I'd also really like to spend a space elevator, but for now there's still a -lot- of research which has to be done until it's at all feasible. On the other hand, private spaceflight can be achieved using technologies which have been around for dozens of years.
I predict that once someone is able to do something as simple as create a footbridge (or even a decent rope) using carbon nanotubes, interest will pick up greatly. For the moment though, it's too high-risk, and people really don't know just how much more research will be needed (or if there are unforeseen obstacles which would make it effectively impossible).
And how much funding has Kliper received so far? My impression is that they haven't received even a fraction of the 10 billion roubles they say they need. Even if they got that much money, they wouldn't expect a first launch of the vehicle until 2010.
There's some more info on the Kliper over at Astronautix.
Seriously, in the 90s NASA had several abortive projects which got about as far as (or farther than) the Kliper is now. Some examples are the Lockheed Martin X-33, the Orbital Sciences X-34, the McDonnell Douglas DC-X, and the Scaled Composites X-38. Most of these had insurmountable technical difficulties, although my personal suspicion is that the DC-X and X-38 could have evolved into very nice systems. Unfortunately, when it comes to government projects, the funding situation is king.
Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this page:
The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked. Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they certainly look interesting:
I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.
Do you have a link to support your claim? I can't find any evidence of it on their web site -- maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.
For the record, I've been to the web site several times (including in its early days), and haven't been frisked at an airport in the past year a single time (I've been on maybe a half dozen plane rides in that time).
Inhibitory Effects of Feeding with Carrots or (-)-Falcarinol on Development of Azoxymethane-Induced Preneoplastic Lesions in the Rat Colon
Morten Kobæk-Larsen, Lars P. Christensen, Werner Vach, Jelmera Ritskes-Hoitinga, and Kirsten Brandt
The effects of intake of dietary amounts of carrot or corresponding amounts of (-)-(3R)-falcarinol from carrots on development of azoxymethane (AOM)-induced colon preneoplastic lesions were examined in male BDIX rats. Three groups of eight AOM-treated rats were fed the standard rat feed Altromin supplemented with either 10% (w/w) freeze-dried carrots with a natural content of 35 g falcarinol/g, 10% maize starch to which was added 35 g falcarinol/g purified from carrots, or 10% maize starch (control). After 18 weeks, the animals were euthanized and the colon was examined for tumors and aberrant crypt foci (ACF), which were classified into four size classes. Although the number of small ACF was unaffected by the feeding treatments, the numbers of lesions as a function of increasing size class decreased significantly in the rats that received one of the two experimental treatments, as compared with the control treatment. This indicates that the dietary treatments with carrot and falcarinol delayed or retarded the development of large ACF and tumors. The present study provides a new perspective on the known epidemiological associations between high intake of carrots and reduced incidence of cancers.
The real mystery is why it took NASA only 7 years after jfk's speach in 62 to make it to the moon. But they estimate it will take 15 years here in 2005 to go again.
(copies old post)
Here are some good reasons for why it'll take longer this time:
1. They had pretty much all the funding they could possibly want during the space race. This time they don't have that luxury.
2. Much greater safety paranoia now. When the crew of Apollo 1 was killed, NASA fixed the problem and moved on with the program. They didn't paralyze their manned spaceflight program, go into a period of national mourning, and launch congressional investigation committees.
3. Von Braun and the other German rocket geniuses who essentially designed and built the rockets they used are just about all dead. Granted, there's some folks around who trained under them, but there's no one with their sheer amount of experience.
4. NASA is much more diversified now than it used to be. Back then, landing on the moon was their one and only goal, and they were able to focus all their resources towards achieving that goal. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to cancel old programs and refocus on something else, because some constituency is going to have NASA's head on a platter.
5. The last time around, all they cared about was getting on the moon. This time, we want to not only land a brief mission on the moon, but we want to create a permanent, self-sustaining settlement there. We want to be sure that the systems we develop are not just going to be suitable for a one-shot quick landing, but that they'll also be useful for a permanent moon settlement.
