Anything that involves a dynamometer and a connection to the exhaust is going to be detectable. You could have something like those side-of-the-highway detectors that evaluate the exhaust of cars as they drive by in actual operation, but that isn't going to be nearly as accurate. It seems to me that the desire for a controlled test and the desire for an undetectable test stand at odds to one another in many ways.
Society operates on trust and the assumption that people will act ethically the majority of the time. Expecting corporations to act ethically isn't unreasonable, even if it is currently unfashionable.
No craft has to operate perfectly if it has humans aboard. Make it serviceable and bring spare parts. You can get far higher reliability this way than by engineering a single perfect specimen.
Curiosity's lessons are absolutely applicable to Mars. If you land an automated return vehicle (lightweight) that then fills itself up with fuel (atmospheric ISRU), you send astronauts down in another relatively lightweight vehicle to meet their already prepped ride home. The landing challenge can be largely addressed via scaling unless you assume a mission architecture where you carry the fuel for the return journey down with you.
Change your assumptions. Technological dealbreakers only exist if you assume a mission profile that's designed to cost as much as possible - which is essentially what the classical NASA structure is. It looks hard, time-consuming and expensive because it is a jobs program. If we decided we wanted to actually get there, it would be a lesser challenge for the engineers of today than the Apollo program was in its time.
Seems to me you are making a hell of a lot of assumptions about a mission profile - something that involves orbital spacecraft manufacture and bringing everything and the kitchen sink.
This is completely unnecessary. Curiosity is on the same order of magnitude as the payloads we would need to land - that engineering problem is essentially solved, scaling would get us where we need to be. What is meaningfully different about atmospheric ISRU on Earth and on Mars? We're using CO2 from the atmosphere in both cases. There isn't anything to teleoperate either - just hit "Go".
Rather than hashing out the details, I'd like to hear your explanation for how something like Mars Direct could possibly be more challenging than a lunar colony.
The only obstacles to Mars are will and politics. Nobody wants to actually get anything done - they want to keep Alabamans employed building obsolete SRBs and make sure that every single NASA center gets a hand in the cookie jar of any high profile mission.
If they really wanted to get to Mars, they would use an architecture like Mars Direct which could be done in 10 or so years, using today's technologies, without even expanding NASA's budget.
Instead, this is really built to show as many SLS launches as possible (read: most inefficient architecture imaginable) to make it appear as though the insanely expensive rocket to nowhere has a nice full launch manifest.
It's "totally known" that the coriolis effect becomes negligible once you get far enough out from the hub. Seriously, this is not new, the calculations have been done many, many times. Hit google for more information, I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know this, and that they'd comment without understanding whereof they speak in the first place.
It isn't "totally known" until someone has done it. Bottom line, we've never subjected a human to artificial gravity in space in any appreciable way. We've got much more experience with microgravity (and arguably lunar gravity) than artificial.
In space you have effectively limitless energy in the form of the sun and limitless resources in the form of asteroids, many of which could individually supply a giant space station with raw materials for hundreds if not thousands of years to come. You don't need to worry about pollution and once your supply lines are set up deliveries arrive as regular as the post. Plus, extracting CO2 from the atmosphere of Mars would be the very least of the technical challenges facing a colony. A colony incidentally that would probably suffer from bone weakness due to the lower gravity on Mars, a problem for which there would be no solution.
Using CO2 is as relevant for a short-term mission as it is for a colony and makes life dramatically easier than a lunar or orbital colony. It is simple technology, with reliable, working prototypes *today*. The heaviest supplies can be generated on-site, which dramatically simplifies the mission architecture. On the other hand, mining asteroids is totally unproven - we haven't even landed on one. Mining and refining solids is not automated on Earth - why do you think we could do that so easily in space, where maintenance is much more difficult, and microgravity makes simple things like transporting material enormously more complex?
