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Mars Mission Back In the Cards After Budget Cuts
ananyo writes "NASA has said it will re-design its Mars exploration program, and that the new architecture would include input — and money — from the human program as well as the space technology division. Orlando Figueroa, the former deputy director for space and technology at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is to head up a seven or eight person committee, and to start developing mission concepts in the next month. One of those concepts would be a possible $700 million mission launching in 2018. The news offers a grain of comfort to a community still reeling from massive cuts to the Mars program."
A single shuttle launch costs that much, in today's dollars.
Seriously, guys?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If they consider raising the figure by at least 2 orders of magnitude, and then they'll probably be getting close to what is necessary.
Seriously.... 700 million isn't a manned flight to mars, it's just an expensive coffin that will orbit earth for several decades at most before burning up on reentry into the atmosphere.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Barack Obama is a stuttering clusterfuck of a miserable failure.
A single shuttle launch costs that much, in today's dollars.
Seriously, guys?
I interpreted that as "the concept" referring to the Mars mission. So, yeah, I could see how $700 million would be a bit much to go into orbit, do some science lab experiments and land ... but when you're planning for Mars (especially manned which is what I thought they were talking about) I can understand a vast increase to your budget.
My work here is dung.
The combination of nationalistic paranoia, cheap energy and a dead president are decades in the past. There is simply no compelling reason to put apes in tin cans for months at a time to go traipse around a dead, hostile rock floating in a radiation-blasted hell.
There is no real need, no perceived need, and absolutely nothing more than pictures can come of it. No one cares, we don't have the resources, and it will never happen. Ever.
Send more RC cars with cameras, get some pictures, the Space Nutter jizz will fly thick and fast.
Until we have an established moon base, we shouldn't even attempt Mars.
Consider:
So just shine an orange light on the moon and call it Mars.
The moon is better anyway
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
They're talking about an unmanned flight...
One way I've read several times to cut the cost of a human Mars mission is to make it a one-way mission.
Take away the expectation of returning- you save a bunch of costs associated with returning. Naturally- not everyone would want a one-way ticket to mars but there are lots of people who would.
Naturally, the technicality is you have to find some way to make them able to live there long term. Mars has lots of natural resources and tecnically could be self-supporting- but this could be complicated.
Those first people who go would have the mission of making the planet ready for the next wave of scientists. I think we should set our sites on a one way mission rather than bite off more than we can chew with our first mission to mars.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Here;
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/pss/
you can read the report from the Plantary Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, to the Science Committee.
It'd be awesome if /. posters read any of this before posting snide/uninformed/trolly comments about NASA, Obama, Space-X, budgets, etc.
The blog Future Planetary Exploration rounds up reporting on this subject;
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2012/02/ruckus.html
Trickle down economics!
Free market!
Abolish minimum wage!
Tea Party!
Vote Ron Paul!
You build 5 or 10 and the price goes down. Just wont be able to do the big sample-return missions which would cost 10x-20x as much. The mostly recent sample-return mission was actually a triple mission: a land-rover, a lander-with orbital rocket, an orbital retriever. Keeps Mars program alive for another couple decades.
Stop building a brand new probe each time you want you carry a new instrument to Mars, Venus or some asteroid. Just make a design that fits most needs and build a dozen of them. Launch four at a time or a dozen to cut down on launch costs. Smaller probes like Hayabusa or Smart-1 are quite effective and light enough that you could easily put a dozen of them into space using a single Delta IV or Ariane 5 launch. Even the mars rovers like Spirit and Opportunity wouldn't need a dedicated Delta II launch each, four or five could be launched at a time. Sure, instrument choice will be limited, but so will be the price and effort of building it and sending it to space.
./ is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, these days.
"Mars mission" does not refer to a manned mission you goddamn idiots. If you actually RTFA before banging your heads against the keyboards to produce idiocy, you'd find the mission in question is most likely going to be an obiter, not even a rover or lander..
