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Massive Martian Glaciers Found
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."
And it's about time. Now we just need to get some "volunteers" to get on a spaceship...
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
Get your ass to Mars...
Get your ass to Mars...
Get your ass to Mars...
Why the need to spell out water ice? Shouldn't H2O be implied and if it's something else (methane, ammonia, etc) then spell it out.
Just wondering.
Quick! Send Arnold to activate the alien terraform device!
Uh, could you convert that to Libraries of Congress, if you don't mind?
Heh, and the City of Los Angeles is already planning a Clarke-style elevator to get into LEO. Just what's needed to bring big chunks of Martian glacier out of those cargo ships and down to thirsty Angelinos.
What's interesting to me, is that they mention in TFA that this ice can't have formed recently. The current Martian climate won't allow it. Meaning that the glacier was laid down ages ago when such formations were still possible, got buried beneath the debris, and has basically been sitting there since.
Forget water harvesting, I'm more interested in studying the ice in situ. If there ever was life on Mars (which is independent of the question of whether there's life there now), the odds are good we'd find evidence of it frozen in the glacier. Cold preserves, objects frozen in ice erode slowly, and the living things generally need water to survive.
Of course, anything that ever lived on Mars would likely have been microscopic. I doubt we'd find anything as big as a terrestrial animal. It'd still be the first evidence of life outside of our own planet though, which is a pretty frickin' huge deal.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
All Right! Lets land a colony and start a casino! Hopefully we don't find anyone living under the Ice already! Of Course if we do, we'll invite them in on an all you can eat Sunday Buffet... As long as it isn't all the HUMANS YOU CAN EAT! :)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
(American Scientist is much better)
The original NASA press release is at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20081120.html
Seriously, I'm getting sick of all these teasers. I just wish the scientific community would hurry up and announce that we've found life on mars.
All the nerd innuendo you will ever need.
Since we're on the subject of Total Recall, and I the only one who noticed that Indiana Jones IV completely ripped their ending off Total Recall?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
A Frozen Throne, Frostmourn, and the Lich King.
I say we bring 'em to planet Earth and tell Al Gore to find another argument.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
I wonder if this discovery had been made a few months earlier if they would have altered the course of the Phoenix lander to try to touch down on the glacier. Or is the crust on top of the glacier too thick for Phoenix to get through? This seems like a prime target for future missions to analyze the ice and look for signs of life.
I think we need to send Bruce Willis and a crack team of oil rig workers to do some drilling on Mars...
Now, about that air pressure problem...
...so that's where they went? To mars?
we can put mammoths there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We'll finally have conclusive proof that Spiders originated from Mars.
Anyone got a light for my sig?
All we need now is an ancient reactor to melt the ice and produce a dense atmosphere...
Seriously, though, that movie did suck...
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to do so.
One of the problems with sending people to Mars is how to get them back again. If we could find volunteers who have a shortened life expectancy (terminal cancer, etc), would it be terribly unethical to send them? No need to worry about return/retrieval, and if you're already dying, you've got to admit that it'd be a heck of a way to go.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Fight Club will never be the same.
Sounds like we should be taking a new look at the "Mars Express" concept. This just screams for a direct look-see by real human beings. And we could really use a project that would kick-start a new wave of technological innovation.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Gee, who would figure a massive surface object on Mars would be hidden under and obscured from study by... dust?
Now let's find that giant face, maybe the Raelians were right after all...
Slashdot: Where opinions are just opinions until you have mod points.
Huh? How is GorgarWillEatYou digging a nomenclatural hole? Also, what imprecise terminology? Solid, liquid, gas. That's it (unless you want to go into plasmas and Bose-Einstein condensates, etc.). Ice is a special word that's used for the solid form of water (usually the crystalline form, but I've heard people talk about amorphous solid water as amorphous ice). It's sometimes generically used for the solid form of things that are are normally liquids or gases here on earth, but if you really want to avoid imprecise (or possibly outright incorrect) terminology, you won't call anything but solid water ice. In fact, you should probably avoid even that if you really want to avoid being imprecise.
In response to this finding, Al Gore has called for a full investigation into the potential catastrophic effects of man-made interaction with said glaciers, and also for an investigation into how he might exploit these potential effects to bring himself more fame, money, Nobel Peace prizes, and maybe a friend, this time.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
It's a God awful small affair
But it's needed to breathe the air
The scientists all wanted to go
But the big wigs kept yelling "No!"
