Will Mars be a One-way Trip?

alexj33 writes "Will humans ever really go to Mars? Let's face it, the obstacles are quite daunting. Not only are there numerous, difficult, technical issues to overcome, but the political will and perseverance of any one nation to undertake such an arduous task is huge. However, one former NASA engineer believes a human mission to Mars is quite possible, and such an event would unify the world as never before. But Jim McLane's proposal includes a couple of major caveats: the trip to Mars should be one-way, and have a crew of only one person."

Comments

I mean...

[Corpuscavernosa]

... shouldn't you at least PLAN on a round-trip ticket, assuming all the obstacles can be overcome, even if it's a long shot?

Re:I mean...

[schon]

This whole article is stupid, and makes some of the most ridiculous comparisons imaginable.

C'mon - comparing flying a single person to Mars with no chance of coming back is like Lindburgh flying to Paris??? Is he saying that Mars is populated with (to quote the Simpsons) cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Or maybe he's suggesting that upon arriving at Mars, the astronaut will have an unlimited supply of hot women and baguettes?

And the whole 'constant communication' - umm.. last time I checked, Mars was between 3 and 21 light-minutes from Earth.. that means you say something, and get a response in a half-hour later.. yeah, that's really constant. It would be more like a video postcard than a conversation.

This article is *really* poorly thought out.

Re:I mean...

[BlueStraggler]

Round-trip tickets are only useful for tourists, and the real reason to go to Mars is to colonize it, not to take some snapshots and then go home again. We are doing that already with robots, so there's really no point in doing it with people.

The interesting idea here is not the one-way thing, but the one-man, one-way thing. The author is right, it's initially kind of a shocking proposal, but when you stop to think about it, we're just a bunch of wusses. Our ancestors did this kind of risky one-way shit as a matter of course. (Think of how the Polynesians colonized the entire Pacific in simple canoes.) There shouldn't be anything shocking about it at all. We're just not worthy. Some other culture will do this, and we'll talk about how barbaric they are for trading so callously in the lives of their astronauts. But I guarantee the astronauts will go willingly, and while we tut-tut their backward ways and high mortality rate, they'll be conquering Mars.

Re:I mean...

[Tiger4]

McLane talks about psychology differences of current astronauts vs the US astronauts of the 1960s and the Russian cosmonauts.

Spending time talking about how the old guys had the right stuff and spirit will carry them through and make the difference is just ya-ya silliness in place of real thought. That is the same kind of thinking that convinced the French that light artillery was just the ticket to face the German threat. The French assumed (naturally) that their soldiers could and would overcome any burden with their miraculous Esprit. Worked really well for them.

Real "problems" have real solutions based in the real world. I disagree completely about the Right Stuff fluff, but in any case, today's astronauts are the ones you have. Deal.

Re:I mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

We're just not worthy. Some other culture will do this, and we'll talk about how barbaric they are for trading so callously in the lives of their astronauts.

Lucky we don't do anything barbaric or callous with the lives of our young people, like sending them to Iraq or something. So we might kill one cosmonaut or astronaut. Big deal. We kill hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Iraq, it doesn't even make the news headlines any more.

Re:I mean...

[jmv]

In fact, Mars has almost the same surface gravity on tiny Mercury (3.7 m/s/s for both), which is closer to the surface gravity on the moon (1.6 m/s/s/) than the surface gravity on Earth (9.8 m/s/s). You also need less than half the escape velocity to leave Mars' gravity well compared to Earth.

Of those, only the escape velocity is actually relevant. The gravity at the surface is pretty much irrelevant. The escape velocity on Mars is twice that of the moon, which means it would take 4 times as much energy to leave Mars as it takes to leave the moon. That's in theory. In practise, it's more than that because you actually need more fuel to lift the extra fuel.

Re:I mean...

[2short]

There are plenty of volunteers for suicide missions with much less lofty goals, as a quick review of the news will depressingly demonstrate.

I'm sure you'd have a ton of volunteers for this, many of them perfectly sane and competent. Everybody dies; but not everybody dies on fricking Mars.

But it will never happen. Manned space exploration is foolish. Robots do a radically better job for a tiny fraction of the price. The only reason we go with humans is the emotional feel-good PR. You need to sell the story to the public, and that doesn't work so well if you're going to kill the guy, no matter how OK he is with that.

Re:I mean...

[Jardine]

Of those, only the escape velocity is actually relevant. The gravity at the surface is pretty much irrelevant. The escape velocity on Mars is twice that of the moon, which means it would take 4 times as much energy to leave Mars as it takes to leave the moon. That's in theory. In practise, it's more than that because you actually need more fuel to lift the extra fuel.

