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Could We Abort a Manned Mission To Mars?
StartsWithABang writes: The next great leap in human spaceflight is a manned mission to a world within our Solar System: most likely Mars. But if something went wrong along the journey — at launch, close to Earth, or en route — whether biological or mechanical, would there be any way to return to Earth? This article is a fun (and sobering) look at what the limits of physics and technology allow at present.
If you're interested in a hard sci-fi, near-future look at how a catastrophic Mars mission might go, you should read an excellent novel called The Martian by Andy Weir.
"The Martian" by Andy Weir is one of the best SF books I've read, and I highly recommend it. Even if you're not into SF, if you're a member here, there's a good chance you'll like it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Yes, the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria could've gone back home - so could the Mayflower (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm pasty white, etc.)
It's a lot harder to do that with a spacecraft if you know you need the Oberth effect of your destination to make it home.
So? A poll was done a while ago indicating that a lot of qualified people would go if they had 1 chance in 2 of surviving.
The only safe ship is the one that never leaves harbor...
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
The first mission or two is probably no return anyway so who cares if you can't abort?
I'd still sign on in a heartbeat.
We need to be WAY less cautious about manned space travel again, we aren't going to do much of import at this pace.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
TFA was neither "fun" nor "sobering". I want my 10 minutes back.
We're all going to die some day.
You can die on Earth like billions of people before you have.
Or you can die IN SPACE!!!
Personally, I'd choose to die IN SPACE.
Seriously, that's just fucked up. I shouldn't have to tell you this, but a good parent would want their kids to experience what life has to offer right here on Earth. Doing what is best for your kids means letting go of your flights of fancy and realizing that your higher calling to the betterment of humanity is already right in front of you: raising your own members of the next generation.
I would gladly go to Mars even if there was less than a 50% chance of survival. Why? I was born without a survival instinct.
If we can barely afford the delta-v to change course and return to Earth with a few grams extra payload on board (this takes two years), we're not going to be able to make Mars orbit and return without a massive exploration vehicle, the size and scale of which would be unprecedented in human history.
If you're interested in a hard sci-fi near-future look at how a non-catastrophic, well planned mission with unforgettable personalities and epic adventures, I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy: Red, Blue, Green Mars. There's catastrophe in there too but it occurs only occasionally.
There's more "things go wrong... in spaaace!" novels and movies than you can shake a stick at. During these boring space creature features I wind up doing a freeze frame on the movie.
I then mentally leave the room and walk around down the space station's corridors, look out the windows, maybe browse the tech manuals for the station. Then I key up some popular music these people of the future listen to, go to the space john (not much has changed) and visit the hydroponics bays. Have some lunch. If it's a lunar colony I don a suit and go play some golf, take a buggy ride. Then I strap on wings and climb the giant trees that fill the dome and jump off and fly.
Eventually I mentally return to the room that is frozen in time on the screen, take a deep breath and un-pause the movie. And the gallant characters resume their battle with the Space Menace and mostly become eaten or horribly killed and all the precious equipment becomes ruined in the process and everything blows up.
Life can be lonely sometimes when you're not into the things that other people enjoy.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
We need to make the all the planets a lot lighter. (This is the solution the KSP designers used.)
[citation needed]
I think we will never achieve a great leap forward until we come to terms with the fact that what is holding us back from leaping forward is the irrational notion that we need to send flesh for a mission to be legitimate. Sending human flesh to another planet is about as useful long term as sending frozen steak or a banana. We don't insist on using only our hand when building a house: we use tools and machinery. In fact, it is said that the thing that separates us from other species is our tool making. We make tools to achieve the things we want to do, and to advance and make our lives better. The tools for exploring outer space are unmanned probes, robots, machines. Machines that don't require flesh in situ to make them work. 10000 years ago, flesh was needed to dig a hole. Now, we use a back hoe. We don't think of a hole dug by a back hoe as somehow suspect because we didn't dig it by hand. Why is space travel subject to these artificial constraints? Sure: Before the age of computers we didn't imagine machines could be sufficiently autonomous to enable them to be effective, long term in space. But now, we know better. In the 1960s, it was thought the future lay with sending humans into space to move levers. Now, we know better. The humans are just inert luggage. Let's go luggage free.