And while the journey did last a year
The cosmic rays could be quite severe
And while the trip was a sadd'ning bore
Going to Mars is no easy chore
Spaaaaaaace men
Fighting in their rocket
Oh man!
Look at those Martians go
It's the freakiest show
Is there life on Maaaaaaaaaaaaaars?
Would there be internet, because i would get really bored.
start the reactor
$ ping www.google.ca
PING www.l.google.com (209.85.171.103) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from cg-in-f103.google.com (209.85.171.103): icmp_seq=1 ttl=242 time=1282654 ms
64 bytes from cg-in-f103.google.com (209.85.171.103): icmp_seq=6 ttl=242 time=1589264 ms
:x
Personally, I think we should just start sending up high-payload conventional explosives to Mars. Releasing nitrogen into their atmosphere would make it so the planet could hold heat for a longer time, and conventional explosives are all Nitrogen-based. If we could do that, and there's already glaciers on mars--then that'd be the first step to terraforming it to be a habitable planet. Granted--that'd take hundreds of megatons of nitrogen, but it'd be cool to say, "we tried blowing up mars, but all it did was make it more habitable."
Hint: Assume the spherical Library of Congress can be mapped do the famous spherical cow of uniform density by an isometric isomorphism.
Time to send in Bear Grylls!
> Everyone knows that - it's taught to kids before they are even 30 shark nipples high.
Bah, why aren't you using metric!? Those kids are only 23.8 laser shark nipples high.
Announcer: A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
Marvin the Martian.
Now if only i didn't need a lifetime supply of thyroid medication, the only problem i could see is it becoming a bit lonely so i guess i would have to hope they send women too. i don't consider it a death-wish at all really, i consider it more of an opportunity to test my limits. if death is a result, then so be it. but if i were to survive until i die of old age, then i would die knowing that i was one tough son of a bitch. I am pretty sure I am not the only one who looks at it this way. All it really comes down too is finding a reason to send someone there, cause there will always be someone who will want to go.
WHAT? Charles Bronson is going to Mars?
Hmm. Is this our insurance against hostile aliens or something?
1. Establish moon base, mine water-ice, build solar-powered magnetic rail launcher and ore smelter.
2. Combine water with mixture of moon regolith plus mined magnetic materials, freeze into projectile, use rail launcher to send into low moon 'parking' orbit.
3. Use mirrors in moon orbit to melt regolith/metal/water mixture from projectiles in 'parking' lunar orbit. Form into desired hollow and radiation-resistant Mars transport. Build necessary habitat inside. Attach VASIMIR propulsion which will use hydrogen extracted from water from which ship is mostly made. Attach Mars lander made mostly from materials mined on moon. Use oxygen from from hydrogen fuel extraction for breathing during trip. (You could even do roughly the same thing on Mars for return trips, or at least refuel/re-shield with sufficient supplies sent ahead on unmanned vehicles to get started.)
4. Get your ass to Mars! Get your ass to Mars! Get your ass to Mars!
5. Profit!
Probably much I've missed, or am mistaken about. Sounds good to me, though.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Willis is about 50 years old now, we need to sen that oil rig now!
"This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."
Hey, I know a planet (ok, satellite) where ice is much more plentiful.
Europa and Encelidus, for a starter. You want water - they've got planet-loads of it. Liquid, as well...
Hell, I'll leave in six months with whatever I can fit in a 3 meter cube if that's what I'm offered. Even if I knew that I would be dead six months after I get there, as long as I would know that I could do useful work making it easier for the next person to get there, I would go.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Sounds about right considering that the "volunteers" will most likely be prisoners that will be drugged into submissive conformity.
Citation needed.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
We have plenty of ways to shield from radiation in transit.
1.) Send robots to the moon first to mine ore and make shielding. This shielding is then boosted up to space (using fuel also made from moon rock) and put it around the vessel.
2.) Crew travels in a meditative state most of the time (monks do it all the time and the training isn't that big a deal) and water tanks for the trip are shaped to surround the smaller area in which that great majority of the time is spent.
3.) Crew is composed of older people who accept that it's a one-way trip. This is being discussed more every year and personally, I think that it's the right way to go.
4.) Send a crew entirely of gamers, give them plenty of compressed munchies, use an even smaller enclosure than the one suggested above, and leave them to six months of uninterrupted gaming.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Speaking as a guy who spent a month in the hospital a few years back fighting one of the worst drug-resistant infections in the world (a nasty kind of c.dif) what you're talking about just doesn't happen that much to healthy people. Not only that, much of how medical technology fights infection (rehydration, boosted nutrients, etc) doesn't actually depend on knowing what the infectious agent is.
