U.S. House Wants 'Sustained Human Presence On the Moon and the Surface of Mars'

MarkWhittington writes "Politico reports in a June 18, 2013 story that House Republicans have added a Mars base to its demands for a lunar base in the draft 2013 NASA Authorization bill. Both the Bush-era Constellation program and President Obama space plan envisioned eventual human expeditions to Mars. But if Politico is correct, the new bill will be the first time an official piece of legislation will call for permanent habitation of the Red Planet. The actual legislative language states, 'The [NASA] Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon and the surface of Mars.'"

Comments

Cool, let's send Congress first.

[Uniquitous]

The moon, Mars, deep space... just get them off this planet and out of our hair ASAP.

Unfunded mandate?

[jandrese]

I don't suppose the house is planning to actually pay for the enormous expense of putting a permanent human colony on a different planet? They just want NASA to stop everything else that they're doing and start making manned Mars rockets? Is it any wonder NASA struggles with long term projects, with Congress meddling every year with crazy ideas and budget uncertainty?

Re:Unfunded mandate?

[the eric conspiracy]

I'm surprised the House admits to the existence of Mars and the Moon as separate bodies in space rather than being lights in a crystal sphere around the Earth.

Re:Unfunded mandate?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

rather than being lights in a crystal sphere around the Earth.

Around!? You do realize that in order to even conceive this notion, they'd first have to make a bold leap of thought regarding the sphericity of our humble middle realm of existence? There aren't many things I would put past them but I think you're too much of an optimist.

Re:Unfunded mandate?

[ColdWetDog]

Actually, NASA has done a shitload of stuff since Apollo. They have been doing long term, small scale research on a whole raft of subjects including plain ol planes. They've organized some pretty impressive technology for the Mars / Jupiter / Saturn unmanned probes. They've kept the ISS up and running.

All of this isn't as sexy as the Shuttle or Apollo programs and NASA would be glad to ramp up it's efforts had it been given some decent long term funding and had Congress resisted the urge to micromanage everything. There have been setbacks of course. The James Webb Telescope/a) (successor to the Hubble) is over budget and over time. Sometimes rocket science is hard.

Given the constraints they have had to work under, I'm surprised they get anything done.

Re:no

[jellomizer]

Like...
Encouraging children to get into STEM Degrees. The moon landing back in the 1960's but a large boom into these careers. Although a small portion of them will be working on the space missions. The interest in these things as a kid will make them far more interested in the topics. Getting kids interested in Science Technology Engineering and Math, will help them get off their butts go to college and get in less serious trouble.

Our Environment. Sure launching a rocket into space take huge amounts of carbon. But to figure out how to get people to survive and thrive on the Moon and Mars (extremely harsh conditions, and little energy sources) will create technology that we can use here on earth. Hey that solar panel on the moon can keep a small city running with a half a month of darkness, means on earth we could at least get it to run half a small city. Plus it will need to be small and light to get there. Extracting Drinking water out of the brimy pools on mars, would help us get drinking water out of our oceans and deserts.

Agriculture, these people will need to be self sufficient, in a bubble, imagine what we could do with these ideas on earth.

Health Care. The people in colonies on the Moon and Mars can get sick, we will need to find new procedures to fix these problems. They can be transferred back to earth as a cheaper solution to many problems.

Those are just a few.

we've seen this before on bullshit mountain

[nimbius]

1. insist the US Postal Service implement pension funding 75 years into the future with no known revenue source to do so, as we cannot directly defund it. pretend companies like UPS and FedEx actually want to deliver bulk mail in place of the postal service but are in fact incumbered by its existence.
2. insist NASA pursue permanent manned installations on the moon and mars despite the fact its orders of magnitude more expensive than current unmanned operations. pretend companies like SpaceX are somehow encumbered by the existence of NASA.

Do it... but do it right

[steveha]

I want to see mankind spread out into the solar system, and ideally I'd like to see the USA at the head of it all. So I'm not unsympathetic toward the idea.

But I really want to see the space program get done correctly. So far, every trip to the moon has been via a single-use rocket, completely used up for the one trip. It made sense when we were trying to win a race, but it also meant we hadn't built out the infrastructure.

The right way to do things: build a truly reusable space vehicle, often called a "space pickup truck". Proposed heavy lift vehicles are more like a "space moving van", and they will have their uses, but what we need more than anything else is a spacecraft that can fly and fly and fly some more with minimal maintenance.

We want a craft that can fly to orbit, return, and then go again tomorrow. It might need some maintenance overnight but it should be as little as possible. The space shuttle needed man-centuries of work between flights... we can do far better than that.

Single-stage would be ideal, but two-stage might be easier to get going... just make sure both stages are reusable and don't need too much maintenance. Cargo capacity need not be huge... it would be cheaper to fly things up in multiple small loads on a truly reusable craft, than to build, launch, and use up a single heavy-lift vehicle.

Once we have the "space pickup truck" we need to build a transportation hub in Earth orbit. It would have emergency Earth return vehicles docked, would have lots of supplies (fuel, water, oxygen, food, etc.) and would have staff on board all the time.

Once you have all the above? The moon becomes trivial. Build a "moon shuttle" that could be basically a couple of fuel tanks and engines bolted to a frame, with some sort of shielded crew compartment and a lunar lander docked to it. It need not be pretty and it need not be tough because it will never land anywhere.

Ideally, also we should build a "space cannon" system that can shoot things into space. This would be the cheapest way to send up inert things like oxygen and fuel, or even dried food and tough electronics. And humans living in space will need serious radiation shielding... the cannon could possibly send up lots of shielding mass.

Imagine how expensive it would be to deliver cargo from America to Australia if we had to do it by building a single-use cargo missile. With modern aircraft the dominating factor is fuel costs. If we could get space travel costs down to chiefly the cost of fuel that would be a massive reduction in costs.

"come on Charlie Brown, kick the football..."

[Thud457]

and I want a pony.
a unicorn pony.
a well-hung unicorn pony.

Until these nimrods in congress actually come up with the funding for this, and given their history of cancellations, up front, this is just useless wheel-spinning that might fund a few shoestring studies that go nowhere. We'd get to Mars sooner if we put the project on Kickstarter than waiting for congress to fund it.