures that spending more than the value of the payload (i.e. passengers) to test the safety of the jet is a waste of money.
One thing that almost leaps out at you is that a small jet seating only 3 people are substantially less reliable than a huge passenger jet.
Now, consider a manned rocket to Mars. It would carry, at most, 5 people. It warrants a testing/verification budget of $50 million.
That rocket sounds very risky to me.
Such vhatch?
It generally takes experience to get such missions right. Mars is a known probe eater. Three different nations have had embarassing failures there. Rather than one big probe, I would suggest they split the science experiements up into 2 or more smaller probes to increase the chances of some success.
Table-ized A.I.
This is a preliminary working document to fund a UNMANNED (Un nerded as well) satellite to Mars. This by a world wide organization of largely volunteer (some academic) folks who are mostly amateur radio operators and who have launching communications satellites for 35 years.
That's longer than the average slash dot reader has been sentient. According to the AMSAT-Germany website some of their members have been listening in on the Mars Express satellites with home brew gear. Previously, other amateurs have listened in on many (if not most) other deep space sats. Thus, the technology to both build, launch and control a Martian mission isn't as much of a stretch as folks would like to believe. No, it won't be Spirit or Oportunity and heck, it might just blow up on the pad, but I think it's an incredible next step for an organization that has been outperforming several government funded efforts for decades.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And they'll get a lot of sympathetic ears, too. The crowd here on Slashdot who grew up on "gee wow" Science Fiction stories won't want to believe it, but my gut feeling is that once regular people start thinking about it, they won't want to see Mars screwed up.
And settlements on Mars are even less likely. Mars is a completely unique environment. It simply won't be allowed.
And please spare me talk about treaties, and land rights, etc, etc, blah blah. Planetary exploration is not like anything else. There is no precident.
What will the earth governments do about it, you ask? A Mars colony will not be able to be self sufficient from a single launch. Without support from the Earth, it will die, period.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism - all these ways of thinking that measure the value of thing in accordance with pleasure and pain , which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naivetes on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity. Pity with you - that, of course, is not pity in your sense: it is not pity with social "distress", with "society" and its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, though the ground around us is littered with them; it is even less pity with grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata who long for dominion, calling it "freedom". Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller - and there are moments when we behold your very pity with indescribable anxiety, when we resist this pity - when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. You want, if possible - and there is no more insane "if possible" - to abolish suffering . And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end , a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible - that makes his destruction desirable .
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin. its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting and exploiting suffering and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness - was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form giver, hammer, hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the "creature in man". for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified - that which necessarily man and should suffer? And our pity - do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?
Thus it is pity versus pity.
But to say it once more: there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure. pain. and pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is naive.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil - Aphorism 225
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Get the surfer duuude, the angry black chick, the whitebreads, the gay guys, the goth chick, the dweeb, the urban hip street black guy, the repressed screaming argumentative vaguely asian girl, the useless stoner, the guy with a drinking problem and the crybaby.
Put em in a space ship for like 15 months and give them utterly useless but challenging tasks to do while they Keepin it Real in Space, yo.
AMSAT is a private organization, but the article fails to identify where the funding comes from . . . if a probe or experiment from a private university is launched into space or performed on the space station, is that a "private space experiment" because the experiment came from a private organization? If the funding is from public sources (like the National Science Foundation in the USA), does that make it a public project even though it originated in a private university? Or is this now a public project because of the public funds?
Once again, a journalist doesn't clarify what he/she is talking about . . . what does private initiative mean? Does it simply mean that a private group came up with the idea? Or developed the idea? Or funds the idea? Or executes the idea? Or owns the data and results from the idea?
SPOIL the environment there. Send a simple probe containing dozens of cultures of bacteria and lichen that would most likely survive the environment and have it land in an area most suitable. If the environment is already contaminated. There won't be as much opposition. Besides, we're going to have to contaminate it one way or another unless we just never intend to colonize it which is just a waste.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Goatse has funded several probes to Uranus.
... your anus.
Your head a splode
"Oil on Titan"
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Step 4 ... Profit!!!
... in Soviet Russia, MARS comes to YOU!!!
I dunno. I'd have to play Doom 3 again to investigate all the ramifications.
