Slashdot Mirror
NASA Working on Mars Menu
DevotedSkeptic writes in with a story about the work going into feeding astronauts on a mission to Mars. "The menu must sustain a group of six to eight astronauts, keep them healthy and happy and also offer a broad array of food. That's no simple feat considering it will likely take six months to get to the Red Planet, astronauts will have to stay there 18 months and then it will take another six months to return to Earth. Imagine having to shop for a family's three-year supply of groceries all at once and having enough meals planned in advance for that length of time. 'Mars is different just because it's so far away,' said Maya Cooper, a senior research scientist with Lockheed Martin who is leading the efforts to build the menu. 'We don't have the option to send a vehicle every six months and send more food as we do for the International Space Station.'"
Is it just me or are the rest of you getting a feeling of deja vu as well?
Easy...
'nuff said
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
No option to resupply? I figured that We would be sending 2-4 tons of supplies to restock every 2-3 months. I mean, it's one thing to hop in the Soyuz capsule and retrograde burn back home, but at the rate things break on the ISS, I can't imagine less than two restocking missions being sent to the mars mission en route, with another set of supplies being sent down every 3 months while they're on the planet. Things break, people get sick, shit happens.
moox. for a new generation.
Might it be time to dig out the poop steak hoax and turn it into the real thing?
Human flesh, human eye ball, and human bone, with a just a sprinkle of martian dust.
On the way out, normal rations but watch very closely who is underperforming in their duties.
On the way back, Soylent Green for dinner.
Just an idea...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
has too many calories
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Is there any reason a whole lot of canned/freeze-dried food couldn't be sent to Mars in advance? Now that we can target Mars with pretty much pin-point accuracy (within a few dozen KM) there's no reason a bunch of supply missions couldn't be sent before the fleshbots arrive.
We herald in the gastronauts.
I'll be back after a short break. Don't go changin'.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
People in the military say that MRE is three lies in one acronym.
.
Unmanned supply ships, why not?
You managed to land a car on mars ffs.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_(chocolate_bar)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Send them waffles and bacon!
Oh, and always promise them cake, but never give it to them.
You want calorie dense nutrient dense foods. I can fit in a single backpack all the food needed by one person for 30 days. Problem is they will go insane eating the same ration day in and day out.
The other aspect is also choosing foods that have a higher conversion factor so the waste elimination is compact and less frequent. You cant go high protein as you have a limited supply of water and you have to have water to process protein. So it 's a balance that is hard to figure out.
The article summary is very wrong, " Imagine having to shop for a family's three-year supply of groceries all at once and having enough meals planned in advance for that length of time." is really easy. Imagine having to shop for a family's three-year supply of groceries all at once and having enough meals planned in advance for that length of time that dont use too much water from your finite limited supply of water and reduces the excrement output of the entire family to be as small as possible.
THAT is what NASA is trying to do, it's massively harder than planning a 3 year grocery list.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Airline Catering add extra salt and spices to meals to avoid people complaining about them being too bland. When flying in high altitudes, apparently sense of taste and smell is impaired.
Could be similar issue in 0-grav and certainly is if cabine-pressure is kept low.
"the lack of gravity means smell - and taste - is impaired. So the food is bland."
Really.
How come nobody else reading Slashdot noticed this ludicrous statement? How can a lack of gravity "impair" smell? Do they mean the SENSE of smell or taste? What are they talking about?
This is correct. Your sense of taste and smell is diminished in zero G. You start slopping on the hot sauce pretty heavily.
Also you start to notice a sweet, metallic smell everywhere you go.
They haven't quite figured out why this happens yet, but since we are essentially big bags of water, and in zero G our internal fluid pressure changes, that may upset the way fluids move through our mucosa.
Dude...
Every single astronaut is close to your definition. They sit on top of some megatons capable explosive fuel and light that candle, hoping to get back in home without being burned on the re-entrance.
Why?
Because they think that there's things more important than their lives.