Do yourself a favor, list to it on audiobook. It is narrated by R. C. Bray. who does a fantastic job. It was one of the few times where the I found audiobook more entertaining than when I read it.
Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes!
The only safe ship is the one that never leaves harbor...
Not even then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
There are loads of examples of ships sinking in harbor or while tied to docks.
That the thing about life, it's just too damn easy to die and there isnt any way to prevent it. So, may as well risk it.
Hell, you could be killed by space sitting in your chair at home!
http://ascendingstarseed.wordp...
We still don't have a station orbiting the moon. We don't have a station on the moon. We don't have a sustainable system within our own lunar orbit.
The only reason a Mars mission is one way is because we insist on building the vehicles and launching from Earth.
The cost of launching from earth is much higher than from space because we have to break Earth's gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
We picked on India for making it to Mars by basically cutting corners and just slingshotting a chunk of cheap crap at Mars and then said "ours costs more because we're more conservative". What's our response? Throw a huge expensive chunk of metal at Mars to prove we do it better.
Build the next space station already. Build it big and ship it people and supplies and do it there. If we cat accomplish that, we don belong in space.
Abort might be just the right term. Sure we can abort a mission to Mars. Simply put an explosive under the pilot's seat. But we can't simply halt such a mission and save the occupants or the capsule carrying them.
I just fucked your sister, then dumped her. Enjoy your new niece or nephew!
A misogynist nerd, I see. Were you part of the dead "gamer" subculture? Still mad at the Real World for destroying your little playground? Well, get used to it. We're about to push you into a corner first, smash all your toys next and drag you kicking and screaming out of your basements into the harsh sunlight and jeer at you.
We should always practice safe space exploration.
I agree with this one. This series would be in my top five of all time.
However, even in case of catastrophe, it means that, what, six people die who signed up for this voluntarily and made history already?
On a mission like that, your might survive one major thing going wrong, but the second mishap will kill you. You can't duct-tape your way out of misfortune after misfortune in space.
See Apollo 13. One thing went wrong, and it took all the engineering and duct-taping skills (literally) to get the crew back alive.
Obama already aborted a bunch of NASA things only to make everyone start all over again while the senior NASA staff who remember the glory days all bail out into the private sector.
Because space is mostly empty, and extremely hostile.
Given the technology available 500+ years ago so was North America: freezing cold winters, strange plants, new diseases etc. Indeed the available technology was barely able to match the challenge and some early colonies failed. However once there, as our knowledge of the new environment and our technology improved it became easy to survive there.
Isn't space exactly the same? Our technology is barely up to the job of keeping us alive on Mars and I expect some of the early colonies will fail. However given time it is likely that survival will become easier and there is a good chance to discover new resources which Earth lacks and which might be very useful in the future e.g. helium-3 on the moon.
It seems that many people - for no apparent good reason - think that a moon or Mars colony will lead to the warp drive.
I'm not sure I would argue that it will lead to "warp drive" given the major scientific hurdles but I expect it will lead to much, much better rocket technology. Once we have human beings on another planet who are producing an important resource we want here on Earth you have all the makings of interplanetary trade which will provide a fantastic incentive to develop cheaper ways to get there.
Sail was the power used for centuries. Initially boats had to hug coasts and only later did we develop the technology needed to take sails across oceans: developments motivated by wanting faster, better ships for trade. Why not the same with rockets?
...the irrational notion that we need to send flesh for a mission to be legitimate.
Why are we interested in exploring space at all if the goal is not to eventually have humans living off-planet? We can use robots for lots of things but ultimately the aim of exploration is to find new places to live and new resources to exploit to propagate the species. Hence the interest in manned missions. That's not to say that unmanned missions are not legitimate: they are absolutely essential but we need to develop, and practice, manned technology as well.