That depends on how many different ships there are. It'd be kinda silly to use the same ship to go from the surface of Mars directly to Earth. A scenario that makes more sense is this:

1. Ship to get to Earth orbit from the surface
2. Ship to get from Earth orbit to Mars orbit and back
3. Ship to get from Mars orbit to Mars surface and
4. Either a separate Mars surface to Mars orbit ship or the same orbit to surface ship from above

That way you get to take advantage of more efficient ion engines (or something similar) on the long haul from Earth to Mars and back. Ion engines are efficient, but the acceleration is too low to get to orbit with them.

Re:I mean...

[PortHaven]

No, manned space missions are not foolish. The issue at hand is the great number of us who believe we need to get off this rock.

If you just want scientific data and never want to move mankind in the stars. Then yes, ROBOTS are for you WAL-E!

But many of us, believe that we need to move out.
a) it protects our extinction from a catastrophic cosmic event
b) it alleviates population issues

Say the new world (Americas) were discovered today. Would it be foolish to send people over? Better to just send robots right? Well...only if you want nothing but pictures and soil samples. But if you want to expand, colonize...you send people.

Re:I mean...

[Urban Garlic]

> b) it alleviates population issues

I believe the population argument is bogus. Increasing wealth and standard of living is strongly correlated with decreasing fertility rates in every culture and nation on earth. Most population projections which include this effect show the earth's population peaking within 100 years, and then declining, and it's unlikely that a significant colonization effort will be underway within 100 years. (Sorry, can't find the population references.)

So, there's Scenario A, in which we all get richer, and the population problem stabilizes, so we can't use it as an argument to go to Mars. There's Scenario B, in which we don't get richer, and consequently can't afford to go to Mars. And of course there's Scenario C, in which a small group becomes very rich while the teeming masses remain poor and continue to reproduce -- in this scenario, the small number of rich people who can go to Mars don't substantially alleviate the population problem, because there aren't very many of them.

There's also a Scenario D, in which a small group of rich people innovate to make trips to Mars affordable for the teeming masses, but I think this is really Scenario A again -- if Mars-going technology is mass-affordable, then many other good things are also mass-affordable, which means that the masses have a high standard of living, which means they already have low fertility, and the population pressure, again, is low. A real Scenario D requires that Mars-going technology be somehow made much more affordable than terrestrial travel, energy, education and birth control, which I would rate as theoretically possible but unlikely.

Personally, I find manned space travel inspiring, but I think it's important to be clear-headed about exactly which problems it does and does not solve.

Redundancy?

[winkydink]

So every system except the human will be doubly or triply redundant? What's wrong with this picture?

Re:Redundancy?

[pete-classic]

The human will be redundant in and of himself. He's symbolic, not operational!

-Peter

Re:Redundancy?

[tomhudson]

So every system except the human will be doubly or triply redundant? What's wrong with this picture?

The reality of large Mars missions is that the human is only along for the ride, sort of like a color commentator, to help snare the public's imagination and more funding.

In other words, even one human is already redundant. After all, what can go wrong go wrong go wrong go wrong go I'm sorry Dave.

Re:Redundancy?

[winkydink]

What's the human symbolic of if he/she dies en route?

Re:Redundancy?

[Chuck Chunder]

Our mortality!

Re:Redundancy?

[Chandon Seldon]

The reality of large Mars missions is that the human is only along for the ride, sort of like a color commentator, to help snare the public's imagination and more funding.

Bullshit. If the mars mission is actually doing useful work, then having people physically there will make the work much more efficient. Humans on mars can make decisions in real time. The latency of radio signals makes trying to do anything significant remotely really obnoxious.

Re:Redundancy?

[NeverVotedBush]

Agreed completely. The farther away, the longer the signals take to get to/from the remote destination. The Mars landers could only creep ahead because the operators here on earth couldn't risk just sending them blindly along. What allowed the Mars landers to cover so much ground was the many months they were there having operators move them around inch by inch and foot by foot.

The astronauts on the moon were able to scoot around like crazy on the rovers. Being there and operating something in real time would be a huge benefit to research of any kind. Instead of sending the command to have a camera pan around to decide where to go next, waiting the 20 minutes or so for it to get there, waiting another 20 or so minutes for the video feed to even start arriving, and you see the issue. A human could just look around and hit the gas pedal. Yeah - that rock over there looks interesting.

Re:Redundancy?

[rmckeethen]

I think Kennedy said it best, so I'll let his words speak for me:

"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... we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun... and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold." http://www.quotesandsayings.com/sjfk.htm

Unless I'm misreading those words, sending a man to the moon in the sixties wasn't easy either, but we still managed to do it and bring everyone back safely. Sending a man or woman on a one-way mission to Mars in this century strikes me as a failure compared to Project Apollo's goals. I can't imagine any politician seriously supporting the plan. The mere idea of televising the journey seems barbaric to me. A one-way trip to Mars is clearly a death sentence to any astronaut willing to make the trip -- televising it feels like a particularly horrid version of reality TV, with a murder/suicide as the gruesome series finale. If that's our bold plan for the conquest of space in 2008, I'd feel better if we just stayed on Earth.