Never underestimate the human being. Not all of us are selfish bastards.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
When the fecal mass agglutinates, reaches the asteroid belt, agglutinates some more and comes back as a honking great comet which will crash straight into us. (No, I am not serious. A maker of feeble jokes yes, but not entirely ignorant of physics).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Still partially selfish... People love the idea of being recognised for crazy things most won't do. Same as Guiness World Record holders.
Imagine having to shop for a family's three-year supply of groceries all at once and having enough meals planned in advance for that length of time.
Then forget that idea, because it's nothing like that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No, storage is easily solvable. Recovery isn't if you have to land on the wrong side of Mars from your cache. Curiosity manages about 4cm/min, and although that's faster than London rush hour traffic often seems to be, nobody is going to land a Cayenne and a fuel dump on Mars.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Top Ramen Dumbass... every college student knows that
Send unmanned supply vehicle(s) ahead of the mission.
If we can now park 1 tonne loads on Mars with some precision, it shouldn't be rocket science groan to send some supply drops to the landing area before the colonists/settlers arrive.
It's possible some of these drops could be hydroponically controlled environments, so that there is the possibility of some fresh food on Mars on arrival.
Or get McDonalds to start a franchise there....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
>If they have the expertise, who cares why they have it if you can make use of it.
I have no idea why a Mormon would need to stash food, it was a reasonable question. The second point was just musing about motives, hardly 'anti-Mormon' unless you have a huge chip on your shoulder.
As for the scores, I can't help the original having 0 - it's posted as AC so that's going to happen.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Devout Mormons are instructed to store away a year's worth of food and necessities. Here in Salt Lake City, Utah, there are numerous stores that cater to this. I wonder what NASA could learn from them. Some stores sell a complete [Freeze Dried] year's worth of food prepackaged, and variety is a big selling point. (And they have various options at various at various prices depending on the variety and quantity you want. (Or buy one of their grain grinders and some grain to mix it up a bit.)
So, NASA could just mail order three one-year packages per person, and be done with it.
So Mitt Romney will get us to Mars first? Color me confused :)
The military has already solved this problem reasonably well with MREs. Another possible solution would be to have progress-like spacecrafts to restock, carefully scheduling the launch dates for them to do a job similar to what they already do to the ISS. In short, do not try to send everything at once (would need a very large ship), send gradually and continuously.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Don't forget the adrenaline rush.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Did you just crawl from under a rock? I can see I'm going to have to spell this out for you, but do you really think that male astronauts (or sailors, or oil rig workers) manage to go for extended periods without getting intimate with one of their hands? Just because the subject isn't exactly widely discussed outside the inhabitants of single-male communities, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. If that little disposal problem can be coped with, periods should be the least of anyone's worries.
Sigh. Yes, you have to spell it out for me, because I don't see how men need pads or tampons, neither of which can be processed through human waste recycling like feces, urine and semen.
Until a propulsion method is invented that can get humans to mars and back in a few weeks the whole premise is ridiculous. No SANE person is going to volunteer to spend a year in a capsule with 18 months on a dust ball with an unbreathable atmosphere and lethal UV radiation. Sure, you'll find some volunteers but I guaranteed they'll all be mentally unbalanced and would probably chicken out at the last moment anyway. And don't anyone compare it with old sailing ship voyages - its nothing like that. On a ship you have gravity, fresh air, you can go outside, stop off at places and even swim. The nearest analogy would be to the conditions the poor slaves were kept in on atlantic voyages down in the hold.
Well, perhaps count me as insane, as I would volunteer for such a trip to Mars in a heartbeat.
Well, if I had to spend a year long voyage to Mars trapped in a capsule the size of a phone booth I would be a little bit more upset and concerned, and there is no way I would travel to Mars in the Orion capsule alone and in free fall the whole way, but there are other ways to make the trip a little more reasonable.