Another objection you haven't begun to answer is how you shield an orbiting colony from radiation. ISS doesn't have that problem because of the magnetosphere. Lunar or martian missions only have to deal with interplanetary radiation environments for days or months, and even then the challenge isn't trivial. We have NO current technology that can protect humans from cosmic radiation that doesn't involve insane amounts of mass or power. Our most sophisticated technique currently is trying to give astronauts a bunker the size of a closet, which is surrounded by water and human waste. That doesn't scale well to a long-term orbiting colony.
On Mars, the technology you need for shielding? A shovel.
It's much easier to get full earth gravity on a space station than on Mars. It's not even possible on Mars as far as I know.
And how will people handle the coriolis effect? This is totally unknown. I'm calling it a wash whether that will be easier or harder to adapt to than reduced Martian gravity.
It's far easier to get to these things (resources) in space.
This is just wrong. The greatest short-term advantage of Mars is the atmosphere full of CO2. That means a limitless supply of oxygen, and that we can bring a tiny amount of Hydrogen by mass which can then be turned into far greater amount of water and methane (rocket fuel). Atmospheric ISRU is easy, your car does it every day. Processing solids, as would be required for mining an asteroid or the lunar regolith, is something that has not yet been automated on Earth, much less in space.
Moon really really sucks due to the whole "lunar night is really really really really cold and long" bit. Okay, you can work around that by building a base at the pole where there are peaks that are in permanent sunlight (and crater bottoms that are permanently dark).
What if you don't want a base at the pole? Probably the most promising place on the moon from a science perspective is the side facing away from Earth, which would be shielded from terrestrial EM pollution and would hence be an absolutely perfect place for a massive radio telescope, or any kind of telescope for that matter.
And one big objection that wasn't raised - moon dust seems to be far more abrasive than Mars dust, since there is essentially no erosion. The gravity problem you mention with Mars is worse on the moon. And there is very little of scientific interest on the moon aside from the aforementioned telescope - Mars, on the other hand, is far more interesting geologically and biologically.
All space stations to date have been regularly resupplied from Earth. The ISS can only go six months without being resupplied before it has to be abandoned. Because of fun things like mass fraction, you can't send something the size of the ISS to Mars.
Adding more supplies to a spacecraft, and scaling it up to accommodate said supplies isn't difficult. You wouldn't need anything near the size of the ISS either, there are a lot of extraneous science modules, etc that would be unnecessary on a journey to Mars.
That said, mass fraction only matters if you are considering a single launch. If you do on-orbit refueling, you can fly Rhode Island around with a single ion engine, as long as you have all the time in the world. Not that I'm advocating such a mission profile, just saying is all.
The fact is that sending mass to the Moon is 100x cheaper and thus you'll have 100x more mass of supplies and equipment and thus orders of magnitude higher chances of success, plus a simple and viable bail-out option with pretty reasonable restart and correction options when things don't quite go right. Its really a no-brainer.
Citation? The delta-V difference between the Moon and Mars is nowhere near 100x. Also, on Mars you can use atmospheric in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to easily generate oxygen, and if you bring a tiny bit of Hydrogen you can create water and rocket fuel (methane) besides. That cuts your mass requirement down dramatically - such that the whole mission could be accomplished in 2-4 launches of an Atlas-V or Falcon 9 class rocket, depending on the mission profile. On the other hand ISRU means chewing up lunar regolith on the moon, something we can't even automate yet here on Earth.
Why do you think SpaceX is building their future rockets to run on methane?
Consider this the equivalent of the Apollo program, in which in 1961 nobody had even been to orbit. By 1968 we were just barely reaching the capability to go 3 days to the Moon, land, and return. Mars is a MUCH harder problem, and we're at a similar point, we know what the technical challenges are, and have several viable options for solving each one, but we have to DO the work.
If anything, your timeline for Apollo just shows how incredibly weak-willed the Mars naysayers are.
A moon landing is at least 10x more challenging than getting to orbit. Getting to orbit is 100x more challenging than suborbital rocket flight. A Mars landing is probably 2x the challenge of a moon landing, if that. If you don't believe me, play enough Kerbal Space Program to understand the scope of the problems and then let's talk. It's abso-fucking-lutely incredible to go from no orbital capability to a Moon landing in less than 10 years, using slide rules. It makes a Mars mission with all of our modern design, simulation, prototyping, and sensing technologies seem like a cakewalk by comparison.
