It is not unreasonable to suppose a woman will be sent on the first manned Martian mission. There will likely be 3 or 5 people. Odd to break tie votes. The team will include the best engineer we can find. Certainly the best doctor. Maybe a pilot/trained technician.
Why not a woman? You might call it a political move, but that's ok. An African American too, maybe? And if a woman goes, perhaps we should send her husband also, so that jealousy/ill-will doesn't surface amount the male crewmembers. Just interesting points to think about.
The question is how can companies make money by participating in Martian exploration. NASA already out-sources many components of each space mission to commercial entities and universities. My experience is with JPL, and traditionally a very large percentage of each project is managed outside JPL. So in reality the governmental and commercial worlds of space mission design overlap.
X-Prize is working so well because the companies involved are competing for a possibly lucrative stake in an emerging industry. There is real money to be made in the next 10 years. But the trip to Mars is far too large and the risks too high for any single company to take on. Current NASA estimates are I believe around $80B to get humans to Mars. Should it appear, industry's best bet to make a profit is to try to get a piece of this pie. NASA certainly will be taking proposals and competing the development of much of the mission - so there will be corporate lure.
One more point on the difficulty of commercial involvement. Even the likely X-Prize winner, Spaceship One, had near fatal problems on its first manned flight outside the atmosphere (I was lucky enough to be there for it). A real commercial Earth-Mars transportation industry is just going to be too risky in the next century. Airlines on Earth are having enough problems, and the only place I see funding coming from is NASA.
Actually design life factors in heavily to nearly all engineering decisions. Solar panels decay with time, they get covered with dust. Bearing lubrication has some lifetime. Batteries can only take so many charge cycles. And maybe most importantly, NASA only has so much money to spend and keeping spacecraft alive after they leave Earth takes a lot of it.
It's true that the engineerings of MER don't know how long it will last. It could die tomorrow. They nearly died just a week after they got there with that memory glitch. When they are designing, the engineergs can calculate some expected life though, with a standard deviation. You want to garuntee the spacecraft/rovers will work past the primary mission phase with some probability (95%?). The expected lifetime is much more.
I agree that robotic missions are of great value. However, I don't think NASA will try to establish plant life on Mars anytime soon.
NASA, specifically JPL, spends millions of dollars every mission to make sure the spacecraft is as clean as possible, controlling the number of bugs per square meter very precisly. They want to prevent "forward contamination" - that is wrecking the Martian ecosystem.
I suppose it is possible to design an instrument that keeps a plant seen inside an internal jar, somehow preventing any possibility of organisms getting out, and then adding some dirt (and water?). But I don't see it happening soon.
Some places on the equator get about 0 degrees C during the day, but most get quite cold at night.
There is another problem though. If you expose water to the atmosphere of Mars, it will not freeze into ice. Yes, it is cold enough, if the pressure were the same as it was on Earth. But it is much lower. The water will actually evaporate. You would have to lower the temperature to get the water into a liquid form. Makes growing a plant tough.
Winds on Mars will never get to 300 MPH. They might approach 30 m/s in a strong dust storm. That's about 70 MPH.
They won't send a one way mission to Mars, NASA spends billions on safety, can you ever really imagine them doing that?
Finally, although I am not against sending humans to Mars, I don't think they will be able to contribute that much new science over current rovers. What does additional CPU power get you? Maybe you can go a little furture each day, see some new rocks. But the current rovers have seen lots of rocks, and they take the best instruments available with them.
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It is not unreasonable to suppose a woman will be sent on the first manned Martian mission. There will likely be 3 or 5 people. Odd to break tie votes. The team will include the best engineer we can find. Certainly the best doctor. Maybe a pilot/trained technician.
Why not a woman? You might call it a political move, but that's ok. An African American too, maybe? And if a woman goes, perhaps we should send her husband also, so that jealousy/ill-will doesn't surface amount the male crewmembers. Just interesting points to think about.
The question is how can companies make money by participating in Martian exploration. NASA already out-sources many components of each space mission to commercial entities and universities. My experience is with JPL, and traditionally a very large percentage of each project is managed outside JPL. So in reality the governmental and commercial worlds of space mission design overlap.
X-Prize is working so well because the companies involved are competing for a possibly lucrative stake in an emerging industry. There is real money to be made in the next 10 years. But the trip to Mars is far too large and the risks too high for any single company to take on. Current NASA estimates are I believe around $80B to get humans to Mars. Should it appear, industry's best bet to make a profit is to try to get a piece of this pie. NASA certainly will be taking proposals and competing the development of much of the mission - so there will be corporate lure.
One more point on the difficulty of commercial involvement. Even the likely X-Prize winner, Spaceship One, had near fatal problems on its first manned flight outside the atmosphere (I was lucky enough to be there for it). A real commercial Earth-Mars transportation industry is just going to be too risky in the next century. Airlines on Earth are having enough problems, and the only place I see funding coming from is NASA.
Actually design life factors in heavily to nearly all engineering decisions. Solar panels decay with time, they get covered with dust. Bearing lubrication has some lifetime. Batteries can only take so many charge cycles. And maybe most importantly, NASA only has so much money to spend and keeping spacecraft alive after they leave Earth takes a lot of it. It's true that the engineerings of MER don't know how long it will last. It could die tomorrow. They nearly died just a week after they got there with that memory glitch. When they are designing, the engineergs can calculate some expected life though, with a standard deviation. You want to garuntee the spacecraft/rovers will work past the primary mission phase with some probability (95%?). The expected lifetime is much more.
Next stop in the North Polar region. Phoenix is a low cost mission baselining the crashed Mars Polar Lander. It is scheduled to launch in 2007.
I agree that robotic missions are of great value. However, I don't think NASA will try to establish plant life on Mars anytime soon. NASA, specifically JPL, spends millions of dollars every mission to make sure the spacecraft is as clean as possible, controlling the number of bugs per square meter very precisly. They want to prevent "forward contamination" - that is wrecking the Martian ecosystem. I suppose it is possible to design an instrument that keeps a plant seen inside an internal jar, somehow preventing any possibility of organisms getting out, and then adding some dirt (and water?). But I don't see it happening soon. Some places on the equator get about 0 degrees C during the day, but most get quite cold at night. There is another problem though. If you expose water to the atmosphere of Mars, it will not freeze into ice. Yes, it is cold enough, if the pressure were the same as it was on Earth. But it is much lower. The water will actually evaporate. You would have to lower the temperature to get the water into a liquid form. Makes growing a plant tough.
Winds on Mars will never get to 300 MPH. They might approach 30 m/s in a strong dust storm. That's about 70 MPH. They won't send a one way mission to Mars, NASA spends billions on safety, can you ever really imagine them doing that? Finally, although I am not against sending humans to Mars, I don't think they will be able to contribute that much new science over current rovers. What does additional CPU power get you? Maybe you can go a little furture each day, see some new rocks. But the current rovers have seen lots of rocks, and they take the best instruments available with them.