As for comparing a trip to Mars with a voyage from London to San Francisco in the 19th Century or even just across the North Atlantic in the 17th Century, I think the analogy is pretty appropriate. No, you didn't just jump into the water whenever you felt like it (assuming that you could even swim... that was not even a common skill for most people of that era). Regardless, I think you are making too many excuses for why it won't work.
If you want to see at least one well thought out proposal in terms of how somebody has suggested a trip to Mars can happen, here is a video for you to look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx6cioPdPZQ
For myself, I would prefer to travel to Mars in a NAUTILUS-X spacecraft. There are propulsion methods for getting to Mars that are effective in cutting that trip down to just a few weeks like you are suggesting, but most of them involve nuclear energy as an energy source of some kind. There are so many anti-nuclear nuts that complain each time NASA sends up a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (usually called simply an RTG) that assembling a full fledged nuclear reactor in space would be seen as public enemy #1 and would kill any attempt to even try. These same idiots would likely complain even if it was a nuclear fusion reactor instead, as that dreaded "nuclear" word would be used still. The trick for travel to Mars quickly is to simply have a high density energy source. Mars is just on the edge of what you can do with chemical energy in terms of using things like liquid oxygen and something else like hydrogen or methane. That is the reason why it takes so long to travel to Mars.
Submarine duty is a better comparison, two to three months without surfacing is typical.
OK, thanks. Makes sense in a historical sort of way. I know pretty much zip about Mormons, never met one so I really couldn't see where the food store thing came from.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
So Mitt Romney will get us to Mars first? Color me confused :)
Sending Mitt Romney to Mars: Brilliant plan! The benefits to the economy will even outweigh the cost of the trip
---
On the other being, being you one of the selfish bastards, rest assured I'm keeping you correctly accounted.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Sending people to mars is one thing. You schedule it to take the shortest route. But sending equipment and supplies is different. They should be sending supplies for 10 years prior to the mission.
The hard part is getting the stuff into orbit. Then you blast it on any convenient trajectory available. You don't have to go very fast at all. In fact you want it to have plenty of fuel when it gets there so that it can park itself in orbit and then be brought down anywhere on the planet using probably the bumper ball landing system. Any fuel left if the craft can be salvaged later.
The food will super freeze so it might be necessary to make a reverse fridge to insulate the food and keep heat inside the storage compartment. You can definitely send all the ice cream you want. And you probably don't need to sterilize it at all if the trip takes two years since the food will be exposed to cosmic rays all that time. The food you send should be as dehydrated as possible, sending frozen water separately. Lots of rice, beans, pasta, quinoa and spices. Dehydrated tomato paste. Lots of aging cheeses. Concentrated milk and cream.
And don't anyone compare it with old sailing ship voyages - its nothing like that.
Except that, well, it is like that. You can have fresh air and artificial gravity on the spaceship as well. You can get outside. And they're going to stop off at Mars and Earth.
People have done this sort of thing for centuries perhaps even millennia, but it's all supposed to be different now because it's in space.
No SANE person is going to volunteer
Uh huh. That's a remarkably ignorant statement. There's never been a shortage of SANE volunteers for manned spaceflight.
In space, nobody can hear you scream.
And that's different how? Keep in mind no one can hear you scream in a storm either. Or if you're adrift alone.
Devout Mormons are instructed to store away a year's worth of food and necessities.
Here in Salt Lake City, Utah, there are numerous stores that cater to this.
I wonder what NASA could learn from them.
Absolutely nothing. NASA already knows much more than they do about preserving food. They also already know something about what kind of nutrients will be needed. The Mormons also have the luxury of pantries.
So, NASA could just mail order three one-year packages per person, and be done with it.
If cost were no object, that would make sense. They'll save more be optimizing foodstuffs. I wonder if they have looked into chia seed, goji berries, and other so-called "Superfoods"? I'd guess yes, but I'm not going looking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's a Bugblatter of Trall cookbook, partly plagairized from How to Serve Pork.
Free Martian Whores!
