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First Details of Manned Mars Mission From NASA
OriginalArlen writes "The BBC has a first look at NASA's initial concepts for a manned Mars mission, currently penciled in for 2031. The main vehicle would be assembled on orbit over three or four launches of the planned Ares V heavy lift rocket. New abilities to repair, replace, and even produce replacement parts will be needed to provide enough self-sufficiency for a 30 months mission, including 16 months on the surface. The presentation was apparently delivered at a meeting of the Lunar Exploration Management Group, although there's nothing on their site yet."
Just think, when Kim Stanley Robinson released Red Mars he settled the first Mars mission in the late teens and colonization in 2024, intending to be on the safe side in his future chronology compared to much science-fiction. And now our lack of vision as a nation and bureaucratical hassles have pushed the date even beyond that. It's a sad time to be an American. If only we had the drive of the Apollo era.
That's right! Put some mag chrome nozzles at those old babies and nothing beats the classics!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
The main vehicle would be assembled on orbit over three or four launches of the planned Ares V heavy lift rocket.
One would think a craft of that form factor, named after Ares, would be referred to as a "missile"
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The common robot-versus-human debate is bound to pop up here, so I thought I should link to the last instance of such rather than reinvent the wheel:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=370701&cid=21480395
Gentlemen, start your mod engines...
Table-ized A.I.
But hey - as long as someone makes it there and back sometime before I die, cool.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Fry: Back in the 20th century we had no idea there was a university on Mars.
Professor Farnsworth: Well, in those days Mars was a dreary uninhabitable wasteland much like Utah; but unlike Utah, Mars was eventually made livable.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
We could have been going in 5 years instead of 25 if we as a species/world community had better priorities.
(example: 500 billion in Iraq, more than enough to fund the complete development and production of everything that would be needed)
Wow, talk about taking the slow & expensive boat to China. Almost seems as if NASA has been given the charge of ensuring we NEVER set foot on Mars.
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My plan is to have a kid next year. I will then force him into the Air Force and make him be a pilot and eventually an astronaut that will go on that mission. I'll have him bring me back some Mars rocks and I will sell them on eBay. Seriously, they should make sure that half their staff won't die of old age midway through the project.
I will literally ROFL if a private company finds a way to get a person on Mars (alive) before NASA does.
Given the work being performed by non-Government corporations into space travel, this isn't an entirely unlikely idea.
There are MANY ppl on this planet that would be willing to take a 1 way ticket to Mars. Seriously, I would, but I also know that I am too old for that. My belief is that the first mission will be a 1 way ticket (in spite of what NASA wants now). The reason is that it takes a LOT of work to get the ppl back. OTH, if we send supplies/equipment ahead of time, and build a small base, then a small group of ppl can go there and build out. I am also guessing that before 2025, the private world will already be heading there, with just the set-up I described.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If NASA aren't planning to get there until 2031 I can almost guarantee that they wont get there first.
The funny thing is, the longer they wait to launch a human mission to Mars, the smaller will be the advantage compared to a robotic one. Spirit and Opportunity can already do a lot of exploration on their own but, currently, humans, could do a lot better, faster, etc. I'm not so sure that this will still be true in the 2030-2035 time frame. Regardless of the state of AI then, robots will be a lot more autonomous, capable of fairly advanced decisions and exploration capabilities. And they will be immensely cheaper to deliver to Mars (and anywhere else for that matter). So, the longer they put a human mission off, the least sense it makes.
Can someone please explain to me (and this is NOT meant to be a troll-post) why someone can't volunteer for a manned mission to Mars, raise funding from private companies/organizations and just go to Mars? Yes it would be a suicide mission, known up front and with the intent of it being for pure research and in the name of science, why the hell couldn't someone hit up a few big businesses and/or private investors for the cash to make a ship, buy or make the equipment for data analysis and the necessary supplies to get there and transmit back pictures and data? And more than just the Mars Rover, being able to survey the planet much faster and with more detail.
Is NASA a governing body in the sense that they can mandate who can go into space and moreover, where in space? It is my understanding that when Columbus wanted to find a route to the far East, he submitted his plans to various people and it took two or three tries before they finally granted him the money and ships he needed and I read that some of the terms of the agreement were such that they (King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella) didn't expect him back... why not something similar for Mars? Setting aside things like training, time to build a ship, and most importantly cost, can it be done? Privately? And no, not the Astronaut Farmer-type thing. I'm talking about a legitimate, scientific exploration, in the name of pure science and discovery, privately funded, privately built and controlled, government and nationally independent.
those astronauts will be hungry when they arrive on the "red" planet
If I've done my math right.. NASA would have to have exactly 71 507 bake sales in order to pay for this mission. I can see why they put the launch date so far off.
