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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's really difficult to put into words just how wrong you are. I realize you're probably just a drive by troll, but on the off chance you're really of that opinion I have to at least attempt to provide a counter point to your myopia.
Understanding the universe, stretching humanities legs, literally, out among the planets in our solar system and beyond represents a life and death pursuit for the human species. Eventually, Earth is going to be in existential peril, and if all our eggs are still in this basket over issues as petty and meaningless as politics, economics, or national pride, then we are well and truly, cosmically, fucked.
It's not possible to start this processes too early. We could detect a rogue asteroid or comet tomorrow that will end life on Earth. On a long enough time line this WILL happen. It's happened before, it'll happen again. When it does, your descendants will be thankful that we took a minute amount of money away from the budget for bombs, sugar water, and pornography, to put those first apes in tin cans and got them to Mars and back.
This is all presupposing you subscribe to the radical notion that a universe with humanity in it is in some way better than one without. As a human, I work from that assumption as a given. You may not, but even if that's so it's not too much to ask that you at least stand out of the way of those who do look that far into the future and can see the dangers and the possibilities that your small mind cannot.
We're talking about pennies here. Pennies now, so that humanity will still exist in one, ten, or a hundred centuries. There is no more important goal than space exploration, manned space exploration, and establishing a permanent human presence in space and on other words.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.
But by God we can spend :
$120 million in retirement and disability benefits to federal employees who have died
$30 million to help Pakistani Mango farmers
$550,000 for a documentary about how rock music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union
$10 million for a remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan
$764,825 to examine how college students use mobile devices for social networking.
$113,227 for a video game preservation center in New York
$765,828 to subsidize a “pancakes for yuppies” program in Washington, D.C.
$100,000 for a celebrity chef show in Indonesia
$175,587 for a study on the link between cocaine and the mating habits of quail
$606,000 for a study about online dating$17.80 Million in Foreign Aid to China – (Department of State & U.S. Agency for International Development)
The Super-Bridge to Nowhere – (Alaska) $15.3 Million
This is of course just a fraction of the stupidity.
Personally, I'd rather send an unmanned mission to Mars.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
On top of that, the extreme challenges we need to meet while doing this sort of thing pushes us further in science with new technologies developed to meet those challenges. How many things do we take for granted today because of problems met by the space flights of yesteryear? Imagine if everyone thought this sort of thing was pointless back then. Where would we be now?
Social Security isn't on the budget at all.
War is cheap if you're sitting on your ass bitching about taxes and not fighting in it.
Not that I think President Obama has been doing a particularly good job or that he's kept his campaign promises or anything like that, but I'm still astounded at the depths partisans will sink to in order to malign him. I mean, sticker shock at the pump is pretty harsh at the moment, but calling them "Obama levels" is disingenuous since they were this high, and higher, before he became President. It's sort of like when people blame the financial crisis on him and you're left sort of scratching your head. You can assume that those people just have short memories, but I remember people blaming him for the financial crisis within a week of him being elected (note: within a week of being elected, not within a week of taking office). That kind of magical thinking is just bizarre.
As for oil on Mars, importing it would be ridiculously expensive, but it could be useful as an in situ resource. It could be great for making rocket fuel for sending natural resources from Mars to Earth. If we could make everything (except maybe a few lightweight items like microchips) to manufacture rockets on Mars, then, from an Earth perspective, it actually would be financially viable to ship petroleum products to Earth from Mars. Of course, if the infrastructure on Mars ever gets that developed, then the resources would be more valuable in the local economy.
Understanding the universe, stretching humanities legs, literally, out among the planets in our solar system and beyond represents a life and death pursuit for the human species. Earth is going to be in existential peril, and if all our eggs are still in this basket over issues as petty and meaningless as politics, economics, or national pride, then we are well and truly, cosmically, fucked.
Soon, you'll die. Sometime soon, I will die. Sometime later our entire race (regardless of how you define it) will cease to exist as well. Perhaps they will evolve beyond what we might recognise as human. Perhaps some disaster will wipe them out. Perhaps they will last, in some form, until the universe dies. In any case, we, as individuals and as a species are irrevocably mortal and I, for one, welcome that - I welcome our deathly overlord. One day we'll be gone and all that will be left is our achievements and successes - and our failures. I am perfectly content to leave a legacy of good deeds and live my life with integrity, even if no-one ever acknowledges that.
It's not possible to start this processes too early. We could detect a rogue asteroid or comet tomorrow that will end life on Earth. On a long enough time line this WILL happen. It's happened before, it'll happen again.
Notably, when it happened before, the Earth was left far more habitable than Mars is now. Were an asteroid to strike the Earth, you would be better off on the Earth than on Mars. For example, on Mars, the radiation is so bad, that to survive for any length of time, you need to live underground. The gravity is wrong, so much so, that within a generation, Martians would not survive on Earth, were they to travel there. So if we lost the Earth,with it's 7 billion inhabitants, we would be stuck on Mars. Forever. Living like termites underground, never able to go to the surface and look, with our unprotected eyes, on the stars. And when the Earth recovers, with it's benison of life once again covering it's surface, we will be gone - either staring back at earth, helpless with rage, or mercifully extinct.
Alternatively of course we could build those underground cities here on Earth, saving millions, if not billions, in the event of an asteroid strike, as opposed to the thousands that could - briefly - survive on Mars. If life on Earth is difficult afterward, then as a planet it is far easier to geo engineer than Mars, what with the handy features that have sustained life through multiple asteroid strikes before. To propose a plan which would save thousands, and rejecting a plan that saves millions (if not billions) amounts to proposing genocide on a scale never before comprehended.
When it does, your descendants will be thankful that we took a minute amount of money away from the budget for bombs, sugar water, and pornography, to put those first apes in tin cans and got them to Mars and back.
Not, they won't, and neither will your descendants. Because they won't be there. And neither will the descendants of the vast majority of the human race, with it's diverse cultures, ideals and dreams. Mars is just too small to capture a representative sample of us. Under your plan, your descendants will die, and so will mine.