No doubt, there are exceptions, but among healthy adults the odds of the kind of thing that you mention are much lower than more simple things like losing oxygen.
Make no mistake, this is still a damned risky proposition. But so is bungie jumping. Hell, so is driving on New Year's Eve. Life involves risk. Pioneering even more so. The real question is not "is there risk?" but "does the likely gain outweigh that risk?"
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Seriously, TFA just mentions it's "thin", but does anyone have a clue just how thin it is? A meter, a few, tens of meters?
Also, I'm kinda curious how would one go about exploiting it. Something like a surface coal mine? That would need some heavy machinery. I'm thinking that one could take advantage of the fact that ice melts, but can't come up with any plausible solutions.
Undoubtedly, the quantities of materiel for a Mars base would be huge. What I can't understand is why nobody is ramping up to spread that job around. Seems to me that there are plenty of companies, states, countries, and so on, who would be delighted to get the chance to spend millions of dollars to have their stuff being used by a Mars crew. And it seems to me that we now know both how to get missions to Mars and how to have them work together.
Why is nobody trying to convince Wisconsin to start their own Mars mission to send five kilos of cheese into Mars orbit along with some clothes from Lands' End and fifteen or twenty kilos of brats and cheese bread? We know that UW Madison has some kickass space scientists and plenty of engineers. Or what about having developing nations pay a fifty or sixty thousand dollars a kilo to get their signature products added to a vessel to then be built and launched by one of the umpty-dozen New Space companies? There are plenty of options.
The smart thing to do at this point is to start pushing non-federal entities to start their own launch programs to launch their own payloads to Mars orbit where they can either wait for landing instructions (safely a few hundred miles or more from the base) or to be ferried down by some purpose-built vehicle.
Not all supplies are high tech. There is no reason that we need to wait years and years before we'll be ready to send low-G cheese, for crying out loud. The vacuum sealers sold in every supermarket today are more high-tech than the gear used to prepare consumables for the Apollo missions. Thousands and thousands of kilos of supplies would fit into this category. Clothes. Food. Bedding. And on and on. And, frankly, there are plenty of ways to structure the contracts so that Mars crew aren't obligated to use what is sent. Something would have to be pretty damn bad to get left in the cold but there's no reason that option can't be included.
And think about it. This way the logistics work is spread around, too. And the cargos can launch at high-G, travel at near-ambient temperatures in low-atmosphere vessels, and in a dozens of different ways, be a hell of a lot cheaper to send then trying to get everydamnthing shipped in a human-capable vessel. Sending everything in one vessel is like shipping a package by buying an airline ticket for it. This would provide the option of "parcel post".
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Afaic, we should be shipping dead bodies to Mars as fast as people will pay to do it. They're excellent biomatter, they provide useful colonies of microorganisms, and they give rich people a means to contribute to the settlement of other parts of the solar system. Same goes for shipping bodies to the Moon and, for that matter, the more stable Lagrange points.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
So find some ice-filled underground caverns and make the first colonies there. Build some large graphene "world domes" above them, as greenhouses to grow crops in. Mars is very geologically stable, so humans can expand their presence underground like an expanding ant colony, while building large graphene bubbles topside for agriculture.
No you dumbass. That's how scientists think. Here's how we will *actually* there:
Let's go over it one more time shall we?
1) Chinese space probe to mars discovers enormous deposits of Gold/Pure Gasoline/or some valuable shit
2) Chinese probe hacked by NSA, findings sent to Obama/Palin who decide to act on it.
3) NASA budget quadrupled, Congress told there would be riots in cities if Godless Chinese were to conquer the Final Frontier.
3.a Father jonathan, O'reilly and Rove talk about "bringing the rich to the People of the Free World and Defending Mars against enemies of Freedom."
4) Congress passes a law authorising use of necessary means to "Bring the Riches of Free Planet Mars to democratic nations of the World."
5) Senate vetoes the proposal stating that it lacks medical insurance for mine workers and their children.
6) Congress appropriates $152 billion to pay for Miners Medical Guarantee Plan.
7) Senate passes the law with 3:1 vote majority. McCain abstains stating it doesn't contain enough protection for PoWs. Ron Paul votes against it, stating "Until the Fed is abolished, real Gold Standard cannot be established even with HUGE martian reserves."