I have nothing compelling to say
I read in a book about curious annecdotes (supposed to be true) that, in the Middle Age, an astronomer told the Pope that the Antichrist was born in Sicilia. The Pope asked what age he might have at that moment, and was told that about three or four years. Then the Pope thougt about it, and said: "Then it will be my successor's trouble!" and it was the last time it was heard about that problem
:-) )
A program that completes in 25 years gives all of the top staff at NASA time enough to retire and leave the details to the people to come (who will blame his predecessors
It would be more credible if there was a middle step (what about a long -3, 4 months- to the Moon, to check that the technology is improving and see what is still lacking?)
Why can't
It wasn't deserved. It just means that one of our resident neocons got mod points today.
I think we have to face facts that once the Shuttle program shuts down and the Russians lose interest in losing money and the ISS reaches the end of its service life that apart from the Chinese and Indians sending a few Nauts into orbit that manned spaceflight is going to take a VERY long break. Perhaps a century or more. Countries and societies seem to have almost no interest in it. Coupled with the enormous ignorance and misinformation about it e.g. a quarter of all Americans think NASA's budget is greater than the Pentagon, coupled with the increasing weaponization of space there just doesn't seem to be any future in it.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Don't worry, the local oil revenue will pay for the whole thing.
dude you mean we get to asiante hillary too. space and a Hillary assinated by a CIA cover up. too cool.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm a huge space proponent...
But it is not like the U.S. Government won't have all sorts of other debts to pay when the Afghan/Iraq wars end.
Let's try Social Security and Medicare to start.
These two programs are all slated to start running in the red decades before any Mars mission.
- dj
They never had Mormons migrate to Mars?
*ducks*
Are you refering to EHD thrusters? These operate by accelerating ions away from the vehicle. Yes, such thrusters have been used, but they are only useful for very small acceleration.
In other words, it's useless for getting out of the atmosphere.
On the topic of contemporary physics, just because we don't understand it doesn't mean its not correct or useful. There's a lot of mathematics out there that I don't even begin to understand that has made huge impacts on the current state of science.
As long as they piddle about with chemical rockets, they won't be doing much more than a very expensive, long and dangerous flag-planting exercise.
Von Braun et. al. were working on a nuclear rocket back in the day for such a mission. Just look up NERVA.
And before anyone jumps on the "danger radiation" bandwagon, I'm not advocating a nuclear rocket for getting from the earth's surface into earth orbit. It would be quite safe to build a reactor, launch it into orbit and to install it on the spacecraft there. It would be quite harmless having never have been taken critical for the first time.
The crew could easily be shielded. Think nuclear submarine. The craft could be much bigger than one chemically-powered. There could be additional shielding for protecting the crew from solar radiation. There would be extra living space, more scientific payload and it would be easier to insert into Mars orbit at the other end.
Fission reactors have been about for 60 years now. We know how to make them safe and efficient. It would be absolutely stupid not to use a nuclear reactor to go to Mars. They could have one designed, built and tested in under 5 years if they put their minds to it.
But they won't. They'll leave that to our grandchildren...
Stick Men
I'm scheduled to be alive for this, Awesome !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
NASA is barely founded. It can only be wasteful if it had money to waste.
If you thought that female astronaut who drove across country in a diaper was crazy, just wait untill you see what happens when you send a fat man into space with no food.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It would have been an interesting article if it had gotten into how this "cryogenic" propulsion system will actually work. The biggest problems are (1) fuel for the outbound and return trip (2) how to land the craft that has humans in it and (3) how to get off the planet again. Mars' atmosphere is too thin for parachutes, and the gravity is too heavy to use conventional chemical thrusters to brake the landing all the way down (which isn't possible anyways due to the mass of the fuel you would have to haul all the way from Earth with those "cryogenic" thrusters).
No one has an answer to this question yet. There may not be one. It's not just engineering, there are basic scientific barriers. This is why SF always invents Warp Drive or some other back door - the constraints imposed by Newton's Third Law and the limitations of chemical propulsion make this whole thing a big pain in the ass. Funny how all these articles never bother to review the basics before launching into all the speculation.
