New Mars Forums

Er, you don't want to see the old page, it was a real mess

Suggestions would be welcome (bearing in mind the limited time I can spend on it)!

I know what you're thinking - who the hell is this 'Adrian'?

Anyway, I got a little too fed up with seeing the completely broken front page of newmars.com and decided to junk the whole thing. I've switched the weblog software over to Wordpress, which is rather better than the old Movable Type software we had before, revamped the theme, imported all the old entries, removed all the spam comments and updated the links.

So it looks nice and new now. Only thing is to add content.

I basically don't have time to keep the weblog updated with new Mars-related articles. However, it seems like there are plenty of people here with their fingers on the pulse. I am happy to set people up with the permission to write articles on the weblog directly; initially moderated, and then if everything works out fine, people can post without moderation. If you're interested, post here.

And with that, I will close this thread and direct your attention to the relevant one in Free Chat.

This thread is being locked. Let it rest. There's another thread about this mission anyway.

Moved from Free Chat to Science and Technology.

The website was hacked again today. The hackers were able to do this because of a vulnerability in the Ikonboard forum software - I have since patched this vulnerability and that should now be the end of any further hacks.

I'd rather celebrate something like the 50,000th post, which should happen in a few weeks time. Maybe we should run a little competition or something?

Done.

It's really quite annoying. I imagine they exploited a hole in Ikonboard or Moveable Type. In any case, minimal damage, fixed now.

Moved from New Mars Articles.

Here's the entire story (as in the Mars Society newsletter):

Tighten the Exploration Initiative
Robert Zubrin
Space News op-ed
April 26, 2004 issue

Question: How much rope does it take to connect two posts separated
by a distance of ten meters? The answer varies. If you let the rope
be slack or diverted along detours, any amount can be used. But if
the rope is pulled straight and tight, the job can be done with about
ten meters. The choice of which approach is preferable depends upon
whether your goal is to connect the two posts — or if you're
trying to sell rope.

The same is true of President Bush's new space exploration
initiative. How much will it cost to get humans to Mars? Opponents
claim that it could cost a politically fatal half-trillion or more,
and while it need not, it could, unless the rope is pulled tight.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is a binge of rope-selling that
threatens to repeat the death-by-sticker-shock that killed a similar
initiative by the President's father a decade and a half ago.

Three major examples of current large-scale rope sales include the
emphasis on the International Space Station, the plans for creating
a "Lunar Cape Canaveral," and the push for high-powered
nuclear electric propulsion. Each of these is a distraction, wasting
time and money.

Let's start at the beginning. What is, or should be, the goal of
the new manned spaceflight initiative? The answer can only be to send
human explorers to Mars. The recent findings of the Mars rovers have
shown with certainty that the Martian surface once hosted standing
bodies of liquid water — habitats that could have hosted the
development of life. Also, in recent weeks, three different groups of
investigators using four different instruments have announced the
detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere at levels far above
what would make sense if the planet were lifeless. These methane
traces must be seen as a probable signature of subsurface microbial
life. If human explorers could go to Mars and set up drilling rigs
capable of reaching the underground refuges of these microbes, we
could sample them, culture them, image them, and subject them to a
battery of biochemical tests that would reveal whether Martian life
is created in accord with the same plan that underlies all Earth
life, or whether it is constructed in another way entirely. Put
another way, by going to Mars we have a chance to find out whether
life as we know it on Earth is the pattern for all life everywhere,
or whether we are just one particular example of a much vaster and
more interesting tapestry. This is fundamental science that bears on
the nature of life itself, and it can only be done by human explorers
on the surface of Mars. It is a rational, program, a search for truth
that is worth the billions of dollars of expenditure and the risk of
human life necessary to implement it.

So, having chosen the right goal, the question then becomes: What do
we need to do to pull it off?

The International Space Station doesn't help reach that goal.
While the ISS provides some useful data for Mars mission designers,
no one with a budget of $50 billion and the task of getting humans to
Mars would choose to spend $30 billion conducting zero-gravity
experiments on human subjects in a station orbiting Earth. Not only
is it a disproportionate share of the program budget, but the
negative effects of zero gravity can be avoided by rotating the Mars-
bound spacecraft to provide artificial gravity.

President Bush's planned lunar base could also be a detour from
the main goal. The limited research that can be done on the Moon —
dating impact craters and other geological work aimed at resolving
questions of the Moon's origin — is much less important than
the
investigation of the nature of life that can be done on Mars. Lunar
science is historical, while Martian science is fundamental. The
lunar base must therefore seek justification in what it can do to
further the enterprise of exploring Mars.

