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NASA Releases 'Journey To Mars' Plan -- But Not a Budget (nasa.gov)
MarkWhittington writes: NASA released a document describing the steps involved in its Journey to Mars program (PDF). But, as the Wall Street Journal suggests, the "plan" has a conspicuous lack of specifics. It doesn't go into how much the program will cost or what intermediate steps have to be taken before human beings set foot on Mars in the 2030s. This is likely because of the upcoming and subsequent changes of governing administrations — the space agency's deep space exploration goals are likely to get a reevaluation. The plan serves as a public relations document more than anything else.
Shuttle project cost/pound to leo $118 actual $8000/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
SLS/ORION is now looking at 14 billion +/ launch
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
If NASA has a hundred billion for the mission expect to cost several trillion.
Let's ignore how cool it is to go into space. Let's ignore the benefits of aerospace technology on our daily lives. Let's teach our kids to uphold the status quo and be good little slaves to their corporate overlords. Let's let the MBAs and their accountant lackeys use their spreadsheets and declare this a waste of money.
I hope an asteroid GUTS this worthless planet. We as a species deserve to die if we're too stupid to see the value of getting off this damnable rock.
"..or what intermediate steps have to be taken.."
This is always a problem: incrementalist thinking, the idea that one can achieve the revolutionary through small intermediate steps with an evolutionary process. This is very limited (and limiting) thinking, and people who think that way will never achieve anything truly revolutionary. If you think like this, you should probably get the hell out of the way of those of us who don't. We'll come back for you. Some day. Maybe.
Indeed :) Don't get me wrong, one can achieve great things through small steps but only if those steps are part of a long-term process planned out in advance with the ultimate goal in mind, and full committal from all interested parties (particularly those funding your endeavor) to follow it through to the end. Otherwise, you're just building castles in the sand to be washed away when the tide comes in.
Is the goal to go to Mars just to check off an entry on our species' bucket list, or is to move toward the the eventual colonization of the planet? Then we better have the whole colonization process down, down to what will lubricate the drive axles on the truck that hauls the fluorite ore from the mine on Arsinoes Chaos to the ball mill at Terra Meridiani, or how to make the replacement bolts for the elevation mounts for a sulfuric acid pipeline at the Becquerel chemical plant. That means in no way, shape, or form that nobody should do anything with Mars until you can launch a whole self-sustaining colony. But it's important to have planned out the whole programme in advance - knowing precisely what materials we're going to need, what parts, how quickly they'll be consumed, how much labor every component's operation and maintenance will take, what raw inputs you're going to need, where you can get them, etc, and ensuring that at no point are you consuming more of something than you can produce.
If you send things to Mars without doing this, you're just going to spend your billions of dollars launching dead-ends - made out of materials that it turns out that there's no practical way to make on the planet, or with processes under which particular steps work out to be impractical or impossible on Mars. Due to the tremendous expense to engineer and launch each piece of hardware to Mars, you want each piece to serve a critical role in your long-term goals. Sent a device to freeze carbon dioxide out of Mars's atmosphere to feed a greenhouse or bioreactor? That may sound great... up until the point that you discover that you also need nitrogen or argon collected from the atmosphere for other processes, and that your whole chiller system needs to be replaced with one that can handle lower temperatures. Sent a pipeline made out of polypropylene to carry some sort of fluid? Great, until you discover that you need to multi-use that pipeline and some of the chemicals you need to send aren't compatible with polypropylene, so you're just going to have to build a new one parallel to it. Etc.
NASA of course has no interest in actually planning things out all the way in advance. And never has.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
If we wanted to send humans anywhere that would pay the most benefit, I really think Venus (cloudtops) would be best. Venus is so under-studied that any mission (manned or otherwise) has the potential to yield huge scientific benefits, and the ability to real-time control probes exploring the surface (aka, where their time that they can spend near the surface is limited before they have to head up to re-chill their cooling reservoir and recharge their batteries, and you don't want the lag time of commands sent all the way from Earth) would be of significant benefit. And in terms of future mining potential, Venus probably has the most useful geology - the types of lava flows found by the Soviets, and the additional potential of carbonatites, combined with the "high radar reflective" precipitated minerals, all are very promising signs for enrichment of rare and economically valuable minerals. Phase-change balloons can descend to the surface and bring minerals up to the cloudtops, and are eminently achievable with current technology - hardly more complicated than the old Soviet Vega probes. Since you're floating, you can move anywhere on the planet in a relatively short period of time (due to superrotation, you really have no choice in the matter ;) ), so you're not limited to whatever resources happen to be close to your base. And the cloudtops are a very hospitable environment to humans - at 52-56km a person may even be able to step outside with nothing more than a mask on (oxygen provision and eye protection are a must, but the CO and SOx levels may be low enough to not be problematic to bare skin - the pressure and temperature are fine). The significant atmosphere overhead provides a good deal of radiation protection, even though there is no dynamo-driven magnetic field.
