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We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft… We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed mission

We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft… We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech. We had only barely launched an astronaut on a suborbital flight at that time! And yet 7 years later…

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong. I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.
- Robotbeat 2y ago
  “Current day technology” is sort of poorly defined because you can make new technology in one day. “Current tech” is a fake constraint, because even preparing for a launch in two years, you’d be developing new technology all along the way. The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > you can make new technology in one day. Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it. People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong. Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.
    - Robotbeat 2y ago
      Note that Mars’ surface has a similar radiation dose as ISS, as measured by the Curiosity rover. (This includes the quality factor.)
      - Retric 2y ago
        A significant part of that is because it’s much further from the sun. A hypothetical 500 day mars mission is ~1 Sv optimistically which is something like 5% fatal cancer risk. A 3 year mission you’re well above that even before considering solar storms etc. I think many would sign up for a mars mission especially as treatment improves, but there’s only so much wiggle room here.
      - idlewords 2y ago
        It does not; see the paper cited in my other reply to you. GCR dose is 1.5-2x on Mars compared to ISS. The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion exposure is that it has a different mechanism of damage, not captured by that paradigm.
        Robotbeat 2y ago
        GCR /alone/, maybe, but it’s, um, strange to pretend the substantial trapped radiation dose on ISS doesn’t exist, as you’re doing here (Table 2 in your linked paper shows the trapped dose at ISS is about equal to the GCR dose at ISS, so ignoring trapped dose makes your estimate off by approximately a factor of 2). It is the total effective dose (including quality factor) which matters, not cherry picking one particular source.
        idlewords 2y ago
        The 2-3x uncertainty in tumor risk comes entirely from the heavy ion component of GCR. Please go back and re-read that section of my post if you need to.
        2y ago
  - iab 2y ago
    I think this shows a fundamental, widespread misunderstanding of space flight in general: > you’d be developing new technology all along the way Aerospace does not work like this. Hardware does not evolve until launch, it is frozen in time to allow for testing and flight qualification for subsystems, and systems as a whole.
throw0101a 2y ago
> We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft… The track record for successfully landing on Mars isn't that awesome: > Historically, counting all missions by all countries, there has been about a 50% success rate at Mars — and the odds of successfully landing on Mars are only about 1 in 3. * https://www.lpi.usra.edu/features/ala_msl/ https://www.lpi.usra.edu/features/ala_msl/
- SECProto 2y ago
  That isn't a very useful statistic - all you should really glean from it is that landing on Mars is hard. The US has done it 9 out of the 10 times it tried, so it seems reasonable that it would succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mars_landers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mars_landers
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    It was done by NASA, who have a culture of triple/ quadriple checking and being very careful about mitigating risk in ways that may seem inefficient to some. I don't see NASA leading the effort to Mars in any meaningful way besides being a conduit for money from the treasury.
    - Robotbeat 2y ago
      If NASA astronauts are on board, they will be triple and quadruple checking things, like they did for commercial crew and are doing for HLS.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket ever launched, by a rather wide margin. It's had 439 successful launches and 2 failures. NASA's Space Shuttle had 133 launches and 2 failures. People who don't normally follow space may be confused by recent things re: Starship because the media is being intentionally deceptive, as usual. These are not normal flights. They are purely experimental flights, mostly expected to fail, to gradually work the kinks out of the system. It's the difference between hitting compile and launching something to production.
sangnoir 2y ago
> We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech When JFK made the speech, it was in the middle if the cold war and there was a realistic fear that the "capitalist way if life" could be beaten by command economics of the Soviet Union in cutting edge science and rocketry, justifying the huge amounts invested in the space race. What is the impetus now? We're all about government efficiency in cutting the social-safety nets, scientific research, but we'll carve out a Mars mission "because it's hard"?
- Robotbeat 2y ago
  We are, in fact, in the middle of a Cold War again. Also, our economy is far larger and we have launch technology that makes such efforts far cheaper/
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > We are, in fact, in the middle of a Cold War again Which political order are we in an existential battle against; Russian-style oligarchy or or Chinese-style state-controlled capitalism? It appears we're losing on both those fronts, any "space race" to Mars would further emphasize the point, AFAIAC.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong. I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.