Don't be an idiot. If this thing only costs $450 billion over a quarter century, that's cheap. The Iraq War has cost $1 TRILLION over just a few years, and hasn't produced anything of value, whereas the space program has produced all kinds of spin-off technologies and economic benefits. NASA's budget has always been a tiny fraction of the DoD's budget.
I suppose smoking will not be allowed on board, but fortunately there are many different alternatives
Are looking forward to doing just this. But it is not intended to be a suicide mission. But the idea IS to send ppl on 1 way missions. In addition, I believe that they are looking at this before 2025. Bigelow's first goal is to get to the moon before 2020 and he has talked about 2015. Likewise, Musk has said over and over, that he wants to provide the cheap launch to get there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Does anyone know the long term (or even medium-term) effects of leaving the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field and being bombarded with all the subatomic particles spewed by the sun? The only humans so far who have done this were only out there for a week or so. From what I understand, high-orbit satellites suffer greatly from this problem and they have to use special electronics designed to deal with it. Normal silicon chips die pretty quickly out there.
The western world is not in ascendency, it is in decline. The fact that Orion, a project with the same capabilities on paper as Apollo had, is set to take longer than it did in the 1960s is proof of this. Given the escalating costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon Iran, I can't see how NASA can maintain enough of a budget for 25 years.
Modern politicians seem aware of the dire state of things, and their attitude towards public services is to make as much money for themselves and their friends out of them, before everything implodes. Why would NASA be any different?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I see FTA that they will use 'advanced cryogenic fuel'.
I hope they start with Paris Hilton.
Bow-ties are cool.
The real WTF is that we need the British Broadcasting Corporation to tell us what the American Space Agency is doing.
Ummm we TRIED the hybrid aircraft/spacecraft platform technology - its called the Space Shuttle, and it ended up setting space exploration back 30 years. Simple rockets work best.
...the beowulf cluster of ISSs that could be put in orbit with a single Ares V launch.
But yeah, manned spaceflight is not a matter of rationalism, so it's just consistent that a mars mission is easier to fund than anything "cheap" in LEO.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
Can somebody explain why the BBC uses "Nasa" instead of "NASA"? I've noticed that the NYTimes does the same thing (repeatedly), using "Nafta" instead of "NAFTA". It just seems...weird, and I've never seen a journalistic explanation.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
The danger "bandwagon" isn't about the danger to the astronauts, it's about the danger to everybody if the rocket carrying the reactor to earth orbit happens to blow up.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Just wait until you send the first zombie to space, I'll be out of food in no time!
I love all the posts criticizing the priorities of the American government.
"If we REALLY had our priorities straight, we'd dump $100 billion right now and be on Mars in 2012!" Well, maybe we could. But what exactly is so damned urgent about getting some dudes on another planet RIGHT AWAY? Yeah, it'd be a better expenditure than the Iraq war, but pretty much ANYTHING would.
If we've got $100 billion to spend, how about putting some of it into running doubt the multi-trillion federal debt, or fixing the US health care system, or Social Security? How about funding some OTHER research, finding a cure for cancer or juvenile diabetes or some other tragic and widespread illness? Or hell, fund some damned energy research, get us all in plug-in hybrid cars fueled by safe nuclear plants, and maybe we can stop pumping quite so much carbon into our atmosphere.
Getting to Mars would/will be cool, and I don't doubt the scientific initiative will introduce lots of unexpected technological advances, so we can all fasten our shoes with ULTRA-Velcro in thirty years. But that doesn't make it the most urgent thing on our plate.
NASA is barely founded.
Wow, you're about 50 years late. Either that or you meant funded ;-)
You just got troll'd!
It doesn't fly to altitude and then launch, it launches from the ground. The only time it really flies like an aircraft is on landing.
"NASA does not have the funding it had during the apollo era, so they are doing the best they can on low budgets"
The whole manned space program from mercury to apollo cost $25 billion.
Each Saturn 5 cost $100 million.
Contrast that with the "reusable" space shuttle that has to be pretty much rebuilt from the ground up after every mision - $500 million dollars a flight.
Add to that that the Saturn 5 has 5x the payload capacity (125,000 kg into LEO) of the shuttle (25,000 kg) and this doesn't add the posibbility of increasing the Saturn 5 payload capacity with SRBs, to between 250,000kg and 350,000 kg)... even taking into account inflation, the shuttle is what has been bleeding NASA. A modified Saturn 5 would need a lot fewer missions to assemble shit in orbit, like the ISS.
