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Target Venus not Mars for first crewed mission to another planet, experts say
- algerd 4y agoWhy no stationary base on the moon?
- dehrmann 4y agoWould you rather have a moon base or 10 probes exploring the rest of the solar system?
- rightbyte 4y agoA moon base please.
- ncmncm 4y agoProbes.
- Phrenzy 4y agoIf I get any input, I would shave some part of the nearly trillion dollar US military budget and use some of that windfall to allow for both of the above options.
- squarefoot 4y agoA moon base would make the probes mission a lot faster to develop and launch, in the long run.
- dehrmann 4y agoHow so?
- squarefoot 4y agoBy assembling parts of the probes and launching from there for example. It would require a lot of time initially, that's why I specified in the long run.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoThe hardest part in exploring our solar system is escaping Earth's gravity. Most of the fuel in our rockets and by extension, most of the rocket itself, exists to lift the actual spacecraft off the Earth. If you can manufacture it on the Moon, you need a lot less rocket.
- nynx 4y agoA crewed flyby? What is the point of that? Colonizing the clouds of venus is a good idea eventually, but it's certainly not a viable first target.
- hadlock 4y agoJust like the moon, we did not attempt to land there on the first go-around. Neil Armstrong was on Apollo 11. Apollo 4-6 were unmanned launches, 7-9 were testing the hardware with humans, mostly with "free return" orbits where even if the engines didn't start again, they would land back on earth in about a week. Apollo 10 was a wet rehersal that did everything except land on the moon#, including "parking" in lunar orbit, then starting up the engines again and going back to earth; finally Apollo 11-17 actually were "boots on the ground" A venus flyby would be similar to Apollo 10 where they would go to another body, and then do a free return fly-by, maybe with engine assist, and return back in a year. Regardless of if/when we go to mars, there will be at least one "free return" mission before they attempt future missions that have a "parking orbit" around mars. Going to Venus would allow us to simulate a mars free return trip, but in only 1 year (which would mean for a mars-class ship, a minimum safety factor of 3 (really, six) for fuel, water, air, food, medical supplies etc), instead of a 3 year mission with only a safety factor of 2. #Apollo 10 was functionally identical to Apollo 11, to the extent that the only difference was that they did not provide enough fuel on the lander/ascent module to return to lunar orbit, to deter Apollo 10 astronauts from "going rogue" and attempting a landing ahead of schedule Also, for completeness sake, Apollo 1 crew died during testing in a fire; Gus Grissom, Edward H. White II, Roger B. Chaffee
- xani_ 4y ago> Going to Venus would allow us to simulate a mars free return trip, but in only 1 year (which would mean for a mars-class ship, a minimum safety factor of 3 (really, six) for fuel, water, air, food, medical supplies etc), instead of a 3 year mission with only a safety factor of 2. Simulate what ? Sitting in place ? We can do that on earth orbit. Engines running for long time ? No need for people aboard for that.
- 4y ago
- mannyv 4y agoYea, because we need more harder problems to solve. /s
- United857 4y agoClickbait headline -- the proposal is for a flyby, not a landing.
- dylan604 4y agoHas anything that has landed on Venus survived for more than a "few" hours due to heat/pressure? Landing humans on Venus seems more of a very cruel and unusual death sentence rather than some sort of a viable science mission. Now, if I were on death row and they offered me the choice of needle, chair, firing rage, or land on Venus, well, I know which one I'd take!
- dsr_ 4y agoLanding on Venus would be ridiculous. However, Geoffrey Landis has (among others) proposed that we put an atmosphere-floating habitat "on" Venus. PDF: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20030022668.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20... Abstract: Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.
- ncmncm 4y agoAnd, breathing air is buoyant. N2 is only 13% of the atmosphere, but if my calculations are right, that means a very great deal more nitrogen than we have, just dissolved into a lot more air. To terraform, release machines that crack CO2 in the clouds and drop diamonds. You release way too much oxygen, but that will bind to the surface minerals. Main thing is to keep the carbon from oxidizing again before you're ready.
- Phrenzy 4y agoWhich is why <<I>> performed a flyby of the article and came directly to the comments.
- ufmace 4y agoI don't get what the point is of a crewed flyby. The crew would just be cooped up in the craft the whole time with nothing to do except take measurements with instruments that could just as easily be done by a machine. This isn't the Apollo era, we're pretty confident we can send spacecraft all over the solar system and keep humans alive in space for years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cratermoon 4y agoThere was, in fact, a plan in the Apollo Applications Program for a crewed Venus flyby, using the SIVB as a wet workshop for habitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby
- dehrmann 4y agoIt would essentially be an ISS mission with a few extra rocket burn stages and a different view.
