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.

Comments

Lost is a tricky word

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:Venus

[Rei]

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.

Re:Mars is impossible

[werepants]

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.

Enough of Mars!

[k6mfw]

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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