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Can The Martian Give NASA's Mars Efforts a Hollywood Bump?
Flash Modin writes: NASA has poured considerable time and resources into Ridley Scott's The Martian — perhaps more than any other movie in history — going so far as to time a Mars human landing site selection workshop to coincide with the film. Jim Green, NASA's head of planetary sciences, was one of the consultants, with other astronomers fact checking every aspect of the set and script. The rockets, modules, and space suits were built — and 3-D printed — with heavy guidance from NASA. The filmmakers even hired Rudi Schmidt, former project manager of the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, to test the experiments done in the movie, including turning water into rocket fuel — which works. And, on the eve of The Martian's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, some of those scientists believe that this obsessive adherence to science fact will be enough to make NASA's Journey to Mars real for Americans. The space agency needs a Hail Mary because, in truth, the real program is nowhere near ready for prime time.
Free Mars!
Not only that; but "exploration" no longer requires heroic bare-chested men going out there with swords and stealing treasure from the natives.
You send a camera on wheels, and sit on your computer chair to analyze the data coming back.
There's nothing for us out there, unless you are unusually attracted to radiation-blasted vacuum.
Propulsion science is just too primitive at this time. This is where the bulk of the money needs to be spent.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No.
Yes, the movie can give NASA a Hollywood bump. A small, ultimately meaningless bump.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
How dumb. The first man on Mars is someone who will be remembered forever.
Thankfully, small-minded cretins like yourself are in a minority.
No, we are no interested. Next question.
The last big bump NASA got was the moon. I really wish that program had follow up instead of being just a giant publicity stunt.
Currently there are plenty of arguments for and against man in space, either way I would like the decision not to be one of which looks the coolest.
Have you seen the usual Mars movie from Hollywood? This movie is FAR more realistic than almost any other ones out there. And for true space geeks (of which NASA is full of), the book is fantastic.
The movie isn't some ultra-clever attempt to kickstart public support, although that doesn't hurt. NASA's funding has shrunk as a portion of GDP, as a portion of government spending, and even when just adjusted for inflation even while NASA now is tasked with a far more ambitious mission (to send people to Mars), such that NASA makes up less one half of one percent of the federal budget (this while the public either think NASA has a much larger portion of the federal budget or has been utterly shut down). A little public support wouldn't hurt, though what NASA really needs is the political freedom to rationalize some of their programs (like being freed by Congress to use existing launch vehicles for exploration, like from ULA or SpaceX, instead of spending so much of their budget on SLS) so they can afford to build things like landers and the like instead of things the private/military sectors already have built (like launch vehicles).
There's nothing for us out there, unless you are unusually attracted to radiation-blasted vacuum.
Oh yeah, very attracted.
I'm trying to get the gear together to blast it with something else, do my part for panspermia if you catch my drift (or maybe Eris will).
< * waves to Elon * >
Dark Reflection
Not that anyone's bothered denying the Moon landing lately; why bother? It's not even old news, it's history. And NASA still insists that people in a space station can't manage their own damn schedule with their own damn alarm clocks. Picture Mal Reynolds waiting for Mission Control to run through a million-point checklist to do anything . . .
Um, no. Water as rocket fuel is separating out water into H and O, turning them into liquid, and burning them as rocket fuel.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Wouldn't you swear if you were just left behind on freaking Mars with no way home?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I've said before to underwhelming response, we need to spend on protecting this gorgeous planet of ours from big rocks coming at us. It has happened before, so instead of trying to get off this really nice planet on to a crappy cold rock, we should first make sure we can defend the nice home with air, water and food before trying to build on a long shot.
The public isn't interested in space, period.
The past N media spectaculars (fiction or non) didn't change that, the N+1th won't either. There's no camel's back for the straw to break.
Um, no. Water as rocket fuel is separating out water into H and O, turning them into liquid, and burning them as rocket fuel.
Or you can separate the H and O and super-heat the H to a fusion reaction. Or you could pass the water through a hot nuclear core so it shoots out the nozzle at high speed (although in that case it is technically a propellant, not fuel.)