We could not abort such a mission whatsoever. As soon as the journey starts, its a one way ticket. even if everything looks good on paper but you miss by a slight margin the right orbital catch, you are hooped. One way ticket :) But that will NOT stop humans from wanting to do it. Not by a wide mile. We hope everything will go right but if it doesnt, death is simply a learning lesson for the next group that attempt it. hundreds of thousand of people are willing to die in their cause, and no i'm not talking about muslims ready to become martyrs :) This cause is noble and worthy and humans have no fear to make mars our collective bitch.
Earth has no more undiscovered continents, no more unexplored territory, and no more absolute wilderness.
Earth has vast amounts of mostly unexplored territory. The 3/4 of the Earth's surface that is covered by water has only barely been explored. Sure, there are bits and pieces of dry land that haven't been explored yet though those are disappearing quickly. But right now we really don't have the technology to explore the oceans comprehensively. I think people tend to forget about the oceans and how vast they really are.
Please note this isn't an argument against going into space. We absolutely should. I'm merely pointing out that there is actually quite a bit of the Earth that we don't know very much about.
What is the difference between sending humans, with all their implications, vs. instruments and engines to get them there?
The differences are vast. It's the same difference as standing on a mountain versus looking at a post card. Sometimes machines are necessary but more often they are a poor proxy.
Why is the human part so important to science?
There is some exploration that has to be done in person. There are some questions that cannot be answered without sending people to answer them. Questions like "are we stuck on this planet"?
And at what cost, to everyone who must pay real money for the expedition, (...never minding the folks who volunteered their 'free time'/lives to go up first)?
The cost of space exploration has paid itself back economically multi-fold. The spinoff technologies alone are worth billions to trillions of dollars. Even the most conservative estimates of economic benefit of NASA and other space exploration research has a 3X-8X return on investment. The question isn't why should we be investing in space travel. The question is why aren't we investing more?
For an oceanographer, saying "I have no idea what's there" is a sign that you haven't done your research
Untrue. The oceanographer is simply being candid. Sure they are not completely ignorant but they also know enough to know their is a lot more to be discovered. They are simply stating the obvious fact that there is a lot of territory to be explored and we haven't explored very much of it in any great detail. They are saying they are like Christopher Columbus who has learned some fascinating things about this new continent while standing on the beach but there is a lot more to be learned. If they claimed they understood it perfectly that would be false because they've barely gotten off the beach (literally).
Because space is mostly empty, and extremely hostile. There's no rational reason for anybody to go there.
There are plenty of rational reasons to go there. Not all of them are economically rational. None of them are without some amount of danger. But the notion that there is no rational reason to go into space is easily and demonstrably false. Off the top of my head:
1) Scientific discovery, particularly as it relates to the human body in hostile environments
2) Technology development
3) Preserving the species (the Earth will cease to be habitable at some point)
4) Curiosity (simple curiosity is rational if risky)
5) Economic development (space R&D has a multi-fold economic payback)
6) Because the experience of standing on another planet is as different as standing on a mountain versus looking at a post card
The Earth is thoroughly mapped, explored, photographed, populated, and exploited. There are no frontiers or mystery here any more.
Complete and utter nonsense. We are discovering things about the Earth daily. We've barely explored the 3/4 of the earth that is under water. We know a lot but there is a lot left to learn right here on Earth and for the foreseeable future Earth is exactly where we are going to learn because we have limited options regarding space travel right now. Our technology is simply not advanced enough to send people much farther than the moon a present and even that is a stretch.
There's an enormous unexplored solar system out there vastly bigger and more interesting than Earth.
And we should explore that too. Doesn't make your previous statement any less false.
I honestly don't understand the mentality of people who aren't curious about it and don't want to go explore it.
I understand it but like you I don't agree with it. We should be exploring space with as much enthusiasm as we can generate as a species. It will take courage and vision and an appetite for risk but the long term payback is almost certainly there. (and I'm not just talking about money either)
Robot operators have a lag time of a millisecond. They just need to get a little smarter, but we're working hard on that.
