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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 11 2017, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-small-orbit-for-man dept.

Buzz Aldrin has said that NASA should stop spending $3.5 billion per year on the International Space Station and relinquish low Earth orbit activities to private companies, such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, and Axiom Space. This would allow for the funding of "cyclers" to enable a base on the moon and eventually a permanent presence on Mars:

http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html

Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" — spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth. "The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."

Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said. Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.

[...] NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.

Is the ISS a key part of the "Journey to Mars" or a key roadblock?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 12 2017, @02:02AM (5 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday May 12 2017, @02:02AM (#508428) Journal

    And twenty years off of their lifespan because of radiation - which we cannot mitigate.

    You had a good comment until you threw this bullshit in there. The radiation risks of a trip to Mars are minimal. Astronauts will be exposed to more radiation than NASA recommendations would allow, but the limits are conservative. Weightlessness will do far more damage to the astronauts than radiation will, and that's a problem that could be fixed by rotating part of the spacecraft.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12 2017, @02:28AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 12 2017, @02:28AM (#508436)

    Radiation concerns are real, but trimming 20 years off lifespan is overblowing it.

    Occasionally one astronaut will get unlucky with the radiation effects and lose 20 years of life to it. Just like commuting to work on the freeway will occasionally do terrible things to lifespan, but not most of the time.

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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Friday May 12 2017, @02:38AM (3 children)

    by tftp (806) on Friday May 12 2017, @02:38AM (#508439) Homepage

    Not everyone is so quick [space.com] to dismiss the danger of radiation:

    The Mars rover Curiosity has allowed us to finally calculate an average dose over the 180-day journey. It is approximately 300 mSv, the equivalent of 24 CAT scans. In just getting to Mars, an explorer would be exposed to more than 15 times an annual radiation limit for a worker in a nuclear power plant.

    We can debate whether the limits are conservative, but the absolute figure of 0.3 Sv (one way) is scary. The astronaut will collect about 1 Sv over the trip - and that is already radiation poisoning [xkcd.com], and there will be no treatment until return to Earth. Once on Mars, researchers cannot stay underground - they have to do research on the surface.

    Everything else, like gravity, can be dealt with. But there is no sufficiently powerful source of energy yet (like a small and clean thermonuclear reactor) to create, say, a magnetic deflector for the solar wind. Another good plan is to fly much faster. Both methods require technology that is not yet available. I believe people should focus on that - and on better robots.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 12 2017, @04:37AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday May 12 2017, @04:37AM (#508470) Journal

      I am totally fine with postponing human missions to Mars until they take 30-60 days one-way instead of 180. It will be too bad if those propulsion technologies are not ready to use by the 2030s.

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    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 12 2017, @04:54AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday May 12 2017, @04:54AM (#508479) Journal

      Not to mention that, once there, the astronauts might no longer remember how to get back. [go.com]

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    • (Score: 2) by Alphatool on Friday May 12 2017, @12:51PM

      by Alphatool (1145) on Friday May 12 2017, @12:51PM (#508588)

      Radiation doses don't add up like that. To get radiation poisoning from 1 Sv all of the dose needs to be delivered over a short time span, think hours rather than days. If the dose is spread out to e.g. 10 mSv per day for 100 days there will be no immediate health effects. There would be an increase in the risk of cancer (maybe 5% per Sv more likely to die from cancer but it's complicated) but in the context of interplanetary space travel 2 mSv per day is nothing to worry about.

      There are some serious and genuine concerns about brain damage from really high energy cosmic radiation (see the reply by by maxwell demon), but that is a very different problem than anything from a conventional radiation dose.