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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.
I've been saying this since the idea of going to Mars came up in the first place. Let's go back to the moon and figure out how to live there, before travelling an insane distance and strand someone on another planet, and leave them to die.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
Of course there is no plan, because it isn't realistic to have humans living on Mars. The radiation and differences in gravity will see to that. People always say: "oh we will *just* build underground". With what? An excavator you bought at the Home Depot on Mars? It isn't realistic to ever have humans living on Mars. You can't even have people living permanently on the Moon for the same reason. Gravity. Radiation.
It seems like the technical ability to go to the moon has more or less been lost, and then someone wants them to leapfrog to Mars.
NASA spent a bunch of years putting stuff exclusively into low Earth orbit (which was always a criticism of the Shuttle), and then subsequently lost the ability to do that ... and to add insult to injury they need to rent lift capacity from Russia, or buy rocket engines from them.
How anybody could expect them to go to Mars when they've not demonstrated the ability to go to the moon in 43 years?
Of course they don't have a plan ... they have neither the budget for it, nor the technology at the moment.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why not Venus?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Explosive allows to make the stuff "shovel-able", breaking big chunk into smaller one. You still need the excavator to shovel the stuff out. You would also need something like it on the moon, but it is not that far away.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
We're pretty sure that - in particularly limited areas - there's water, in some form (ices, hydrated minerals, etc). The problem is not only that you have to set up large-scale offworld mining, melting, filtering, and storage (an engineering project of quite significant note, given the harsh environment and the cost of delivering hardware to the lunar surface), but you also have to create low-cost reusable rockets designed for repeat operation on the moon with little to no maintenance, fueled by materials from the lunar surface. Which is a vastly harder, more expensive task. After all, it makes no financial sense to mine a tonne of water from the surface of the moon and then deliver it into lunar orbit or beyond with 10 tonnes of hardware/propellant sent from Earth, which in turn took 100 tonnes to get off the surface of the Earth. Everything has to be long-term operable entirely in the lunar environment with lunar resources.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets. But, if your goal is to advance the tech of reusable rockets, space mining, in-situ propellant production, etc, then by all means go ahead. Just don't pretend like you're doing it as a "cost saving measure" for a Mars mission.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
The technical ability to go to the moon, or even low earth orbit, is at our finger tips. The practical ability to do so today does not exist in the NASA storehouses.
The mathematics required to go to the moon and return was at least half the battle. Anyone who has had to slog through Battin knows that pain. But we are, to a certain extent, beyond that now. Our ability to simulate orbital mechanics and transfers far exceeds anything imaginable back in the last 50s and early 60s. NASA didn't not land rockets back on earth like SpaceX because they didn't think it would be more convenient, they didn't do it because the entire computational infrastructure that existed couldn't handle the mechanics.
Just about everything that was done has been advanced since the Apollo era. Will we need to re-invent some things? Sure, but in many cases the materials, technologies, and capabilities we have today would make all but the lessons learned books* obsolete for new construction.
We haven't really "lost" anything but the will. And by will, I mean solid, long-term funding commitments.
*yes - they do exist. They have been written for many missions and you can browse through them at several NASA libraries.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Imagine a project at work that will take a year. You've been commissioned to do a study and you present it with the schematics. Good, now go do it.
Oh, I can only guarantee you that I will give you time to work on it for the next month, and in a month I'll tell you if you have time. I'll need you to develop a complete spec and fixed manpower pricing. But you won't have anyone to work on that, because I need all your people to be working on my other pet project.
Fast forward 6 months:
So why haven't you worked on this? Oh, and by the way, your boss is about to retire. His replacement almost certainly doesn't care about this project.
We'll call you in in 6 more months to yell at you for not being complete.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why? Mars is much easier. Moon is only slightly closer (energetically speaking).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sounds like a good analysis. Personally, I don't give a rip about having people walk around on Mars: I think it's far more important to advance technology of reusable rockets, space mining, etc., so I think going back to the Moon makes far more sense.
Think about it this way: we landed men on the Moon over 40 years ago. We haven't been back since. What good did it do us, besides having some neat photos and museum exhibits about our past greatness which we cannot replicate now (without a whole lot of money and effort--we can't just launch a Moon mission next month if we wanted to)? We've actually **lost** the capabilities we had back then: back in the early 70s, we had the ability to send men to the Moon, and we did, several times. Today, we simply don't. Going to Mars will be no different: we'll spend a bunch of money on some big-ass rockets and send a handful of people to Mars, they'll walk around, and then we'll have nothing to show for it besides some photos and rock samples, and we won't be able to easily do it again because it'll be too expensive (because we chose the most expensive method possible because we wanted to do it as quickly as possible).
If we develop technologies more, then trips to other planets and moons will be cheaper. No, a singular trip to Mars will not be cheaper than the slower method of going back to the Moon and developing a lot of tech and capabilities, but **lots** of trips to Mars, to Saturn, to Titan, etc., will be far, far cheaper if we develop the tech now, than just sending singular trips to each of these places.
So the important question is:
Do we want to just send some people to walk around on Mars, and then quit all manned space exploration after that?
Or do we want to be able to send manned missions all over the solar system?
If your answer is the former, then going straight to Mars is the correct choice. If your answer is the latter, then going to the Moon is.
Do you think the European colonies in the Americas were cost effective from the start?
It took quite a lot of support from to get those colonies self sustainable, specially if it wasn't possible to enslave the natives to do their master's bidding.
The colonies were sold in Europe as way for riches, and to get more land, but mostly to get windfall riches after the Spanish stroke the motherload with the Aztecs and the Incas.
