6 ms·

Why There's Still Not a Human on Mars

46 points by T-A 11y ago

petewailes 11y ago
The simple answer is, because it's really, really difficult, for a very limited benefit. Getting people to Mars is hard. Keeping people alive on Mars is hard. Getting anything to work on Mars is hard. Manned settlement (which is pretty much the only point of sending wetware there), would require underground buildings. (No magnetosphere or atmosphere really to speak of in terms of protecting soft squishy humans from radiation means you need to bury your buildings under the regolith at the very least. Beyond that, you've also got issues of power generation once you're there, consumables and resupply (growing food at scale means lots of buildings, which means some form of underground or buried village). Plus social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months, landing them and enough stuff to keep them alive (because it's easier to land rovers than humans, generally speaking). Beyond that there's more subtle issues - comms takes a while. If anything goes wrong, it's a very long way to send help. And that's before you work on getting people back. You'd have to plan a multi-month mission at least to just send people there and back purposefully, or multi-year mission to make it really worthwhile. And as it turns out, every single part of it is really difficult.
- iwwr 11y ago
  Kennedy's deadline: "by the end of the decade" was crucial. It became "the president's deadline" and everyone rallied to fulfil it. A human Mars mission now is comparatively less difficult than the challenge that Apollo faced, with far superior technology, knowledge and funding. NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven. Mind you, it's doing great stuff still with the robotic exploration program, but undertaking a deep-space human mission involves the kind of determination a bureaucracy on autopilot is just not capable of. NASA is also more than anything a creature of the President and could respond to such a challenge once more, given the chance.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Rocket fuel hasn't changed any.
  - oberstein 11y ago
    Any goal by the President must be fulfilled within 8 years at most, otherwise there's no chance. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_%28NASA%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_%28NASA%29 initiated by Bush and killed by Obama. Greater than any technological or Presidential initiative challenge is the challenge of culture and media. Human lives matter a whole lot more now than they did during the Apollo missions, and a disaster resulting in the deaths of astronauts is the worst thing that can happen to NASA. As long as it is subject to public scrutiny and criticism that affects its budget and goals, it will continue in the fashion of the medical industry -- accepting all the consequences of do-nothing neglect instead of doing something that carries the risk of the deaths of a few individuals. In the medical industry, hundreds of deaths some of which could have been averted with not-yet-FDA-approved surgeries or drugs; in the space industry, the always looming threat of an extinction-level asteroid or other existential threats.
    - andars 11y ago
      Not sure about this. The Apollo program itself lasted through 3 presidents and for 11 years.
      - Consultant32452 11y ago
        I think the key difference is that the Apollo program was ridiculously well supported by the populous and mass media. I casually follow what's going on with NASA and honestly I think I heard about Bush's lunar outpost thing one time.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    > "NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven." NASA manned spaceflight has, which is distinguished from unmanned spaceflight, which doesn't have the same problem. This is because the propulsive force of the Apollo program was primarily LBJ, who was a master politician. He made the Apollo program a constituency-driven project by wheeling and dealing in congress, to great effect. But those deals outlived the Apollo program and LBJ as well. They twisted NASA manned spaceflight and resulted in the mis-step of the Shuttle program and the diminished capabilities and high costs of the post Apollo era.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  Please consider the last stanza of JFK's Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, you may not have heard the whole thing before (emphasis mine): > We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. Isn't that the whole point? The main reason we want to go to Mars in the first place is because it's really, really difficult. Humans like doing things that seem impossible because when we prove that they are possible, our capabilities expand. That's what evolution has programmed us for. We need to do more shit. You can't just say "we know we can go to Mars but it's too expensive and dangerous", because until you demonstrate you really can, that actually means "we can't go to Mars".
  - cousin_it 11y ago
    That was to beat the Russians.
    - trhway 11y ago
      one can only imagine how human space programs would immediately fire up if we find an alien probe with yellow note attached clearly stating that the invasion is going start on 1st January of 2025 :) Nothing stimulates the creativity and enthusiasm like a firm stick.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        See also: Neal Stephenson's newest novel, Seveneves, in which instead of an alien probe with a post-it, something just blows up the Moon. A great book with tons of interesting ideas.
  - yongjik 11y ago
    If we have to try hard things, how about eradicating poverty across the world? That's gonna be really, really hard, and accomplishing that will fill anyone's heart with justifiable proud. ...With an added benefit that once you accomplish that, there will be several billion people who no longer have to search for food all day long, and they can start to worry about other hard and interesting stuff, like going to Mars.