The moon is nearby and a conveniently low gravity well, but as far as minerals go, it's pretty boring - to the point that the best people have come up with is "helium 3 fuel" to power reactors which don't exist and which probably will never be an idea fusion fuel (if you can fuse it and can make an economic case for it, you can probably also fuse P-B which is much better and cheaper). And it will always suffer from "been there, done that" syndrome.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
I think a trip to Vegas would be beneficial.
In case anyone's asking.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The footprint photo at the end of the brochure is 50 years old and we haven't been back. NASA has been talking about a manned mars mission 20 years in the future for the last 50 years. OK to be honest it was 10 years in the future 50 years ago.
The space age is over.
Eventually some civilization, mayl find the Apollo landers and and wonder why we gave up with the stars withing our grasp. We won't be around for them to ask.
Sounds like it might a gamble to me.
1. Go to Mars
2. Come back
3. ???
4. Profit!
Table-ized A.I.
This is always a problem: incrementalist thinking, the idea that one can achieve the revolutionary through small intermediate steps with an evolutionary process.
There's nothing particularly revolutionary or even evolutionary about sending humans to Mars: there's robots already there, and robots can cater for any foreseeable need for a presence on the surface of Mars. If anything, humans are an evolutionary step backward: humans are ill adapted to Mars and our time and effort on the surface of Mars will be spent catering to our own survival rather than doing anything useful.
If you think like this, you should probably get the hell out of the way of those of us who don't. We'll come back for you. Some day. Maybe.
You do realised you aren't going to Mars? and that no amount of 'thinking big' will change that?
You aren't going to Mars.
It's conceivable that we might suppress our better judgement and send some humans one day, but the chances of it being you are about 1 in a billion.
Why send humans down to the surface when you can just send expendable android avatars which can be operated from geostationary orbit by teams working in shifts to maximise the work done for the mass transported down to the surface? When you leave you don't have to retrieve anything but samples and that takes a much smaller rocket, or allows more samples than if you need to also retrieve humans off the surface. Make the androids smart enough and they will learn enough before you go to continue a lot of the work with minimal instructions from Earth. It makes no sense at all to send people until you have built a truly sustainable habitat for them to live in on the surface as colonists. Why will this not be doable by the 2030s?
Yet, it's by slow steady intermediate steps and evolutionary processes that practically every one of mankind's major breakthroughs, advances, and achievements have been accomplished. They're not visible to the narrow minded or the the clueless - but they're there none the less.
The problem isn't with "limited (and limiting) thinking", it's with idiots who have no patience and no grasp of how the world works... who think things just happen magically.
I don't believe NASA could send another capsule to the moon, let alone Mars. The organization seems to be a big P.R. "money hole".
If we need to rely on the Russians to hitch a ride to ISS, that tells much about our decline in ability for space exploration.
I don't believe NASA could manage a reasonable budget for manned Mars exploration as well as likely inability to manage the spacecraft development required to accomplish the task.
It's a tired, bureaucratic albatross. "Lost In Space".
"..or what intermediate steps have to be taken.."
This is always a problem: incrementalist thinking, the idea that one can achieve the revolutionary through small intermediate steps with an evolutionary process.
But that's where revolutionary ideas come from. Progress is a long series of small intermediate steps and some of those steps turn out to be the revolutionary ones. That's why you get things like Alexander Graham Bell's "race" to the patent office, or Darwin finding out that Wallace had also discovered natural selection. Revolutionary ideas need a solid foundation of incremental discoveries.
But that's actually kind of off-topic for this story, we have all the revolutionary technology already, it's simply a matter of cost and will, and "incrementalist thinking" is a great way to make each of these easier.
This is very limited (and limiting) thinking, and people who think that way will never achieve anything truly revolutionary. If you think like this, you should probably get the hell out of the way of those of us who don't. We'll come back for you. Some day. Maybe.
I suspect you have it backwards. If you're only interested in the revolutionary you'll never get anywhere because you'll be missing all the intermediate steps. If you want to move forward start by doing all the incremental things, eventually you'll have done enough that the revolutionary is in sight.
I stole this Sig