8) President signs the law.
9) NASA hires 31,000 new contractors on open bidding. KBR cries foul.
10) KBR is guaranteed an exclusive-yet-non-binding contract to supply food and refreshments to all passengers to Mars.
11) NASA completes a massive extension to the Space Station at a cost of $1.2 Billion. Station now contains $800 toilet seats and $450 Hamburgers supplied by KBR.
12) NASA shortlists 12 astronauts: 9 Men with EVA hours of 500 min. 3 Women with EVA hours of 400 min.
13) The Gay & lesbian Association Against Defamation files a suit in SCOTUS against NASA alleging discrimination against Gays To Mars
14) Citizens of NYC and SF hold candle-light vigils in Support of GaysToMars. O'reilly darkly hints against subversion of Space.
15) A riot breaks out in NYC between Cops, Gays and Neocons resulting in 20 dead (all gays), 13 injured (cops) and 56 arrested (neocons).
16) NYC mayor bans further such demonstrations for 90 days, is promptly sued by ACLU & EFF. Ban upheld by NY Supreme Court. ACLU appeals and the appeal is upheld. Ban revoked. NYC police commissioner resigns.
17) NASA trains 12 astronauts: 3 Men, 6 women(!), and 3 Gay/lesbian combo. ACLU sues citing discrimination against men(!). Case dismissed with costs.
18) Russia launches 5 HUGE rockets from Baikonaur. The rockets discharge their payload on moon. One destructs.
19) Russia launches 6 HUGE rockets again to moon. The rockets cargo is Von Neumann machines that assemble a self-sustaining life station to be launched with Ion engines to Mars.
20) Russian president resigns after it was found he was secretly aiding China(!) China vehemently denies. Russia vehemently denies. NSA defector states NSA engineered it.
21) Space station launches a triple stage rocket built by Northrop Grumman, GD and GE. The launch is a success. Unfortunately the 10 of 15 electronic toilets fail due to the shock. Apparently some unknown indian software company had written the software for the same. The president issues a Presidential order excluding non-US companies from building spaceships for US.
22) Mid journey to Mars, a sex tape involving the 3 lesbians and 3 straight men is leaked. The Gay community is dismayed and outcasts the lesbians. Congress hauls NASA commissioner over coals. GAO inquiry finds KBR had overbilled NASA by $350 billion. the GAO report is re-classified and GAO denied funds for subsequent investigation.
23) Spaceship arrives at Mars. Protest Rallies and Victory Rallies clash in SF and NYC killing atleast 300 people in riots. Fox covers it truthfully.
24) First American on Mars lands to find the martian soil green with moss.
25) A Huge Terminator rolls into camera, greets the man in Russian and waits for response.
26) The american responds in English, whereupon he is vaporized instantly by the Terminator which
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
It's a pity that NASA chooses to use quicktime as their movie format. I can't even get mplayer to open the streams.
Well, it might be a bleak existence over time, but it's no different than being trapped on ISS, or stuck on a U-boat, or even in Antarctica. I personally would devote every moment to expanding the comforts of home onto the new soil. That means non-stop building, "barn-raising" (more graphene domes), tunnel-pressurizing, etc. You could spend all your time designing self-sustaining eco-systems, the way an urban planner designs new neighborhoods. And yes, make money off it. When vital resources are located, then you find a way to create sustainable colonies/eco-systems near that spot. Maybe tourism would become a big driver. Even if people won't want to live there for long, they might be very eager to visit for short periods of time. A booming tourism industry could arise, once the travel costs come down.
Cool idea, but the only incentive I'm seeing is promotional at this stage, and that requires an exuberant economy.
More interesting than sending 5 pounds of cheese is devising a way to make cheese from the available raw materials on site... far fetched? yes. far more useful? of course.
We don't want our Mars settlers eating Soylent Green.
to get Arnold Schwarzenegger out of the state of Cahlifourniahgh. the real question isnt whether or not he could start the reactor in time, but whether or not time travelling robots can live on mars...
Good people go to bed earlier.
oil.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
So, really what you're saying here is that when future travelers to Mars arrive and are asked why they came they can legitimately say "For the cheese." (I'll be really surprised if anyone gets that reference ;-) ).