The difference between a moon landing and a Mars landing is pretty minimal. The big design jobs are the same: You still need a lander, an earth-reentry capsule, a life support module for the trip there and back. The vast majority of your Delta-V is spent getting to LEO, as well - as Heinlein said, once you are orbiting the Earth you're halfway to anywhere. So the biggest technical difference between a Moon landing and a Mars landing is that the trip is much longer. As mentioned previously, this is an eminently solvable (arguably solved) problem.
Granted, there are some landing challenges presented by the atmosphere of Mars, but we've successfully landed numerous craft, some of a substantial size, on Mars. We had far less experience with the Moon in the Apollo days than we have today with Mars.
If it was planned for it certainly could. The duration is mainly just a function of supply/resource levels - increasing storage capacity isn't a difficult engineering challenge.
Your car faces much harsher conditions though - constant starts and stops, bumps and potentially abuse from owners that don't follow maintenance schedules. Look at something closer to a generator, which can be made for extreme reliability. Also, nobody ever said there couldn't be maintenance - the entire intent is to support manned missions, so it is fair to suppose that astronauts will be on hand and the system will be designed to be serviceable in the field.
While I agree more with your points than the OP you are responding to, there is a world of difference between LEO, inside the protective cocoon of Earth's magnetosphere, and interplanetary space. But IMO the moon is a much more logical place to start. It's a lot warmer and closer to home.
Of course there is, but that's why we go to a planetary body - you've got minimal time in unprotected space, then, and then you have lots of feasible options to better shield yourself.
On the other hand, I don't agree that the moon is better - it is closer, yes, but it has less resources, less scientific opportunity, bigger technical challenges (need power storage for 2 weeks of darkness, and how do you grow plants like that?), no atmosphere for rad protection or easy resource utilization... overall Mars has much more to offer at a similar technical cost.
I think the 10-year plan for a manned landing is feasible, within current budgets and current technology, if we went with something like Mars Direct. The problem though is not just the lack of will, but the political infighting between NASA branches, and the continual change of direction we get due to new presidential directives every year or two combined with Congress viewing NASA purely as a jobs program, and folks like Richard Shelby who ensure the flow of taxpayer dollars to keep Alabamans employed building obsolete, expensive, and dangerous solid rocket boosters.
Thanks to all of that, the real goal of the people who control NASA hasn't actually been anything technical for a long, long time (arguably not since Apollo wrapped up). So if this happens, it is going to take either a complete shakeup in NASA or a philanthropic private effort like Elon Musk's to realize it.
Everything useful at NASA happens in spite of the best efforts of the president and congress.
ISRU is stinking easy if you are just pulling resources from the atmosphere. Anybody suggesting that you start with subsurface martian ice or lunar regolith or asteroids deserves to be ridiculed, but there are no technical barriers to cracking atmospheric CO2 to get oxygen for starters, and then if you bring a small reserve of hydrogen you can make your own water and methane (rocket fuel) besides.
Arguably you applied ISRU to get to work this morning - you used atmospheric oxygen in a chemical reaction to propel your vehicle. Internal combustion engines are also much more complex mechanically than the basic system I described would have to be.
Well said. BTW, oxygen, water and rocket fuel are pretty easy to obtain from the atmosphere by breaking down CO2. Although you might want to bring a bit of hydrogen yourself to make things easier.
When you object to Mars on the ground of practical value, why don't you simultaneously object to sports, endless wars, or reality TV? I'd much rather invest our disposable resources (of which we have plenty by any reasonable metric) expanding into a new frontier, improving our scientific and technological capabilities, and giving future generations the chance to not go extinct when the next asteroid comes around.
There are plenty of way to do a Mars colony without nuclear rockets. Start off with in-situ resource utilization just for rocket fuel, oxygen, and water and cut down the necessary provisions by an order of magnitude or two.
As badass as it is, Project Orion is never happening in the current political climate. Much better to invest our time advocating realistic approaches. Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that.