- xattt 4y agoIs a fully-assembled ISS capable of withholding torsional stress that would come from insertion burns?
- s1artibartfast 4y agoNobody is talking about doing an insertion
- Tepix 4y agoWith a much different radiation environment.
- layer8 4y ago> we're pretty confident we can […] keep humans alive in space for years Are we? In outer space? Radiation, psychology/isolation, months away from any support in case of an emergency? My understanding is that there are a lot of open questions, and that even a mere fly-by mission would constitute a major new step in manned space flight.
- xnx 4y agoA crewed flyby is barely more ridiculous than a crewed landing.
- loufe 4y agoI've been wondering about the "experts say" part of a headline like this. Qualified people lending their opinion is an important piece of information to the context of the article, absolutely, but it also seems exclusive. It's not the opinion of the editorial board of The Guardian, however I also know for a fact that other "experts" would vehemently disagree. Would qualifying this as "some experts say" erode the confidence of the title and thus how sensational it is? Is it maybe implied in the framework of news titles that this is not a universally held opinion by "experts" so much as at least that of several?
- ravi_m 4y agoMost likely the real reason is that articles with "experts say" in the headline performs much better than "some experts say" or "some experts wonder if". The underlying reason for the higher CTR is that most readers want to engage with articles that are more certain than less and their inability to fill in the unstated uncertainty gets exploited.
- ofrzeta 4y agoI've come to the conclusion that "experts" is just a wildcard for journalists to quote random people. Of course every "expert" has to have some track record of the subject in question but there's no measure in qualification. For instance having a track record of wrong predictions in specific economic questions doesn't seem to invalidate your status as an "expert". So what does? And what could an "expert" possible be if there are no usable criteria.
- remarkEon 4y agoIt’s part of the sea change that happened starting with social media but significantly accelerated in the 2010s. It hit foreign policy first, I think, but by now it’s a feature of reporting for basically everything. > Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”[1] Rhodes here is talking about geopolitics, but it extends to everything. So many news outlets don’t actually have many people with practical experience anymore, and so they call random people for quotes. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-nov...
- hsnewman 4y agoWe should seed Venus with microbs that consume amonia and the other chemicals on Venus, starting at least to make it habitable.
- causality0 4y ago“You’d be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission,” he said. All of these "Not Mars" people always seem to fall into the same boat where they know there's zero point to sticking human beings and life support systems into an observation probe so they trot out this "it's good practice, guys!" horseshit. Scientific progress is not the point of putting the first set of boots on Mars any more than it was the reason for first climbing Everest. The point is to prove it can be done. After that you can quibble about the most efficient method of further human spaceflight development. It's like they're standing in the way of us learning to walk because they insist we figure out the best brand of shoe first.
- ncmncm 4y agoGoing to Mars will be among humanity's least revered achievements. There is nothing there. The only plausibly valuable exports from Mars might be the engines that got your supplies there. With their bells cut off.
- Phrenzy 4y agoAmong the least revered? You mean, below peanut butter and jelly in the same jar? If humanity is going to emerge out of the cradle, Mars will have to be the 2nd step. Right after Luna. As we are out there exploring & homesteading, maybe we will realize what a gem the Earth truly is.
- ncmncm 4y agoGravity too low, too cold, weak sun, no air. Really, all Mars has is dirt, and that is corrosive. We could do much better building spinning cans to live in, out in orbit. Even Venus cloudtops would be a better place to camp than Mars. Peanut butter reliably on the shelf certainly is a greater achievement than people on Mars would be, if we ever bother. When Elon quits hyping it, Mars will slip out of the collective consciousness.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoHow could first foot on an alien planet possibly not be a historic achievement? The point is not and could never realistically be exports. The point is to overcome the challenge and develop capability. You can't learn how to live on another planet in silico
- orbital-decay 4y agoThis was the original plan by Korolev and co, before the moon speech by JFK, and before the conditions on Venus became known. They wanted to figure out orbital assembly, and then circumnavigate Venus as the first step in the Solar System exploration. Hard to say how realistic it was, but modular orbital stations were an offshoot of that original vision, so it's been partially implemented.
- aatd86 4y agoThe title fails to mention that the experts in question were astrologists. Not astrophysicists. /jk