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Trump Has Grand Plan For Mission To Mars But Nasa Advises: Cool Your Jets (theguardian.com)
Donald Trump would like to see Americans walk on Mars during his presidency. Nasa would love to get there that quickly, too. The reality of space travel is slightly more complicated, however. From a report: On Monday, during a call with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who was aboard the International Space Station, Trump pressed her for a timeline on a crewed mission to Mars, one of Nasa's longest standing and most daunting goals. "Tell me, Mars," he asked her from the Oval Office, "what do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?" Whitson answered by pointing out that Trump, by signing a Nasa funding bill last month, had already approved a timeline for a mission in the 2030s. She added that Nasa was building a new heavy-launch rocket, which would need testing. "Unfortunately space flight takes a lot of time and money," she said. "But it is so worthwhile doing." Trump replied: "Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed that up a little bit, OK?" It was not clear whether the president meant the remark as a quip or something more serious.
Even if there is no suitable launch window in a decade, put him in the rocket and let him test it anyway. It could make America great again!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Living on Mars is not the same as a discussion about visiting Mars.
But, "we can't do XX. Ever." has been said a million times about a million different things and every time, when there was the will and the money to do XX the person making the statement came down as a short-sighted idiot.
That Trump will finish a first term much less get reelected to a second term is as unlikely as NASA to send astronauts to Mars in the next eight years.
He's not interested in space travel, he's interested in himself.
I have a suspicion this is Ego vs Science.
He wants to cut all sorts of science and research budgets, so he's obviously not in favor of public money being spend on science. In Trump's eyes science is a private enterprise thing, not a government thing.
So why does he want to go to Mars, and specifically why does he want to go during his presidency?
The answer is Ego.
He wants to be known as the President who got man to another planet. He wants the capital city on some long-in-the-future Mars to be called Trump Town.
He doesn't want to go to look for signs of life, he doesn't want to go to advance science, he doesn't want to go to see if there is any long-term investment strategy.
He wants to go for the ego-boost.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"Interplanetary travel is more complicated than I thought it would be."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Argument overheard several tens of thousands of years ago:
Enough with this migrating to Asia thing. We cannot live in Asia. Ever. The difference in temperature will guarantee that. You can't fix biology and evolution. And don't say "take the skins off animals" or "build fires". Give us all a break.
I just don't understand this. Every single time he says something idiotic, there are always people who try to claim that he isn't serious. "Oh, he's not serious about the wall" "Oh, he's not serious about his vendetta against immigrants." And then he will do, or at least try to do, exactly what he said. Anyone who, at this point, honestly believes that he doesn't mean what he says, is either stupid, deluded, or both.
So yes, I think he's entirely serious that he wants to have people walking on Mars within his term. The only question is, what will he do when he finds out that it's impossible? Will he throw craptons of money at NASA, thinking that he just throw money at the problem? Will he just get pissed off and "fire" NASA?
The man is so completely divorced from reality that there's really no way to anticipate what he will do.
"or, at worst, during my second term" ... Please... No...
And the rockets will coal powered. Beautiful, clean coal. That's the secret to making America great again.
It's not that he's evil (at least in this context), it's that he's making everything about himself.
#DeleteFacebook
What? The difference in temperature is minimal between the two areas. You fell into the common trap: since one thing is possible, all things must be possible. Mars is nothing like the Earth. Nothing. Imagine living in the bottom of the sea, or on the North Pole. That is paradise compared to Mars. Just because you can run to the end of your block doesn't mean you can run a marathon either.
If that gets us a mission to Mars sooner, so what?
It only has an induced magnetosphere, like Mars (although about twice as powerful). But it's big defense against radiation is the thickness of its atmosphere; radiation has to pass through a lot of mass to get to habitable areas. The radiation levels within Venus's middle cloud layer are perfectly acceptable without extra shielding.
Not in the middle cloud layer. Actually it's just the opposite, the pressure / temperature relation in the middle cloud layer means somewhat low (but still acceptable) pressures at normal Earth temperatures. But it's still by far the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth.
