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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.
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
Really? You go all the damn way to Mars and then stay in the car when you get there?
Because going to the surface, living on the surface, and launching off the surface is really hard, and really expensive, and requires a lot of engineering and solving a lot of problems that we haven't yet solved. We don't know how to land something on Mars that's as large as a human habitat. This will take some work. Landing on Mars is going to be a very expensive mission.
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing... that might be a very powerful incentive to try to get that technology made and actually land on the next mission.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.