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Mars is hard
- BigZaphod 17y agoFrankly, I don't care if it is hard. Nothing worth doing is easy.
- delano 17y agoBut it is important to note the magnitude of difficulty so you can understand where a particular goal fits in among the rest. Getting into Earth's orbit is difficult. I imagine landing on Mars would be something like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more difficult.
- BigZaphod 17y agoI don't see why it'd be so hard to land on Mars. We've done it there with automated probes and we re-enter and land in atmosphere all the time right here on Earth already.
- imp 17y ago1) Those probes don't come back. I assume we'd have to try to get the human back to earth. That requires sending enough fuel with the ship for two launches, unless they can process fuel on Mars. 2) Manned space missions require a safety factor of 2, where unmanned missions have lower restrictions. So it might technically be more difficult to accomplish the same thing just with a human.
- jsolson 17y agoI think if you time it right getting from Mars to Earth actually isn't so bad since Earth is in a lower solar orbit than Mars. Think of it as a big de-orbit burn. Of course you'd want it to deposit you into Earth-orbit (perhaps after some aerobraking), hence the need for proper timing, but on the whole much easier than trying to enter the higher orbit of Mars. Two rocket scientists I asked confirm this, but asked me not to quote them on it, so I'm paraphrasing :). Also, Mars' lower gravity makes achieving escape velocity substantially easier than on Earth. Of course, it's still a not insubstantial amount of fuel, but it's not quite as bad as duplicating the trip up to get back. Personally, though, if we shipped up enough stuff to survive, I'd be cool with a one-way trip.
- bigiain 17y agoI remember afew years back talking with a friend who was working at NASA at the time (Peter the Rocket Scientist!), who told me about a internal NASA conference/talk he'd attended - the speaker outlined the order-of-magnitude increase in difficulty of making a manned Mars mission come back home, and asked the audience how many of them would volunteer to fly on a one way mission to Mars - apparently about half the room raised their hands...
- eru 17y agoThe PR effect of manned one way missions would be interesting.
- TriinT 17y agoAn expert believes it's not that hard: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713585 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713585 It's interesting to read both articles because of the contrasting perceptions of the challenges a manned mission to Mars would pose.
- BigZaphod 17y agoI like this article better... :)
- tom_rath 17y agoThe question is, is a human Mars mission worth doing? Wouldn't a series of missions building an infrastructure to use metal and water-rich asteroids do more to establish a permanent human presence in space? Given a fixed amount of time and research money, what provides the best return for the next four decades?
- BigZaphod 17y agoIt's pretty hard to quantify things like inspiration - and I personally think that's a huge argument in favor of going to Mars. There's also the insane technological advancement factor to consider. Apollo led to hundreds (if not thousands) of advances in all kinds of fields of technology. It's hard to put a price tag on that, too.
- tom_rath 17y agoCan you name a dozen of those hundreds (if not thousands) of advances? If you can, try to identify those which wouldn't have happened without Apollo. The harsh truth is there aren't any. We've tried the 'get something great as a result of spin-offs' route before. It disappoints every time. Why are people advocating it again with a human 'flags and footprints' Mars mission? Why don't we instead direct resources towards an inspiring goal which delivers something concrete? Given the choice, I would much rather today have a permanent LEO infrastructure of a dozen privately funded Skylabs (from those same tried-and-true Saturn V rocket parts) and cis-lunar tugs rather than the 'spin off' soon-to-be-retired Goldberg contraption of Shuttle.
- BigZaphod 17y agoYou could start here for a list of a few Apollo-era spinoffs: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm That doesn't take into account the raw knowledge/experiences/technologies that were transmitted between NASA and the various private companies and universities they worked with during that era which no doubt influenced some of those 20,000 institutions later in history. As to proving if the same technologies or products would exist without Apollo - that's just stupid and pointless. How about you try to prove everything would have turned out the same had we not gone to the moon? Has the private sector developed time machines that I'm not aware of?
- davi 17y agoexcellent graphic linked in the article: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/image/79352 http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/image/79352
- lunchbox 17y agoBy 1989, NASA estimated such a trip would come to half a trillion dollars I admit the idea of going to Mars is very exciting, but honestly, is this where we want to be spending our money?
- dougp 17y agoIt will more then pay for itself with increased interest in engineering and science. But besides that the US is throwing trillions at all kinds of unpopular things. I would much rather it be mars.
- BigZaphod 17y agoThey wouldn't just burn the money as rocket fuel - that money would be used to create jobs and buy materials. From Wikipedia: "At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities." That's some serious movement of money there.
- randallsquared 17y agoI loathe the "stimulus", but if our taxes are to be spent in such sums anyway, I think that the result should make a difference. Replace all high emissions cars with electrics or hybrids. Pay off all mortgages in the country, while passing an amendment that forbids the Feds from ever doing it again (otherwise, the possibility that they'll do it again will distort the market even more than it would anyway). Set up prizes for all kinds of space or research goals, like landing on the moon, landing on Mars, first private individual on the moon, first full GWhr beamed from a solar power satellite, first tonne of machinable superconducter at room temperature, first, tenth, and thousandth tonne returned to earth from an asteroid, etc. This has the added bonus that tax money is only spent if someone makes it. Or something else. But something that matters, rather than just paying people to do a little more of what they're already doing, here or there, where they went to school with the program administrators or whatever.
- eru 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic