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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
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!
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.
Musk needs a customer. Even his massive wealth can't cover a joy ride to Mars.
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