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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.
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.
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?
I'm a big fan of Venus as a destination. Scientifically, it makes a lot more sense than Mars - we know far less about it, and there's a real benefit to the latency reduction provided by humans concerning Venus surface rovers (which can only tolerate the surface conditions for relatively short periods before they need to float back up) than to Mars rovers, which are fine just sitting around and letting their batteries charge while waiting for more instructions. A thorough Venus survey program requires "diving" rovers based on phase-change balloons to explore the surface, and an aerial base station to hold all of the power generation, coolant handling, sample analysis, high gain radio communication, etc hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions. The easiest way to get a lifting gas on Venus is to split CO2 into CO and O2 (the same technology being tested on the Mars 2020 rover); O2 is a lifting gas there. And there's already N2 in the atmosphere. So if you have an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station, you pretty much already have livable space. Combine this with how Venus is easy to get to with frequent launch windows, easy aerocapture/aerobraking, far lower dangerous ionizing radiation, dramatically more solar radiation, nearly Earthlike gravity, etc, and how the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike that a person might even be able to step outside with nothing more than a facemask on**... it's very easy to make the case for Venus rather than Mars.
** - The known SOx and CO levels are dangerous to human eyes, but it's not certain that they rise to the point that they'd be dangerous to bare or lightly shielded skin for reasonable exposure durations. Either way, no pressure suit, cooling, or heating would be required.
I think the main thing Mars has going for it over Venus is "romance" (ironically). If people go to another planet, they want to have their feet on the ground, touching alien soil, hiking in alien canyons, etc, rather than just floating in clouds above a hellscape. Then again, I'm sure Venus has its own beauty to it.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Actually in a lot of ways Mars is much easier. Plenty of water and CO2 to support growth. Sand that has been worn smooth by millenia of dust storms so that it won't destroy your equipment and especially air seals. A day length within the range of human adaptablity.
You do need a slightly larger rocket to get stuff there, but for unmanned supply ships it really is only a small difference - the Moon is already most of the way out of the Earth's gravity well, and once you're out of the gravity well you can get anywhere in the solar system essentially for free, if you're willing to take your time. Even a relatively fast Hohmann transfer orbit isn't *that* much more energetically demanding. Yes, it needs a larger rocket, but we've got SpaceX already dedicated to having the necessary rockets within a decade. It's only the manned ships that need to cross the distance in a hurry for radiation reasons, and I'm reasonably confident that Musk isn't just blowing smoke when he says his planned rockets will be up to the job.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?
We have literally ZERO evidence that humans need 1g to remain healthy. We know long-term microgravity causes problems, but we also know that the worst of those problems are related to the lack of exercise and impact stresses on the skeleton from walking, and any sizable fraction of Earth gravity will provide those. We won't know if there are problems with 40% until we actually do long-term experiments.
Radiation protection is an issue, but that's easy enough to provide with thick-roofed shelters. Not like there's any shortage of rock and sand on Mars. We won't be walking in the open air any time in the next many centuries, maybe never if we're unable to successfully terraform the planet (Venus would likely be a more appealing target for that anyway), but there's no reason to believe we can't survive in artificial habitats. Most people on Earth already spend most of their life cut off from nature in cities anyway, what difference does it make if the city is roofed over?
--- 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.
-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.
We haven't evolved to live outside of tropical climates by your argument, because we can't live in Northern latitudes without artificial clothing and shelter.
Technology is evolution. We now direct our own adaptation to the environment and use technology to live in places that couldn't otherwise sustain us. Living on another planet is no different.
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