All other colonies had to endure several decades of very little growth and dependency of their country of origin,
The moon is a lot worse cause there null infrastructure, and the affordable technology for getting to orbit and out of Earth orbit doesn't exist yet.
But we now have ways to automate stuff, and we could send automated stations that could assemble buildings and materials in the Moon.
Probably, have an automated station building materials and equipment for some years would make it feasible to colonize the moon.
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.
We know how to build ships that can reach 0.2c
Until we actually build one and it travels that fast that is not true.
Problematic is it to scale that for humans ... however I'm pretty sure most of us will witness the first probe going to an other solar system.
Not in my lifetime. Not in yours either.
Care to offer a counter-argument then rather than just ad hominems?
The moon is almost outside the Earth's gravity well. For non-perishable shipping purposes that's all that really matters - once you've escaped Earth the rest of the solar system can be reached for almost zero additional delta-V. More rocket just reduces the shipping times. Obviously that's a big deal for shipping radiation-sensitive humans, but they're only a small fraction of the shipping weight of an outpost, and can be sent once the supplies are already in place.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think neither the moon nor Mars are good destinations; we should be heading for the asteroid belt.
No, if you want to send men all over the solar system, you develop infrastructure that doesn't live in a gravity well. Which, I believe, is what NASA is actually doing. Unfortunately "mission to some to be named asteroid the identity of which depends on when we have enough funding to do anything but build a useless congressional pork rocket project" doesn't have the same ring as "return to the moon".
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.
end quote
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
It's exactly that kind of congressional thinking that has left NASA with no ability to even get humans into space for the last 5 years.
SpaceX currently only has the ability for fairly light lift to orbit for satellites and ISS cargo runs. SNC and Blue Origin are working off NASA's old technology to get humans to low Earth orbit. And Virgin Galactic is suborbital flight only (so lets not even consider this one for anything other than a joyride for rich men at the moment). Ultimately none of these are pushing the boundaries beyond what the Russians have kept reliably running for the last 5 decades.
NASA is trying to push boundaries to move on beyond LEO however congressional politics have been flushing every attempt to even catch up down the drain every few years, and this whole session looks like they are finding excuses and setting it up to do it again as soon as Obama is out of office.
Damn belters
That's physical distance, I'm talking energy distance, completely different thing. The energy difference is what's important for rocketry - as long as you're not standing still, physical distance can be crossed just by waiting to coast across it, no extra energy needed. Energy differences require the application of energy, no amount of time will cross it.
Look at this crude drawing of gravitational potential energy around the Earth and moon for reference.
http://www.cyberphysics.co.uk/...
The Earth's surface has a specific potential energy of -62.6 MJ/kg, the moon's orbit (sans moon) only -0.5 Mj/kg (always negative, because zero energy is traditionally taken to be at infinite distance so that all calculations share the same zero). That means that once you make it from the Earth's surface to the Moon's orbit (+62.1MJ/kg), it only requires 0.8% more energy to escape from the Earth entirely. And once you're free of the Earth you can use gravitational slingshots to take you anywhere in the solar system without spending any more propellant aside from fine-tuning course corrections. The so-called Interplanetary Transport Network that most of our probes have taken advantage of. It's slow, but you don't need to spend energy except to get free of Earth.
If you want to get there faster, like if carrying astronauts who can't survive in interplanetary space for long, then you need to consider the orbital energy of the planets, in which case Earth is at about -444 MJ/kg, and Mars at about -291MJ/kg, a difference of about 152MJ/kg. So getting to Mars without gravitational slingshots takes about 3.45x as much energy as getting to the moon. Admittedly more of a challenge. On the plus side, if we start out orbiting in the opposite direction as the moon, we can at least slingshot around that to double our initial momentum, lowering the requirements to only 2.45x as much energy as needed to get to the moon.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I kind of like the idea, with some variations:
It shouldn't be Nevada, nor Antarctica like someone else mentioned. It should be somewhere with near-surface permafrost, with good road access to keep costs down. Mars isn't a dry desert, nor is it a glacier, it's ice mixed in with sand, dust, muck... honestly, I think the Icelandic highlands would be perfect. The last time I was out there I actually ran into some geologists who were studying a new volcano there to help better understand Mars ;)
The contest should be NASA funded - it'd be a (relatively) low cost way for them to retire a lot of risk. They should solicit plans from a wide range of sources and fund half a dozen or more. It shouldn't just be "a rover". They should be given a standard cylinder that all of their hardware has to fit in (representing the landing craft), and a weight limit. The teams should be required to build their proposal and put it into a shipping crate, which would then be delivered and transported to the test site. They would then be powered on and left to their own devices, tasked to build the best "shelter" that they can.
If they could do it on Earth, they could (with some modifications) probably do it on Mars.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
For approximately 1.5 trillion dollars the world 2014 military spending. Lets use, half... nah a quarter of that directed to space. Plenty of money for maintenance and payroll. That give you $325 Billion for space development. 2014 total expenditure was about $65 billion so thats 500% more resources available. Give the engineers and scientists some money to burn.
Your country wants to opt out? No space for you! (literally)
Knowing it all since the late 70's.
It's much too far away; it's even farther than Mars. It also doesn't have that much mass, and it's all spread out except for Vesta and Ceres. We should be sending probes there, for sure, but we're nowhere near ready to send people there. Even Mars makes more sense than that.
The Moon is right next door, has plenty of material (not sure how usable it is for construction, but from what I remember it is possible to make "lunar concrete" with the regolith), has some water at the poles, has some gravity for manufacturing but not too much so it'll be cheap to launch from there or even build a space elevator (this is entirely possible on the Moon because of the low gravity), and will give us practice in doing stuff offworld without having to endure 6+month transit times.