Why not?

[Bragador]

In the end everything is useless anyway but a mission to mars is fun for the whole species.

See, instead of everyone looking at their navel, people will start raising their head and will start looking at the stars. Instead of having most people working for their own goals, people will start to share a dream. Instead of fighting each other, people will start to work as a team.

I'm currently working in the field of psychology and even though I'm not high on the ladder, the calls I receive are about couples breaking up and people complaining of surviving instead of living. A lot of people are living without knowing what to do with their life and this is the kind of goal that might bring people together and give them something to do with their life even if in the grand scheme of things it is useless.

Also, about the benefits, you can't go wrong with studying how to negate the effects of loneliness which apparently affects tons of people that live in cities. Also you get to fight back bone problems that are not that different from the problems aging people have. Of course, you also get the technologies for space travel but you don't care for that that much.

So is it worth it ? I say sure, why not?

Re:A few very complicating points...

[guardiangod]

Biosphere 2 was an experiment to simulate earth's natural environment and be self-sustainable.

The colony on Mars, on the other hand, needs only to be self-sustainable. This means that they can skip all the "pollinate with bees" crap and concentrate on producing O2 and food via artificial means.

As for moon base, given the nature of the moon- ie radiation, micro meteor, lack of atmosphere, etc. I would say that while a moon base is easier to do in the short run, a Mars base has a much better chance of being sustainable.

As for contamination- don't be silly, of course we have contaminated Mars. The question is, in what ways?

Re:I'd go.

[Tiger4]

"When I type "totally self-sufficient", I mean totally."

Then it would be a one-way trip for two (or more) wouldn't it?

see also: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062827/

What's the point?

[z-j-y]

Why are we so fascinated by the idea of someone physically being somewhere?

But I'd volunteer if the one-way mission is a reality. I don't find it necessary to live among other humans in close distance. And once on Mars, I won't do shit. What, are they gonna fire me?

Bah!

[drgould]

Sending one person on a one-way trip to Mars isn't exploration, it's a publicity stunt.

And a morbid one at that.

Um, sure pal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our glorious ancestors went on one-way trips when the alternative was certain death or hopeless oppression. I will concede that was 'a matter of course' in our past, it is not our current reality. More contemporary explorers (Columbus, Lewis & Clark, Amundson, Armstrong, etc.) had every expectation of returning and have taken every possible precaution. Did they accept the fact that they might not return? Yes. But never did they have this suicidal death wish you seem to think is some kind of virtue.

Re:I'd go.

[mcmonkey]

It'd be just like the Mayflower... Only without the natives and smallpox...

Yeah, only problem is, without help from the natives, everyone on the Mayflower would have died within a few years.

I'll make my own interplanetary mission...with hookers, and blackjack.

Mars is a much shorter trip than Magellan's

[arete]

1. Parent is dead on; wish I had mod points.

Mars could already be a shorter trip (each way) - that we know MUCH more about, and have more ability to deploy resources for - than Magellan's was, just as an example.

But, I have two opposing points:

2. Think of the robots. Basically, we have robots now, which simply are better for this kind of exploring. So we don't need a human there to EXPLORE Mars (or the moon.) Obviously the current rovers are massively, massively cheaper than a manned mission... and I think we could get more done with hundreds of rovers than some dude. a) For any given cost, the robots will probably do the exploring better. In other words, I think we should send a person to Mars when it's economically profitable to send a _person_ there compared to the robots. We just don't NEED some guy to go there anymore.

b) I think the cost involved in a human mission would be tremendous if the gain is largely symbolic. You don't go there just to touch it, you go there to find out a lot more about all sorts of things you didn't know.

c) So the other reason to go there is to _colonize_ to really expand the scope of human life to a new place.

c) in my opinion involves either: i) generate resources FROM Mars instead of spending a ton to be there or to ii) have a sufficient breeding population of humanity off earth that we'll survive a colossal extinction event. I believe i) will come before ii) AND I think i) is more likely to be done by remote control, too... or at least most of it. So wait for a NEED for a person - which personally I feel like will be a long time coming; the robots will get better faster than our ability to cheaply get a person there So maybe the first person will be a paying tourist.

3. While I think Mars is close enough to be within reach, there are things we've skipped. I think all of the above applies to the moon, but I think it's so significantly cheaper to send stuff to the moon than to Mars. We're just finally going to put a telescope on the moon... For that matter, I think we should have orbiting solar power pretty soon.

We only have like 3 people living outside our atmosphere. I think that's shameful in some ways... but there's no reason we need to "touch" Mars with a real person before we have commercial occupation of something closer / cheaper* - the technology we need for that to be sustainable - longer term, more sustainable, cheaper inhabiting of harsh environments - is something we can demonstrate much closer.

