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The Strangeness of the Mars One Project
superboj sends an article written after its author investigated the Mars One Project for over a year. Even though 200,000 people have (supposedly) signed up as potential volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars, there are still frightfully few details about how the mission will be accomplished. From the article:
[Astronaut Chris Hadfield] says that Mars One fails at even the most basic starting point of any manned space mission: If there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, if you don’t know the very dimensions of the capsule they will be traveling in, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it. "I really counsel every single one of the people who is interested in Mars One, whenever they ask me about it, to start asking the hard questions now. I want to see the technical specifications of the vehicle that is orbiting Earth. I want to know: How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled. What’s the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist. You can’t just go to SpaceMart and buy those things."
The author concludes that the Mars One Project is "...at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work."
The minute they said there was an application fee it should have been obvious.
That, plus the tiny size of the team, the handwaving away of all technical problems to subcontractors, and the bizarre funding ideas, should have warned people off long ago. Sadly the regular newsmedia, in their admirable efforts to publish fun and interesting science storise, were duped.
It really is an example of the effects of authority and herd behavior. They first approached a number of prominent science/tech figures and asked them to endorse it. Turns out, if you approach a large enough number of people with a crazy idea, a few will by chance support it, especially if you keep the details hidden. Then this was enough for the avalanche of followers and news reports to start.
Do we have the technology to get to Mars? Depends on who you ask. NASA already has the plans on the drawing board. They just don't have the money. And that's the sticking point. There is absolutely no way you are going to get the $100 billion required for a Mars mission by producing a freaking reality show.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I am torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I agree with the submission's stance. Those things are custom engineered to perform optimally in the specific problem domain they are engineered for. A space suit worn to do EVAs wont work on mars, or vice versa.
The habitats need to be designed with all manner of ergonomic considerations; people will live the rest of their lives inside the damned thing. They need to be designed to withstand constant ablation by blowing sand and fine particulate dusts. They need to have door seals that are up the the task. They need to have robust circuitry that can withstand the increased intensity of solar storm radiation, since mars lacks a comprehensive global magnetosphere. So many things need to be engineered for, purpose built for the specific tasks at hand, and built to not only last, but last a lifetime, or longer.
On the other hand, the nature of this kind of mission makes it toxic to any world government that would actually be able to accomplish it properly. No politician in this universe wants to be the one who willfully signs the death certificates of highly trained, highly intelligent and skilled people. That's what a manned mission to mars would be. It would require much more than the vertical thrust booster used by the LLM in the 60s to get the crew back to the command module. It would take another complete lower stage rocket. Unless you want to soft-land something that weighs millions of tons, filled with highly volatile propellant on mars so that the crew can get back into space again after the mission period is over, you are planning a one-way trip, and that means consigning those people to die up there.
Politically, a proper mars mission is a non-starter.
That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths. People that dont mind if people die, and dont care about being associated with signing that check. Corporate America, and those similarly aligned to the all mighty dollar.
Sadly, that same sociopathy means that any such mission will be done with duct tape, bailing wire, and discount bubblegum wrappers. Lowest bidder on everything. Minimum training for the mission personnel. A mission that, if it succeeds, it would be a statistical anomaly.
I am conflicted.
I want people to get off this planet. But at the same time, I want them to get there safely, properly, and with the tools they need to actually have a chance to pull it off.
I agree with the article author, that the lack of meaty information about this project is not something that instills confidence. By now, the first round of selectees should be getting initial training. Where are they being trained, and what are they being taught? Did they even get out of their homes yet?
Who knows.
Exactly. I don't think that humans will go to Mars to remain there until robotic missions have essentially built and distilled and mined and refined enough to make the human settlement functional to the point that it runs without the human presence stressing the systems. It's going to be like remotely building a combination aircraft carrier and submarine on another planet with a communications loop of 20 minutes.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
political freedom for starters.
I stand astounded. Whatever makes you think that living on Mars will bring political freedom? How are those ideas even connected?
Everything about Mars suggests that political freedom is virtually impossible. You will not be able to pay the cost of your transfer to Mars (including the tons of food and supplies needed to keep you alive there). This means that to convince someone to pay for your trip to Mars, they will require something from you in return. The basis of life on Mars is obligation - your obligation to the government or company that paid for you to travel there.
In addition there is the issue that nobody on Mars will have any money or any means to make money. There is no resources , no soil to grow crops, no infrastructure to support primary industry or manufacturing. At best people might trade the various things they brought from earth. And themselves (i.e. prostitution), although the notion of sex will be less attractive after the radiation sickness kicks in.
Mars will be like prison, without any chance of escape. Linking life on Mars with political freedom is simply laughable.
Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.
It might not have occurred to you that you caused that orwellian state. Who is to blame for the state of Western democracy but ourselves? In which, you will just take that corruption with you to Mars. Unless you view yourself and coincidentally your fellow travellers as somehow more enlightened than the rest of us - do you think that?