"NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s," reads the official NASA web site. But National Geographic points out that "the details haven't been announced, in large part because such a massive, long-term spending project would require the unlikely support of several successive U.S. presidents." And yet on November 4th, NASA put out a call for astronaut applications "in anticipation of returning human spaceflight launches to American soil, and in preparation for the agency's journey to Mars," and they're currently experimenting with growing food in space. And this week they not only ordered the first commercial mission to the International Space Station, but also quietly announced that they've now partnered with 22 private space companies.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2015, @04:07PM
We are WAY WAY far off still. And we will stay way far off until we can show a self-sufficient habitat first, then we can talk about getting there.
This sounds like a budget grab, striking while The Martian rod is still hot.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 23 2015, @04:27PM
The Martian's own writer has said the plat as described required several small improvements on existing rocket technology along with totally made up radiation shielding.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Tuesday November 24 2015, @02:15AM
You're probably right, but the money grab to waste on looking up into space is better than money grab for violating everyone's privacy or murdering folks in other parts of the world.....
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Monday November 23 2015, @04:09PM
We are using the unit of time to measure the distance, where we should be using money.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2015, @05:07PM
Indirectly, we already are. Time is money, remember?
T-minus $100,000,000...
T-minus $99,999,999...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by geb on Monday November 23 2015, @04:40PM
If NASA's asteroid mission is allowed to proceed, we'll be a lot closer. It's been getting heavy criticism from many sides, partly because it's going to be using the SLS, and that's a massive hate-magnet, but the asteroid capture plan will be demonstrating some pretty cool propulsion technology. The solar electric ion stage is specifically designed for hauling cargo to Mars in vast quantities, roughly a hundred tonnes per trip. It's too slow for humans to ride along, but it would be perfect for laying the foundations of a crewed mission.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday November 23 2015, @04:51PM
It will remain a one-way mission for a while. Mars escape velocity is about 40% of the Earth's, so even without nearly as much atmosphere, it's still one hell of a rocket system to bring in, just to bring people back.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 23 2015, @08:49PM
Of course keep in mind that a 40% escape velocity translates to only 16% of the kinetic energy, which translates to far less than that in required fuel for launch thanks to the non-linearities of chemical rocketry.
I'd say that if we can manage a direct surface-to-Mars launch as envisioned by Musk, then the return flight should not be an issue. The only real challenge will be producing the fuel for the return flight, since carrying it with would indeed make things a lot more challenging. But there's no shortage of water or CO2 on Mars from which to produce fuel. It will just take time and energy.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 23 2015, @10:19PM
Taking 10% of a Soyuz (you need to go higher), you still need to make at least 4 tons of fuel. 5% would be a couple tons. Just to escape, not to get home at a decent clip.
If we are anywhere near the tech to send pieces of a production plant to Mars which, after surviving the trip and the environment, can safely pump out 4 tons of pure propellant out of not much energy and resources in a short period of time, I demand to know why we're still waging wars to pump dead dinosaurs.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 23 2015, @10:39PM
I agree "in a short period of time" is a problem. Bust most all of such plans I've seen involve the travelers spending several years on Mars before the return trip, which makes it much more feasible to produce the fuel. Obviously the flip side is that it's much more likely something will go wrong before then, but exploring new frontiers has never had a terribly good survival rate.
And we're still fighting wars over oil because it's the most cost-effective way to power the existing infrastructure, and some very powerful people have invested a lot of resources over a a long period to try to make sure their cash cow can be milked for everything it's worth. The per-kWh cost of solar is already at or below coal ($0.03/kWh, about 1/3 the cost of gas), but the complementary energy storage systems still have issues. Even if everybody agreed it was the right thing to do, we're not going to switch to electric cars, etc. overnight.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mhajicek on Monday November 23 2015, @05:02PM
A permanent service station on Luna should be considered a prerequisite.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2015, @07:57PM
A permanent service station on Luna should be considered a prerequisite.
and another on phobos...
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday November 23 2015, @10:19PM
Why on the moon? Why not in orbit of it?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:22AM
You can mine the moon, and have things stay where you put them. You can also dig in for radiation shielding.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 23 2015, @05:22PM
I don't see why we have to do space flight the same way now as we did in the 50's, with re-purposed fighter pilots doing things by the seat of their pants. We now have robots and tele-presence. Why not employ those to make sure there's a fully human-habitable base before humans ever make the journey? Why not? There's the human drama of intrepid astronauts risking their lives millions of miles from home, but do the risks and costs associated with that really make sense?
