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Planetary Society Pushes For Mars Orbital Mission Before NASA Landing
MarkWhittington writes The Planetary Society announced Thursday the results of the "Humans Orbiting Mars" workshop that brought in a number of space experts to develop helpful suggestions for how NASA can fulfill its mandate to send humans to Mars in the 2030s and return them safely to the Earth. The plan is to send a mission to orbit Mars in 2033 in advance of the landing mission in the late 2030s. The workshop believes that this could be done for a NASA budget that increases about two percent a year after the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2024.
ISS2 will do a single transit to and from Mars, possibly with time spent in a highly eccentric orbit around Mars, waiting for the return launch window. Russia will have to built their own space station which will presumably be MIR2.
The second mission may deploy a small vehicle to test aero-braking at Mars, and a landing on one of the moons. Maybe landing on the third mission?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Really? You go all the damn way to Mars and then stay in the car when you get there? That just sounds wrong on the surface of it. Like going to the Grand Canyon and then staying in the car in the parking lot. Maybe just send the lander module on ahead, confirm it is orbiting properly, let the crew module come later and dock up and send down the lander. Anything but drive there and come back without getting out to look around.
But this is a lot longer trip and a much greater up front cost.
At the very least they should should have a remote-controlled lander to execute a land, launch and recover exercise to verify that they can pull somebody back out of the gravity well
And, perhaps a series of launches with a 6 month separation so that they can create a Mars orbiting space station
Oh, and just in case you didn't see this POS from Wired
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/b...
Bill Nye is no Leslie Knope, he rocks much harder!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Clearly, they know nothing.
So by my math that would not be 2% (which is the 'small' amount they want you to see). That is ~35% increase in 15 years. That seems reasonable if inflation holds and priorities are the same. However, it is a bit disingenuous...
The real problem is not NASA. It is them being jerked around over and over. Then outsourcing everything to other companies that only have 1 customer of NASA.
Sounds like they have a great idea. They should Kickstarter that and get the project started!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why not send an unmanned habitat lander? Something that lands, deploys a habitat, then monitors the performance of that habitat and the health of the return vehicle *before* committing a crew? Knowing that they have a safe and established home base on Mars and a ride ready to take them back home would add some redundancy and encouragement to the crew. If a meteorite crashes into the habitat or an Exogorth eats it, the crew aborts the landing and returns home.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Cool. I've been proposing this for years.
http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa....
http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa....
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
By 2030 Elon and SpaceX may have already landed people on the surface. Maybe not a huge settlement or anything, but an outpost. Going all the way without landing is kinda silly.
Isn't Musk far ahead of this schedule? So far as I can remember his time for getting a man on Mars is 15 years on the outside.
There is no half way. There are no viable one way missions. If you're going to send humans to Mars, then send humans to Mars and bring them back.
It's hard enough for any project to live more than 2 years at NASA -- "a second mission sometime in the mid 2030s" is likely to be just as canceled as the previous visions of getting to Mars which would have had us there last decade.
As NASA is publicly funded, and as the public is fickle, NOTHING less than a human walking on Mars within our lifetimes, with further trips to follow is going to convince us, the taxpayers, to not begrudge the 50 cents a day we spend on NASA's budget.
Nothing short of an inspired public (and leaders brave enough to inspire the public) will get us funded to bootstrap ourselves into space, if this is to be done by a public agency.
Declare war on Mars! All of a sudden, the budget will be 40x larger!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is dumb. We took baby steps to the moon because it was only three days away (and we were not sure what the surface was actually like). With our current level of technology Mars is still like fourteen months away (one way). Why go all that way, take a look, and travel fourteen months back to Earth? We know plenty about what the surface is like having sent many landers and rovers. We don't need a practice run, the only reason to send men to Mars is to LAND!
The US Federal government won't be solvent by then; the millions of knees and hips our elderly voting class are spending our future on guarantee this. These are pipe dreams, every bit as much as Russia's never ending series of pipe dreams.
There are a lot of different pieces required to go to Mars, land, and return. Some of these, like a habitat that humans can live in for the required transit to Mars and back, we have, or at least, we can make with only small modifications to what has been developed (the Space Station). Some of them, like landers and habitats and space suits for use on the Martian surface, we don't have. Every one of these pieces is a potential bottleneck for a human mission.
What you are basically saying is, we should delay Mars exploration with humans until we have all the pieces developed. The Planetary Society is saying, no, let's not delay, let's do a mission we can do now
The longest usage we have gotten out of a space suit on the moon is three eight-hour walks. The report from the Apollo missions was that the suits were trashed by that point (lunar dust is very abrasive)-- they would not have been usable for another use. Mars dust is not as abrasive as lunar dust, but it is much finer. A different problem. Do you want to send humans to Mars if you then have to tell them "oh, by the way, you'll be on the surface for 500 days, but you can only go outside three times. After that we're not sure your suits will still hold pressure, so stay inside."
Of course, we can develop and test suits for Mars. Developing and testing is something we're good at. But there are a hundred pieces that have to be developed and tested, and only so much budget.
So the question is, do we want to delay, until all the parts for landing and habitation and launching back from Mars have been developed and tested? Or do we go now, doing what we can with what we can do?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The money you spend on a Mars orbit mission sets you up for landing on Mars by developing and testing a critical portion of the technology, the part that gets humans to Mars orbit and back.
Taking the first step gets you one step closer to Mars.
If you waited to take you first step until you were ready to run a marathon, you'd never stand up at all.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing...
...it would be a stupid waste of billions of dollars. Humans can't do anything from Mars orbit a machine
[can't do much better.]
Actually, right at the moment, that's not true-- humans are vastly more capable than robots. I'm quite supportive of robots, but a human geologist could do in a day what it takes the Mars rovers a month to do.
(specially a 2030s machine)
Ah, now that's the question. Robots are evolving much more quickly than humans. What will the machines be able to do in 2030?
(will they need us at all? for anything?)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There is no reason to go to mars just to say we did that. I want to see a real function, not just a stunt. I think we should be on mars, and it should have been done 20 years ago, but for whatever reason, it didin't happen.
People on mars is like going back in time on earth to a time before any civilization existed, only there is no water, no air, no supply, no help. We are not ready because there has not been any effort, and the effort should have been done 20 years ago.
Now we need to send robots that can find and refine water and fuel, build shelters, refine materials for construction and manufacturing, and since all that takes practice and experiance and knowledge because it has never been done before, it needs to be done right here on Earth first. If it can't be done here, then there is no reason to send it there. Once we can do it here, the moon is the next logical step. Then we can establish a mining colony and use the resources there.
Otherwise this entire plan is nothing but a waste of money, and the governments do far too much of that already as they cry and whine that they need more and more money from us.
15 years to land humans on Mars? Get real. It won't happen until the 2050s if not much later.
If history taught us anything, taking the current political climate into consideration, it's more likely for another war to break out in 15 years. Every century will experience war 3 or more times and it usually happens at the beginning, middle and nearing the end of said century. Don't believe me? Wait 15 years and then come back to this reply.