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How is he going to do the landing? Human manned craft are going to be too big for bags, and the atmosphere is too thin for parachutes to work. Landing on thrust
by sgt101 15y ago
How is he going to do the landing? Human manned craft are going to be too big for bags, and the atmosphere is too thin for parachutes to work. Landing on thrusters is somewhat fuel heavy (so to speak).
- blueprint 15y agoGlider?
- samstave 15y agoThis is why I said we first need to conquer the moon. Send robotic building machines to the Moon, let them build habitable structures there first. Then send these to Mars, have them remotely operated and autonomous and build a habitable setup there first without humans. Then ship fuel pods to orbit mars which would allow you to go there with an empty lander - fill it up in orbit then land. I think we need to take logical steps before we shove humans in a pringles can and launch them to mars.
- warpspeed 15y agoLike this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudlaGh1A0o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudlaGh1A0o edit- Parachutes are probably more practical. They work if you make them big enough.
- ballooney 15y agoYour mass scales with the cube of linear dimension. Parachute drag scales as a square of linear dimension. What this means is that the chute gets bigger much more quickly than the payload as you increase lander mass, to the point that you quickly get outlandishly large and impractical chutes for manned landers. Hence the research into alternatives.
- lewisgodowski 15y agoI haven't gotten a chance to read the article yet, but is he planning on landing at all? I would imagine it would be much easier to just go there and back, without landing...? Much more fuel efficient and technically still "round trip."