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I think the book's key point was the other way around: He took Hydrazine (rocket fuel) and converted it to water.
"Can The Martian Give NASA's Mars Efforts a Hollywood Bump?"
Yes, for about 30 days. Then we'll have BlackFriday, Xmas, etc. All will be forgotten, while waiting for the next Survivor/Dancing/Bachelor/whatever.
...the entire country needs a hail mary, never mind NASA. It's constantly being fucked over by politicians. It's sad that I've gone my entire 40 year life now without seeing a single good US president.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
How many people here pictured Scarlett Johansson playing the role of Johanssen?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
How did you get from the Youtube comments section to Slashdot?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
So, is this your example of the swearing that is done in the book "The Martian"? Cause I am not sure what exactly you are even talking about now.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Right, Nothing. Just essentially inexhaustible natural resources, defeating our civilization's all-eggs-in-one-basket issue, endless non-polluting-of-living-environment industrial space, low-grav environments for the disabled and elderly, low and zero-grav industrial environments, endless storage and manufacturing space, CHON, no, nothing at all "out there." Whatever are those "scientists" thinking?!?!?!?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well yeah, but in the case of this book/movie, they used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engines like NASA uses currently.
Looking through Up Goer Five, it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
https://xkcd.com/1133/
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
> There's nothing for us out there, unless you are unusually attracted to radiation-blasted vacuum.
One could have said something similar about the American west, or Australian outback. Not vacuum, but a hostile environment. In fact, 80% of the Earth is inhospitable without the help of technology (the oceans, deserts, and ice caps). Slightly better technology will allow us to live anywhere in the Solar System.
Perhaps you see nothing out there, but I've done some real estate development in the past, and all I see are opportunities.
Or feeding it directly to a plasma thruster (basically a 200 kW microwave oven with a nozzle). Much higher exhaust velocity = higher fuel efficiency, but lower thrust.
it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
Well apart from the first stage of the Saturn V which burned kerosene and liquid oxygen, about half the total all-up weight of the entire stack, in rather crude inefficient engines.
No one cares for Mars. It's a frikin dead rock. There are so much better exploration targets out there.
You presume too much.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Are you suggesting we'll get to the low energy + material cost state by sitting on our thumbs? There's a huge learning curve here. We either climb it to get to the honey, or we don't get the honey.
Again, are you suggesting we'll get to the "resources, energy and know-how" state by sitting on our thumbs?
First of all, "out there" is not just mars. Second of all, no. The ocean floor has almost none of the benefits space provides.
ok, fine, endless vacuum. It's a challenge. It's not an impossible to breach barrier. And learning to do it, particularly learning to do it space-to-space instead of ground-to-space -- is part of the process. Once we get an industrial base established -- and that's the key here, make no mistake -- costs will drop precipitously. Robotics will drive that too, but there are all manner of advantages for humans "out there."
Yes, creating a viable presence off-planet / in space is very challenging. But no, it isn't something we should -- or really, can afford to -- ignore.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not only that; but "exploration" no longer requires heroic bare-chested men going out there with swords and stealing treasure from the natives.
OTOH, heroic, bare chested women would make great reality TV, swords and treasure optional. Probably the best funding angle NASA could ever devise.
(And, you can have your bare chested men there as well for those special SJW type folk).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Um, no. Water as rocket fuel is separating out water into H and O, turning them into liquid, and burning them as rocket fuel.
Even better than that, if you start off with H and O, then you have rocket fuel which you can turn into water and energy. The energy can be used to power an ion drive or preheat the rocket fuel.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Within 20 years of us being able to regularly move back and forth between the moon and earth like we move personnel between military commands, we'd have the technology to give the USMC their very own ODST special forces unit. The military tech opportunities would be immense...
There's are essentially inexhaustible natural resources here on Earth too.
I suggest there are other ways besides "sitting on our thumbs" that are orders of magnitude more feasible, economic and realizable. But I'm a rocket scientist, so what do I know?