John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.
Here's a paste:
Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.
It was awesome!
We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.
We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"
Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.
The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.
The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.
The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.
Besides more details, the research paper also includes photos of things like a shot of the artificial retina on top of a penny (it's about as big as Abraham Lincoln's nose), the actual circuitry, and where it gets placed in the back of the eye. It also shows the results of their visual tests on patients with the artificial retina.
The last time around, all they cared about was getting on the moon. This time, we want to not only land a brief mission on the moon, but we want to create a permanent, self-sustaining settlement there. We want to be sure that the systems we develop are not just going to be suitable for a one-shot quick landing, but that they'll also be useful for a permanent moon settlement.
1. They had pretty much all the funding they could possibly want.
2. Much greater safety paranoia. When the crew of Apollo 1 was killed, NASA fixed the problem and moved on with the program. They didn't paralyze their manned spaceflight program, go into a period of national mourning, and launch congressional investigation committees.
3. Von Braun and the other German rocket geniuses who essentially designed and built the rockets they used are just about all dead. Granted, there's some folks around who trained under them, but there's no one with their sheer amount of experience.
4. NASA is much more diversified now than it used to be. Back then, landing on the moon was their one and only goal, and they were able to focus all their resources towards achieving that goal. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to cancel old programs and refocus on something else, because some constituency is going to have NASA's head on a platter.
They've also abandoned the mission to Jupiter and pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems
Could you point out where you saw that "pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems" has been abandoned? I heard about them (effectively) cancelling JIMO (the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter), but I'm under the impression that Project Prometheus (for nuclear-powered space probes) is still ongoing.
This makes perfect sense to me. It really doesn't make sense to use a prototype nuclear reactor on a huge space probe already packed with plenty of (expensive) instruments. It makes much more sense to first test the reactor design on something far simpler.
The multi-billion dollar Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo) mission was to have been launched in about 2015 as a demonstration for the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion initiative.
It would have gone into orbit around the giant planet and its moons, possibly putting landers on their surfaces in much the same way as Cassini has done with Huygens on Titan.
Nasa officials now say Jimo is too ambitious an undertaking for an initial demonstration project, and a search for an alternative mission is underway.
"These big missions always have ups and downs," commented Professor Fred Taylor, from Oxford University, UK, and a scientist on the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990s.
"At this stage it was always just a study - and when approved missions get cancelled, then one should really get upset.
"If the alternative is a cheaper mission that would go more quickly, we might get more science faster. If the current study is uncovering a serious viability problem then we might be better off backing off and looking for other solutions," he told BBC News.
First off: Nobody is proposing launching directly to Mars from the Moon.
Secondly, there are a number of common components between going to the Moon and going to Mars. There's really two main differences between going to Moon/Mars and what we're doing now in LEO: flight times, landing/relaunching, and surviving on the surface.
Now what are the differences in required equipement needed for a long-term stay on the Moon vs. a long-term stay on Mars? Here's what I can think of:
* A bigger booster
* A Mars relauncher can take advantage of in-situ resource utilization for generating fuel
* Longer flight times require more shielding
* Can take advantage of aerobraking on Mars
Besides that, most everything else is common between the two. One big one is settlements. A modified Bigelow- or Transhab-style inflatable space settlement would do well on either the Moon or Mars. Plus, just the experience of running long-term extraterrestrial ground operations like this will be invaluable.
But since sending Astronauts to Hubble is too risky they're going to send Astronauts to MARS instead? This does not compute.
I disagree with not sending astronauts to Hubble, but the rationale is that the space shuttle itself (because of various design issues) is inherently much more unsafe than the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be. So yes, it's quite possible that sending astronauts to the Moon on a CEV (Mars is barely on the picture) would be safer than sending astronauts to Hubble on a Space Shuttle.
NASA's sole purpose isn't science -- if it was, it'd just be rolled into the National Science Foundation. That said, I'm a big fan of spending the money instead on the Hubble Origins Probe -- hopefully we'll see that happen.
Your argument though reminds me a little bit of something I once saw, which said that all/most space advocates were either Saganites, O'Neillians, or Von Braunians (each named after a famous figure in the space field). The descriptions are as follows:
Saganites: "Look, but don't touch." The sole purpose of space endeavours is to increase our scientific knowledge, which will in the long-term lead to the enrichment of mankind.
O'Neillians: The ultimate goal is to turn humanity into a space-faring species. Our focus should be on space settlement
Von Braunians: They want to push the technology to the limit and beyond, and do what's never been done before. Sending huge rockets into orbit and planting flags on extraterrestrial bodies is valuable in and of itself, if only for the glory.
Of course, many are actually some mix of the above. Personally, I'd consider myself a former Saganite, more recently leaning towards O'Neillian.
During the 60s and 70s (the Space Race) the US was predominantly Von Braunian. In the 80s and 90s the US government's space program has been predominantly Saganite, focusing primarily on scientific missions. It's gotten to the point that now many people think that's the only worthwhile thing to do in space. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration is intended to turn the government's space program into a mix of O'Neillian and Von Braunian, doing things like establishing a permanent, self-sustaining moon base.
I'd characterize most private spaceflight folks like Burt Rutan and Elon Musk as a mix of O'Neillian and Von Braunian.
NASA has no current plans for terraforming Mars, just concept studies. Whoever submitted the original article was confused. NASA's plan is to return to the moon and establish a permanent settlement there before putting humans on Mars.
Any moderators with available points should mod this post back up. Even though it's discussing Venusian terraforming instead of Martian terraforming, it's still quite informative and relevant to the general topic of terraforming.
Margarita Marinova (the primary researcher) isn't a "Dr.", she's a (first-year?) graduate student at Caltech. Part of what's impressive about this work is that she primarily did it when she was still an undergraduate. I think I heard from someone else that she even started doing this when she was in high school.
So yeah, it seems that Mars had an atmosphere in the past, and it slowly (i.e. over millions of years) leaked away. What they mention in some of the better articles on this story is that they studied flouride-based gases, some of which are 10,000 times as effective as CO2. A relatively small production of those over many years would probably be able to sustain the atmosphere.
As seems to be increasingly the case, I already submitted (rejected) variants of this story twice over the past week. I've pasted one of those variants below, which has links to sources far more information than the freakin' Guardian:
Greenhouse gases could breathe life into Mars
MSNBC, New Scientist and PhysOrg report on research by Margarita Marinova and others on using synthetic greenhouse gases to warm the Martian atmosphere and create the conditions for life to thrive. The study focused on fluorine-based gases (dubbed "super-greenhouse gases"), which would be non-toxic, nearly 10,000 times as effective at capturing heat as CO2, and could be made from Martian resources. The research concluded that adding 300 parts per million of these gases would lead to a feedback effect by unfreezing CO2 and water on the surface. According to Marinova, 'Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further.' The feasibility and consequences of such terraforming have been debated in the past.
Also, note that contrary to the accepted submission's title, NASA hasn't done any sort of proposal of actually doing this. This is simply cool research exploring a very interesting "What-if".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also really like to spend a space elevator, but for now there's still a -lot- of research which has to be done until it's at all feasible. On the other hand, private spaceflight can be achieved using technologies which have been around for dozens of years.
I predict that once someone is able to do something as simple as create a footbridge (or even a decent rope) using carbon nanotubes, interest will pick up greatly. For the moment though, it's too high-risk, and people really don't know just how much more research will be needed (or if there are unforeseen obstacles which would make it effectively impossible).
And how much funding has Kliper received so far? My impression is that they haven't received even a fraction of the 10 billion roubles they say they need. Even if they got that much money, they wouldn't expect a first launch of the vehicle until 2010.
