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NASA Safety Panel Finds Concerns With the Journey To Mars (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel issued its annual report on various space agency programs. The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding. It suggested that NASA's plan to launch the first crewed mission on the Orion, which would use the heavy lift Space Launch System to go around the moon, in 2021 was unrealistic given current, anticipated funding. The panel also suggested that lack of a clear plan for the Mars program is compromising its viability. It also suggested that the decision not to return to the moon should be revisited in view of the desire of international partners to do so and the need of low gravity surface experience in advance of going to Mars
"The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding."
Then the panel is considering the wrong things. The areas of concern regarding a journey to Mars are many, all much greater than any funding consideration. Basically, sending people to Mars with current technology is a stupid idea. The moon is _right next door_. Let's figure out how to live there first.
Yes, Congress funds projects, not the President.
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding.
They needed a panel to figure this out? Shit, I have nothing at all to do with NASA and I thought that was bleeding obvious from the cheap seats where I sit. The Apollo program required funding about 4X what we see today as a percent of federal budget. I don't really see us getting back to the moon within my lifetime (much less mars) without a very substantial budget increase. It's been 40 years since we landed on the moon and we haven't been out of low orbit since. I see nothing in the current plans that will change that.
Let's go back to the moon and stay in high orbit.
Let's stop pretending humans can survive in deep space or or Mars.
It doesn't take a week of reading articles @ JPL to realize we're not built for longterm weightlessness or different gravities.
Let's send remote devices that can do our bidding now.
Maybe one day when we start either manipulating our DNA or build ships with artificial gravity....but landfall is going to be unhealthy
and not in anyone's lifetime that can even see this page. It's all a con.
End of Line.
Really? Humans can improvise and adapt? So the human is supposed to build a mass spectrometer out of duct tape and discarded food pouches?
Modern science isn't conducted by rubbing two sticks together and seeing what happens, it requires complicated equipment. Whatever we send, that's going to be the equipment that does the science, whether it's a rover or a human behind it.
Humans can "go places and doing things" by means of us sending them and a huge amount of mass to support them, mass that could have made the robot vastly more capable of "going places" and "doing things" than the humans using up that payload mass could have. If your manned Mars mission costs 50 times more than a typical robotic mission then you're displacing 50 different robots with 50 completely different sets of capabilities sent to 50 different places on the planet. Or a dozen vastly more advanced rovers. Or hundreds of stripped down rovers.
Humans just simply cannot compare, gram for gram. And gram for gram is what matters when delivering payload to the surface of Mars costs upwards of $100 per gram. Humans really only buy you latency. And who gives a rat's arse about latency when budgetary constraints limit how often you can fund something like that? If you can get the money for such a "supermission" once every 20 years, what does it really matter if the data comes back after one year or three?
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
You mean much less than previous presidents, or are you in wingnut alternate reality where they hallucinate outrages, because if they stop and think, they'd have to admit they've been living in a fantasy-land, and that Republicans are too delusional to ever have power outside their cult.
You should see the setup they use to produce the graphene before separating out the layers with tape.
Also, may I add: it's a stupid assumption that robot operators can't innovate either. Because they do this sort of stuff all the time, inventing new techniques - using the hardware they sent - to do things that weren't expected at the time. From rovers dragging wheels to expose buried sediments while they roam, to New Horizons' doubling its planned data throughput by the realization that they could run both TWTAs at the same time with different polarization if they got the extra power by shutting down the flight computer after spin-stabilizing the craft.... the limitation isn't humans. Because humans are involved, they're the ones controlling the robots. The robots are only limited by what hardware was sent. As are humans. Send a robot with a duct tape tool and it can make things out of duct tape too that weren't planned when they launched.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.