No one remembers the first person in Europe, Asia, Australia or the Americas. It's likely we don't know the first person on Antarctica either. Not to mention Africa.
The SSME are about as perfect a rocket engine that will ever be made. Only a H - F engine can be more energetic, but not worth the added complexity and the RS-25s came very close to maximum theoretical performance.
I presume, then, that you know rockets.
You demonstrate some serious shortsightedness in other areas, though.
Backing up to your rocket-ness, as it were, you know that the energy budget is almost the entire problem. In space, there is an unlimited energy supply 24/7. Gathering can be done on any scale, and once the scale becomes automated, surplus energy is a guaranteed result.
This is the end game: Manufacturing problems: material supply: near infinite. Material costs: extremely low, essentially whatever it costs self-maintaining equipment to maintain itself, which -- eventually -- will be nothing. Manufacturing room: unlimited in our terms. Shipment costs -- near zero (unlimited energy, continuous incoming streams of raw materials and outgoing finished products or intermediate materials, etc.)
We can't do this if we stay here. It's not just difficult, it's flat-out impossible. Whereas in space, it's definitely going to be difficult, and you bet it'll be expensive, but the reward is huge beyond the wildest dreams of any sitting economist or world leader today.
The eggs in one basket is also a very serious issue all by itself for anyone who feels that survival as a race is a worthy goal. Not everyone does, of course, but I definitely do.
We need to go. Naysayers need to be beaten with a wet noodle until the understand it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The movie is PG-13, therefore they can only have one f-bomb (two if they're really crafty, but usually not). Usually heavy-swearing movies are rate R for that reason, PG-13 probably means the swearing is toned down. There may be some in dire situations, but I doubt it will be as constant as the book.
Gravity and Apollo 13 and [haven't seen it yet] The Martian and others are stunning visions... intricately crafted works of awe-inspiring wonder. Some people working on these films, some folks going to see them, actually desire to explore space. So they must see these films, because they have some space in them. Many see these as space movies. I see them differently.
GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong.
SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong in space.
We love those 'things go absolutely fucking wrong' stories. To overcome adversity, to never give up or give in, keep your spirits high in the face of certain doom. But these do not help to prepare us to face the most perilous moments of a modern mostly-comfortable existence. What do do as you graduate school tomorrow, whether you should start fishing for a better job (and what if you find one?), when to pay the bills. Hollywood knows that the best formula is to deliver action, danger and adrenaline rushes to theaters. So human conflict turns violent, science turns menacing and the future hangs by a thread.
But when you get right down to it most people don't like violent conflict, menace and a future in dire peril. Personally that is. So you could say that these movies are like poisoned apples that are fun to taste, then spit out. Is it possible to spit them all out, and do you lose something else in the bargain? And what is the effect of all this on children? It's easy to wait until someone else creates something awesome, point to it and say "THIS is the PROBLEM". I'm not trying to do that here. I ask rather, what is missing?
Imagine for a moment *IF* you were forced to pick out some media to become an integral part of a school curriculum, from Preschool on up. What you will find is that the material we consider appropriate for younger children only approaches 'high budget' production values as its content departs from reality --- extremely, like those bizarre Pixar abominations. On the other end of the spectrum you have stunning documentaries that may inspire but do not always entertain, because to produce a science documentary you have to scrub the 'passion' and human interaction out. (One exception: Cosmos old and new). You have reliable PBS-y things like Sesame Street, informative and interesting (but yet) few children would insist on seeing an episode right to the end if you offered them a movie. So what movies would you offer them, if you wanted to inspire in them a yearning for space travel?
MISSING SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking right, in space. With children in them. Being people, successfully.
Oh maybe a little human conflict here and there, or a technical challenge that is presented as a simple challenge and not a cheap friggin' menace. And (Hollywood: hint) if you really want children to grow up to become people who yearn to explore and colonize space and planet, you must show them children --- already in space! Oh no you say. Space exploration and colonization is an 'adult activity'. (Pretend helicopter parent: on) In order to prevent, um like, kids from sneaking into launch sites and becoming stowaways on our missions, we must only show them movies with adults doing adult things, like battling monsters. In the leave-taking scene on the eve of the mission, the astronaut's daughter never cries, "Take me along, please!" because she knows her Mommy or Daddy is going to do adult-stuff in space and that is no place for kids. Like going off to war. Her lines are only, "Come home soon!" Children, as props.