There's some more info on the Kliper over at Astronautix.
Seriously, in the 90s NASA had several abortive projects which got about as far as (or farther than) the Kliper is now. Some examples are the Lockheed Martin X-33, the Orbital Sciences X-34, the McDonnell Douglas DC-X, and the Scaled Composites X-38. Most of these had insurmountable technical difficulties, although my personal suspicion is that the DC-X and X-38 could have evolved into very nice systems. Unfortunately, when it comes to government projects, the funding situation is king.
Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
0 0002175.png 0 0002215.png 0 0002260.png
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:
http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp
I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.
Do you have a link to support your claim? I can't find any evidence of it on their web site -- maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.
For the record, I've been to the web site several times (including in its early days), and haven't been frisked at an airport in the past year a single time (I've been on maybe a half dozen plane rides in that time).
Here are links to the actual research abstract and paper.
Abstract text:
Inhibitory Effects of Feeding with Carrots or (-)-Falcarinol on Development of Azoxymethane-Induced Preneoplastic Lesions in the Rat Colon
Morten Kobæk-Larsen, Lars P. Christensen, Werner Vach, Jelmera Ritskes-Hoitinga, and Kirsten Brandt
The effects of intake of dietary amounts of carrot or corresponding amounts of (-)-(3R)-falcarinol from carrots on development of azoxymethane (AOM)-induced colon preneoplastic lesions were examined in male BDIX rats. Three groups of eight AOM-treated rats were fed the standard rat feed Altromin supplemented with either 10% (w/w) freeze-dried carrots with a natural content of 35 g falcarinol/g, 10% maize starch to which was added 35 g falcarinol/g purified from carrots, or 10% maize starch (control). After 18 weeks, the animals were euthanized and the colon was examined for tumors and aberrant crypt foci (ACF), which were classified into four size classes. Although the number of small ACF was unaffected by the feeding treatments, the numbers of lesions as a function of increasing size class decreased significantly in the rats that received one of the two experimental treatments, as compared with the control treatment. This indicates that the dietary treatments with carrot and falcarinol delayed or retarded the development of large ACF and tumors. The present study provides a new perspective on the known epidemiological associations between high intake of carrots and reduced incidence of cancers.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I stand corrected.
He had its DSP core with some fava beans and a dab of Arctic Silver.
The real mystery is why it took NASA only 7 years after jfk's speach in 62 to make it to the moon. But they estimate it will take 15 years here in 2005 to go again.
(copies old post)
Here are some good reasons for why it'll take longer this time:
1. They had pretty much all the funding they could possibly want during the space race. This time they don't have that luxury.
2. Much greater safety paranoia now. When the crew of Apollo 1 was killed, NASA fixed the problem and moved on with the program. They didn't paralyze their manned spaceflight program, go into a period of national mourning, and launch congressional investigation committees.
3. Von Braun and the other German rocket geniuses who essentially designed and built the rockets they used are just about all dead. Granted, there's some folks around who trained under them, but there's no one with their sheer amount of experience.
4. NASA is much more diversified now than it used to be. Back then, landing on the moon was their one and only goal, and they were able to focus all their resources towards achieving that goal. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to cancel old programs and refocus on something else, because some constituency is going to have NASA's head on a platter.
5. The last time around, all they cared about was getting on the moon. This time, we want to not only land a brief mission on the moon, but we want to create a permanent, self-sustaining settlement there. We want to be sure that the systems we develop are not just going to be suitable for a one-shot quick landing, but that they'll also be useful for a permanent moon settlement.
I for one would be pissed if I realized that I am the cloned version of someone else.
I've been friends with several pairs of identical twins, and they didn't seem particularly pissed off.
And of course, you are much more informed regarding which method is more promising than the actual scientists performing the research.
John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.
r o-g.mpg
Here's a paste:
Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.
It was awesome!
We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.
We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"
Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.
The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.
The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.
The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic1.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic2.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_09_26/ze
For more details, here's a link to an actual research paper by Chow et all (2004): The Artificial Silicon Retina Microchip for the Treatment of Vision Loss From Retinitis Pigmentosa .
Besides more details, the research paper also includes photos of things like a shot of the artificial retina on top of a penny (it's about as big as Abraham Lincoln's nose), the actual circuitry, and where it gets placed in the back of the eye. It also shows the results of their visual tests on patients with the artificial retina.
One more reason I thought of...
The last time around, all they cared about was getting on the moon. This time, we want to not only land a brief mission on the moon, but we want to create a permanent, self-sustaining settlement there. We want to be sure that the systems we develop are not just going to be suitable for a one-shot quick landing, but that they'll also be useful for a permanent moon settlement.
Four reasons I can think of:
1. They had pretty much all the funding they could possibly want.
2. Much greater safety paranoia. When the crew of Apollo 1 was killed, NASA fixed the problem and moved on with the program. They didn't paralyze their manned spaceflight program, go into a period of national mourning, and launch congressional investigation committees.
3. Von Braun and the other German rocket geniuses who essentially designed and built the rockets they used are just about all dead. Granted, there's some folks around who trained under them, but there's no one with their sheer amount of experience.
4. NASA is much more diversified now than it used to be. Back then, landing on the moon was their one and only goal, and they were able to focus all their resources towards achieving that goal. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to cancel old programs and refocus on something else, because some constituency is going to have NASA's head on a platter.
Gerard O'Neill, who was the major proponent (and designer) of space settlements:
. html / 104-9298540-5520764 l l
http://www.space-frontier.org/HighFrontier/gkobio
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0962237906
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Kitchen_O'Nei
They've also abandoned the mission to Jupiter and pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems
Could you point out where you saw that "pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems" has been abandoned? I heard about them (effectively) cancelling JIMO (the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter), but I'm under the impression that Project Prometheus (for nuclear-powered space probes) is still ongoing.
This makes perfect sense to me. It really doesn't make sense to use a prototype nuclear reactor on a huge space probe already packed with plenty of (expensive) instruments. It makes much more sense to first test the reactor design on something far simpler.
Ok, I just found a quote from a BBC article:
The multi-billion dollar Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo) mission was to have been launched in about 2015 as a demonstration for the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion initiative.
It would have gone into orbit around the giant planet and its moons, possibly putting landers on their surfaces in much the same way as Cassini has done with Huygens on Titan.
Nasa officials now say Jimo is too ambitious an undertaking for an initial demonstration project, and a search for an alternative mission is underway.
"These big missions always have ups and downs," commented Professor Fred Taylor, from Oxford University, UK, and a scientist on the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990s.
"At this stage it was always just a study - and when approved missions get cancelled, then one should really get upset.
"If the alternative is a cheaper mission that would go more quickly, we might get more science faster. If the current study is uncovering a serious viability problem then we might be better off backing off and looking for other solutions," he told BBC News.
First off: Nobody is proposing launching directly to Mars from the Moon.
Secondly, there are a number of common components between going to the Moon and going to Mars. There's really two main differences between going to Moon/Mars and what we're doing now in LEO: flight times, landing/relaunching, and surviving on the surface.
Now what are the differences in required equipement needed for a long-term stay on the Moon vs. a long-term stay on Mars? Here's what I can think of:
* A bigger booster
* A Mars relauncher can take advantage of in-situ resource utilization for generating fuel
* Longer flight times require more shielding
* Can take advantage of aerobraking on Mars
Besides that, most everything else is common between the two. One big one is settlements. A modified Bigelow- or Transhab-style inflatable space settlement would do well on either the Moon or Mars. Plus, just the experience of running long-term extraterrestrial ground operations like this will be invaluable.
But since sending Astronauts to Hubble is too risky they're going to send Astronauts to MARS instead? This does not compute.
I disagree with not sending astronauts to Hubble, but the rationale is that the space shuttle itself (because of various design issues) is inherently much more unsafe than the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be. So yes, it's quite possible that sending astronauts to the Moon on a CEV (Mars is barely on the picture) would be safer than sending astronauts to Hubble on a Space Shuttle.
NASA's sole purpose isn't science -- if it was, it'd just be rolled into the National Science Foundation. That said, I'm a big fan of spending the money instead on the Hubble Origins Probe -- hopefully we'll see that happen.
Your argument though reminds me a little bit of something I once saw, which said that all/most space advocates were either Saganites, O'Neillians, or Von Braunians (each named after a famous figure in the space field). The descriptions are as follows:
Saganites: "Look, but don't touch." The sole purpose of space endeavours is to increase our scientific knowledge, which will in the long-term lead to the enrichment of mankind.
O'Neillians: The ultimate goal is to turn humanity into a space-faring species. Our focus should be on space settlement
Von Braunians: They want to push the technology to the limit and beyond, and do what's never been done before. Sending huge rockets into orbit and planting flags on extraterrestrial bodies is valuable in and of itself, if only for the glory.
Of course, many are actually some mix of the above. Personally, I'd consider myself a former Saganite, more recently leaning towards O'Neillian.
During the 60s and 70s (the Space Race) the US was predominantly Von Braunian. In the 80s and 90s the US government's space program has been predominantly Saganite, focusing primarily on scientific missions. It's gotten to the point that now many people think that's the only worthwhile thing to do in space. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration is intended to turn the government's space program into a mix of O'Neillian and Von Braunian, doing things like establishing a permanent, self-sustaining moon base.
I'd characterize most private spaceflight folks like Burt Rutan and Elon Musk as a mix of O'Neillian and Von Braunian.
That's pretty much exactly the plan:
l oration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exp
NASA has no current plans for terraforming Mars, just concept studies. Whoever submitted the original article was confused. NASA's plan is to return to the moon and establish a permanent settlement there before putting humans on Mars.
For even more "meaty" information, check out this research paper by McKay and Marinova from 2001, titled "The Physics, Biology, and Environmental Ethics of Making Mars Habitable".
Unfortunately, I don't think Marinova's latest paper on this is publically available on the internet.
Any moderators with available points should mod this post back up. Even though it's discussing Venusian terraforming instead of Martian terraforming, it's still quite informative and relevant to the general topic of terraforming.
Margarita Marinova (the primary researcher) isn't a "Dr.", she's a (first-year?) graduate student at Caltech. Part of what's impressive about this work is that she primarily did it when she was still an undergraduate. I think I heard from someone else that she even started doing this when she was in high school.
So yeah, it seems that Mars had an atmosphere in the past, and it slowly (i.e. over millions of years) leaked away. What they mention in some of the better articles on this story is that they studied flouride-based gases, some of which are 10,000 times as effective as CO2. A relatively small production of those over many years would probably be able to sustain the atmosphere.
As seems to be increasingly the case, I already submitted (rejected) variants of this story twice over the past week. I've pasted one of those variants below, which has links to sources far more information than the freakin' Guardian:
Greenhouse gases could breathe life into Mars
MSNBC, New Scientist and PhysOrg report on research by Margarita Marinova and others on using synthetic greenhouse gases to warm the Martian atmosphere and create the conditions for life to thrive. The study focused on fluorine-based gases (dubbed "super-greenhouse gases"), which would be non-toxic, nearly 10,000 times as effective at capturing heat as CO2, and could be made from Martian resources. The research concluded that adding 300 parts per million of these gases would lead to a feedback effect by unfreezing CO2 and water on the surface. According to Marinova, 'Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further.' The feasibility and consequences of such terraforming have been debated in the past.
Also, note that contrary to the accepted submission's title, NASA hasn't done any sort of proposal of actually doing this. This is simply cool research exploring a very interesting "What-if".