Kevin Smith on Prince
The problem with space is that it is dull. Mercury: Dust, rocks, and craters; Venus: Dust, rocks, and craters (but with a hot, poisonous atmosphere); Moon: Dust, rocks, and craters; Mars: Dust, rocks, and craters. Ganymede: Dust, rocks, and craters; Pluto: Dust, rocks, and craters. Well, If I wanted dust, rocks, and craters, I could go to Utah. If only one probe took a photo of an obelisk, or a road, or a forest... we'd be in space quicker'n you can say prime directive.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
police departments have robots (UAVs) to help chase criminals
Those aren't robots, any more than radio-controlled cars are robots. Most "robots" seen these days are just like this: simple radio-controlled vehicles. Our robotics technology is frightfully primitive, compared to what books and movies have predicted for many decades. The Roomba is actually probably one of the most advanced robots out there, and all it does is navigate around a floor.
UAVs don't work very well for space missions because the speed of light is too slow, causing very long response times between the human operator and the machine on a different celestial body. Even if we did have better robotics technology available, the AI would have to be amazingly advanced, since the whole nature of space exploration is that you're going someplace where no one has gone before, and have little idea what you'll encounter there. It's hard to program a robot's response to unknown and unpredicted conditions. That's why robots are generally best for boring, repetitive tasks like cleaning, factory work, etc.
And spend a couple of hours retracing the entire distance the rover has moved in the past three years.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I think that you might find this intesting if you have not seen it before. It might be interesting on /. as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can't fix Social Security; it's mathematically impossible because the population isn't growing, and there's lots of retired people who paid into the system when a Dollar was worth a lot more than it is now. It's a pyramid scheme; it's simply not possible for it to work long-term without an ever-increasing (geometrically) population as long as inflation exists.
It doesn't matter, it still won't work. You can't fly to altitude, then turn on rockets and launch into LEO. The problem is the amount of fuel you'd need. Ever notice that huge orange tank the Space Shuttle carries during launch, and those two extra rockets that fall off after a while? The amount of fuel needed to get into orbit is staggering; trying to fly the shuttle to altitude with that orange tank probably wouldn't work too well. Plus, you'd have to deal with the mass and complexity of extra jet engines, in addition to the regular rocket engines needed to go from altitude to orbit. The only point of taking off from altitude is to save the fuel needed for getting from MSL to 10,000-20,000 feet or so, and instead of carrying all your fuel with you (rockets), only carry part of your fuel and react it with oxygen from the air (jets). And if you're going to not bother with the extra jet engines and only use rockets, then there's no point in flying like a plane; you might as well just launch vertically.
I'm sure the people at NASA thought of all this back in the 70s when they designed the Space Shuttle.
We could go tomorrow, or at least start building the components to do so. We don't go because congress doesn't care anymore. I'm tired of all this nonsense "lets plan to go to mars in the future" from NASA and the president, as if planning is somehow contributing. We already have the *plans* we don't have the *money*. There's nothing special about the future that's going to change a lack of caring.
Well, if you let "The Holy and Unfallible Austrian School of Economics" run their funding, that's what's going to happen to NASA. Underfunded, and with equipment barely even capable to do the job.
Some things require a "Manhattan Project" approach to get off the ground, when the market solution would take generations to even get something off the ground and be made with no attention to quality or assurance that anything living would survive.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Indeed we are getting soft, it is due to prostituting this nation's sovereignty with globalization(in its current form).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...within my lifetime. Nah, that would be too good to be true, Wishful thinking.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I just hope that this iteration of refunding, that the old SDI/"Star Wars" initative can be awakened .
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's not how it works. You can't just throw a whole bunch of money at a project and make it happen overnight. Developing new technology takes time, not just money. NASA currently employs almost all of the rocket scientists in the country, and spending more money isn't going to make more of them overnight. Moreover, you can't put too many engineers on one project before it becomes an unsuccessful bureaucratic nightmare (just look at MS office), and spreading work over many engineers won't necessarily reduce the total time of completion, just as adding 100 processors to your computer won't make it 100X faster.
War has cost $1 TRILLION over just a few years, and hasn't produced anything of value, whereas the space program has produced all kinds of spin-off technologies and economic benefits.
Rose-colored glasses: military R&D technology is "waste", NASA R&D technology has "economic benefits".
Imagine what all that money could have done for the space race.
OT (a bit) i know, but imagine if a trillion dollars had been spent on fusion tech, then we wouldnt have to even give a shite about iraq's oil and might have to worry about actual terrorists.