Poor thing. Children deserve to be portrayed as more than simple emotional props. They are watching for Chrissake.
I'm not calling out action movies as the problem. By being the only way you get to leave the planet, they're better than nothing. They're Grrrreat! Please let's have more like, Commander Tom brought a chainsaw into Spaace on Halloween -- see what happens next! This mons
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Making rockets isn't hard. Development costs are on order or less than a commercial jet liner, complexity is the same (the B787 cost $32 billion to develop and costs $250million each. Also there are ~30 large commercial planes made each month). The hard part is you have maybe one to a couple chances with a rocket, whereas a plane will have thousands attempts to correct any defects. That makes rockets look hard, but their not really, at least in the sense of being harder than any equivalent sized engineering project.
So what it comes down to is an economics problem Sending people is a very bad ROI. If you want to say we need to study humans in space in case of existential crisis, doing anything with a few dozen people over a few years won't matter much compared with the thousands of people years that could take place in a matter of a dozen or so months...if we really had to. That goes down a lot to statistics and reliability (which is the really hard part of rocket science).
Seriously, my mousewheel starts smoking whenever one of these new web 3.0 pages come up. Scrolling scrolling scrolling forever. Who the hell likes these things>? Is there something so wrong with embeded images? does every page have to be some downward scrolling adventure? its just supposed to be a god damn article!!!
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LH2/LOX engine technology is very well-developed and modern versions like the Vulcain 2, the RS-25 and RS-68/RS-68A produce close to the maximum possible Isp given the reaction chemistry involved absent a slight loss of efficiency due to the need to throttle up and down. The bad news is the amount of mass they throw out the back to provide thrust is low because hydrogen is a very light gas. Most LH2 engines run oxygen-rich to improve their total thrust by increasing the mass of the exhaust.
LH2-fuelled engines don't perform at their best in thick atmosphere as the large volume of exhaust gas is fighting the back pressure. LH2/LOX rockets really do well in vacuum where there's no back-pressure on the exhaust -- the Delta 4's RS-68 engine has an Isp of 365 seconds as sea-level (100kPa) but that increases to 410 seconds in vacuum.
The low density of LH2 also means the pumps, plumbing, injectors and most critically the tankage have to be substantially larger and heavier than a motor burning a denser fuel like kerosene or maybe liquid methane, the fuel for SpaceX's future Raptor engine.
after the moon landings they had the earth rise photo on the wall on the oval office.
a year later they replaced it with a stupid tree painting, that's the true level of commitment to space by dumb fucks in office that are nothing more than high school jocks in a suit.
nasa also got a retard looser for a head that didn't want to be there.
fact is, USA and corporations would rather spend $20 trillion dollars over 40 years on wars and military, while nasa gets a few crumbs. Criminals they all are in office, utter scum.
"Ben Rich Lockheed Skunk Works director had admitted in his Deathbed Confession that Extrat errestrial UFO visitors are real and the U.S. Military travel among stars."
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
We have almost limitless energy on earth that we still can't exploit.
Cheap storage VM.
