There are two general trains of thought I've noticed in this thread that I want to respond to. You'll have to forgive me if this has been gone over before, but I set my threshold pretty high.
Robots can do it better and cheaper than people
Let's do a simple thought experiment. If you dropped a thousand Spirit-type rovers into the South Dakota badlands, you might have found a fossil or two at the conclusion of the mission. On the other hand, you may not find anything. However, if you send a trained human geologist with a rock hammer out, he'll come back in a few hours with a wheelbarrow full of fossils. Only the presence of humans will be able to uncover the subtle signs of past life on Mars, if it once existed. This is a question we cannot afford to ignore. Its implications are too fundamental to the basic questions that puzzle the thinkers of our era.
True, each robotic mission costs less than a manned mission would, but you are certainely not going to get anywhere near the same kind of scientific returns. Robot missions are cheap and don't put people at risk, but they aren't by any means giving you the same value for your dollar as manned missions could.
We don't have the technology/money to put people on Mars and bring them back.
This is patently false.
In 1990 two then little known engineers named Ed Baker and Bob Zubrin introduced a new Mars misssion architecure called Mars Direct. Mars Direct used sound engineering, no-nonsense thinking, and some novel ideas to bring the estimated cost of a manned mars program down from NASA's existing estimate of $450 billion to only $20 billion, with a unit cost of $2-$3 billion per mission, round trip. Zubrin and Baker's cost estimates have been varified by NASA and Lockheed Martin costing experts, but Zubrin himself claims that a private company could accomplish the same mission for only $4-$6 billion in development and $1.5-$2 billion per mission.
$20 billion spread over a 10 year development program is only $2 billion annually, or around 15% of NASA's current budget of $15 billion.
The lynchpin of the Mars Direct concept was a technology called In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) or as Zubrin puts it "living off the land". This is actually a lot more modest than it sounds. All it means is that instead of carrying oxygen, water, or rocket fuel for the mars surface stay and return trip phases of the mission, only a small amount of hydrogen feedstock is brought from earth. Once there, the hydrogen is is processed by a series of chemical reactions into water, oxygen(for breathing and propellent) and methane(rocket fuel). The only martian resource needed is carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide is 95% of the martian atmosphere, it is readily available. This relience on martian resources is therfore not nearly as risky as it firsts sounds, and still enables huge mission mass savings.
At the time of its introduction, Mars Direct relied on no unproven technology except for the ISRU equipment. Everything else, propulsion, power, materials, life suppert, etc... was all based on proven, time-tested technology.
However, in the intervening decade, Lockheed Martin has designed, built and tested working prototypes of all the chemical gear necessary for a Mars Direct-type mission. Zubrin himself has developed several succeeding generations of the technology at his own company, Pioneer Astronautics.
In addition to low cost and simplicity, Mars Direct offers a number of other advantages over competing architectures. It incorporates a spinning tether system, like a bolo, to provide artificial gravity to the crew, avoiding the negative effects of prolonged exposure to microgravity. Mars Direct requires no on-orbit assembly. Everything is built on earth, where our industrial infrastructure coincidentally already happens to exist. On Earth, everything can be built and tested in the presence of trained specialists, not by glorified pilots. On Eart
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There are two general trains of thought I've noticed in this thread that I want to respond to. You'll have to forgive me if this has been gone over before, but I set my threshold pretty high.
Robots can do it better and cheaper than people
Let's do a simple thought experiment. If you dropped a thousand Spirit-type rovers into the South Dakota badlands, you might have found a fossil or two at the conclusion of the mission. On the other hand, you may not find anything. However, if you send a trained human geologist with a rock hammer out, he'll come back in a few hours with a wheelbarrow full of fossils. Only the presence of humans will be able to uncover the subtle signs of past life on Mars, if it once existed. This is a question we cannot afford to ignore. Its implications are too fundamental to the basic questions that puzzle the thinkers of our era.
True, each robotic mission costs less than a manned mission would, but you are certainely not going to get anywhere near the same kind of scientific returns. Robot missions are cheap and don't put people at risk, but they aren't by any means giving you the same value for your dollar as manned missions could.
We don't have the technology/money to put people on Mars and bring them back.
This is patently false.
In 1990 two then little known engineers named Ed Baker and Bob Zubrin introduced a new Mars misssion architecure called Mars Direct. Mars Direct used sound engineering, no-nonsense thinking, and some novel ideas to bring the estimated cost of a manned mars program down from NASA's existing estimate of $450 billion to only $20 billion, with a unit cost of $2-$3 billion per mission, round trip. Zubrin and Baker's cost estimates have been varified by NASA and Lockheed Martin costing experts, but Zubrin himself claims that a private company could accomplish the same mission for only $4-$6 billion in development and $1.5-$2 billion per mission.
$20 billion spread over a 10 year development program is only $2 billion annually, or around 15% of NASA's current budget of $15 billion.
The lynchpin of the Mars Direct concept was a technology called In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) or as Zubrin puts it "living off the land". This is actually a lot more modest than it sounds. All it means is that instead of carrying oxygen, water, or rocket fuel for the mars surface stay and return trip phases of the mission, only a small amount of hydrogen feedstock is brought from earth. Once there, the hydrogen is is processed by a series of chemical reactions into water, oxygen(for breathing and propellent) and methane(rocket fuel). The only martian resource needed is carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide is 95% of the martian atmosphere, it is readily available. This relience on martian resources is therfore not nearly as risky as it firsts sounds, and still enables huge mission mass savings.
At the time of its introduction, Mars Direct relied on no unproven technology except for the ISRU equipment. Everything else, propulsion, power, materials, life suppert, etc... was all based on proven, time-tested technology.
However, in the intervening decade, Lockheed Martin has designed, built and tested working prototypes of all the chemical gear necessary for a Mars Direct-type mission. Zubrin himself has developed several succeeding generations of the technology at his own company, Pioneer Astronautics.
In addition to low cost and simplicity, Mars Direct offers a number of other advantages over competing architectures. It incorporates a spinning tether system, like a bolo, to provide artificial gravity to the crew, avoiding the negative effects of prolonged exposure to microgravity. Mars Direct requires no on-orbit assembly. Everything is built on earth, where our industrial infrastructure coincidentally already happens to exist. On Earth, everything can be built and tested in the presence of trained specialists, not by glorified pilots. On Eart