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Dennis Tito's 2018 Mars Mission To Be Manned
Last Thursday, we discussed news that millionaire Dennis Tito was planning a private mission to Mars in 2018, but details were sparse. Now, reader RocketAcademy writes that Tito has provided more information about the tip, and that he intends the mission to be manned:
"Dennis Tito, the first citizen space explorer to visit the International Space Station, has created the Inspiration Mars Foundation to raise funds for an even more dramatic mission: a human flyby of the planet Mars. Tito, a former JPL rocket scientist who later founded the investment firm Wilshire Associates, proposes to send two Americans — a man and a woman — on a 501-day roundtrip mission which would launch on January 5, 2018. Technical details of the mission can be found in a feasibility analysis (PDF), which Tito is scheduled to present at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March. Former NASA flight surgeon Dr. Jonathon Clark, who is developing innovative ways of dealing with radiation exposure during the mission, called the flight 'an Apollo 8 moment for the next generation.'"
Whats the point? You're shoving many extra tons (between person and life support), and you have to put it on an orbit that brings it back home, and for a payload that can do little more than look out the window and go "ohh, pretty" while being irradiated for years outside of the protection of the Earth's magnetic field.
Even if the mission goes 100% to plan, the cancer risk alone is probably a death sentence for the two passengers.
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Stories like this sort of pisses me off. There are a lot cool things we could be doing if, as a nation, America used it's wealth for good instead of evil. But we'd rather spend trillions enriching the very few via wars/police state crap to prevent fewer deaths than dog bites cause (*), or on bailouts for the very rich and unscrupulous. What a fucking waste.
* http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/25/304113/chart-only-15-americans-died-from-terrorism-last-year-less-than-from-dog-bites-or-lightning-strikes/?mobile=nc
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The ship comes back with an extra passenger or two..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Landing and living on Mars might actually be safer than a cruise back to Earth and a 10g landing, after two years of microgravity. A better idea would be to send older people, land them on Mars and schedule resupply missions.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
sorry to burst your cum-bubble, but jizz and vag spoo and sweat dries very quickly.
Well, perhaps, but it will still be floating around unless it connects with a surface before it dries.
And if it does dry and continue to float about, will that be a respiratory issue?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
sorry to burst your cum-bubble, but jizz and vag spoo and sweat dries very quickly. The answer to your bukkake question is that it will be possible at a somewhat greater distance than on earth. the only thing left for you to fantasize about it how the place will *smell* after the mission is done. I find it ridiculous that they talk of sending a middle aged couple because of radiation concerns regarding sperm and egg, plenty of young couple opt to be made sterile by one means or another, tubal ligation or vasectomy or whatever. deep space porn rights could help offset cost of mission.....
Control of biological...undesireables... is actually a bit tricky in space. Lots of problems that just solve themselves when you have an entire planetary atmosphere to work with just don't when you have a few thousands or tens of thousands of liters of atmosphere along with whatever climate control you packed with it.
Both Mir and the ISS developed moderately nasty mold problems, and Mir even had a number of horrid water globules hiding behind rarely used access panels growing various vile slime.
It isn't obvious that sexual fluids would be worse than mere sweat(might actually be less troublesome, since there is a strong evolutionary imperative in favor of mechanisms that keep other microorganisms from hijacking our gene transfer mechanism for their own ends); but we know that mere sweat and exhaled water vapor are enough to really gross up the place.
The problem is that Earthrise is going to be kinda lame.
"Sort of cool, but..." sums it up. A moon landing mission launched 440 days after Apollo 8 splashed down, and there was hardly a great deal of media interest in Apollo 13 until the explosion. So a trip of 501 days could be a bit longer than our collective attention span.
Also Apollo 8 was part of a series of missions culminating in a moon landing less than a year later. And it wasn't competing with awesome robots wandering around and sending color pictures from the surface as the tourists whizzed past.
The sleeping quarters are going to look like a Jackson Pollock under the blue lights! Seriously, how do you cum on someone's face in zero G? If I'm doing it "doggy" and pull out right before I fire my huge load like a rocket, will the force blow me into the wall and hurt my back? And I mean, seriously, unless there is some kind of environment vacuum system to suck all the cum and sweat and other liquids out of the room space, by a few months into this thing, the whole place will be filled with free-floating globs of cum and pussy juice. On second thought, I'M IN!