I will do it.
Not be Mr negativity, but this is some of the reason why many say that NASA is becoming a failed experiment not worthy of federal funding. I don't mean to discount what they do and what they have done. But sometimes, they spend far more effort engineering than actually producing which is what makes it really hard to secure public buy-in over time.
You can re-supply a mission to the planet, you can accomplish many things but NASA's model of 6 years development for a 20 year mission isn't closing the gap fast enough to keep public interested in what they are doing. Really, do you *need* to plan a 3 year mission, no, your intentionally adding a layer of complexity to try and make everything into one bubble. NASA's hayday of accomplishment where they had massive amount of public interest was because everyday people saw the things that they were doing. They took chances (measured) and didn't engineer everything to death. They simply need to get out of their own way long enough for people to actually feel inspired by them.
Go on then hero, give NASA a call and put your name down.
so you lead a very sheltered safe life and have a very narrow view of what 'sane' is. You probably would become mentally unbalanced in dire or stressful situation. Meanwhile, there are plenty of tougher sane people who would do the job well with perfect mental health.
All they need is a good supply of molded protein. With a little ingenuity, you can even make a birthday cake out of it!
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I get your point, but I think you romanticize it too much. It's not like they are going over a trench in WW1 to save the man beside them, knowing for a fact that, short of some miracle, they will die. Astronaut death rate is only about 7.5% (34 deaths per 450 visitors to space)-- and I imagine it is only getting safer. They become astronauts because the thought of going into space is sweet, it pays lots of money, gives you lots of glory, and in some case, lots of fame. Astronauts compete with many other men to be one of the few to make it into space -- It's not like they do it because "Someone has to do it! And I will do it for humanity!" or something like that. You make it seem as though they are doing something that everyone else is too scared too do. No, they actually competed and won the opportunity into travel into space.
Maybe, a few of them hold the attitude of doing the job as a dangerous and selfless act for the good of humanity, but they are few and far between. Most of them as kids watched the first man step on the moon and spent the rest of their lives wanting to follow in his footsteps (no pun intended). I don't think the dangers are really part of their consideration -- just excitement and the prospect of a childhood dream and once-in a lifetime experience being fulfilled.
Go on then, put your name down. Whats stopping you?
There's the whole, "We don't have a manned Mars program" thing.
"I, for one, would definitely consider doing it if not to get off this dirtball planet."
Right, because Mars is a tropical paradise. Oh , wait...
Too many problems with humans as it stands, anyway. Give me all the video games, movies, tv shows and music that I want as well as companionship and I'll really think about it."
Yeah , course you would. Now hurry up, your mum is calling you for supper.
What would you do for mental stimulation for a year?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Seriously. Wouldn't it make sense to launch several unmanned "shipping containers" of food and supplies well ahead of the manned craft, set to land near the proposed landing site, and to continue to send such craft during the mission timeline? (I'm aware that Earth and Mars are both in motion and travel times vary, but given the long run-up to a manned mission, there would be a lot of viable windows to launch such "advance craft".) Make plans for at least one, if not more, such launches during the on-ground mission time period. (Also, include the most advanced 3-D printers of the time on the main craft, and backups on the "shipping containers", along with plenty of raw material to feed them. The odds of needing to create a spare part, or a custom tool, to deal with unexpected events are pretty darn good, and it's better to send "tools to make tools" than to try to guess what parts you're most likely to need a spare of.)
(Hell, while we're dreaming.... why not send some kind of self-assembling farm? I'm serious. Robot craft lands. It release a greenhouse-like structure that unfolds and assembles itself. It begins drawing water from the atmosphere -- there's not a LOT, but there's some -- or from the frozen ground (am I wrong, or is there evidence of lots of sub-surface ice locked in the soil? No time to check now...). When enough is gathered, it starts off a hydroponic process. As the plants produce oxygen, it's drawn off and stored, and CO2 is drawn from the surrounding Martian environment. Yes, I know sunlight is much dimmer on Mars. I do not think it's unreasonable that some plants can be found on Earth which can survive on lower levels of sunlight, or at least genetically engineered to do so. Even very simple plants can be processed into something edible, if not necessarily gourmet.)
