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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
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Sounds like the 'Don't Be' Committee to me..
He will be the first to drive a Tesla on Mars.
Why do they come out with this kind of stuff right after I bought my ticket? The damn thing is non-refundable! [rushes out to see if CowboyNeal cashed the check yet]
We first went to Mars in 1964, and we've never stopped. We've done all kinds of amazing science there, on an ongoing basis, and we continue to do so..
Seriously, sending humans is silly. Humans are frail, highly expensive to maintain due to all the extra mass that must be taken along to keep them going, and increase the price of missions by two orders of magnitude. Let's get the most science for the dollar, which is not done by "flags and footprints". It's done by continuing to push the envelope of robotic exploration. We're so far from a sustainable Mars-colony that we don't even have to think about that. Maybe in a thousand years we can revisit. For now, it's a waste.
"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.
If you had a "nano" straw to Earth from the moon, could you sip air from it?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
I think more important things need to be done on Earth then a sending people to Mars. So far, all the unmanned vehicles have not provided any real reason to send a human to Mars. We dream to go there because our technology does not provide any other manageable travel to anything else. We go to the Moon again, or Mars.
It's like not being able to go to Hawaii so let's go to Disney World again. We go go to Mars many times for the price of one human trip. Why would we do that?
To plant yet another flag?
That it would be a easy trip to California?
La cucaracha, la cucaracha...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized.
When you are spending taxpayer money it is ALWAYS political. This was true back during the Apollo era too. We just ignored it because of the Cold War.
The real problem is that to fund something like a space program you either need to be doing it for national security (see Cold War) or there needs to be economic opportunity. The economic opportunity is actually there but unfortunately the benefits are indirect and long term which makes it a hard sell to politicians who only care about the next election cycle.
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.
I've been saying for ages that this push to skip the Moon and go straight to Mars with manned missions was a bad idea.
verwenden Sie den richtigen troll Vorlage und Ihr Leben wird süÃY sein
Ich habe gerade gehÃrt eine traurige Nachricht auf Talk-Radio - an diesem Morgen britische Schauspieler Alan Rickman verlor seinen Kampf gegen den Krebs. Es gab keine weitere Details. Ich bin sicher, jeder in der Slashdot-Community werden ihn vermissen - auch wenn Sie genieÃYen nicht seine Arbeit, es ist nicht zu leugnen seine BeitrÃge zur PopulÃrkultur. Wirklich eine amerikanische Ikone.
honoring troll ancestors is important.
I think more important things need to be done on Earth then a sending people to Mars. So far, all the unmanned vehicles have not provided any real reason to send a human to Mars.
Sure they have. It's another freakin' planet. Or haven't you seen the photographs? You think another planet wouldn't be awfully interesting to explore in person?
It's like not being able to go to Hawaii so let's go to Disney World again. We go go to Mars many times for the price of one human trip. Why would we do that? To plant yet another flag?
Because we would hugely advance human knowledge by going. On trip involving humans would require advances in medicine, life support, shielding, power, communications, propulsion, ground transport, and even possibly agriculture just to start with. More technology would have to be developed than you will see from 100 years of robotic probes. You also will get FAR more excitement about humans going. Only science geeks really give a shit about sending probes but pretty much everyone will be interested (at least for a while) in a human setting foot on Mars. Sending a person to Mars can inspire entire generations of engineers and scientists. Robots not so much.
We can make the choice to not invest in sending people outside of low earth orbit but I think that is extremely foolish and short sighted. A manned space program is among the very best investments in our future I can think of. Economically, socially and experientially.
Who needs to be on Mars when the own planet is in peril. Just a mind-distraction from currently unsolved issues.
Seems to be some firmware bug in human brains. Fixing that one, maybe a collective reboot is needed....
Good luck!
You'd think someone like the head of the Senate Subcommittee on Space and Science would realize that there was not enough money budgeted to design payloads, to actually use the SLS. Knowing this, shouldn't that senator have pushed for the cancellation of the SLS program years ago? I think someone whom has successfully developed luxury properties would understand project management better.
Congress should have known they were not going to allocate enough money to make the SLS worthwhile. You'd think Congress would understand itself better than that.
They should have let Obama kill it off, and keep the ISS fully funded with research.
Showing NASA's budget as a percentage of the entire Federal budget isn't a very good comparison
There are plenty of others if you prefer. Pick any one of them. My point stands. We are spending less on the space program by whatever inflation adjusted measure you care to use. Thinking we are going to get to Mars which is MUCH harder than getting to the moon while spending less is pretty naive I think.