- trhway 11y ago
  I think Vasco De Gama and Magellan would completely agree with you, especially on the issues like "comms takes a while" or "social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months". Though it was much easy back then i guess - for example they could just flog or hang an offender. On the other side they didn't have 3D printers which could just print all your habitats out of sand and sunshine.
  - nhaehnle 11y ago
    They also didn't have to worry about basic life support. Sure, sweet water supply and scurvy are issues on long sea journeys, but compared to a Mars mission, they really had it easy.
    - trhway 11y ago
      >but compared to a Mars mission, they really had it easy. man, i can't agree. We have only pure engineering/technological issues to solve. In addition to those (which i don't think were easier for them at their level of tech), they also had the Kraken who could end their journey and lives at any moment and they didn't even know what is waiting for them where they were going and even where that where actually is. They were sailing almost into Black Abyss ...
    - nickff 11y ago
      18 of 237 men who set sail with Magellan made it back to Europe alive.[1] Of the men who set out to land on the moon, 12 of 14 landed, and 2 had to abort their mission; all 14 made it back alive.[2] Please explain why you think that modern (1960s-2020s) space travel is riskier than journeys like Magellan's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage_of_circumnavigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage_of_c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_astronauts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_astronauts
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's not riskier, but it's harder to get right. We met the challenge though.
- davidw 11y ago
  In terms of the distances from 'civilization', I'm reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Fur_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Fur_Company Of course, there were plenty of people already there, so it's only one aspect of many. Still though, those guys were a long way from home.
- rezashirazian 11y ago
  I agree but I would say, the simpler answer is because there is only one super power. few decades ago the limited benefit of putting a man on the moon was compensanted with the symbolic ass kickery of the soviets. Lack of competition kills innovation. For something as difficult and expensive as putting a man on Mars, there needs to be something more than short term commercial success.
throwaway420 11y ago
NASA quite simply doesn't have the level of technology needed to successfully fake this kind of large-scale mission yet. Audiences today are going to expect much more than a grainy live feed that's recorded with a potato level camera. But I have confidence in NASA rising to the challenge and eventually being able to fake this mission as well.
- jcslzr 11y ago
  the fact that you have to make a throwaway to state the truth shows how fucked up things are
sampo 11y ago
In Mars you have: gravity and solid ground, but you don't have atmospheric pressure or comfortable temperature. Giving up on solid ground, a floating habitat 50+ km above the surface of Venus might have almost Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperatures, also gravity, but lacks solid ground. Is it sure that solid ground makes everything so much easier that colonizing Mars would still be easier than floating colonies in the atmosphere of Venus?
slicktux 11y ago
Now, I was much too lazy to read the article, but reading through the comments here I must ask: Why not send the necessary supplies, equipment, and essentials now, on unmanned craft's, and once all the important items are present in Mars we then send humans?
- mburns 11y ago
  That is indeed the first detail of the first proposal mentioned (Mars Direct). It doesn't fundamentally change the equation, and loads the project with upfront costs.
workitout 11y ago
If I were an Astronaut, I'd rather see Pluto than Mars. If you managed to figure out how to survive the extremes of Mars over an extended time, you probably will already know what you need to survive Pluto long term too. That's where it's at, the edge of our Solar System; a launch point for intergalactic travel. Launch from Earth then keep hitting the engines to build speed, cutting the travel time to Pluto from years down to weeks. Orbital slowdown would also probably take several weeks.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. If we manage to get to Pluto in weeks and survive there, we may stand a chance at interstellar travel. Mars in that sense tells us little.
- ant6n 11y ago
  There's nothing much interesting at Pluto. And it won't ever be a stop-over for interstellar travel, because stopping doesn't make sense. Also, intergalactic travel won't happen any time soon.
jonnathanson 11y ago
Perhaps sending a crew to Mars will be trivial by the time we have the technology and know-how to keep people alive, sustainably, on Mars in the first place. We could maybe put a team on Mars in a few years, perhaps, but they'd have to find a way to turn around and come back almost immediately. And we wouldn't be able to follow up on that mission for decades. It would be a symbolic effort at best, and a PR nightmare at worst if anything went wrong. The risk/reward just seems so badly skewed in favor of risk right now. Shame on us for the wishy-washy way we have handled our space program over the last few decades, sure. But we are not suddenly ready just because everything has been on an apparent pause for awhile. In the meantime, we should continue sending robots up there and perhaps launching supplies and equipment.
ychen11 11y ago
maybe because there is no restroom on Mars
widgetic 11y ago
Because his team returned with the spacecraft and spent more than 500 additional days in space to pick him up.

