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Jesus, I'm all for sending out as many missions as Congress will pay for, but another Mars rover? Can't they throw a little bit of money towards sending a melt-
by rpm4321 14y ago
Jesus, I'm all for sending out as many missions as Congress will pay for, but another Mars rover? Can't they throw a little bit of money towards sending a melt-bot to Europa or Enceladus, or a boat-bot to Titan already? It'll be 2015 before we even know what Ceres really looks like.
Mars is certainly critically important, but the solar system is a massive place, and with such limited budgets why wouldn't you spend at least a chunk of your resources on explorations that have the potential of finding life in our solar system? We've known about these options for decades, and yet each mission gets scrapped at the last minute. I don't get NASA's priorities sometimes.
Also, in that time frame Elon Musk, China, and even NASA have bounced around various plans for getting humans to Mars. I'm usually an advocate for robotic exploration, but for the deep digging you will probably have to do to find something interesting, it may be better to have boots on the ground (for example exploring for microbial life or fossils below the surface.) It really seems like we're at the beginning of a Mars space race anyway, and this rover will inevitably be cancelled 5-10 years from now in order to focus on beating the Chinese there.
- mkr-hn 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EJSM/Laplace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EJSM/Laplace > In April 2011, ESA stated that it seemed unlikely that a joint US–European mission will happen in the early 2020s given NASA's budget, so ESA is investigating the possibility of proceeding with a European-led mission.[3] The ESA-led mission is called the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) and will be based on the JGO design. Selection of JUICE for the L1 launch slot of ESA's Cosmic Vision science programme was announced on May 2, 2012.[4] It always comes down to budget. There's only so much you can do with $n billion, and NASA gets less money each year. Billionaires and governments are free to declare that they'll do it faster and cheaper, but NASA has a head start on science and engineering. It's easier to believe NASA's timetables and budgets because it has the experience.
- worldsayshi 14y agoI don't see how it can be made feasible to return humans from Mars for a very long time. Think about the expenditure and infrastructure required to launch a vehicle to escape velocity on earth. Shipping that kind of equipment to Mars seems like a undertaking so many times larger than a few rovers. And I don't see how a one way trip would be politically/ethically possible. edit: This sounds negative. All things considered; We have to try though. But perhaps knowing that we can have a sustainable settlement have to be the step zero of space colonization.
- danielweber 14y agoNASA's Mars Reference Mission [1] calls for landing an un-fueled return vehicle on Mars and then manufacturing fuel. In-situ production or not, any sane humans-to-Mars mission is going to involve landing a bunch of equipment at the landing site ahead of time. The marsnauts are going to have very complete maps of their new home before they even launch from Earth. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Design_Reference_Mission_3.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Design_Reference_Mission_3...
- tambourine_man 14y agoI'd love to see us getting to Europa too, there must be something alive down that salty ocean, but melting several kilometers of ice is hard even on Earth. Enceladus seems a lot easier, just fly through the volcano plumes and/or land on one of the tiger stripes. I mean, we've got water, heat and organic compounds. What are we waiting for?