I fully support humans going out to colonize other worlds and explore other places, but why not send out machines to do it first, at a far lower cost & risk?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday November 23 2015, @06:42PM
We now have robots and tele-presence. Why not employ those to make sure there's a fully human-habitable base before humans ever make the journey? Why not?
Well, let's start with the light-speed lag. The closest that the orbits of Earth and Mars can ever come is 32,605,000 kilometers. It takes light - or radio waves - a bit over 108 and a half seconds to traverse that distance. Okay, so you want to operate a telepresence robot from Earth to build a habitat on Mars. You send your robot and it gets there and you sit down at your control console and start operating it...and it takes almost two minutes for your commands to get to Mars...and about three and half minutes before you see the results of your inputs. And while you're waiting to find out what happened when your commands got to the robot...oops! Your telepresence robot just knocked over that wall that we spent the last week building.
We can definitely use telepresence robots to do some of the work, and more and more of it as the technology improves. But in order to get a feedback loop that operates in a reasonable amount of time, the human operators need to be close to the robots. So while we may be able to use telepresence to build some of our buildings on Mars, we'll likely have to send a human-crewed spacecraft with the operators there in order to have a Mars base build in less than a century.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2015, @11:15PM
Am I the only one that sees numbers like 32,650,000 kilometers and can't get over seeing it as 32 million thousand meters? Why doesn't anyone use higher prefixes? is 32.65 gigameters that bad? or nix the prefix and just have a larger number ? 32,650,000,000 meters?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 24 2015, @12:07AM
So it's like life in the pre-broadband era. Some of us have been there. With the assistance of adequate buffers and AI, we can queue commands. Still better, faster, cheaper, and safer than sending Bob up to micro-manage the machines.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday November 23 2015, @08:26PM
the apollo astronauts didn't all get teh cancer because they weren't in space very long, the space station crew because they are protected from radiation by the earth's magnetic field.
If we're going to get to mars we have to protect the crew from radiation. It's a problem that can be solved but is a difficult one to solve because the straightforward shielding would be very heavy.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2015, @05:05PM
It is said that John F. Kennedy commissioned NASA with, first, identifying the intermediary tasks required to put a man on the Moon, and, second, the optimal order in which these tasks needed to be accomplished. [1]
The result was said to be a list of over one million goals that needed to be accomplished - for instance, before the spacecraft could be designed, the engines needed to be built; before the engines could be built, some metallurgical problems needed to be solved. [2]
Similarly, any predictions need to leverage off of the critical path for Mars. As Mr Crawford notes, we need to solve the problem of long-term radiation exposure, for instance.
A quick-and-dirty, back-of-the-napkin attempt to figure out what needs to be done would have to include:
[A] A permanent, massively redundant human, probably international presence in low Earth orbit
... which would be required, in order to achieve:
[B] A permanent, massively redundant human, probably international presence on the Moon's surface
... which would be required, in order to achieve:
[C1] A permanent, massively redundant human, probably international presence in lunar orbit
-AND/OR-
[C2] A permanent, massively redundant human, probably intrernational presence at one or more LaGrange points [3], [4]
... which would be required, in order to achieve:
[D] A permanent, massively redundant human, probably international presence in Mars orbit
... which would be required, in order to achieve:
[E] The capacity to land on Mars, with the hope of returning, alive.
I predict that humanity will capture asteroids, hollow them out, install space drives, and then steer them towards Mars and install them as new, temporary moonlets, orbiting Mars and providing a base of operations for exploration and possibly terraforming.
We are at least fifty years away.
~childo
Notes:
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=2rPqFvn3nocC&pg=PR19&lpg=PR19&dq=kennedy+critical+path+moon+one+million+tasks&source=bl&ots=rgbuBI5FmB&sig=axkwg0-IfwlqdS7IjNB_ADwRllM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_pd--wanJAhVL8WMKHUjUCboQ6AEIFDAA [google.com]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method [wikipedia.org]
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point [wikipedia.org]
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point_colonization [wikipedia.org]