If every nuclear weapon in existence were detonated all at once in a war-to-end-all-wars, the earth would still be much more inhabitable than any other body in our solar system.
If even a few bunkers of isolated survivors on earth lived through a super-plague of epic biblical proportions, they would still be far more likely to survive than any colonies of humans in space (who would all be dead very shortly after the supply drops stopped coming from earth).
Keeping all our eggs in this basket is our only option.
Nonsense. A self-sustaining colony isn't feasible in 10 years, but it certainly is within 100. And how do we learn to build self-sustaining colonies? By trying.
No way... the moon is just about as technically challenging, but offers no easy opportunities for in-situ resource utilization, has 2 weeks of darkness to contend with, and presents minimal scientific potential. A propellant depot in space makes far more sense than a refill station at the bottom of a gravity well, as well.
That article makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions. The thing that makes Mars attractive (and feasible) is resources, and in-situ resource utilization is technically proven and achievable. That will cut your 60 shuttle launches down to 2 or 3 - the primary benefit is that you don't have to lift all the rocket fuel for the return trip. Mars Direct is the name of a mission profile that is far more efficient (although less politically attractive) than the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to Mars described by the article.
Great question. First off, really important resources can be extracted directly from the atmosphere of Mars - specifically, rocket fuel and oxygen. It's easy, and has been demonstrated already in prototypes that are arguably less complex than a modern internal combustion engine. Getting resources in solid form from an asteroid or lunar regolith would be much more challenging, technically speaking.
Secondly, radiation is a difficult problem for space travel. A sustained human presence would not be practical in space beyond low-earth orbit, where the ISS currently resides. That's because the ISS is shielded by the Earth's magnetosphere. No interplanetary space station would get the benefit of that protection and would be exposed directly to galactic cosmic rays and solar activity, and the crews would have an unacceptably high increase in cancer risk, along with the potential for more immediate fatalities if there was a bad solar event. Currently we don't have any good technology to deal with that problem long-term.
On Mars, though, you immediately get your radiation dose cut in half because you are sitting on trillions of tons of very effective shielding. You also get some benefit from the atmosphere, and there is a ton of quality shielding material close at hand - bury your habitat in dirt or dig into the side of a mountain and you are safe.
There are other factors as well, but either of those alone makes a planetary colony much more attractive than an orbiting one.
Bullshit. We spend far more money on far less important things, continually. Look at the entire sports industry, for starters. Or anything that has been on reality TV, ever. Or the endless war the U.S. sustains with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?)
For practical purposes, our resources are NOT limited. We don't have war and poverty because of resource limitations, we have them because of economic and political problems that will not be fixed by any quantity of resources.
The technology required for a Mars mission is here, right now. The resources required are substantial, but I'd much rather our money go to scientists and engineers to build new space hardware than have it go to the military to kill people in the middle east.
Columbus also didn't have the advantage of physics, or reliable maps, or any kind of prior exploration. Sustaining a colony on the New World was at the absolute limits of the technology of the time. As is demonstrated by the mortality rates of early colonists. Arguably in our case the problem is much easier because we have a much more specific idea of what to expect when we arrive and can prepare accordingly, we can choose our destination with a high level of precision, and the colonists will have continual access to the world's experts to help them solve any problems they do encounter.
It seems to me the main difference is that we are content to invest our spare money and time on cat memes, TV, different flavors of sportsball or just good old fashioned violence and subjugation of foreigners. Judging by our spending habits we as a race are much more willing to dump money on mindless distraction than we are on great historical human endeavors.
Also - are you content to let the human race go extinct the next time an asteroid strikes? If it happens today or tomorrow or in 10 years, a Mars colony will make no difference. If an asteroid shows up in 100 years or 1000 years though, having a Mars colony and the attendant technology will be the difference between survival and death.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell of a long-endurance spacecraft using the existing state-of-the-art in life-support and logistical technology to endure for 9 months in space.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what I was going to say. This is a textbook example of what optocouplers are for.
Ok wise guy - how would you design the test?