Back on topic, with that unlimited fusion power, a mission to mars would become much cheaper-energy wise...
The schedule will slip several years, and they will end up dealing with the Unix time problem half way through the mission.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Well, from 2 weeks ago:
NASA Inspector General: NASA's Most Serious Management and Performance Challenges [PDF]
I agree. But there are other differences in play today, too. It makes it hard to see for sure how it plays out. For example, now that the fully-committed competitor turns out to be countries to whom the US outsources the lion's share of its work, what is the significance of a "competitive program" with those countries? Who will have the resulting bragging rights?
One perceives some sort of variant of Gerald Holton's remark about Giants is called for here. Something vaguely like: "In the modern world, our greatest achievement would be to pull the rug out from under the giants upon whose shoulders we have elected to stand."
My personal sense is that the space program was not a way to show off that we were technologically good, but rather was a path to becoming technologically good. That is, it was the investment in US infrastructure that mattered, and all the better that it was for a peaceful purpose and gave mankind hope that people could use technology for something other than weapons. The open question is not whether the passport carried by the person going to Mars is a U.S. one, but where the dollars spent on R&D will flow to. If a by-product of the program is not a ramping up of interest in and investment in US math and science programs, then the whole notion that we are competing is a sham. The space program was never about space.
And besides, if we want to go somewhere that has air that's hard to breathe and a temperature that isn't so good and not very much drinkable water, we can do that easier than building a spacecraft for just a couple of people: By sooner than 2031, with very little effort on our part, we can make the Earth itself into such a place and not even have to get off the couch to do it. We can just go on ignoring global environmental and climate issues and we'll be in "out o' space" in no time...
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It took humanity more than 10,000 years to go from primitive societies to crossing the oceans...24 years to cross a vast space area to go to another planet, is, very very very little.
I know, we all would like (I put myself in) to see the space era, where spaceships zoom to and from Mars and other planets.
It doesn't going to happen for our generation, but it will in future ones. We are just not the lucky ones...but 24 years is an extremely small time period for such a big job.
A good time to read Orbiter, a graphic novel by Warren Ellis. It depicts a near-future scenario where NASA has shut down its manned space program, and what ensues.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
People can't stand the fucking procrastination that occurs by the likes of NASA; for the billions spent, what is the accomplishment? nothing!
People want big fucking huge things, something to point at and say, "hey, this is where our money went - look at the size of that bloody thing! its huge!", "this is where our billions went, and we got our money's worth - its HUGE!"
Where is the huge space ship, the moon base etc. All of this can be accomplished today - too bad we have screw balls on earth who are worried about the effect of 'zero g on tiny screws' than actually pushing forward with adventurous projects.
please mod him up.... wish I had points today
Huh?
This is a solved problem. The cryo fluids are unspecified, but there are several choices on the trip to Mars and one can design an engine to burn different propellants. I think methane/LOX or LH2/LOX is most likely. The return is surely going to be methane/LOX because that's what you can get in situ. Landing on Mars probably will use both aerobraking and retrorockets. Aerobraking makes sense to slow the vehicle down to orbit Mars. Then it makes a lot of sense to aerobrake to slow down during reentry. A drogue chute can do that just fine. Then employ retrorockets to land. And how to get off the planet? Use the methane/LOX that you've been manufacturing on site since well before the crew even left Earth orbit. There are your answers. It's basic engineering and it's already been done.
"Going to Mars" is a project--it has a defined start and finish, and will have a definite price tag. The war in Iraq is another.
Social Security and Medicare are onging programs (processes) with no defined end points. "Problems" and "solutions" are simply matters of where the lines cross in various projections, which means that slight changes in the structure--or adjustments of assumptions--can have large aggregate effects.
If you try to wait to "solve" processes before taking on projects, you'll never get to the projects. The nature of processes/programs is that they require regular adjustment, because the future is unknowable and variable. The intersections in Social Security and Medicare can easily be put much farther into the future with only slight adjustments. This sort of thing is politically palatable and has been done before. If we think a project is important we should not wait for that.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
well, yeah, cos just because you bring the troops home doesn't mean you've paid for it, done, finished, over. You realise the USG has borrowed that trillion dollars from the bankers of the rest of the world, right? You still have to pay it back. That's the deal with debt, you see... they give you the money... then you give it back later, plus a bit more. So enjoy social security and medicare whilst you've got 'em; they're not going to last long. 15 years is my guess.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven