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Congressional Testimony Says NASA Has No Plan For the Journey To Mars (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Testimony at a hearing before the House Science Committee's Subcommittee on Space suggested that NASA's Journey to Mars lacks a plan to achieve the first human landing on the Red Planet, almost six years after President Obama announced the goal on April 15, 2010. Moreover, two of the three witnesses argued that a more realistic near term goal for the space agency would be a return to the moon. The moon is not only a scientifically interesting and potentially commercially profitable place to go but access to lunar water, which can be refined into rocket fuel, would make the Journey to Mars easier and cheaper.
Why not Venus?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Do it the old fashioned way. Drill holes, fill the holes with small charge, blast. Move forward and repeat. No reason it couldn't work.
Honestly, if they can't tackle the problem of putting someone on the Moon for a week, or a month (or at all) ... they have no way in hell of trying to solve some of the problems with going to Mars.
Permanently living on the Moon isn't even a pipe dream, but the only way to start solving some of these problems is to actually try to do it there ... put up a structure and go back to it hasn't been achieved, establishing a "permanent" settlement anywhere? They don't have anything remotely resembling that.
Trying to even get people to Mars would be suicide at this point, let alone trying to have them live there. At least not without developing and proving an awful lot of technology under realistic conditions.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Seems to me most of the people people of the "well you just do this" persuation have never even put together an Ikea chair, never mind a building. They don't seem to have a clue of the effort involved. The ONLY way it could be done is to send equipment, fuel, food & water there via autonomous lander for years prior to any humans landing possibly with (as yet not technically possible) some sort of building robots that can construct shelters and then hope the stuff is still ok when the humans eventually get there.
-1 Stupid. Why is this modded "Insightful"? It's dumb.
It's absolutely realistic to have humans living on Mars, or the Moon. It's easy: you build underground.
The problem is, you have to have a lot of technology and capabilities in place to do that. You'll need excavators, and you're not going to do that with one little mission. That's why we need to go back to the Moon, and start working on our construction capabilities there first, before heading all the way to Mars. The Moon is only a few days away, so it's a great place to get started working on this stuff, plus there's still plenty of scientifically interesting stuff to do there. Don't forget how many people would pay a handsome sum to take a vacation on the Moon. Once we have the capabilities of building underground habitats on the Moon, building large ships in space for interplanetary missions, etc., **then** we can head over to Mars and start building there.
As for gravity, we don't know what the long-term effects of 1/3g or 1/6g are on humans. It's surely not as bad as zero-g, which the guys in the ISS put up with. Building on the Moon will help us find this out, and in a safe manner since it's only a few days' journey back home to Earth. Having people spend a month or two at a time on the Moon is probably fairly safe, once we deal with the radiation problem. Mars is more of a problem because it's so far away, so you can't just come home if the low gravity is affecting you. However, it's also double the gravity of the Moon, so it likely won't be such a problem.
Anyway, these things are all challenges which can be overcome, in time. Which is why your post is stupid, because you assert that these challenges can **never** be overcome.
Living on the moon isn't that interesting, because there is almost nothing useful up there except for solar energy.
Think so? The moon has no atmosphere so it is potentially awesome for astronomy. The moon could provide a useful base for deep space exploration as its gravity well is much smaller than Earth's. It could be a source of raw materials. It may be possible to produce propellant on the moon. The moon consists of more than moon dust and reflected sunlight.
The goal should be to become self sufficient on Mars.
A fine goal but how do you get there? It's not hard to make a reasonable argument that colonizing the moon (which is much closer) could be a useful stepping stone to the goal of Mars and beyond. Putting an entire infrastructure to support human habitation on another planet is a monumental undertaking and we don't even have a fraction of a percent of the technology needed to do that. The Moon could be very useful in development of some of that technology.
If you can do that, you can make real progress towards colonizing the solar system because you don't have to bring everything from earth.
I could make the same argument regarding moon colonization.
There's lots of suggestions floating around, none within reach of current technology. The closest and most efficient is probably the idea of seeding the atmosphere with an engineered airborne algae or diatom that would convert the atmospheric carbon into a stable form that would precipitate to the surface as they died. Get rid of the CO2 and the planet will cool over the course of many centuries to something we can work with - without greenhouse gasses Venus would be colder than Earth. Lingering CO2 and water vapor would prevent that, but probably even a fair fraction of the water vapor would condense out as the atmosphere cools.
Of course there's still that ~117 earth-day day to deal with. And probably a fairly extreme air pressure even after we've removed around 1/3+ of its mass (presumably it's not just pure carbon that precipitates out). That's going to take some real creative genetic engineering if you want complex surface life to thrive, but hey maybe by the time the planet cools off enough to work with we'll be up to the challenge.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Here we go again... NASA is doomed to keep a single course to Mars.
I think only reason they talk about Mars is if talk about the Moon, then need to put up some real money now to build transfer stage and lander. But talk about Mars because you can always defer those costs of hardware 20 years into the future for some other smucks to deal with. Also why colonize Mars? I don't see a huge land rush to Gobi Desert even though that place is 1000 times easier to settle. Reason is that place is a terrible place to live, we only fantasize about Mars because it is so far away.
Matula posted this on NASAwatch:
I blame most of the destination argument on the creation of the Mars underground in the 1980's. Prior to that NASA was focused on using the Shuttle for industrialization in LEO with projects like demonstrating the repair and return of satellites, building structural items in orbit, tethers, etc., all logical starting points for building a Cislunar industrial capability that would have given us the Solar System. NASA didn't even have plans to send robots to Mars. By advocating that we needed to skip the Moon and go rushing off to Mars they started this entire useless destination debate that has paralyzed space policy ever since.
Although their arguments made no rational or economic sense, falling back on outdated ideas like "manifest destiny" and painting Mars like a second Earth, they struck some cord among a very vocal hard core group that has shouted down any rational space strategy ever since. We see it now with Senators force feeding the SLS with money it doesn't need while starving commercial crew because the SLS would, in theory, be able to take astronauts to Mars. As a result the ISS is only one Soyuz failure away from being abandoned.
We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that is already well mapped and explored.
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mfwright@batnet.com
And so are you. Humans are delicate blobs of protein, fat, and carbs in aqueous solution or suspension. Not the right stuff for space. The only good reason for humans to leave the Earth is to travel to another hospitable planetary surface to establish a permanent colony. All else is engineering ego.
There is little that a human can do in space that can't be done faster and cheaper (when you count life support costs) by an AI controlling robots. But NASA has become a very conservative and bureaucratic organization that feels more comfortable doing what it has already done. For engineers this may be fun but it's not very productive. Once you've expended the boost energy to get out of Earth's gravity well, Mars is not much further away, energy wise, than the Moon.
And there IS a very good reason to establish a self-supporting colony on Mars. Survival of the species.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Hey, it worked on Earth. All it takes is introducing one microbe capable of thriving to remake an ecosystem. On Earth it was the first blue-green algae to develop photosynthesis a couple billion years ago. It took over a billion years to saturate the oceans with oxygen, and another half-billion before the atmospheric oxygen built up to current levels, but it did the job. And heck - there's the evolution of cellulose as well. That wasn't microbes, but the 80(?) million years between the evolution of cellulose and the evolution of something capable of digesting it locked gigatons of carbon into woody materials that eventually became planet-wide coal deposits, in the process interrupting a runaway greenhouse effect that would likely have left Earth in a state not so very different than Venus.
Start with an intelligently designed microbe without any competition or predators and I'm willing to bet we could see similarly dramatic effects within only a few millenia. Not exactly fast in human terms, but we're talking about rebuilding an entire planet - patience is going to be required.
Well, either patience, or the application of godlike power, which is also not completely out of the question when we're talking about looking many centuries into the future.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.