Visiting Our Red Space Neighbor

Enthusiasm for visiting our red space neighbor seems to be growing. m4dm4n writes "A study carried out by MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics department has concluded that getting men to Mars in the 2020 timeframe is possible. The intelligent re-use of crew habitat modules, propulsion stages, and engines in various missions will enable NASA to significantly reduce their initial timeline which was well past 2030." Relatedly, ErikPeterson wrote to mention a Space.com article where Neil Armstrong says getting to Mars may be easier than getting to the Moon was back in the day, because of the hurdles they had to overcome. From the article: "It will be expensive, it will take a lot of energy and a complex spacecraft. But I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo (space program) in 1961." We're starting to understand more about the red planet as well, as madstork2000 writes "The BBC is reporting on the possibility of active volcanoes on Mars. So now there is water, heat, and soon big business when 4Frontiers gets there. Hopefully we'll get a Google Mars soon to check it out up close."

Comments

Re:Business on Mars

[Inspector Lopez]

For example, how many companies fortunes have been made with digital computers?

Many. But what evidence is there that digital computers would not exist in their current form without the Space Program? Roughly speaking, the "robustness" needs of spacecraft lead to the use of ancient, low performance, extraordinarily well understood, mature, technologies.

As prior comments have indicated, "teflon" and "velcro" were invented long before the Apollo program, and were invented to address very terrestrial applications.

Just what technologies do we now depend upon that were developed to support manned space flight? Certainly there are many technologies associated with unmanned spacecraft that we rely upon, such as GPS, satellite phones, NOAA solar wind measurements, etc. The horrifying ground truth here is that "science" and "technology" have been far more rapidly and inexpensively advanced by unmanned spacecraft than by manned spacecraft.

I'm in the space science business myself, and I see red whenever I read "space science" and "manned spacecraft" in the same sentence, because a hardnosed accounting simply cannot justify "manned space flight" for science reasons.

On the other hand, I'm very much in favor of manned spaceflight, and I'm in favor of going to Mars. But not because of a Science mission --- but rather, because this is the kind of challenge that humans should set for themselves.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

  --- notorious Massachusetts liberal John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Space Effort, September 12, 1962 http://www.rice.edu/fondren/woodson/speech.html

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Can anyone imagine W speaking such words (thank god that "nuclear" doesn't appear within)? W's idea of space flight seems to have more to do with Rapture than Noble Endeavor. Perhaps we should attempt to persuade W that Osama bin Laden, and huge oil deposits are on Mars. It is not inconceivable that he'd believe it --- this is, after all, the same president who thinks that Intelligent Design is a reasonable alternative to the modern theory of evolution; the same president who remarked that no one expected the levees to break.

Okay, that was a karma damaging late hit: sorry.