Thus, we now hear proposals for the creation of a "Lunar Cape
Canaveral." According to the advocates of this concept, a Moon
base will enable Mars exploration because launching from the Moon is
much easier than launching from Earth. While it is true that it
should be possible to generate liquid oxygen, the majority component
of chemical rocket propellant, on the surface of the Moon, and the
low lunar gravity certainly makes Moon launch much easier than Earth
launch, the fact remains that before the Marsbound spacecraft
launches from the Moon it needs to reach the Moon, which means it
must be launched from Earth in any case. Furthermore, because the
Moon has no atmosphere to enable aerobraking or parachute assisted
descent, the amount of rocket propulsion needed to go from low Earth
orbit to the surface of the Moon is substantially greater than that
needed to go from low Earth orbit to the surface of Mars.  What this
means is that even if a Moon base existed right now, and had large
reservoirs not only of liquid oxygen but also of fuel to burn with
it, sitting in propellant tanks and available for free, it would make
no sense to use it to support Mars expeditions, because it would cost
more to get there than it would to go directly to Mars.

A lunar base could serve as a training ground for Mars missions, but
that same objective could be accomplished at a thousandth of the cost
by establishing prototype Mars stations in the Arctic. Far from
making a Mars mission easier, the Moon base would just be a gold-
plated lunar tollbooth, wasting tens of billions to build and adding
massively to the expense of every Mars mission forced to use it.

Another oft-mentioned diversion from the main goal is high-powered
nuclear electric propulsion (NEP). According to the high-power NEP
rope-sellers, manned Mars exploration won't be possible using
today's rocket technology, because the six-month transit to Mars
would expose the crews to lethal doses of radiation. Accordingly,
they claim, enormous hundred-megawatt class nuclear electric
propulsion systems will be needed, since these would allow the ship
to reach Mars in two months.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In order to enable
a two month transit from Earth to Mars, the NEP system would need to
achieve a power density of  3000 W/kg. In contrast, the actual NEP
systems now on NASA's drawing board for the Jupiter Icy Moon
Orbiter (JIMO) mission will have a power density of 16 W/kg. If the
JIMO spacecraft were sent from Earth to Mars, it would require 48
months to do the trip, each way. In reality, there is no prospect of
being able to develop NEP systems with one-third the trip time of
current chemical systems, or the same time, or three times the time
for that matter.

Fortunately, however, such faster trips are not necessary. The
radiation dose received over a 2.5 year period on a roundtrip Mars
mission involving two six month transits and an 18 month stay would
have no visible effects, and be expected to increase each crew
member's lifetime risk of cancer by about one percent (in
contrast, the average American smoker increases his cancer risk by
twenty percent). Of the half dozen astronauts and cosmonauts who have
already received cosmic ray doses comparable to those that would be
experienced on a Mars mission, none has experienced any radiation-
induced health effects.

It may also be noted that the NEP megasystems described above utilize
xenon as propellant, and have no use for the liquid oxygen that might
be manufactured at the Lunar Cape Canaveral. So, while each of these
two boondoggle projects lacks merit on its own terms, taken together,
they are doubly nonsensical, as neither fits together with the other.

We need to break with this kind of thinking. Unless the rope is
pulled tight to define a critical path program, we will be left with
a tangled mess of incoherent and useless projects which will never
lead to Mars and which ultimately will fail even in their desired
objective of rope-selling as their pointlessness becomes apparent.

The missing ingredient is leadership. NASA's average Apollo-era
(1961-73) budget, adjusted for inflation, was about $17 billion/year
in today's dollars, only six percent more than the agency's
current budget. Yet the NASA of the sixties accomplished a hundred
times more because it had a mission with a deadline, and was forced
to develop an efficient plan to achieve that mission, and then
constrained to build a coherent set of hardware elements to achieve
that plan.

If the new space exploration program is to succeed, it must proceed
in the same way today. To be defensible, it must be rational, which
means it must actually commit itself to its true goal, and define a
minimum cost, minimum schedule, plan to reach that goal. In the
absence of rigorous leadership from NASA headquarters, Congress
should take the initiative and instruct the space agency to report
back in one year on its options for humans to Mars by 2016, with a
total program budget of $50 billion or less.

The rope must be pulled tight.

Dr. Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer, is president of the
Mars Society (http://www.marssociety.org]www.marssociety.org) and the author of The Case for
Mars (1996), Entering Space (1999), and Mars on Earth (2003).

Hi all,

As much as I'm sure we're rather not go over this topic again, I've been asked by the Mars Society to remove all threads concerning the ISA and Rick Dobson. These topics really have nothing to do with the Mars Society and since they descended into attack campaigns against the Society (which I should point out is not the same as normal criticism, which people have been doing constructively here for a long time), it won't be tolerated. Where possible, posts that have value independent of the attack campaign and are not simply responding to it will be saved.

Adrian