Anything that involves a dynamometer and a connection to the exhaust is going to be detectable. You could have something like those side-of-the-highway detectors that evaluate the exhaust of cars as they drive by in actual operation, but that isn't going to be nearly as accurate. It seems to me that the desire for a controlled test and the desire for an undetectable test stand at odds to one another in many ways.
Society operates on trust and the assumption that people will act ethically the majority of the time. Expecting corporations to act ethically isn't unreasonable, even if it is currently unfashionable.
No craft has to operate perfectly if it has humans aboard. Make it serviceable and bring spare parts. You can get far higher reliability this way than by engineering a single perfect specimen.
Curiosity's lessons are absolutely applicable to Mars. If you land an automated return vehicle (lightweight) that then fills itself up with fuel (atmospheric ISRU), you send astronauts down in another relatively lightweight vehicle to meet their already prepped ride home. The landing challenge can be largely addressed via scaling unless you assume a mission architecture where you carry the fuel for the return journey down with you.
Change your assumptions. Technological dealbreakers only exist if you assume a mission profile that's designed to cost as much as possible - which is essentially what the classical NASA structure is. It looks hard, time-consuming and expensive because it is a jobs program. If we decided we wanted to actually get there, it would be a lesser challenge for the engineers of today than the Apollo program was in its time.
Seems to me you are making a hell of a lot of assumptions about a mission profile - something that involves orbital spacecraft manufacture and bringing everything and the kitchen sink.
This is completely unnecessary. Curiosity is on the same order of magnitude as the payloads we would need to land - that engineering problem is essentially solved, scaling would get us where we need to be. What is meaningfully different about atmospheric ISRU on Earth and on Mars? We're using CO2 from the atmosphere in both cases. There isn't anything to teleoperate either - just hit "Go".
Rather than hashing out the details, I'd like to hear your explanation for how something like Mars Direct could possibly be more challenging than a lunar colony.
The only obstacles to Mars are will and politics. Nobody wants to actually get anything done - they want to keep Alabamans employed building obsolete SRBs and make sure that every single NASA center gets a hand in the cookie jar of any high profile mission.
If they really wanted to get to Mars, they would use an architecture like Mars Direct which could be done in 10 or so years, using today's technologies, without even expanding NASA's budget.
Instead, this is really built to show as many SLS launches as possible (read: most inefficient architecture imaginable) to make it appear as though the insanely expensive rocket to nowhere has a nice full launch manifest.
It's "totally known" that the coriolis effect becomes negligible once you get far enough out from the hub. Seriously, this is not new, the calculations have been done many, many times. Hit google for more information, I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know this, and that they'd comment without understanding whereof they speak in the first place.
It isn't "totally known" until someone has done it. Bottom line, we've never subjected a human to artificial gravity in space in any appreciable way. We've got much more experience with microgravity (and arguably lunar gravity) than artificial.
In space you have effectively limitless energy in the form of the sun and limitless resources in the form of asteroids, many of which could individually supply a giant space station with raw materials for hundreds if not thousands of years to come. You don't need to worry about pollution and once your supply lines are set up deliveries arrive as regular as the post. Plus, extracting CO2 from the atmosphere of Mars would be the very least of the technical challenges facing a colony. A colony incidentally that would probably suffer from bone weakness due to the lower gravity on Mars, a problem for which there would be no solution.
Using CO2 is as relevant for a short-term mission as it is for a colony and makes life dramatically easier than a lunar or orbital colony. It is simple technology, with reliable, working prototypes *today*. The heaviest supplies can be generated on-site, which dramatically simplifies the mission architecture. On the other hand, mining asteroids is totally unproven - we haven't even landed on one. Mining and refining solids is not automated on Earth - why do you think we could do that so easily in space, where maintenance is much more difficult, and microgravity makes simple things like transporting material enormously more complex?
Another objection you haven't begun to answer is how you shield an orbiting colony from radiation. ISS doesn't have that problem because of the magnetosphere. Lunar or martian missions only have to deal with interplanetary radiation environments for days or months, and even then the challenge isn't trivial. We have NO current technology that can protect humans from cosmic radiation that doesn't involve insane amounts of mass or power. Our most sophisticated technique currently is trying to give astronauts a bunker the size of a closet, which is surrounded by water and human waste. That doesn't scale well to a long-term orbiting colony.