Leaving aside your obviously pro-cheese stance (Would Martian cheese be red instead of green?) I agree with you that private industry and cooperating countries will probably be the key to future exploration. I don't believe any single entity would be able to handle the effort of continuously sending supplies to a permanent station on Mars (certainly not the US in its current economic state). On the other hand, what would be the major incentive to get private and other entities involved? Bragging rights? Advertising space? I can imagine it now:
Wisconsin Cheese Company: We have cheese on Mars and all the interplanetary billboard space we could ever need!
I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of resources or economic gain to motivate organizations to work together in order to make a major manned mission to Mars worth it.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Not necessarily in the sense of "little green men" so much that there is still some possibility of hostile native bacteria, and definitely of unknown hostile environmental conditions.
All the nerd innuendo you will ever need.
Well, you get some geek speak around here, but all I'll ever need? Hardly. --And actually, I have to say, I enjoyed Slashdot a lot more ten years ago before everybody got married and their wives pecked the fun out of their lives so that they wouldn't be embarrassed to take their hubbies to muted social gatherings. Now half the geeks I know walk around looking strained, pretending that life isn't fun, while putting on a false show of scowling at those who have the guts to enjoy themselves.
Too bad. I've been lucky. My GF's have dealt with my geek obsessions gracefully. The best part is when I find out their fathers are Star Trek or D&D fans, and then we can rap while the girls head to the kitchen to talk about girl stuff. But the BEST of all is when each side admires the other regardless.
-FL
Too cold for one thing, and too dry
One of the common assumptions about life (even intelligent life) anywhere else in the universe is that it would have to meet earth-like characteristics or conditions.
Hell, on earth we continually find species in odd places that *astound* scientists. Didn't they find some aquatic life in a superheated area near some oceanic vents (basically almost an undersea volcano temperature-wise).
So, we might not find "earth-like" life out there, but that still doesn't rule out something unexpected.
Hauser: "Now, this is the plan. Get your ass to Mars!"
Colonise Mars with a couple of Agrophobics... living in the confines of a cramped craft wouldn't then be so much of a problem
Aliens responsible for creating ancent empire - Stargate and IJ-4.
A rather important difference being that in, say, Jamestown, you didn't need freaking life support systems to walk outside. All you needed to do was bring your farm implements, seeds, and livestock, and you were in business. And even then, the first colonists barely made it, even with periodic resupply. Given that our track record of maintaining "biosphere" type systems on earth has been mixed at best, I wouldn't give too much for your chances on Mars. Colonizing North America: dangerous. Colonizing Mars: yes, truly suicidal, at least for now.
What's the likely gain? Specifically, can anyone make any money from this? If the answer is no, you're left with stuff like prestige for country that launched the mission, and increased scientific knowledge. There's a limit to the risks people will take and the money they'll spend in exchange for this.
If you think there is money to be made, well, make the case. Bear in mind that getting stuff out of earth's gravity well, into Mars', and back again, is almost unimaginably expensive (and for the return trip at least, technically very difficult to accomplish). Also bear in mind that Mars is mostly made out of the same things as earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, etc.
There's this thing called "return on investment". I'm a manager at a very large engineering company, and anyone at our outfit who proposed spending millions of dollars to send stuff with our logo on it to Mars would get laughed out of the room. I doubt our company is alone in this.
You're kidding, right? For starters, because the taxpayers would string up the legislature if they wasted tax funds this way. And even if you managed to persuade them to do this, you'd only need to do it, what, a million times before you had enough food (and the ever important Squall jackets) necessary to outfit a Mars colony for any length of time?
Answer: more than all the governments on earth put together could afford to spend. Just the first part of step 1 - "establish moon base" - is ludicrously expensive.
There's this thing called "return on investment". I'm a manager at a very large engineering company, and anyone at our outfit who proposed spending millions of dollars to send stuff with our logo on it to Mars would get laughed out of the room. I doubt our company is alone in this.
That's because you're an engineering company. An outfit like Nike, Underarmour, Apple, etc. that makes consumer products, and spends lots of money on advertising, might go for it.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
It seems like the Yip Yip Martians have been around
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yip+yips&page=2
Hanging meat lasts longer !
quaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaade... start the reactorrrr...
Now if we can just build some sort of contraption from the movie Total Recall and give Mars an atmosphere. (I realize the movie is fiction and it probably doesn't work that way in real life)
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Hey A friend and I volunteered to be the first prisoners in the Martian penal colonies. But no one took us seriously and we couldn't get a hold of any serious explosives so we gave it up.