There's many risk during space flight. I'm impressed with our rover track record. what many people don't realize is the martian magnetosphere is very week. It's not strong enough to protect DNA from damaging radiation. The solar and cosmic radiation bombarding mars will need to be dealt with. We've learned how to build a life support system.. but even the ISS needs oxygen, nitrogen, and water and depends on supplies sent. I don't think we have the technology to support a 150 - 300 day flight to Mars (all depends on time of launch). Lets say a the mission starts when mars is closest to the earth. 150 days out. .. 10 days on mars... @ 300 days to make it home.
the mission would last at least 1 1/2 years. That's a long time to survive space. Life support systems can fail. return command module can fail.
The landing module would need to provide a shelter against the harsh martian environment. Adequate air pressure, oxygen, nitrogen, and protection against solar and cosmic radiation. The martian magnetosphere is very weak.
We need that drive we had in the 50s that lead to being the first to land on the moon. we didn't know if our astronauts would make it home then either.
We are going to need enough fuel for lift off of mars, break martian gravity and point the spacecraft to earth, and a safe reentry.
I am not sure if we have the technology yet.
So trip to Mars is dangerous? Go figure...
Any given thing should be cheaper now (in real terms) then in the 1960s. And it is...if you look at SpaceX.
SpaceX is doing things that have already been done. They aren't breaking major new technical ground. They are breaking new economic ground by improving already existing technology. Don't get me wrong, that's SUPER important but SpaceX isn't going to send us to Mars. They aren't working on that problem in any meaningful way because they can't. No private company can make a credible business case for going to Mars. The economic and physical risks are large and mostly unquantified, the cost is enormous, the technology needed is substantial and well beyond any one company to develop, etc. No business could possibly hope to do it.
The ONLY institution with enough money and the ability to absorb the risk of pure exploration is a nation state. They might contract SpaceX to do something but the only realistic route to the first boots on Mars is through NASA or some other nation's equivalent agency.
The deeper problem is a public relations one. The American people have lost the will to travel to space. Many people see the huge cost of resources etc. necessary to take the next step and consider it to be a case of diminishing returns. If 90% or 80% or even 40% of American people were strongly highly supportive of space exploration it would happen. However, if you look at national polls about which issues are of highest concern to likely voters , space exploration doesn't even register in any of them.
I believe the reason is there is really a lack of a well articulated goal that reaches the general public. Even I have trouble framing any.
There are of coarse many interesting things to learn and learning is beneficial but there is still a whole lot to learn here on earth , in deep space and in near orbit. There isn't any one achievable goal that is set forth in a specific vision like there was for the moon launch.
Also, with robots getting better the question of , why risk and send fragile human beings that cost much more needs to be addressed. Why not simply but the money towards advancing robotics and communications equipment until we can learn everything we want to without risking human life.
If you actually wan to get into the colonization you have to ask the question why?
Most of the common answers just don't play well off the big screen with most voters.
Economics? ( if it was as good economic idea then why not let it be handled by free enterprise and for profit).
Survival of the species? Exactly what is that important to the individual voter, value of anything is more or less a religious argument and something as abstract as the species just isn't very motivating to most people.
So challenge for the true space enthusiast. Why should we devote resource to space exploration that could be just as easily spent on , 'solving global warming problem' , 'decoding the human genome and improving medicine' , 'solving problems with robotics AI and quantum computing'.
Why not make the 'go to' scientific issue that stimulates research solving global warming?
My point is in no way to disparage. My point is if you who wish to support space exploration cannot articulate it fully to yourself how are you going to convince anyone else. Also, I'd really like to know, as maybe it would help me articulate it to someone else myself and right now I have difficulty arguing for it in the face of the questions I posed.
President puts forward the budget and congress approves.
Yep, and this has been an issue way before Obama. I stopped listening to State of the Union addresses under Bush the Younger because while he would usually bring up going to Mars and other hopeful NASA missions, when I checked, NASAs budget would not even been keeping up with inflation. Presidents and even Congress have been talking about Mars missions for years, but they have just been talking, not actually doing anything. It's all just sound bites for the public and this safety panel is probably just NASA diplomatic way to telling everybody including the public that. Anybody that has been following the effort to get to Mars knows that there has been lots of talk and never a budget to actually do so.
Space has always been politicized. We need to find a way to make funding and planning more stable.
Perhaps the money should be committed up-front to specific plans and not subject to fiddling by the next shift in DC. I'm not sure how to legislate something with a "lock box" built into it. Space bonds?
Table-ized A.I.
Well ... the start of budget negotiations is the President's Budget Request. The surprise in the mars program being overfunded is BECAUSE it was not in PB16. Such gives rarely happen except as pork in the military budget to buy a certain already designed thing from a certain representative's district. Very rarely does it happen with RDT&E money.