On Mars, the technology you need for shielding? A shovel.
It's much easier to get full earth gravity on a space station than on Mars. It's not even possible on Mars as far as I know.
And how will people handle the coriolis effect? This is totally unknown. I'm calling it a wash whether that will be easier or harder to adapt to than reduced Martian gravity.
It's far easier to get to these things (resources) in space.
This is just wrong. The greatest short-term advantage of Mars is the atmosphere full of CO2. That means a limitless supply of oxygen, and that we can bring a tiny amount of Hydrogen by mass which can then be turned into far greater amount of water and methane (rocket fuel). Atmospheric ISRU is easy, your car does it every day. Processing solids, as would be required for mining an asteroid or the lunar regolith, is something that has not yet been automated on Earth, much less in space.
Moon really really sucks due to the whole "lunar night is really really really really cold and long" bit. Okay, you can work around that by building a base at the pole where there are peaks that are in permanent sunlight (and crater bottoms that are permanently dark).
What if you don't want a base at the pole? Probably the most promising place on the moon from a science perspective is the side facing away from Earth, which would be shielded from terrestrial EM pollution and would hence be an absolutely perfect place for a massive radio telescope, or any kind of telescope for that matter.
And one big objection that wasn't raised - moon dust seems to be far more abrasive than Mars dust, since there is essentially no erosion. The gravity problem you mention with Mars is worse on the moon. And there is very little of scientific interest on the moon aside from the aforementioned telescope - Mars, on the other hand, is far more interesting geologically and biologically.
All space stations to date have been regularly resupplied from Earth. The ISS can only go six months without being resupplied before it has to be abandoned. Because of fun things like mass fraction, you can't send something the size of the ISS to Mars.
Adding more supplies to a spacecraft, and scaling it up to accommodate said supplies isn't difficult. You wouldn't need anything near the size of the ISS either, there are a lot of extraneous science modules, etc that would be unnecessary on a journey to Mars.
That said, mass fraction only matters if you are considering a single launch. If you do on-orbit refueling, you can fly Rhode Island around with a single ion engine, as long as you have all the time in the world. Not that I'm advocating such a mission profile, just saying is all.
The fact is that sending mass to the Moon is 100x cheaper and thus you'll have 100x more mass of supplies and equipment and thus orders of magnitude higher chances of success, plus a simple and viable bail-out option with pretty reasonable restart and correction options when things don't quite go right. Its really a no-brainer.
Citation? The delta-V difference between the Moon and Mars is nowhere near 100x. Also, on Mars you can use atmospheric in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to easily generate oxygen, and if you bring a tiny bit of Hydrogen you can create water and rocket fuel (methane) besides. That cuts your mass requirement down dramatically - such that the whole mission could be accomplished in 2-4 launches of an Atlas-V or Falcon 9 class rocket, depending on the mission profile. On the other hand ISRU means chewing up lunar regolith on the moon, something we can't even automate yet here on Earth.
Why do you think SpaceX is building their future rockets to run on methane?
Consider this the equivalent of the Apollo program, in which in 1961 nobody had even been to orbit. By 1968 we were just barely reaching the capability to go 3 days to the Moon, land, and return. Mars is a MUCH harder problem, and we're at a similar point, we know what the technical challenges are, and have several viable options for solving each one, but we have to DO the work.
If anything, your timeline for Apollo just shows how incredibly weak-willed the Mars naysayers are.
A moon landing is at least 10x more challenging than getting to orbit. Getting to orbit is 100x more challenging than suborbital rocket flight. A Mars landing is probably 2x the challenge of a moon landing, if that. If you don't believe me, play enough Kerbal Space Program to understand the scope of the problems and then let's talk. It's abso-fucking-lutely incredible to go from no orbital capability to a Moon landing in less than 10 years, using slide rules. It makes a Mars mission with all of our modern design, simulation, prototyping, and sensing technologies seem like a cakewalk by comparison.