Robotbeat 2y ago
“Current day technology” is sort of poorly defined because you can make new technology in one day. “Current tech” is a fake constraint, because even preparing for a launch in two years, you’d be developing new technology all along the way. The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.
- Retric 2y ago
  > you can make new technology in one day. Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it. People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong. Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.
  - Robotbeat 2y ago
    Note that Mars’ surface has a similar radiation dose as ISS, as measured by the Curiosity rover. (This includes the quality factor.)
    - Retric 2y ago
      A significant part of that is because it’s much further from the sun. A hypothetical 500 day mars mission is ~1 Sv optimistically which is something like 5% fatal cancer risk. A 3 year mission you’re well above that even before considering solar storms etc. I think many would sign up for a mars mission especially as treatment improves, but there’s only so much wiggle room here.
    - idlewords 2y ago
      It does not; see the paper cited in my other reply to you. GCR dose is 1.5-2x on Mars compared to ISS. The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion exposure is that it has a different mechanism of damage, not captured by that paradigm.
      - Robotbeat 2y ago
        GCR /alone/, maybe, but it’s, um, strange to pretend the substantial trapped radiation dose on ISS doesn’t exist, as you’re doing here (Table 2 in your linked paper shows the trapped dose at ISS is about equal to the GCR dose at ISS, so ignoring trapped dose makes your estimate off by approximately a factor of 2). It is the total effective dose (including quality factor) which matters, not cherry picking one particular source.
        idlewords 2y ago
        The 2-3x uncertainty in tumor risk comes entirely from the heavy ion component of GCR. Please go back and re-read that section of my post if you need to.
        2y ago
- iab 2y ago
  I think this shows a fundamental, widespread misunderstanding of space flight in general: > you’d be developing new technology all along the way Aerospace does not work like this. Hardware does not evolve until launch, it is frozen in time to allow for testing and flight qualification for subsystems, and systems as a whole.

throw0101a 2y ago

> We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft… The track record for successfully landing on Mars isn't that awesome: > Historically, counting all missions by all countries, there has been about a 50% success rate at Mars — and the odds of successfully landing on Mars are only about 1 in 3. * https://www.lpi.usra.edu/features/ala_msl/ https://www.lpi.usra.edu/features/ala_msl/

SECProto 2y ago
That isn't a very useful statistic - all you should really glean from it is that landing on Mars is hard. The US has done it 9 out of the 10 times it tried, so it seems reasonable that it would succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mars_landers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mars_landers
- sangnoir 2y ago
  It was done by NASA, who have a culture of triple/ quadriple checking and being very careful about mitigating risk in ways that may seem inefficient to some. I don't see NASA leading the effort to Mars in any meaningful way besides being a conduit for money from the treasury.
  - Robotbeat 2y ago
    If NASA astronauts are on board, they will be triple and quadruple checking things, like they did for commercial crew and are doing for HLS.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket ever launched, by a rather wide margin. It's had 439 successful launches and 2 failures. NASA's Space Shuttle had 133 launches and 2 failures. People who don't normally follow space may be confused by recent things re: Starship because the media is being intentionally deceptive, as usual. These are not normal flights. They are purely experimental flights, mostly expected to fail, to gradually work the kinks out of the system. It's the difference between hitting compile and launching something to production.

sangnoir 2y ago

> We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech When JFK made the speech, it was in the middle if the cold war and there was a realistic fear that the "capitalist way if life" could be beaten by command economics of the Soviet Union in cutting edge science and rocketry, justifying the huge amounts invested in the space race. What is the impetus now? We're all about government efficiency in cutting the social-safety nets, scientific research, but we'll carve out a Mars mission "because it's hard"?

Robotbeat 2y ago
We are, in fact, in the middle of a Cold War again. Also, our economy is far larger and we have launch technology that makes such efforts far cheaper/
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > We are, in fact, in the middle of a Cold War again Which political order are we in an existential battle against; Russian-style oligarchy or or Chinese-style state-controlled capitalism? It appears we're losing on both those fronts, any "space race" to Mars would further emphasize the point, AFAIAC.