Rumours that a titanium sun lounger and a beach towel are among the capsule's payload have been strongly denied... :P
... apart from a little bit of money and some moral support. It was put together more or less as a private project by a Professor and anyone he could find to help him.
I know this link has been on /. several times before, but I feel the need to bring it up again. Mars Scorecard
Given the history with our probes, five years does not seem to be a plausible timeline for this goal. However, it may be just the swift kick in the arse that NASA needs.
insert interesting sig here
Some balance will have to be struck. If the UN actually enforced this (unlikely--has the UN enforced anything lately?), then that would be kiss of death for space development. Why run the risks if you had to give away all the proceeds?
I have frequently wondered why everybody concentrate on doing a quick landing on Mars. Slowing down rapidly is difficult and generates high heat. I like the balloon method - since there are no human beings in the craft, it doesn't matter how long it takes to slow down and reach the surface. Also, with a sloooooow descent, you can collect data while going down.
Oh well, what the hell...
What?
You'd think MS would venture into space travel...if only to get the executives away from the DOJ... remember guys, Engineers are CHEAPER than lawyers!!!
Some of us Amateur Radio people in Australia are proposing to Prof. Karl Meinzer to establish a southern hemisphere ground station with a 10m or larger dish antenna. There are at least two sites we know of where such antennas are available; one would offer the ability to co-locate further antennas for effectively increasing the virtual dish using interferometry (signal addition). Note: Analysis done already shows that a 3m dish should be large enough to received signals from Mars under normal circumstances. The 20m dish at Bochum, or the system as proposed for the southern hemisphere, is required for abnormal circumstances such as if the satellite points away from Earth.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
How sad that this was marked as off topic when in fact it is probably the most profound, but apparently misunderstood, reply on this story.
Why doesn't slashdot start it's own space program? We certainly have enough experts in the required areas of study to design and produce a working prototype. I'd also bet we could all chip in our lunch money to fund said projects.
Check out Space Exploration Technologies. (spacex)Yes, they are the real thing. Wish I could say more except "Magic Dragon".
Any *private* organization still has to abide by
any *international* treaties entered into by a Government. Even a US one.
Heck, guys do you really be the Idiot remembered by
history as the "guy who made mars alive?" We want to look for life there, not *take* it with us.
and we have to watch out. Those pesky rats, cats and
other stuff have *ALREADY* done enough damage on *this* planet.
I always wanted to be the first man to mars, I think the current speculation is a 2 year trip there and back.
I have child-like [ie non seriously] sketched is a ship with a rotational gravity ring [stabalizers and counterweights] or a partial ring to allow 2 years of centrifugal gravity^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hforce.
It would unfurl from its stored position about 2 days into the trip. I am sure there are more problems, such as micro-particle belts or other wierdness of space we haven't seen.
Oh and I would want some half mad sentient glowing computer to control all vital environment controls. Funded by a rival space company. In [thinks of most dubious and untrustworthy country on earth] the US.
scary! Saw Bourne Supremacy 'tother day, fantastic.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
The first version of Internet Explorer shipped in Microsoft Plus pack, which was released simultaneously with windows 95.
Yes, it really should have been marked as "overated", becuase that sums up Nietzsche pretty well. He seems very impressive when you are an angsty teenager, but he really isn't all that (and yes, I've read a fair bit of Nietzsche).
Now I don't agree with the very original post, there will always be more "worthy" goals that could use funds, but if we invest exclusively in them there would never be progress. However, the idea that you shouldn't seek to end suffering because that is where all human greatness comes from is, quite frankly, bollocks.
Since so much of Nietzsche is a commentary on past philosophers, poets, and other artists, I do highly doubt you could have understand the vast majority of what he was saying as a teenager.
Pretty much every great thinker since Nietzsche has credited him with a profound contribution to modern thought. Your dismissal of him based on his appeal to youthful angst is, at its heart, an extreme example of intellectual naivete. For that reason, I won't respond further to your post. I just wanted to point out that you are not a particularly reliable source on the matter.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
He's more interested in football.
They havent even sent a trained man to Mars yet and they are already thinking about a private mission? Don't know about you, but even if i had the money the risk wouldn't we worth it.