Why bother
Looks to me like you're just a wee bit confused on this whole cost factor. How many kilos of mass do you think the first group will be bringing with them, anyway?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
"We're monkeys! We'll go!"
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You think that promotion "requires an exuberant economy"? You have GOT to be kidding me. Take a look at any history of advertising stunts during the Great Depression. Hell, just search for "depression glass". Not only that, such a plan would appeal to all sorts of motivations. As I said in the post I linked to, not only would this be something that the citizens of some places do if only to show how cool they are (anybody care to deny that Texas would jump at an excuse to have their own space program?) it would also give a structure in which high tech states like North Carolina could develop their own expertise and networks.
India got their moon program done for a hundred million dollars. Care to tell me that Texas A&M couldn't get a small payload to Mars orbit for less? Especially in partnership with a few dozen local businesses and schools?
I agree that food making technology is important, but first of all it takes time. The longer we wait to get that right the longer the delay before a Mars crew has what they need. Secondly, it's subject to breakdown. Do you really want to be that far from support when your algae tank shuts down? Third, have you ever tried to live on synthetic foods? I've got a jar of Marmite and some vegan "sheese" right here if you want to try it. Especially in a confined space with limited stimuli, good food, nice bedding and clothes, and so on, get very, very important. Ask anybody who has served on a submarine, especially a boomer crew, and they'll talk your ear off about it. To the extent that boomer crews talk about anything ;->
Note, also that I'm not just talking about food. I'm talking about any resource that is low tech enough that supply can be decentralized. Not only does this include what I mentioned above, it even includes sheets of insulating material, robots for greenhouse work, and all sorts of useful things that NASA then doesn't need to pay to get out there. What you suggest and what I suggest do not have that high a substitution effect. They pull from different funding sources, use somewhat different pools of labor, are best suited to different time scales, and, to some extent, would provide different resources to Mars crews.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Back when the Coke-Pepsi wars were red hot, there was a fierce bidding war over who would get the rights to engineer and provide the first cans of soda to be used in space. The resulting project was the center of quite a lot of advertising; maybe you saw some of it. And from what I read in the advertising trades, this project was looked upon by those in the field as a hell of a good investment and one that they would have been delighted to repeat.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You didn't read what I wrote very carefully, did you? I didn't write just "something with a logo on it". I wrote about sending some of an actual distinctive product to then be used by people on Mars. Do you have any idea how much your own suppliers would spend for this privilege?
"The Mars team uses Fluke temperature sensors. Shouldn't you?"
"On Mars they enjoy real Wyoming free range beef."
You want to make sarcastic remarks about Squall jackets? Dude, do you have any idea of the cred Lands' End got in their early days from having their stuff photographed being worn by sailing teams? Personally, I was over at J. Crew for some of that time and I can guarantee that the folks who ran J.Crew in those days would have jumped at such a chance. These days I live in Portland. As the poster before me noted, have you ever heard of our little local outfit, Nike? They spend a few bucks now and again to get their gear seen being used by high profile people. Certainly no more than half a billion dollars a year. Maybe you've seen some of it.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
From Space.com
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/081119-tw-magnetic-shield.html#comments
------------
Ruth Bamford of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and her colleagues conducted tests on a miniature plasma field in the laboratory with similar properties to the wind of charged particles in space coming off of the sun (the source of much of the most harmful radiation to humans). When scientists set up a magnetic field inside this artificial solar wind, they found that the magnet created a bubble where no radiation could enter.
"We switched it on and there it was," Bamford told SPACE.com. "When we put the probe in we found out there were no particles inside the little bubble. If a spacecraft had been somewhere in this bubble it would have been protected from this beam. That was lovely to see."
Bamford detailed her findings in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion.
The engineering details of how to use this technology on a spaceship must still be worked out. Moreover, the portable magnetic shield could only protect against particles coming from the solar wind, while other kinds of harmful particles, such as high energy gamma rays and X-rays, wouldn't be affected. Still, the technique is promising, since particles from the solar wind are extremely dangerous, especially during solar storms, when the wind plasma flares up and sends out surges of radiation.
"The protons [from the solar wind] apparently are the greatest concern for the health of the astronauts, because of their large concentration during storms, and because the particles are large enough to break DNA down," Bamford said. "In the early Apollo missions, the astronauts were very lucky to not be in space during a radiation burst. There was a storm between Apollo 16 and 17, which would have been fatal if the astronauts had been in space."
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It is just a matter of time. We is smaht monkeys....