I don't know if you've spent much time with a girl, but after a few weeks of constant contact with no breaks and no showers, there's not going to be a whole lot of sex going on.
I don't know if you've spent much time with a girl, but after a few weeks of constant contact with no breaks and no showers, there's not going to be a whole lot of sex going on.
On the contrary, it will me like rutting animals. There will be nothing else to do. In fact they should take the Kama Sutra and a video camera, and sell the rights to Vivid Entertainment... And of course they will have to sign up a couple who are HOT looking and so forth...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think the idea is to do only one incredibly hard thing at a time until you get it right. I hope I dumbed it down enough.
Build an automated city on Mars first. A habitat is needed so that people can land there and have something waiting. It would be even better if the automated city were busy harvesting water and splitting it into H2 and O2 for the return trip.
Before you do any of that, get international agreement that contamination of Mars is acceptable. Once humans land there, it's inevitable.
An "Apollo 8" for Mars just seems like a really bad idea.
Who's willing to pay for it? This guy is willing to fund a non-stop trip to mars and back, sounds like he just wants to see some man (and woman) reach mars before he dies.
If you want to fund an automated city on Mars, go for it - build a compelling case and shop the idea around to some billionaires and see if you can get it funded. That's probably easier than getting politicians to give NASA enough funds to do it.... or worse, trying to build an international coalition of national space agencies to do it.
IMHO, the tech for exploring Mars has to come from the mining industry. Yes. Mining. Start with ultra-automated mines on Earth. Then, Mars-adapt that technology and send it there. Ditto for construction. Come on miner/builder-bots guys, build us some Mars bots and get 'em on the job.
I don't know if you've seen earthbound ultra-automated mining but it's typically built of very heavy steel, not something you can easily get to Mars until asteroid mining is available (and this research is in-progress). Mines on earth of more interested in replacing human labor with machines so use big machines to process large quantities of materials.
How about instead of people, we send a few robots and some self-contained factories with which to build more.
Do that here, on Earth, first. It would be even easier, given that we know a lot about this planet. Make a robot that, once dropped off in, say, Himalayas, will do whatever is necessary to assemble another one. When that happens we will discuss flying such a robot to Mars.
IMO, it would be a challenge to even find one human - or one group of humans - who'd be able to pull that off. Many alternative history books were written where such scenarios are proposed, studied - and rejected as improbable. The threshold of building a factory that makes semiconductors is absurdly high. One robot, or one human, will not be able to do it. You have to bring up the whole technological civilization to just produce all the chemicals that go into manufacturing of semiconductors. A robot will need a few thousand years to spiral it up, starting with stone tools and likely having to invent unique technologies on the spot as it discovers new minerals and new environmental conditions.
Have they done a similar study for a Venus flyby? The launch dates might be more forgiving, the target a bit closer, the trip length might be a shorter and the delta-V requirements a bit less. Most important maybe the earth re-entry requirements would be a little less extreme. It is a 14km/sec aero-capture maneuver prior to re-entry that would, in some scenarios, put the vehicle in an elliptical, battery power only, 10-day trajectory beyond the moon (not to mention abusing the heat shield TWICE) just to reduce G-forces!. And there's only a 6km entry "window" between burn-up and bouncing off the atmosphere on an escape trajectory!
I mean since this trip is mainly a (very useful) test of long duration deep space flight with very limited "observation" of an already well-studied planet (there are currently three orbiters and two rovers on Mars), does it really matter which planet we flyby? Since the trajectory for this mission already takes it inward almost to Venus' orbit, they will be exposed to the same levels of solar heat (and radiation). Mars is, of course, more relevant for future long term exploration but other than the P.R. value there is not much more that would be gained over going to it versus Venus.
On the other hand, if somebody forks up the money for this tomorrow, please ignore everything I said. Mars or bust!
you mean they're sending Silvio Berlusconi up there?
Why not just send one person? You only have to take half the food, your tiny space is less cramped, and the mental pressures of being isolated can't be worse than those of being stuck in a tiny room with someone for two years.
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