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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."
What about getting women there ?
Geeks can't get women here, so isn't that a rhetorical question?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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.
"Visiting our Red Space Neighbor?" What the hell? That's a terribly headline. What's wrong with saying "Mars?"
"Excuse me honey. I have to go to the big toilet room neighbor."
Stupid like a fox!
the study suggests that the most efficient scheme for lunar exploration would involve sending a spacecraft non-stop to the Moon's surface, and then back again
This conclusion is probably 100% accurate. Direct shots are, in general, probably more efficient. Efficiency, however, is not the only criteria.
Griffin's plans involve launching large interplanetary payloads into LEO to which a manned CEVs are docked prior to interplanetary injection. The very large benefit of this design is crew safety. The mass goes up using immense, dripping wet, snarling 100t+ boosters. People go up in small, simple, reliable systems.
Rockets fail frequently. Dramatic detonations on the pad, missed orbits due to failed stages, etc. Why are most people oblivious to this? Because there are no people on board when it happens.
NASA has got to stop killing astronauts. Griffin intends to launch people using the simplest, safest system he can come up with. That intention will probably lead to something other than enormous non-stop direct flight vehicles.
would actually increase mission safety, by decreasing the number of critical maneuvers required, such as orbital rendezvous and docking
There have been a lot of rendezvous and docking maneuvers in space and no one has yet been killed as a result. Mir was almost lost due to a fender bender with a Soyuz, but that's as close as it has gotten. I question the risk value assigned to these events in this analysis.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Depends on where the Earth and Mars are in their orbits. Also depends on where Earth and Mars are in their daily rotations, as for a lot of the day your servers would be on the wrong side of the planets. You would need to set up a satellite relaying system, and a global radio network in order to be able to have constant communication. And even with that, there may even be times when the Sun is in the way, and communication doesn't really work. That is why some people propose using the Lagrange points as good places to put communications relays.
This is all actually important for if we ever want to actually send astronauts there.
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?
According to Wikipedia, "Teflon is the brand name of a polymer compound discovered by Roy J. Plunkett (1910-1994) of DuPont in 1938 and introduced as a commercial product in 1946." As for Velcro, "The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the seed pod burrs which kept sticking to his dog on their daily walk in the Alps."
That's a very interesting question, and you are right, it does often seem to b conveniently ignored. I did find a couple of rather woolly links here and here. There are of course many other links , but they seem largely preoccupied with managing food, oxygen and human waste rather than actually getting the astronauts back off the Martian surface.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Google Earth Hacks has overlays of all the planets! So if you have Google Earth, you can have Google Mars!
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.
It'll never happen by 2020 to 2030. Why? Because first humans have to design a real spaceship, not some skinny ass 1960's style rocket or some slightly modified space shuttle with the heat shielding falling off every third takeoff. I'm talking at least on a level with something like the ships in the original Alien movie or something on that level. It's a lot farther to Mars than to our moon. Sure we've come a long when since then but I don't think people realize there's a hell of a long way to go before we're zipping around our solar system much less our galaxy in a real spaceship. A whole new type of propulsion system needs to be designed at the very least. Also, I don't recall hearing about anyone solving the problem of astronauts being bombarded with cosmic radiation both on the way to Mars as well as once they're on the surface of Mars. I'd love to watch people strolling around on the surface of Mars as much or more than anyone else but let's face it. It's a long ways off and thinking we'll be there in 2020 or 2030 is kind of ridiculous. Just because this is the 21st century doesn't mean we're living like the fscking Jetsons yet.
As for Velcro, "The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the seed pod burrs which kept sticking to his dog on their daily walk in the Alps."
No it wasn't. It was sold to a businessman in a big city near Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania, by a strange woman with pointy ears in the late 50's.
Yup, I know I'm going to get modded down for referencing that, but I've got karma to burn...
I know it sounds crazy. But to walk just once under an alien sky...darnit, our children deserve the stars, and someone needs to claim that inheritance for them. IMO, if you've never looked up at the sky and wondered why we're stuck here, well, call God and see if you can get a refund or warranty repair job on your soul.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
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.
Yeah but think of the patenting opportunities!
Method for locking a door... IN SPACE!
Method for input of data... IN SPACE!
etc.
Then you have the meta-patents...
Method for input of data.. ON A COMPUTER! IN SPACE!
They could do it now with the images on file from US, ESA, and Soviet spacecraft but for the zoom-way-in effect we all love we'll have to wait for the Mars Reconnaissance Observer to build up some data. Details here: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
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.
So you are claiming that, without the Moon landing, digital computers woudln't have been invented? Don't be obtuse. Obviously, nobody's claiming that. Technology has been an evolution, demarcated by the occasional revolutionary breakthough that ends up being a core component years later (tube, transistor, integrated circuit, etc). These are important, sure, but they aren't really what makes advances. Advances are made through necessity, real or imagined. Right now the "necessity" seems to primarly be entertainment driven, which is why you see so much R&D going into high-density storage.
In the 60s though, there was a different necessity: Beat the soviets to the moon. It was very important to a lot of USians, and the Kennedy administration had made it a big focal point. Science of course, had a different aim, but the political and social pressures drove funding.
There was a big perceived problem at the time, though. The soviets had "won" every aspect of the race in 1960. And they had the N1 on the horizon, whose heavy lifting capability easily surpassed anything that NASA or the army (redstone, vanguard, etc) had on the drawing table. Nobody knew, of course (or at least the public didn't), that the N1 had some serious design flaws that would later result in the worst disasters in the history of manned space flight (and that includes the two lost orbiters).
The workload of actually performing a moon landing was so intesive that it wasn't thought possible for two or even three men to do it with any reasonable safety or confidence. They knew they were gonna to use those new-fangled digital computers for guidance systems, control, environment, etc. Problem is, of course, nobody had ever built a small computer that was up to the task and there was certainly no software capable of handling all the tasks (often more than one simultaneously). Keep in mind, the overwhelming engineering pressure at all times was payload mass. Every kg you take up is another kg of fuel you can't burn, plus you have to add fuel to push that kg, so dropping a kg of payload is worth more than its weight in fuel.
In 1961, NASA formally chose the MIT Instrumentation Lab to produce the AGC (apollo guidance computer). This is in an era before the term "software engineering" had been coined. Nobody had ever written a piece of software like this before, its scope, at the time, was literally inconceivable. The were no development procedures, testing models, best practices, etc. Everything had to be created from scratch.
It almost didn't happen. In 1964, NASA came close to pulling the plug on MIT, because MIT was behind schedule and beginning to fully understand that the details where much more sophisticated than they had originally thought.
During this project, the MIT Instrumentation Lab operated as nearly a pure research facility. They documented their procedures and they shared knowledge with other research facilities. It was there, in that lab, that software development as we know it today was born.
Would it have happened otherwise? Probably. Not in the same way of course, and not at the same speed. Some of the conceptual leaps that were made w.r.t. software development might never have happened, because they might not have been perceived as necessary. One thing is for sure, the apollo program did change the face of the world in an area not directly related to space-flight. Speculating what might or might not have happened without apollo seems largely pointless.