46 points by T-A 11y ago

The simple answer is, because it's really, really difficult, for a very limited benefit. Getting people to Mars is hard. Keeping people alive on Mars is hard. Getting anything to work on Mars is hard. Manned settlement (which is pretty much the only point of sending wetware there), would require underground buildings. (No magnetosphere or atmosphere really to speak of in terms of protecting soft squishy humans from radiation means you need to bury your buildings under the regolith at the very least. Beyond that, you've also got issues of power generation once you're there, consumables and resupply (growing food at scale means lots of buildings, which means some form of underground or buried village). Plus social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months, landing them and enough stuff to keep them alive (because it's easier to land rovers than humans, generally speaking). Beyond that there's more subtle issues - comms takes a while. If anything goes wrong, it's a very long way to send help. And that's before you work on getting people back. You'd have to plan a multi-month mission at least to just send people there and back purposefully, or multi-year mission to make it really worthwhile. And as it turns out, every single part of it is really difficult.

iwwr 11y ago
Kennedy's deadline: "by the end of the decade" was crucial. It became "the president's deadline" and everyone rallied to fulfil it. A human Mars mission now is comparatively less difficult than the challenge that Apollo faced, with far superior technology, knowledge and funding. NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven. Mind you, it's doing great stuff still with the robotic exploration program, but undertaking a deep-space human mission involves the kind of determination a bureaucracy on autopilot is just not capable of. NASA is also more than anything a creature of the President and could respond to such a challenge once more, given the chance.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Rocket fuel hasn't changed any.
- oberstein 11y ago
  Any goal by the President must be fulfilled within 8 years at most, otherwise there's no chance. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_%28NASA%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_%28NASA%29 initiated by Bush and killed by Obama. Greater than any technological or Presidential initiative challenge is the challenge of culture and media. Human lives matter a whole lot more now than they did during the Apollo missions, and a disaster resulting in the deaths of astronauts is the worst thing that can happen to NASA. As long as it is subject to public scrutiny and criticism that affects its budget and goals, it will continue in the fashion of the medical industry -- accepting all the consequences of do-nothing neglect instead of doing something that carries the risk of the deaths of a few individuals. In the medical industry, hundreds of deaths some of which could have been averted with not-yet-FDA-approved surgeries or drugs; in the space industry, the always looming threat of an extinction-level asteroid or other existential threats.
  - andars 11y ago
    Not sure about this. The Apollo program itself lasted through 3 presidents and for 11 years.
    - Consultant32452 11y ago
      I think the key difference is that the Apollo program was ridiculously well supported by the populous and mass media. I casually follow what's going on with NASA and honestly I think I heard about Bush's lunar outpost thing one time.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  > "NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven." NASA manned spaceflight has, which is distinguished from unmanned spaceflight, which doesn't have the same problem. This is because the propulsive force of the Apollo program was primarily LBJ, who was a master politician. He made the Apollo program a constituency-driven project by wheeling and dealing in congress, to great effect. But those deals outlived the Apollo program and LBJ as well. They twisted NASA manned spaceflight and resulted in the mis-step of the Shuttle program and the diminished capabilities and high costs of the post Apollo era.
thescriptkiddie 11y ago
Please consider the last stanza of JFK's Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, you may not have heard the whole thing before (emphasis mine): > We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. Isn't that the whole point? The main reason we want to go to Mars in the first place is because it's really, really difficult. Humans like doing things that seem impossible because when we prove that they are possible, our capabilities expand. That's what evolution has programmed us for. We need to do more shit. You can't just say "we know we can go to Mars but it's too expensive and dangerous", because until you demonstrate you really can, that actually means "we can't go to Mars".
- cousin_it 11y ago
  That was to beat the Russians.
  - trhway 11y ago
    one can only imagine how human space programs would immediately fire up if we find an alien probe with yellow note attached clearly stating that the invasion is going start on 1st January of 2025 :) Nothing stimulates the creativity and enthusiasm like a firm stick.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      See also: Neal Stephenson's newest novel, Seveneves, in which instead of an alien probe with a post-it, something just blows up the Moon. A great book with tons of interesting ideas.
- yongjik 11y ago
  If we have to try hard things, how about eradicating poverty across the world? That's gonna be really, really hard, and accomplishing that will fill anyone's heart with justifiable proud. ...With an added benefit that once you accomplish that, there will be several billion people who no longer have to search for food all day long, and they can start to worry about other hard and interesting stuff, like going to Mars.
trhway 11y ago
I think Vasco De Gama and Magellan would completely agree with you, especially on the issues like "comms takes a while" or "social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months". Though it was much easy back then i guess - for example they could just flog or hang an offender. On the other side they didn't have 3D printers which could just print all your habitats out of sand and sunshine.
- nhaehnle 11y ago
  They also didn't have to worry about basic life support. Sure, sweet water supply and scurvy are issues on long sea journeys, but compared to a Mars mission, they really had it easy.
  - trhway 11y ago
    >but compared to a Mars mission, they really had it easy. man, i can't agree. We have only pure engineering/technological issues to solve. In addition to those (which i don't think were easier for them at their level of tech), they also had the Kraken who could end their journey and lives at any moment and they didn't even know what is waiting for them where they were going and even where that where actually is. They were sailing almost into Black Abyss ...
  - nickff 11y ago
    18 of 237 men who set sail with Magellan made it back to Europe alive.[1] Of the men who set out to land on the moon, 12 of 14 landed, and 2 had to abort their mission; all 14 made it back alive.[2] Please explain why you think that modern (1960s-2020s) space travel is riskier than journeys like Magellan's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage_of_circumnavigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage_of_c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_astronauts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_astronauts
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's not riskier, but it's harder to get right. We met the challenge though.
davidw 11y ago
In terms of the distances from 'civilization', I'm reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Fur_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Fur_Company Of course, there were plenty of people already there, so it's only one aspect of many. Still though, those guys were a long way from home.
rezashirazian 11y ago
I agree but I would say, the simpler answer is because there is only one super power. few decades ago the limited benefit of putting a man on the moon was compensanted with the symbolic ass kickery of the soviets. Lack of competition kills innovation. For something as difficult and expensive as putting a man on Mars, there needs to be something more than short term commercial success.

