Not to mention that rats and mice can breed in space...they get a little screwy, but then, we're not expecting people to get preganant on the way to Mars, are we?
NASA Gets To Mars; What Now?
- Thread starter Puget Sound
- Start date
Not to mention that rats and mice can breed in space...they get a little screwy, but then, we're not expecting people to get preganant on the way to Mars, are we?
Germaniac already calculated it at $120bn total expenditure for the Apollo programme. But don't forget that for Apollo, a lot of the neccesary tech had to be developed from scratch, whereas for Mars Direct, most of the tech already exists - some of it dating back to the 19th Century - which significantly reduces the development costs and time. And time is a major factor, since time = man-hours = money.
Muscular degeneration isn't as big an issue as you make it out to be. Some Russian Cosmonauts spent 18 Months onboard Mir in a 0G environment, and made strong recoveries within a fortnight. For Mars, using the Mars Direct profile, you can safely use the spent TMI stage as a counterweight to simulate the 0.38 Martian Surface Gravity to cut the degeneration and slash the rate of bone demineralisation, to perhaps nothing. You shouldn't spend more than 6 months in 0G this way.
Radiation is not a significant issue, a properly designed Hab will protect the crew from the once-per-year or so Solar Flares via a storm shelter, while the background radiation is a thin trickle of high volt and almost no watt particles and rays - which can be stunted even by the thin Martian Atmosphere. Total projected exposure is 40-60 Rem pa, nowhere near enough to cause immediate illness, and only enough to increase your likelyhood of developing fatal cancer from 20% to 21% - assuming you're a non-smoker.
ISRU Propellant Production will allow you to make you're return Lox/LCH4 propellant from the Martian Atmosphere and imported LH2 via gaslight era technology, an exothermic and therefore self sustaining process. This allows all the neccesary hardware to be flown with direct throw of the booster, so long as the Return Vehicle is sent first. And the booster and haul the required payload on its own - hence some justification for Ares V - which used only chemical propulsion. You don't need new propulsion technologies for a Mars Mission, though incorporating them when they become available will help matters a lot.
As for what to gain, how's this for starters, a brand new avenue for human growth and development. Remember how the World was changed forever by the colonisation of the USA? Its growth and development forced the rest of the world to adapt or die, it will be the same with Mars. Because we can't afford more of the last 40 years, where, human advancement has been stalling, and is likely going backwards. Without Mars, we're screwed. But good luck getting our politicians to face that, which has always been the sticking point. Politics, which keeps us stuck here on Terra Firma when we could have been exploring at least this solar system by now, with people, not probes.
That sounds like NASA; plant a flag, pick up a few rocks, and say 'Ok, we did it!' and then never try again. If that's the goal, just send a probe; it can plant the flag and pick up rocks considerably cheaper.
One-way ticket to Mars
I read (somewhere) that the thinking is now a group of people going to Mars permantky. No coming back.
Not in a suide mission but going there to colonise Mars. The whole thing will get a bit easir if we do not plan for a return.
Re-supplying is also "fairly" easy after all.
It does put it into a different perspective, but it probably dovetails fine with Steve Hawkin's thinking that we must somehow get off the planet and go do something else in space. That probably means leaving the rearview mirror behind, once and for all.
Maybe that was what Columbus' people felt? (not Columbus because he had the Chinese map, I know).
I will bet 50c that a one-ticket to Mars will look attractive to a lot of people.
Imagine now if there is a working Mars colony, having been in business for 30+ years? being re-supplied with the stuff that they cannot grow or do themselves?
If the sole purpose would be to transport +/- 1,000 people to Mars, I somehow think the challenges would have been manageable in 1970/80.
(Build a bigger ISS as a transit station, transport 50 people per shuttle launch, use space craft designed for only flying to a Mars like ISS, as a transit station for landing on Mars. Somebody wrote something about it).
Ivan
I read (somewhere) that the thinking is now a group of people going to Mars permantky. No coming back.
Not in a suide mission but going there to colonise Mars. The whole thing will get a bit easir if we do not plan for a return.
Re-supplying is also "fairly" easy after all.
It does put it into a different perspective, but it probably dovetails fine with Steve Hawkin's thinking that we must somehow get off the planet and go do something else in space. That probably means leaving the rearview mirror behind, once and for all.
Maybe that was what Columbus' people felt? (not Columbus because he had the Chinese map, I know).
I will bet 50c that a one-ticket to Mars will look attractive to a lot of people.
Imagine now if there is a working Mars colony, having been in business for 30+ years? being re-supplied with the stuff that they cannot grow or do themselves?
If the sole purpose would be to transport +/- 1,000 people to Mars, I somehow think the challenges would have been manageable in 1970/80.
(Build a bigger ISS as a transit station, transport 50 people per shuttle launch, use space craft designed for only flying to a Mars like ISS, as a transit station for landing on Mars. Somebody wrote something about it).
Ivan
seconded.
plus, once the initial investment of setting up a base has been "paid for", maintaining the base and said colonists will be cheep (relatively speaking), compared to sending people to mars, only to have them return a year or two later. not to mention, using water and the such found on mars, any colony will be able to grow its own food (or most of it) and the such. (everything from greens, to root crops, to chickens and fish. beef and the such will be import luxery items, same with wheat too, sadly). imo, it should have been done (started) a long time ago.
A Mars colony won't be working unless it can export to Earth something that Earth hasn't got even if it is is just knowledge which would be the export that would be cheapest to transport (you radio it).
For quite sometime any Mars colony is require income from Earth whether it is government aid or the colonists are living off investments they made before emigrating to Port Lowell. If one had been built it would be have been screwed at least twice by government cuts in spending or three times by stock market crashes. Any colony would be close to the edge in just surviving.
I am not saying that Mars is not coloniseable, merely that a lot of dosh is going to have to be poured into it for years before it can stand on its own. Settling in a new world won't be anything like the European expansion 1500-1800.
Well, very likely one of the crew members is a doctor (almost certainly a surgeon too). Therefore unless the pregnant woman has a complication the doctor can't deal with, it's not too dangerous... unless the doctor IS the pregnant woman.
A lot less planetary science would get done with everybody doing babysitting duty. Not saying it's a good idea-no children should be born on Mars until there's a fair-sized colony. Still, it's eventually going to happen if enough people start making the trip.