The difference between a moon landing and a Mars landing is pretty minimal. The big design jobs are the same: You still need a lander, an earth-reentry capsule, a life support module for the trip there and back. The vast majority of your Delta-V is spent getting to LEO, as well - as Heinlein said, once you are orbiting the Earth you're halfway to anywhere. So the biggest technical difference between a Moon landing and a Mars landing is that the trip is much longer. As mentioned previously, this is an eminently solvable (arguably solved) problem.
Granted, there are some landing challenges presented by the atmosphere of Mars, but we've successfully landed numerous craft, some of a substantial size, on Mars. We had far less experience with the Moon in the Apollo days than we have today with Mars.
If it was planned for it certainly could. The duration is mainly just a function of supply/resource levels - increasing storage capacity isn't a difficult engineering challenge.
Your car faces much harsher conditions though - constant starts and stops, bumps and potentially abuse from owners that don't follow maintenance schedules. Look at something closer to a generator, which can be made for extreme reliability. Also, nobody ever said there couldn't be maintenance - the entire intent is to support manned missions, so it is fair to suppose that astronauts will be on hand and the system will be designed to be serviceable in the field.
While I agree more with your points than the OP you are responding to, there is a world of difference between LEO, inside the protective cocoon of Earth's magnetosphere, and interplanetary space. But IMO the moon is a much more logical place to start. It's a lot warmer and closer to home.
Of course there is, but that's why we go to a planetary body - you've got minimal time in unprotected space, then, and then you have lots of feasible options to better shield yourself.
On the other hand, I don't agree that the moon is better - it is closer, yes, but it has less resources, less scientific opportunity, bigger technical challenges (need power storage for 2 weeks of darkness, and how do you grow plants like that?), no atmosphere for rad protection or easy resource utilization... overall Mars has much more to offer at a similar technical cost.
I think the 10-year plan for a manned landing is feasible, within current budgets and current technology, if we went with something like Mars Direct. The problem though is not just the lack of will, but the political infighting between NASA branches, and the continual change of direction we get due to new presidential directives every year or two combined with Congress viewing NASA purely as a jobs program, and folks like Richard Shelby who ensure the flow of taxpayer dollars to keep Alabamans employed building obsolete, expensive, and dangerous solid rocket boosters.
Thanks to all of that, the real goal of the people who control NASA hasn't actually been anything technical for a long, long time (arguably not since Apollo wrapped up). So if this happens, it is going to take either a complete shakeup in NASA or a philanthropic private effort like Elon Musk's to realize it.
Everything useful at NASA happens in spite of the best efforts of the president and congress.
ISRU is stinking easy if you are just pulling resources from the atmosphere. Anybody suggesting that you start with subsurface martian ice or lunar regolith or asteroids deserves to be ridiculed, but there are no technical barriers to cracking atmospheric CO2 to get oxygen for starters, and then if you bring a small reserve of hydrogen you can make your own water and methane (rocket fuel) besides.
Arguably you applied ISRU to get to work this morning - you used atmospheric oxygen in a chemical reaction to propel your vehicle. Internal combustion engines are also much more complex mechanically than the basic system I described would have to be.
Well said. BTW, oxygen, water and rocket fuel are pretty easy to obtain from the atmosphere by breaking down CO2. Although you might want to bring a bit of hydrogen yourself to make things easier.
When you object to Mars on the ground of practical value, why don't you simultaneously object to sports, endless wars, or reality TV? I'd much rather invest our disposable resources (of which we have plenty by any reasonable metric) expanding into a new frontier, improving our scientific and technological capabilities, and giving future generations the chance to not go extinct when the next asteroid comes around.
There are plenty of way to do a Mars colony without nuclear rockets. Start off with in-situ resource utilization just for rocket fuel, oxygen, and water and cut down the necessary provisions by an order of magnitude or two.
As badass as it is, Project Orion is never happening in the current political climate. Much better to invest our time advocating realistic approaches. Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that.
If every nuclear weapon in existence were detonated all at once in a war-to-end-all-wars, the earth would still be much more inhabitable than any other body in our solar system.