The unfortunate thing for Venus is that people think only in terms of surfaces; if Venus's atmosphere had stopped at its middle cloud layer, nobody would be talking about Mars today. But because Venus's atmosphere is carbon dioxide, almost any common gas can be used as a lifting gas. Including nitrogen and oxygen - ordinary Earth air is a lifting gas, offering about half as much lift as helium does on Earth. Meaning you can actually live inside your lift envelope. And airship envelopes are not particularly heavy, despite their large sizes. Your entire habitat is this completely mobile, constantly exploring new ground, accessing the surface as needed with bellows and/or phase-change balloons.
Now you're talking about terraforming, which we're nowhere near doing for any planet (not Mars either - Mars's biggest problem is that isotopic ratios indicate that almost all of the planet's nitrogen has been lost to space). Carl Sagan famously, before Venus's conditions were known, proposed seeding Venus's clouds with phototrophs in order to sequester carbon and create an oxygenated atmosphere. He later changed his mind, saying that you'd end up with a huge deep layer of carbon and a dense, hot oxygen atmosphere, and the whole planetary surface would explode. Further dampers were put on the concept when it was pointed out that, depending on what assumptions you make, it'd take tens of thousands to millions of years to sequester regardless.
Many, many different proposals for terraforming Venus have been made over the years, but honestly I think Sagan had the right idea, for the wrong reason. Namely, because we've seen this situation before. Earth used to be a world with a CO2-rich atmosphere, no oxygen, ferric oxide on its surface (well, more accurately, Fe+2 ions in the oceans), etc. Did Earth explode once microbes developed photosynthesis? Of course not. As fast as they could produce oxygen, the iron oxidized to ferric oxyhydroxide to magnetite and hematite, laying down bands of iron oxides (interspersed with sequestered carbon), which we now know as the banded iron formations. There was no "thick layer of graphite" or "dense explosive oxygen atmosphere being made" on Earth, and there's all the less reason to expect it on Venus, because in Venus's hot, dense surface conditions the abundant ferric oxide (and other species) will be even more reactive. Oxygen will be consumed as fast as it's created, until you've exhausted all available surface ferric oxide, which will take quite a long time. Indeed, if you took some of the "atmospheric ejection" or "atmosphere freezing" terraforming proposals, you'd be faced with a problem when you actually started producing oxygen in Venus - you'd be fighting against the rusting of the planet.
The low levels of hydrogen are IMHO more challenging; I don't like most of the proposals for getting more
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
No, no, no. How many times have we told you not to try out your code on the production server?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The sulfuric acid is more of a resource than a problem, and it'd be easier to colonize Venus if the sulfuric acid was denser. It's actually pretty sparse - a couple to a couple dozen milligrams per cubic meter. Standards for breathing sulfuric acid on Earth for an 8-hour shift are between one and a couple milligrams per cubic meter, if that puts it into perspective. It's like a bad smog (or more accurately, vog) than being like a bath in sulfuric acid. There are many polymers with excellent sulfuric acid compatibility.
The reason sulfuric acid is a resource is, first off, it's not 100% sulfuric acid, so there's the water content that can first be dehydrated. After further heating, you decompose H2SO4 to SO3 + H2O. Further heating, plus catalysts, can also decompose SO3 to SO2 + O2. Alternatively you can use the SO3 as a scrubber conditioning agent to help capture more moisture from the atmosphere. There's also the sulfur-iodine cycle for the generation of hydrogen.
Not so, the sunlight in the middle cloud layer is rather earthlike (depending on your latitude). The cloud decks have absorbed only about a third of the light by the time it reaches the middle cloud layer at the equator (more toward the poles), and Venus's solar constant is higher than Earth's, so it roughly equals out. Except that light comes from all sides.
Solar power has even been shown to be possible to use at the surface, albeit with extremely low power density. But enough to run, say, a seismic or weather station.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."