"Nothing out there..." you are incredibly short-sighted. Just for starters, there have already been two large bodies-- I'm too impatient and lazy to actually look up which ones, but Google it yourself if you care-- found to be nearly pure gold in one case, and platinum in another... the asteroid, as I recall, that was platinum- rich just passed very close to Earth recently. Gold is nice stuff but has limited industrial value; not so of platinum, which is very handy for all manner of instruments and manufacturing equipment. There are millions of asteroids out there waiting for us to discover what "rare earth elements" (what irony!) they have in abundance. There are dozens of elements on the Periodic Table which would be of huge value to us if we had plentiful stores of them, mined from other bodies in our solar system. But we can't even begin to know without more exploration, and that exploration is not dependent on launch costs we are currently restricted to. If SpaceX manages to develop a reliable way to build totally reusable rockets (as they appear close to realizing), it would reduce the cost of orbital launches by 90% or more. Or, if the Space Elevator ever finds ways of being built... or, if that freaky, UFO-like, EM Drive NASA is embarrassed to say they don't understand and seems impossible but does work, nonetheless... if any of these things become the new reality, the disruption would be beyond game - changing. The EM drive is said to be able to make round - trips to Mars possible in just a matter of weeks, and at just a tiny fraction of the cost as we see it today. All these naysayers I see in this discussion make two enormous mistakes: that exploration will never have any more value than they are capable of seeing as of today... and exploration will never be cheaper than it is in today's world. Both assumptions are as ridiculous as those that claimed aircraft would never be of practical benefit.
BTW... how do you make "paragraph breaks?"
Going bare chested on Mars might not be a good idea. The atmosphere there is basically a (slightly thick) vacuum.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
The real problem though is identifying the weaknesses in the technology and improving it. We have identified the main weaknesses of current rocket technology - The main one is that 90% + of what goes up is merely fuel, the system only works once and then is destroyed, only being used once limits the safety and reliability of rockets, the fuels are highly dangerous volatile & corrosive.
It all comes down to the fact that rockets are still a pretty marginal technology and the core problem is the rocket engine itself.
The only real way to improve the efficiency of rockets is to have a higher exhaust velocity, and the energy required increases as the square of the exhaust velocity. With a higher exhaust velocity we can get to orbit in a single stage - and then use retro breaking in orbit and then return to the ground and then be reused. With that technology sending humans to Mars and beyond would be relatively easy. (Skylon is another alternative.)
Of course the only type of rockets that can achieve enough power and efficiency are nuclear rockets. The difficulty is designing a nuclear rocket 'safe' enough to use in the atmosphere. The basic solid core engines already tested could probably be developed and improved enough to do it. A better bet though is 'Gas Core Closed Cycle' GCCC 'nuclear lightbulb' engines as these could potentially achieve even higher efficiencies.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
No you really couldn't. No on the surface of earth is even remotely comparable to space. Not only is there no oxygen, there is nothing at all, no pressure, no nitrogen. Just plenty of radiation if you want to make a cancer farm.
Antarctica is millions of times more hospitable than space or even the surface of mars.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
You may want to look up your facts from something better than where you get them from. There are these almost stainless steel type asteroids that have a high level of Pt group elements. In the parts per thousand or even higher. But there is nothing even close to a solid gold or even 1% gold. Also as the native americans said "when will you learn you can't eat gold". Seriously in space you don't need gold, you need food and air and stuff. And it turns out we have plenty of that here.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
You, fella, are the one, eho, needs to check your facts. It took me all of five seconds to find multiple articles for both gold and platinum-rich asteroids. https://news.ycombinator.com/i... https://www.rt.com/news/310170...
... also, you obviously did not even bother to read my post, since I clearly stated: "Gold is nice stuff but has limited industrial value". Stop criticizing people if you can't be accurate in what you say. It just makes you look like an idiot.
LOL you quoting something that give ZERO numbers. Look up what platinum rich means. It does not mean what you think it means.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Lol, sure, show me proof of any time I have "run away".
Google often proves me right, and often I provide links, so provide your links to prove me wrong oh wise one.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I am not worried. Compared to the average space nutter, I look positively cleaver. You are well below average.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
You are correct, I missed that.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
My god, what kind of an idiot are you?!? You obviously didn't even bother to read the article, in which it says the asteroid is estimated to be worth 5.4 TRILLION dollars! That's more than you make all week! Please stop making a fool of yourself, and don't waste my time.
LOOK it up you dumb arse. I majored in astrophysics. Platinum rich means like a few parts per thousand to maybe 1% or something. No sold. The fucking thing is bigger than a lot of mines we have on earth.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?