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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.
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
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.
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.
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.