New Mars Forums

So basically you are saying the colonists will be prisoners. Well if we're going in that direction, why not just set up a penal colony? So are you saying life support systems can't be mass produced in factories at low cost?

Capitalism is the key, if we can reuse the vehicles that get us into space, that will bring down the costs to that of fuel and maintenance of the ships. SpaceX made a start by landing its boosters, if the boosters can be reused, that the company the cost of manufacturing a new booster, this will allow SpaceX to reap huge profits thus drawing in competitors, once competitors are in the market they will bid down the cost of travel into space.

Make America Great Again!
I remember first learning about Apollo when it was over and done with, I just missed it, the President that made this happen was Lyndon B Johnson, the very next Democrat in the Oval Office was a huge disappointment, that would be Jimmy Carter! Jimmy Carter it seemed did not want to make America Great Again, he refused to go back to the Moon as we did with Johnson and Nixon, he was just a muddle through President, who sought not to achieve greatness at all! It was during his Administration that Skylab crashed down around Australia. There were delays and delays with the Shuttle.

The surprising thing is that dim stars have narrow habitable zones, so I'm surprised that you can fit three Earth sized planets in them. The planets would be very close together, you could see one planet from the surface of another, and they won't appear as bright stars, but as worlds just like the Moon as seen from Earth. These planets would gravitationally affect each other too. The tidal forces should be fairly significant, both from the other planets and the fact that these planets would tug each other out of circular orbits, this would change the tidal forces from the central star as the distance changes, you would get the "Io effect" from that! Since all thes planets in close proximity would rule out circular orbits, then the planets cannot be completely tidally locked with their primary either! There are places on the planet where the star would rise and set, bobbing up and down over the same place on the horizon. Volcanoes would be quite prevalent I think, the oceans would tend to rise and set, probably all that volcanic activity would heat up the ocean on the dark side preventing it frm completely freezing.

if you want to go live in a fish tank called "Aquarius" than go right ahead! I remember the movie Hair because it showed a long haired man urinating in a public park, that was a big turn off to me. I lose sympathy for the character right away if he thinks he can act like a caveman in a public square, it is also disrespectful to the other people using the part to see a man urinating out in the open. People paid for that park, they don't need to see a hairy dude acting like an animal! I thought the song was kind of cool, until I saw the movie that went with it. I think of 1969 as the year man first landed on the Moon, but other people think of Woodstock as their significant event, with people jumping over fences, getting drunk, getting high, and puking all over the place, and leaving trash and garbage in their wake, as a kid, I often wondered what's so great about that?

When I first became aware of the Apollo moon landing they were all over with, I saw some pictures on a barbershop wall. I often wonder why the cancelled the Moon program, was it because they would rather spend the money to get high? Those crazy hippies would rather to that than colonize space? So I really have mixed feelings about the so called "Age of Aquarius".

Well Mars currently has no government, so that is as libertarian as you can get!

I seem to recall that I had full access to my account during the so called "collapse of the US bank system!" I had no trouble getting my money, so you must be referring to another country named the "United States", Mexico is one, just as an example, its official name is "The United States of Mexico".

And look at all the riots in the cities from the descendants of all those slaves. These people that want the right to pick your pocket, to rob your stores, to mug you, rape you, and sell your kids drugs, because their ancestors 150 years ago were slaves to white masters. When does this stop. Liberals suggest we should tolerate black crime because their ancestors were victims of slavery and that we should make allowances for their situation. I figure that with the election of the first black president, that era should be over! If blacks don't like laws, they should move out, go some place where laws aren't enforced outside of America. I'm not going to endanger my life just so some black people can have a career in crime. if they think cops are racist, well they should go some place where the cops aren't racist, often times they just want the cops off their backs so they can commit more crimes. By trashing neighborhoods whenever they complain about white on black racism, they are just proving me right.

What we need is an "Elon Musk" for rejuvenation, Elon proved you could land a booster rocket, until then, nobody really took the idea seriously, we need someone to do the same and make an old man young again. I have yet to see that happen. If we can break the age barrier, we would have another problem, an exploding population. Right now in advanced industrialized countries the birth rate is roughly equal to the death rate A couple has 2 kids, raises them to adulthood and then they die. What happens if they don't die? Then every time a couple has two children and time passes and they don't die, then the population has doubled in that time! Typical case, lets suppose a couple of twenty-somethings has two children when they are about 25 years old, in twenty years they are 45 years old their children have grown up, by the time they reach 50 years old, they should have jobs and should be moving into their own homes and having children of their own. But what if the 50 year old couple was still physically the same as a 25 year old couple and they decided that because they are still young and healthy they could have two more children, and their first two children decided to each have two children of their own?. Maybe every 25 years the population would double. If a rejuvenation treatment were invented tomorrow, then 25 years from now the population would be 14 billion, and 25 years after that, it would be 28 billion! If people don't grow old and die, that would happen! By the end of this century the World population would probably be 60 billion, hopefully we will be a spacefaring society when that occurs and most of us will be living in space. The great part of this would mean that interstellar travel just requires patience, we can go slow and take a long time, and the people who started out on the mission, can finish it an still be young. It would also be easier to terraform planets if we don't age, we won't be working for the next generation or the one after that, we would be working for ourselves!

Its just a capsule!

You remember what happened on election night, all the mainstream media was predicting a Hillary Clinton Victory, and I knew they were lying and not reporting the truth, they were lying hoping to demoralize the Trump supporters into not voting, and it didn't work! When Trump won, they got mad, and started attacking Donald Trump every way they could hoping that Donald Trump would eventually be impeached. The problem here is the New Media stopped being reporters and became propagandists instead, they hungered for political power, and they wanted to exercise it by telling lies to the people in order to influence their votes so the Media would get the government it wanted.

That is because they are all controlled by the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party tells them what to report and they obey! When was the last time you ever seen the Mainstream press report anything negative about the Democrats? They fawn over Obama and Clinton and attack Trump, that is obvious, they are no more a reliable source of news that the Communist Newspaper Pravda!

 
How can they be neutral when they are funded by the government?

Not on the planet I live on!

You can present the same facts in different ways, you can ignore some facts and focus on others to achieve a different effect, that is how propaganda is usually done. Most propagandists look for facts that support their positions and ignore other facts which contradict them. For example, CNN is not interested in any scientific data that does not support Global Warming or Climate Change.

No news source is ever 100% unbiased, the best we ca do is balance out the left wing news outlets with right wing ones and give the consumers of news a choice, they can look at both sides of the issue and decide on their own, rather than let CNN do their thinking for them!

How do you know they are reporting falsehoods when they have a habit of lying?
They didn't have  habit of reporting falsehoods of the Obama Administration, they weren't interested in Jerimiah Wright and Benghazi, they just repeated whatever Obama had to say as if it were gospel. And now they suddenly become critical of Trump in ways they never were about Obama!

Well Trump did not fire everybody in all Departments when he became President, so there are a lot of leakers from the Obama Administration that are still there!

In the shadow of a crater, we could store fuel for ascent for a long time, also a lander would require less fuel for descent if it also didn' have to carry its ascent fuel. It could use precisely the same amount of fuel it used for descent as it would need for ascent if it could refuel on the Moon. The extra payload capacity could be used to haul up more Lunar rocks, or the same descent rockets could be used for ascent. I think establishing a base for fuel production would be a good idea after the first few missions.