I'm not claiming this technology exists off-the-shelf today, but nothing strikes me as beyond 10 years or so of focused development efforts. It shouldn't require breaking any laws of physics or lifter/booster technologies orders of magnitude beyond what we currently have. (Regular, incremental improvements in lightweight materials, genetic engineering, and robotics are safe predictions, as such things go. Expecting significant breakthroughs in the cost of getting anything into orbit is probably not a safe prediction, so it's best, to my mind, to think about "What's kind of stuff could we put in a payload in 10 years?" than "How can we lift a bigger payload in 10 years?")
Probably has more to do with lower than normal atmospheric pressure in the vehicle than gravity.
What I was thinking. Smelling something (and therefore tasting, somewhat) depends on molecules from that substance reaching your nose through the air. If the air pressure is lower, there are less molecules reaching your scent receptors. Just a thought. I have no idea how it really works.
I think it makes more sense to make it a one way journey. Front load a bunch of cargo ships with MRE's, Genesis type habitats, grow lights, batteries, solar panels, seeds, RTG's, and enough spare equipment to keep them going and tools to make all the spares they'll need. Give them a food buffer and the materials to start growing their own.
The next project would be to start using indigenous materials.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Why can't you? McDonalds figured this out 40 years ago, a Drive through. Actually, I'm patenting a Drive-Thru (In Space, on a mobile device) If it's a year and a half trip, send the first batch of food 1.5 years before leaving, the second 1 year before leaving, and the third 6 months before leaving. The first one lands on Mars, the other two are put in orbit around the sun in a straight (ish) line to mars. When the ship carrying people is 2-3 days out, accelerate the food to the speed of the ship so that they are travelling the same speed beside each other. Dock, and voila! Space Drive Thru
Probably the a similar thing to what happens on airplanes: http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/14/revealed-why-airline-food-tastes-so-bland/
Is 1563649 a prime number?
that sending a delivery vehicle every 6 months should be part of a mission to mars. And supplies should be sent ahead of the manned mission.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IN case they need food for a trip to another planet? No? then they probably have nothing to add. And by probably I mean, definitively.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
people have stayed in space for a year. plenty of those "flyboys" you admire have volunteered to do more. And like those in the "tin can" known as the ISS, they wouldn't be alone. Sane people do important dangerous work
Beta test on the moon not on Mars.
Beta test on the moon not on Mars.
Apollo was alpha.
A DS and like 50 games is a good start. Thats roughly the size of a shoebox. An e-reader with a memory card full of things is another good one. I assume communication with home would be on the agenda as well.
I would assume the others on the ship would make for good conversation as well.
2000 tons of fuel+oxidizer is not "some megatons". In fact it is closer to two kilotons. They're not "lighting that candle", they're riding the most expensive machine ever created, with much of the cost invested to improve its reliability.
It's still a lot less reliable, but these guys are not throwing their lives away as you imply.
TFA:
Can anyone suggest to me why powdered milk, and freeze-dried or liquid nitrogen frozen meat would not last for the three year voyage? One vendor freeeze-dired meat entrees claims they last 7 years: http://www.mtnhse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=M&Category_Code=MHDL
Is there some constraint that they are not telling us about?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
By the way, there will be no Mars mission, ever...
The United States is broke, seriously broke from losing two trillion-dollar wars (lost in the sense that the money is gone and the assholes are still car-bombing and slicing off the noses of teenage girls). And there was the trillion dollars used to bail out the banks 'too big to fail'. Not to mention the trillion dollars pissed away on the housing bubble. And several hundred billion that disappeared after the dot-com bubble. Not forgetting the 100 million 60+-year-old people about to incur serious medical expenses for the first time. And totally ignoring the economic disruptions from peak-oil and global warming.