If even a few bunkers of isolated survivors on earth lived through a super-plague of epic biblical proportions, they would still be far more likely to survive than any colonies of humans in space (who would all be dead very shortly after the supply drops stopped coming from earth).
Keeping all our eggs in this basket is our only option.
Nonsense. A self-sustaining colony isn't feasible in 10 years, but it certainly is within 100. And how do we learn to build self-sustaining colonies? By trying.
No way... the moon is just about as technically challenging, but offers no easy opportunities for in-situ resource utilization, has 2 weeks of darkness to contend with, and presents minimal scientific potential. A propellant depot in space makes far more sense than a refill station at the bottom of a gravity well, as well.
That article makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions. The thing that makes Mars attractive (and feasible) is resources, and in-situ resource utilization is technically proven and achievable. That will cut your 60 shuttle launches down to 2 or 3 - the primary benefit is that you don't have to lift all the rocket fuel for the return trip. Mars Direct is the name of a mission profile that is far more efficient (although less politically attractive) than the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to Mars described by the article.
Great question. First off, really important resources can be extracted directly from the atmosphere of Mars - specifically, rocket fuel and oxygen. It's easy, and has been demonstrated already in prototypes that are arguably less complex than a modern internal combustion engine. Getting resources in solid form from an asteroid or lunar regolith would be much more challenging, technically speaking.
Secondly, radiation is a difficult problem for space travel. A sustained human presence would not be practical in space beyond low-earth orbit, where the ISS currently resides. That's because the ISS is shielded by the Earth's magnetosphere. No interplanetary space station would get the benefit of that protection and would be exposed directly to galactic cosmic rays and solar activity, and the crews would have an unacceptably high increase in cancer risk, along with the potential for more immediate fatalities if there was a bad solar event. Currently we don't have any good technology to deal with that problem long-term.
On Mars, though, you immediately get your radiation dose cut in half because you are sitting on trillions of tons of very effective shielding. You also get some benefit from the atmosphere, and there is a ton of quality shielding material close at hand - bury your habitat in dirt or dig into the side of a mountain and you are safe.
There are other factors as well, but either of those alone makes a planetary colony much more attractive than an orbiting one.
Bullshit. We spend far more money on far less important things, continually. Look at the entire sports industry, for starters. Or anything that has been on reality TV, ever. Or the endless war the U.S. sustains with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?)
For practical purposes, our resources are NOT limited. We don't have war and poverty because of resource limitations, we have them because of economic and political problems that will not be fixed by any quantity of resources.
The technology required for a Mars mission is here, right now. The resources required are substantial, but I'd much rather our money go to scientists and engineers to build new space hardware than have it go to the military to kill people in the middle east.
Columbus also didn't have the advantage of physics, or reliable maps, or any kind of prior exploration. Sustaining a colony on the New World was at the absolute limits of the technology of the time. As is demonstrated by the mortality rates of early colonists. Arguably in our case the problem is much easier because we have a much more specific idea of what to expect when we arrive and can prepare accordingly, we can choose our destination with a high level of precision, and the colonists will have continual access to the world's experts to help them solve any problems they do encounter.
It seems to me the main difference is that we are content to invest our spare money and time on cat memes, TV, different flavors of sportsball or just good old fashioned violence and subjugation of foreigners. Judging by our spending habits we as a race are much more willing to dump money on mindless distraction than we are on great historical human endeavors.
Also - are you content to let the human race go extinct the next time an asteroid strikes? If it happens today or tomorrow or in 10 years, a Mars colony will make no difference. If an asteroid shows up in 100 years or 1000 years though, having a Mars colony and the attendant technology will be the difference between survival and death.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell of a long-endurance spacecraft using the existing state-of-the-art in life-support and logistical technology to endure for 9 months in space.
I know, right? If only the U.S. (or the Russians perhaps) had the foresight to start trying to build technology that could sustain human life for an extended period in space. Since nobody did any such thing, I suppose it is impossible. That kind of thing would have had to start over 40 years ago.