What's not mentioned in the article is that the plan is to save Mars exploration by gutting outer planets research. If you wanted to know more about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Europa, Io, Titan, Enceladus, Triton, the Kuiper belt, or anything else, forget it. Because of the long travel time, scrapping the projects currently being planned may mean you won't hear anything new about those places for decades.
A recent discovery of long term space exploration is that being in low gravity for too long literally folds parts of your eye. Causing astronauts who spend too much time up in space to have permanent vision changes that leave them very far-sighted and required to wear reading glasses. Just six months in low gravity was enough for major changes in vision.
Imagine a missions to Mars that takes six months just one way? These astronauts would be blind under our current understanding of how space travel affects sight by the time that they came back.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/20/nation/la-na-blind-nasa-astronaut-20110921
"What we are seeing is flattening of the globe, swelling of the optic nerve, a far-sighted shift, and choroidal folds," said Dr. C. Robert Gibson, one of authors of the study published in the October 2011 issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. "We think it is intracranial pressure related, but we're not sure; it could also be due to an increase in pressure along the optic nerve itself or some kind of localized change to the back of the eyeball."
The study identified new risks for those who live in space for at least six months. Blurred vision was the primary issue reported by the seven astronaut test subjects.
"After a few weeks aboard the [station]," said Astronaut Bob Thirsk, a Canadian Space Agency physician who spent six months as a member of the Expedition 20 and 21 crews in 2007, "I noticed that my visual acuity had changed. My distant vision was not too bad, but I found that it was more difficult to read procedures. I also had trouble manually focusing cameras, so I would ask a crewmate to verify my focus setting on critical experiments."
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/Astronaut_Vision.html
The way I see it is that there are two options. The first one is we only send replicants to Mars or more unmanned flights. The other is that NASA gets some awesome new understanding of vision loss or develops technology to overcome vision loss. Either way this would be quite the benefit for society if NASA can develop some new things to combat vision loss.
Manned missions are not on the list of near-term items...rtfa
Mars has 37% the gravity of earth- this may be enough to prevent these problems. As for the 6 month trip- cosmonauts have spent over a year in space before without going blind so your comment:
Imagine a missions to Mars that takes six months just one way? These astronauts would be blind under our current understanding of how space travel affects sight by the time that they came back.
Is... an exaggeration. They may have limited vision damage- yes. As well as other medical conditions both known and unknown.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Why go?
Which is sexier, James Webb or Orlando Figueroa?
every year, and they have no money to do anything about it. A new plan each is meaningless when the president wants to take money away from scientific endeavors and dump money on civil servants in social programs.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Or they could send myopics like me, and we would arrive on Mars with perfect distance vision! (Note to self: remember to pack reading glasses.)
Why not just use corporate sponsors. Apple alone could donate almost $1 Billion by just donating 1%of its cash reserves alone.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The Moon doesn't have it, never did.
Mars might've had it, still might.
Eventually, it will (probably?) be easier to terraform Mars than the Moon. Then Mars will truly be a place we can LIVE ON (you know, without space helmets and everything).
It's just some story by some guy (not finished yet), but I've enjoyed reading it
The Martian
:-Dave
...or they use artificial (ie rotational) gravity to sidestep the problem entirely.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Why not open this thing up to public donations? I'm sure that I'm not the only one who would give money to see a person on Mars...
This is going to be the SpaceX Red Dragon mission. The idea is to send a dragon space craft that lands on mars. It will have drilling capabilities and loads of science capabilities. I am not certain of the power, if it will be nuke or just solar. However, keep in mind that 3/4 of B is a fraction of the typical mars missions. In fact, this will be launched with the Falcon Heavy. As such, it will have room for a number of small sats that can be dropped off at Mars.
Oddly, we might even be able to put the Mars Telcom system up there on the same mission. One major sat with laser to earth, etc, with a number of nanosats that act as relays between the surface and other sats back to the main sat.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am extremely nearsighted as my clear visual range is 2 - 8 inches in front of my eyes (without corrective lenses). So going into space will correct this to normal vision. Who Hoo! Where do I sign up?