throwaway420 11y ago

NASA quite simply doesn't have the level of technology needed to successfully fake this kind of large-scale mission yet. Audiences today are going to expect much more than a grainy live feed that's recorded with a potato level camera. But I have confidence in NASA rising to the challenge and eventually being able to fake this mission as well.

jcslzr 11y ago
the fact that you have to make a throwaway to state the truth shows how fucked up things are

sampo 11y ago

In Mars you have: gravity and solid ground, but you don't have atmospheric pressure or comfortable temperature. Giving up on solid ground, a floating habitat 50+ km above the surface of Venus might have almost Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperatures, also gravity, but lacks solid ground. Is it sure that solid ground makes everything so much easier that colonizing Mars would still be easier than floating colonies in the atmosphere of Venus?

slicktux 11y ago

Now, I was much too lazy to read the article, but reading through the comments here I must ask: Why not send the necessary supplies, equipment, and essentials now, on unmanned craft's, and once all the important items are present in Mars we then send humans?

mburns 11y ago
That is indeed the first detail of the first proposal mentioned (Mars Direct). It doesn't fundamentally change the equation, and loads the project with upfront costs.

workitout 11y ago

If I were an Astronaut, I'd rather see Pluto than Mars. If you managed to figure out how to survive the extremes of Mars over an extended time, you probably will already know what you need to survive Pluto long term too. That's where it's at, the edge of our Solar System; a launch point for intergalactic travel. Launch from Earth then keep hitting the engines to build speed, cutting the travel time to Pluto from years down to weeks. Orbital slowdown would also probably take several weeks.

IndianAstronaut 11y ago
That makes a lot of sense. If we manage to get to Pluto in weeks and survive there, we may stand a chance at interstellar travel. Mars in that sense tells us little.
ant6n 11y ago
There's nothing much interesting at Pluto. And it won't ever be a stop-over for interstellar travel, because stopping doesn't make sense. Also, intergalactic travel won't happen any time soon.

jonnathanson 11y ago

Perhaps sending a crew to Mars will be trivial by the time we have the technology and know-how to keep people alive, sustainably, on Mars in the first place. We could maybe put a team on Mars in a few years, perhaps, but they'd have to find a way to turn around and come back almost immediately. And we wouldn't be able to follow up on that mission for decades. It would be a symbolic effort at best, and a PR nightmare at worst if anything went wrong. The risk/reward just seems so badly skewed in favor of risk right now. Shame on us for the wishy-washy way we have handled our space program over the last few decades, sure. But we are not suddenly ready just because everything has been on an apparent pause for awhile. In the meantime, we should continue sending robots up there and perhaps launching supplies and equipment.

ychen11 11y ago

maybe because there is no restroom on Mars

widgetic 11y ago

Because his team returned with the spacecraft and spent more than 500 additional days in space to pick him up.