Not on mars they don't. Not when being operated from earth. Average latency to send a bit of data to mars is around 13 minutes in each direction. Sometimes longer depending on where the earth is in its orbit in relation to mars. The speed of light is fast but mars is really really far away.
I hear that said a lot, but is it really true?
Probably yes.
Could a human crew carry more scientific equipment than Curiosity did?
Wrong question. You have to get the equipment there either way. The question is what can you do with the equipment once you get it there. Presently the state of the art in robotics is such that we are pretty limited in what we can do with equipment once we get it there. Generally speaking people can usually do a lot more in a short amount of time than even the most state of the art automation unless it is highly repetitive. It's exactly the same problem we have in automating factories here on earth. Automation can be extremely useful but for most tasks we still have no better or more flexible tool than a competent human being.
Keep in mind that even the most basic manned mission is gonna cost so much money you could send 50 curiosity rovers there.
And the R&D payback will probably be 100X as large on a manned mission. People focus too much on the mission cost without considering the full economic picture. Remember that you have to develop a LOT more technology for a manned mission and much of this technology is applicable elsewhere.
Why the hurry? It's not like Mars is going anywhere.
Why the delay? You have something better to do? What could possibly be a better use of your time than the greatest exploration mankind has ever undertaken?
Plus, the robots have a lot of autonomy. They move around obstacles pretty much by themselves, with only occasional help.
I think you are grossly underestimating the amount of hand holding going on from mission control here on Earth.
Except we need to colonize space.
No we don't. There is a vast difference between the things you want (in the manner of a little girl wanting a unicorn), and the things that humanity needs (food, shelter et. al). We aren't going to spend trillions of dollars genetically modifying a horse to make a species of unicorn just because some little girl wants one. The same applies to your desire to see a space colony.
No, we're not doing human level science on Mars. Opportunity, the previous generation rover, has taken 10 years to travel 25 miles. Which is only slightly further than how far the Lunar Rover for Apollo 17 travelled (22 miles) over the course of 4.5 hours.
Notably, when the Apollo astronauts wanted to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time they used a machine. If we built the Lunar Rover today and attached modern guidance software and some cameras/LIDAR it would, again, travel 40 kms in 4.5 hours. It's speed had nothing to do with the humans aboard.
"It's a one-way trip, at least for now" don't these people get? One-way trips don't have a return leg, that's what makes them one-way. Really, is this so hard to understand?
The question arises I think from equating a trip to Mars to a car trip to some distant vacation destination. If there's a problem you simply turn the car around. However once you are travelling in space at 10 miles/second there's no turning around. You don't have the fuel. And carrying enough fuel to allow an aborted attempt raises the cost so much, you will delay the launch to Mars by a century.
Aborting a mission to Mars is easily done.
Up until the rockets fire.
We could easily abort a manned mission to Mars.
We just cancel the launch.
If they've gone past more than the initial Earth-Lunar escape, however, the way you abort the mission is you vent the oxygen tanks remotely, after triggering the failsafe protocol.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A good explanation of the limits of current interplanetary flight. Basically, once you leave low earth orbit you're committed.
Returning to Earth assumes that the craft carries a landing module capable of Earth landing. A Mars lander would be built differently (and less substantially) because of the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere on Mars. Mostly likely the aborted mission would have to wait in LEO until another craft could launch from Earth to bring the people down.
Worked my way through "Red Mars" ; not feeling any particular desire to order Blue or Green. OTOH, if I found myself imprisoned on an oil rig (which happens several times a year, for up to several months at a time) with nothing else to read, I'd probably not be too upset. That's not going to happen, because I'm the only SF fan who takes books out for the rig's library.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
If an astronaut dies during a mission, does the survivors have a plan for ejecting the bod into space? One has to consider the necessity, nicht war?
They go downhill, the first is the best.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Not encouraging. Cheers for the summary.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"