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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."
Considering that the government has severely increased spending (Iraq, Katrina) while decreasing money input (less taxes taken in), something is going to suffer.
Education is almost always at the front, and I'd say that NASA is second in line for the big axe.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
It won't be easier to get to Mars than to the Moon because the US manned space program is no longer run by engineers, but by greedy defense contractors, paper-pushers, and ass-covering PHBs. In short: NASA no longer has the Right Stuff.
And this talk of "the" CEV is disturbing. Sounds like the same "let's-make-one-spaceship-that-can-do-it-all" approach that gave us the Shuttle.
PS - Am I the only person in this country who thinks putting a manned spacecraft (the new CEV) atop a solid rocket (Thiokol SRB; as used by Shuttle) is a really bad idea?
I like human space travel however humans are inferior to robots in one important area: cleanliness. You simply can't sterilize a human you send onto another planet like you can a robot, unless they never leave their habitat/lander (if nothing else then because dragging such sterilization equipment to mars isn't feasible).
The only "fossils" we're likely to find on Mars are microbes, and even those are probably rare which means w need every advantage in finding them. Humans simply increase the risk of contamination orders of magnitude which makes finding such microbe remains a much greater challenge.
I can see why a country would want to go to Mars. There is always the national honor, staking territorial claims, etc. for a Mars landing. I just can't see spending billions of dollars for no financial return at all.
The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military. And that company would hold the patents. This would also establish that organization as the premier space exploration/transport company... Think what it would mean to their earth-based enterprises.
The second answer is marketing. This company would be in the news every day for years, and they would certainly be in every schoolchild's history books for centuries to come. Doesn't Coke have a roughly $1.5 billion advertising budget? Not saying they'd be the one to do it (though Virgin does have a cola, too...) Putting this kind of money into the greatest technological accomplishment in history may be worth it...
The other part of the problem is maintaining public interest. The mission would last a minimum of a year, and the general public would get their fill of Mars coverage. Trying to fund the *2nd mission* to Mars would be just about impossible.
I can imagine the public response: "It costs a billion dollars, and we've had people already spend a year there. Why spend any more?"
I personally don't think it is worth the effort to go to Mars unless we already have the technology and infrastructure in place to maintain a permament settlement. Otherwise it will be the Moon program all over again: Plant the flag, hit some golf balls, come home, cancel the follow-up missions.
You could do the same thing far more efficiently by directly funding research through the National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, the NSF has seen its budget cut while funding for NASA has been increased.
I think that NASA's unmanned programs do some valuable research and they should continue, or even be expanded, but the manned program is just a publicity stunt. I mean what did the Shuttle program ever discover, other than a bunch of science-fair projects along the lines of "does classical music make plants grow better... in SPACE?" Their biggest single contribution to research has been repairing a robot- the Hubble Space Telescope. I think that says something about where space exploration is going. The sooner we get humans out of space exploration entirely, the more progress we'll make. Likewise, if there really is any way to make money from going to Mars, it will doubtless be cheaper to send robots to do it, instead of sending humans.
Before we get to Mars, we need to stop and ask why we want to go. As far as I can see, our reason is pure conceit. We want to say that people have reached Mars. What does reaching Mars accomplish? Mars is an inhospitable desert. We can't do much research there that wouldn't be better done here, except for investigating Mars itself. Aside from research, why go? It's not profitable, and earth is still inhabitable enough so that establishing colonies on Mars isn't necessary.
All the money spent on making Mars spaceships and reasearching how to protect the astronauts, etc, would be better spent on improving our earthships (cars) and figuring out ways to make civilization much more energy efficient. This HAS to get done in the near future with Peak Oil and the end of cheap energy approaching. Unfortunately, we definately don't have enough money to do both types of research. With the current trends, we could be even a lot worse off by 2030.