*unless it turns out a person on Mars would help us mine something ridiculously expensive, or something. But a cluster of robots could have a higher chance of finding that for less money.

I'd certainly accept that having the nice thin unbreathable atmosphere there might involve some cost savings in radiation damage/shielding, pressurization, etc. But that's only a justification if those costs are going to outweigh the much-higher lift costs and the much-lower chance of a bail-out.

The good news is we're getting there - commercial boost to space is becoming practical, commercial space tourism is growing, and that means soonish a space hotel could be a reality - and as costs drop, hopefully attendance will increase. And by all means explore Mars extensively before we're ready to go there... just don't waste a ton of money on symbolism; spend that money wisely.

Everyone dies, why not doing the extraordinary?

[guidryp]

I don't think analogies apply here, this is nothing like Lindburg, this is so far beyond that.

Even without resupply and a likely limited lifespan (say two years) I would do it.

Face it, most of us will lead mundane 9 to 5 insignificant lives and will likely die a forgotten death lingering in a hospital bed. Why wouldn't you trade that for a chance to blaze a completely new trail for humanity, to truly go, where no one has gone before.

I am sure there are a lot of scientist who trade the rest of their life for 2 years studying Mars in person.

Besides that, he is talking about sending company, resupply etc.

On top of that, this would be a volunteer mission. I don't quite get the nervous nellies who have a problem with someone else making this choice. It might not be for them, but they should at least be able to realize that for some this is an inspirational idea.

I just can't believe the amount hand wringing over this.

Though I think it is immediately clear that this will never be done because of the tender sensibilities of the public. If even the slashdot crowd are getting bent out of shape, the general public would frothing at the mouth.

We seem to be becoming a world of spineless weepy nannies.

Re:One-way trip? Sure!

[RobBebop]

But if I went to Mars, even if I died, well then at least what I did and where I ended up would be remembered,

Memory is a funny thing. Can you name the English settlers who died in 1587 attempting to settle in what is modern day Virginia? Can you even named the original settlement, aside from its name "The Lost Colony"?

My bigger gripe is people who say the 9/11 will always be remembered... and then can't name the day Pearl Harbor occurred (December 7, 1941). Yeah... memories are very generational.

There is a very real difference

[Chrisq]

There is a very real difference when it comes to risk. I remember a formula 1 racing driver from just after the war saying that it was quite acceptable to have a driver killed in every couple of races, after all they had beaten worse odds in the war and you have to die sometime. Imagine a sport with such odds of death today - nobody would allow it.

Then there are wars where "hundreds" of casualties are seen as terrible. Of course for the individuals they are, but in previous conflicts you could lose thousands in a single battle, and if you made ground it was seen as a success.

Re:There is a very real difference

[Mantaar]

The wars you're talking about are not like the wars back then. Let's face it: most don't care about wars like the ones in Rwanda where American or at least Western soldiers are not killed. There a genocide is seen as terrible, but only until Paris Hilton decides to expose her genitals on the very same news show. Those wars are being talked about by the 'intellectuals', but not by everyone.

The other kind of wars, like the recent ones in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kosovo, where Western soldiers could die are where the public interest would actually last longer than one news show. That's because this kind of war is also fought for entirely different motives than those before: it's not about crushing your opponent, it's not about gaining territory. Sometimes nobody really knows what it's all about (like the last Iraq war). And that's where people at home actually care for the soldiers over there - and not for any other soldiers, but for their own. How many Iraqi soldiers left their life during the invasion? Do you know? Do you care? IIRC it was about a thousand more than lost their lives on September 11th 2001 in the Twin Towers. But somehow - even here in Europe - it seems that the only body count that's getting mentioned on mainstream news is the American one (I may be a bit wrong on that since I generally don't follow mainstream media...)

The problem isn't the volunteer...

[raehl]

The problem is the ethics of sending the volunteer. Too much of the public would find something inherently 'wrong' with sending a person on a known, one-way mission with no chance of coming back, and that lack of support would pretty much doom the effort.

Re:I'd go.

[sckeener]

It'd be just like the Mayflower... Only without the natives and smallpox...

I'd rather do the Greek Colonies one way trip. Send excess population out into space to found colonies that will eventually trade with Mother Earth.

Colonies might be easier on Earth, but the principle is the same. We just have higher start up costs and planning for space.

I could easily see China doing this. The red planet might be Red.

Firefly will probably turn out right...Mandarin and English will be the spoken languages in space.

Also, I'm all for doing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress i.e. sending prisoners out into space. Prisoners are usually are risk takers. I can think of nothing more rewarding and risky than founding new colonies in the long term.

Re: Two? No, one.

[BigBlueOx]

Do what any good geek would do: Make an AI.

How does geek would do: make an AI make you feel?