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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?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 12 2017, @04:54PM (3 children)
Your bad habit of not Googling is showing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_experiments#Controversy [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 12 2017, @05:15PM (2 children)
So what kind of time lag do you refer to?
That failed experiments of the past would cause a time lag seems not connected?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12 2017, @06:08PM (1 child)
That failed experiments of the past would cause a time lag seems not connected?
Failed? With a human presence and the necessary gear, the label release experiments (a series of batches of organic compounds which showed anomalous reactions) could have been rerun in days. Instead, we still don't know the causes or problems with this particular experiment because no one has tried it since. And it has been 41 years and counting since the experiment was run.
What is ignored here is the enormously poor quality of science and enormous lag that comes from using probes exclusively. Too often, researchers have had to guess at a phenomenon merely because they have no way to explore it further in any reasonable time frame. White lumps [nasa.gov] at the base of your lander's legs? Probably water ice, but who knows for sure? Nobody will be doing a near polar landing mission again for a few more decades (it's already been almost a decade since).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 12 2017, @07:09PM
You're right on. And it's time to go to Mars not because it's easy or cheap but because it can bring benefits we just won't realize without presence. The possible risk is contamination of Mars which could mess up testing results. And of course the really serious risk of any back contamination. Probably a low risk with high impact.