Broke means no money for things like manned Mars missions. So plan them endlessly to the exacting detail, debate and discuss them forever on Slashdot. But don't ever delude yourself that manned Mars missions are ever actually going to happen.
Well, I'll do my part and volunteer for our non-existent Mars program! Does that make you feel better?
Part of designing a launch vehicle and a habitat plan will need to include sufficient storage space for food supplies. In order to know how much space your food supplies need, you will need to know what food will be included, thus the need to plan the menu.
Or are you suggesting that you don't need to know how much mass and volume your foodstuffs take when designing a launch/transport vehicle, and habitat?
And you don't think hiring people to design and manufacture the equipment for such a journey would create jobs?
Our economy is in the shitter and we're spending money building a menu for Mars?
Do we have a launch vehicle?
Do we have a lunch vehicle
A habitat plan?
We'll use Katrina trailers.
And I thought NASA didn't have enough money to support core missions.
And you thought wrong, the real space program won't be seen by the ordinary people. To believe that rocket fuels both solid and liquid, are the way to go, shows just how far the dumbing-down of the American people has succeeded. Critical thinking skills are basically non-existent.Believing incidences from the past have no relevancy today offers case after case of evidence to the contrary. 9/11, 7/7, Challenger accident, Columbia, Katrina as well as all the political crap, with nothing done as the order of business, demonstrates the gullibility of the general population.
As for the first question, more money is squandered in war, political cover-ups, crooked business dealings, government backing of Wallstreet gambling debts, with tax payer funding, Enron, the Banksters and yet, nobody in jail, makes NASA funding picayune.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
"On the other hand, you being one of the selfish bastards, you can rest assured I'm keeping you correctly accounted."
Not that this matters anymore.
(I'm going to need some more English lessons - or better yet, a geriatrician)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
You do realize there's this stuff called cloth, right? It can be washed. Women used it for the purpose you're concerned about for, oh, basically all of human history. It IS possible.
That said, hormones are much easier for all concerned, and it's not hard to find women who prefer NOT to bleed. There have been a number of studies done on the subject of long term hormone treatments suppressing a period, and it appears to have no ill effects. Then again, as with most women's health research, it was undoubtedly underfunded and underdone and could stand several followup studies. But still, indications are, it's safe.
Sure there will. It will be in roughly 50 years, and the astronauts will speak either Mandarin or Farsi.
Our economy is in the shitter and we're spending money building a menu for Mars?
Please quantify your objection. To help you with this, the current unit of government waste is bank bailouts, which replaced the previous unit (time spent in Iraq) in mid-2009.
So how many bank bailouts are we talking here?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
He has his hand.
If he gets bored, he has his other hand.
Worst comes to worst it is quite likely that the spacecraft will be packed with computer equipment and will have several TB of data containing books, games, videos and for the worst case scenario where someone is BORED there most likely will be a facility where he can go code or do actual work like scientific experiments.
Bored? No.
Go completely nuts? Sure
Where do I sign up?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Oh come on
Just declare in a newspaper somewhere that we are certain that there is gold on Mars and humans will be over there in any which way possible.
If that means that some government on the planet who does not have an aversion to strapping a nuclear reactor to several thousand tonnes of fuel and launching it into space to become the core energy generation system for our planet's interplanetary bus.. then it will happen.
Gold, I tell you, gold. Trust human nature to bypass all problems and concentrate on getting there and back. Greed and stupidity can solve just about any problem, in the same way that a hammer can solve just about any problem..
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
BTW, there are a whole bunch of people stopping me from going to Mars at the moment. It doesn't matter how much money you put on the table and hand to somebody like even Elon Musk, you simply can't get there from here without approval from the FAA. Actually simplify that. You simply can't get there from here, period.
I could go into the reasons why that is the case. It isn't a grand conspiracy so much as simply ineptitude on the part of the government and policy makers thinking that there is this one and only "space program" running everything in space, and changing the mindset that it may even be possible for a private individual to come up with their own way to get there. This issue has been debated in congressional hearings where members of congress simply laugh at the thought some private individual even could make it into space, in spite of bringing people like Dennis Tito or Richard Garriott to those hearings to show that a determined person can get into space on their own.
It should be embarrassing that a Russian company is sending private individuals into space, but America can't get the job done. Why is that?
Oh, as for Newton's 2nd & 3rd laws, it is really just energy. Yes, reaction mass is an issue, but if you send that reaction mass at a high velocity (say a significant fraction of the speed of light) you can go to a lot of places with not much mass. If you want to see an example of this, just look no further than the Dawn spacecraft that just left Vesta and is on its way to Ceres. That isn't pie in the sky crazy stuff, but real working hardware currently in use on an actual mission in progress. Other similar kinds of propulsion methods exist too, so it isn't really physics holding people back. Scaling up such systems is a trick, and ultimately it is simply a raw energy budget that is needed when designing such vehicles.
Obviously you have such a weak argument to counter anything I say that you must resort to an ad hominem attack on me. Nice to know that is the only possible response you can offer instead of a sound rebuttal.
The first thing I thought of, man I hope they have a really big beer fridge, 3 years of beer is gonna take up some serious room!
Then I thought, wow that is a lot of piss, though I suppose that could be mostly recycled into water etc....
Then I thought, 3 years of food? That is an awful lot of poo. Is the spacecrft going to be making regular dumps on route, or are they going to have some vaste resivoir of poo that they are going to cart along with them...
Then I thought, I kind of hope they do, though landing with the additional weight might be hard, but they might be able to use the poo as fertilizer to establish some greenhouse on Mars...
Of course if they are trying NOT to contaminate Mars with Earth stuff, that is probably not the way to go...
Do you really think you would've been safer jumping off the ship in the middle of the Atlantic in the 1800s, than being on a spaceship to Mars?
(Arguably now, IF you had some kind of rescue beacon and a life raft, theoretically they could find you with aircraft.. Still seems not much safer.)
Most banks repaid the government loans long ago, with interest. Some banks went through forced mergers... then the absorbing banks were punished with billion-dollar fines for the violations committed by the banks that were absorbed. Wachovia and Washington Mutual come readily to mind.
AIG cost the US government at least $200 billion. But AIG is not a bank. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac have cost the US government at least $238 billion; in return the government received assets of unknown value... though probably worth more than zero.
I guess I would like to know if there are any banks out there that still owe the US Treasury. Certainly there are some that are "underwater", but if they fail then the FDIC covers the losses, and the FDIC is financed by fees collected from banks.
I can't imagine there would be a shortage of volunteers for the one-way trip to Mars (assuming a well thought out, long-term plan), and we could do far more actual science if we were committed to long-term settlement.
I wouldn't volunteer as a 20-year old, but as a 60-year old? Hello Mars! :-)
Quoting from Monday's WSJ:
"The government says it has already made a profit on the emergency funds injected into banks at the time of the financial-industry bailout, and the Fed has fully recouped money spent on acquiring toxic assets from troubled companies.
The Treasury, which invested $245 billion in more than 700 banks, has so far collected $264.7 billion from its bank programs.
The New York Fed, meanwhile, has fully recouped $72.7 billion in loans that were used to buy toxic assets and has reaped gains of more than $5.2 billion so far."
on the other hand:
"Treasury still hasn't outlined a concrete strategy for exiting other large financial-crisis investments, such as those in mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and lender Ally Financial Inc. The government remains in the red on its investments in Fannie and Freddie, which have received $188 billion in taxpayer support. The U.S. continues to hold sizable stakes in General Motors Co. and Ally that it spent $68 billion on and may not fully recover."
So, if one is going to discuss bailouts and whether the money might be better spent on space exploration, let's be clear who or what has been bailed out.