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NASA Looking For Ideas To Explore Mars
ZeroExistenZ writes "NASA plans to make another trip to Mars in 2018 for which they want to devise a plan by this summer. To come up with ideas for this mission, they turn to the public to tackle a few challenge areas. Participants must submit a brief abstract (no more than two pages) outlining the idea, and indicating in which of the topical areas the idea belongs. Abstracts are due no later than 5:00 p.m. U.S. Central Daylight Time May 10, 2012."
You could probably send volunteers. But sending criminals is pointless. Survival on a mars mission will require an extreme level of technical skill that just isn't plausible to develop in that population. Sending criminals is just a ludicrously expensive way to implement the death penalty (and existing systems are egregiously expensive enough).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm. We would be able to get a lot more accomplished, a lot quicker, if we drew upon the pool of astronauts and possible-astronauts who are willing to do a long-term mission in the name of science.
Pour as much money as they can into psychological screenings and legal documents making sure that they are absolutely not liable, and send them off. The real reason we've stayed on Earth and its orbiting bodies is that we've concentrated too much on packing enough fuel with them for a round-trip, and not enough on finding ways to allow Humans to live indefinitely in enclosed Martian settlements. The current model of "go to star, get data, come home, instant hero" is just not feasible for meaningful space travel beyond what we have today.
Send criminals, the way the British used Australia. Either they make it or they don't, but you don't have to worry about packing fuel for the return trip. Ship them supplies and see what happens.
All right! Whom do I have to kill to get a slot?
Cutting spending isn't as important for politicians as the appearance of cutting spending. If they want to stay in office, it's a good idea to find something to cut. The typical voter doesn't have much of a head for numbers, and sees just $X million saved. Millions of dollars always sounds like a lot, even when it really isn't.
It's pointless for another reason, given a chance to go to mars, even if ostensibly a "one way trip" NASA would have far more volunteers than they need, including many many fit and technically competent candidates.
Send the elderly to Mars?
I'd not blame NASA for this but rather congress, which tends to try to exert strong control over NASA, which in many areas really amounts to micro-managing projects, without Congress really understanding what it is doing...
1. A cheap way to launch supplies into Earth orbit. No people will be shipped this way so even a huge cannon would be good.
2. Prep the supplies from #1 in orbit (need a space station or shuttle for this) and use cheap, slow engines to get them to Mars.
3. The supplies enter Mars orbit and stay there until they are signalled from the ground to come down.
Keep up a steady stream and roll any improvements into the system and you should be able to supply a mission for however long you want to keep them alive.
Getting them back to Earth will be a problem.
Are there any volunteers for a one-way mission?
At least until they can assemble their own launch pad to get their people back into orbit.
Fuel for a return trip is mostly an excuse. You just need to do the return trip in two hops: bring enough fuel in the lander to get yourself to orbit, then dock with a giant tanker that carries enough fuel for the rest of the trip. Mars gravity is only about twice that of the Moon, and we got a lander into lunar orbit over fifty years ago, so I can't imagine a Mars ascent being that much of a leap.
The harder part is actually landing a pod big enough to provide long-term living quarters. You could probably do it with inflatable buildings and large air compressors, but you'd still need a supplemental oxygen supply and either a steady supply of food and oxygen or a means of producing your own.
The ideal solution would require landing somewhere with water ice. Water can provide oxygen by electrolysis. Sure, there are other ways to get oxygen (using CO2 electrolysis, for example), but that won't provide them with the water they'll need for other things like cooking, bathing, etc., so landing somewhere with an ample supply of water would be a big plus.
So combine some very powerful air compressors with oxygen generators, lots of heating coils, some inflatable buildings, some disassembled airtight greenhouses, two or three shipments containing large, rolled-up solar panel sheets, etc. and it might actually be feasible to create a long-term habitat on Mars for not a lot more than the cost of a few rover missions. Remember to provide at least three of everything so that they won't be screwed if one of them doesn't work, preferably in separate bundles within reasonable walking distance of a single drop zone. Then provide a small lander with enough reserve oxygen and power to last them a month or two just in case it takes them longer than expected to get things set up.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
do they have lawns on mars?
Why should anyone waste their time sending NASA anything? We already have enough goddamn ideas already. What we need now is someone to put them into action, not more meetings to plan more meetings.
Let's think of a realistic plan and what its purpose is. I submit the purpose should be meaningful exploration toward expansion of the human race to the stars in order to:
- understand our environment,
- increase survivability of catastrophes, and
- grow our technical capabilities to a scale necessary to meet the challenges this endeavor presents.
The purpose is not to waste human lives, or waste time, or make political basketball.
We gain the hearts of the populace by making solid progress on the timescales of everyday lives, building momentum, and teaching science so that the populace understands why space is important.
Incidentally nobody wants to go die on Mars or to make a mission that will require dying so let's just stop talking about getting volunteers.
If we try to make a manned mission to Mars in the near future, it is going to be extremely risky and in the best case will end up like the manned moon mission: a success after many years but then a long hiatus of no exploration after that, since we have "gone there". I recommend we do not waste resources on manned travel to Mars yet, at least not without a much faster engine, and proceed with the following:
First of all we need funded projects immediately covering:
- develop a robust, automated, semi-intelligent manufacturing capability able to mine, create parallel worker bots, build smelter and factory, develop energy sources such as solar and heat gradient, etc.
- develop an ultra-high velocity launcher
- develop high speed space engines, whether this is nuclear or ion-based remains to be seen
- develop micro-size exploration craft
The manufacturing technology will be built for use on our own planet and perfect here for many uses and climes. It will work underwater, on arid mountain slopes, in antarctica, in the steamy tropics. It will survive attacks by wild animals, tornadoes, floods and monsoons. This project will revolutionize the human realities and economies of Africa and will turn our deserts into solar energy farms. It can be approached as if an alien space exploration and exploitation mission to Earth, which will might help its promotion.
The high-speed space engine will allow us to explore moon, asteroids and Mars on a time-scale that allows many missions during our lifetimes. Do it in months and years not decades.
The launcher will launch seed of this technology to the moon and will be perfected there with astronauts going there for a specific purpose, not just "to go" and make everyone feel good. In other words, the next time we go to the Moon we will take with us a superior technology and feel we can easily set up shop anywhere on the Moon we want.
The exploration craft will be useable on the Earth, Moon, Mars and anywhere else we want to go. Ultimately we want to be able to add capabilities so these semi-autonomous agents can roll, jump, fly, swim, climb etc. as needed and take advantage of local energy sources. Use on the Moon, Mars, Europa and the asteroid belt will be the goals. Before we get there, we can use them on Earth for exploration underwater or in jungles, and for search and rescue, and response to natural disasters like forest fires and tsunamis. Certainly such a capability would have been useful in the Fukushima disaster.
Realistically, our current technology is not high enough at the present moment to sustain a human presence on Mars or the Moon. Ideally from the perspective of someone going there, we would like to have an intelligent, autonomous nanotechnology that could somehow go there ahead of us and build us an entire self-contained, self-repairing station while allowing us to decide what we want to do with the planet. For example whether to leave it as-is, bombard it with ice, seed it with hardy lifeforms, etc.
However an advanced semi-automated manufacturing technology that can slash at the costs and time scales required to develop and maintain this machinery would be very useful, both on Earth and on Mars. If we can better marshal our resources through superior technology it will make life better on Earth as well as bring us a step closer to meaningful exploitation of space.