Mars dreams give targets, but shouldn't dictate policy or actual project goals. Sci-Fi is fiction, and there's a reason it is often paired with fantasy - super colony ship is just as much a fantasy as Puff the magic dragon. Create practical technology and an actual "in-space" industrial base by continuing efforts in LEO and work on handling the risks we face now. Those are primarily the recovery of sattelites for repair, control of waste/wreckage, and maintaining the agreements against space-based weaponry. A few attacks/collisions and then there are trillions of titanium particles whizzing around would easily make Swiss cheese out of everything else up there.
Except for Apple, what with their $205 billion dollars in cash on hand...
Apple has cash (not enough for a Mars mission) but if they said they were going to Mars their stock would plummet faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Companies cannot do things which have unknown ROI, distant if any payback, huge costs and unquantified risks. Doesn't matter how big the bank account is, they can't do it because they can't show how they'd make a profit doing it.
A realistic Mars mission is probably going to cost north of a trillion dollars and I'm not even counting all of the R&D costs.
We'll get to mars the same way cup cars run races: sponsors. Get enough sponsor stickers on the side of that space ship and you can turn left all the way to mars.
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.
This is actually a problem throughout government. It's impossible to plan long-term missions well when you have to argue for funding every year, rather than being able to get a five-year spending plan approved. This bugs the hell out of the CIA, for example.
They need to establish resupply dumps all the way there and back to ensure the potato supply does not run low. In fact if they grow a sufficiently large potato in orbit that could solve all of their problems including shielding the crew from space radiation. The only risk then will be the question of if a sufficiently large potato could become sentient and decide they would make good fertiliser or somehow enslave them as a source of poo.
First you build a shipyard in orbit, then you build a long-term interplanetary research vessel, deploy, rinse and repeat. Do that and Mars will naturally follow.
The present mode of expensive one-off mission after another is horribly flawed.
:T:R:A:N:S:
In the 1960s NASA was a relatively small bureaucracy with lots of engineers and some scientists.
NASA TODAY is a monolithic bureaucracy with almost no engineers or scientists who will come out of anonymity for fear of being flogged by the Press Corps.
NASA's well-healed propaganda pice, The Martian, won an award recently for "Best Comedy"!
And that appraisal is correct!
Sorry thing is that the TOP BRASS at NASA can't understand the joke!
Ha ha
Fuck U
Safety First! But come on, stop the foreplay and get this party going! Follow the money! Like someone on the NET said, "Who's body, What body, No body cares"!
I think that's an unfair characterisation of what SpaceX has done/is doing.
SpaceX is doing some great work in lowering cost to orbit and improving rockets in a variety of ways. The importance of that cannot be overstated. But they are most decidedly NOT at the frontier of human exploration. Rockets to orbit is a solved problem. So is landing rockets on land. We can get better at it and do it cheaper (which is what they are doing) but we've done it before. They are incrementally improving work that has already been done in other projects. They're making the technology better and cheaper and more accessible.
Landing an intact first stage after it was travelling 6,000mph the other direction is pretty groundbreaking.
We've landed rockets on the ground before. Hell we've done it on other planets before. Yes it is very impressive but it's a new wrinkle on ground that has already been covered.
Propulsive landing of a space capsule for re-use is pretty major too.
Yes it is, though they haven't done that yet.
Then there's the Raptor engine, most of the way through the development with some components already tested to a high degree. A full-flow gas-gas staged combustion engine and a large one at that. No-one's built an engine like that before.
Incremental improvements to mostly already existing technologies. They are like Apple making what was already there better and more accessible and more reliable. (and unlike Apple, cheaper) I don't mean to sound like am minimizing what they are doing. It's awesome, important and badly needed. But it isn't work on the frontier of human knowledge for the most part. What SpaceX is doing is lowering cost to orbit. That is a very important piece of the puzzle but SpaceX by itself isn't going to get us to Mars any time soon. They aren't working at all on the thousands of other problems that will have to be solved to enable a Mars mission and they can't because there is no business case for it. One day hopefully there will be and the work SpaceX is doing now is a key piece of making that possible.
The only way that America will do lunar or martian missions is if it is a service. Basically, the GOP will continue to treat NASA as a jobs program, which is horribly wasteful. But the private space that first W, and now O, have been backing funding, will enable NASA to take missions to first the moon and then Mars. These will likely not use the wasteful SLS that Congress forced on O. But this will depend on the GOP to quit trying to kill private space, esp spacex.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Congress and president do the budget together. No doubt about it. But the president does have power on this. He can veto anything that Congress pushes. In particular, O did kill off constellation after the group said it was way underfunded and it became obvious that it would never work economically. Instead, O focused on private space to remove congress future ability to mess with things. The GOP has fought hard against private space, and instead created SLS funding. SLS was a deal in which o gets private space funding while the GOP get their jobs bill. In the end, SLS is dead, and private space will take us cheaply to the moon and Mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.