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Stephen Hawking wants humanity to pursue a Mars mission in the mid-2020s rather than the mid-2030s:
Prof Stephen Hawking has called for leading nations to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020. They should also aim to build a lunar base in 30 years' time and send people to Mars by 2025. Prof Hawking said that the goal would re-ignite the space programme, forge new alliances and give humanity a sense of purpose.
He was speaking at the Starmus Festival celebrating science and the arts, which is being held in Trondheim, Norway. "Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity," he said. "I hope it would unite competitive nations in a single goal, to face the common challenge for us all. "A new and ambitious space programme would excite (young people), and stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology".
Prof. Hawking also talked about interstellar travel:
[We'll] never know how hospitable Proxima b is unless we can get there. At current speeds, using chemical propulsion, it would take 3 million years to reach the exoplanet, Hawking said. Thus, space colonization requires a radical departure in our travel technology. "To go faster would require a much higher exhaust speed than chemical rockets can provide — that of light itself," Hawking said. "A powerful beam of light from the rear could drive the spaceship forward. Nuclear fusion could provide 1 percent of the spaceship's mass energy, which would accelerate it to a tenth of the speed of light."
NASA usually talks about planning for "Mars 2035". Who is trying to get there by 2025?
A Mars mission architecture SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk will unveil in September will call for a series of missions starting in 2018 leading up to the first crewed mission to the planet in 2024, Musk said June 1.
Related: Elon Musk's Plans for Mars and Beyond Revealed
Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday June 21 2017, @10:33PM (1 child)
These guys [wikipedia.org] settled in America over a thousand years ago, why couldn’t we go to Mars? Fuck, I’ll go to Mars even if only to drop dead on arrival. (Read ‘The man who sold the Moon’ [wikipedia.org] if you haven’t.) Would I go to the next star and die on the multigeneration ship? YES! Even if my name is not remembered by anyone, the experience itself would be worth it.
Of course, I'm too old to see any of that happen in my lifetime, but I wish the younger crowd luck on colonizing every planet, asteroid and moon where people could possiblyy live.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @10:41AM
Because they were in an environment where you didn't rely on small, cramped shelters to shield you from the horrid conditions outside, which will kill you immediately if you ever leave them. Not to mention, where the slightest failure of one system (springing a leak!) means a slow and agonizing death. You also don't have alternative supplies of food - no game to hunt, soil is of questionable value for raising much of anything (they have experiments, but experiments and actually trying to grow a crop on Mars to the point of edibility is not something you want to volunteer for). Nor much supply or equipment to make replacements. Sure, we can send you replacement parts that'll arrive in a few years, even though you need it now. But settlers could get most of the replacement parts they needed by chopping down a tree.
It's way too easy to forget that settling elsewhere on Earth involves access to breathable oxygen and survivable temperatures. While some might say, "but you could get black plague or killed by the natives or..." Yeah. None of that compares to the fact that the creaky junk around you that was probably built on government contract by the lowest bidder and/or had parts manufactured in 37 states is the only thing separating you and death. Our technology isn't robust enough at this point to do anything serious on Mars, and it's not fast enough to make up for that.