New Mars Forums

Men may be from Mars. But, say scientists, only women are strong enough to fly there.

A new study by experts in the United States has claimed that women may make better and fitter astronauts for long trips into space. Men are simply biologically inferior and less able to withstand the rigours of space flight.

Where do I start, in order to know the down mass we must detail the needs for the given size crew and the stay time frames plus a buffer zone on consumables and this includes energy needs.

Energy needs are not only for science, lighting, Heat and other uses. So what is the exact quantity of the supply that we can send and what forms of creation can be supplied for the safety of the crew(solar, nuclear..).

If nuclear we can detail out what it would provide and we know how much it weighs but what happens when it is not working for any reason or that it must work at a reduce power available rate. What them would the crew do for there energy needs?
Multiple power sources are needed and they each must be capable of at least half of all power requirements or needs each or more.

Actually the plan would be to demostrate the ability on the moon with a mars pre-planning process being put in place.
Meaning make the goals to design hardware to last as long as a mars mission would, design ships capacities to those that are required for a mars mission.
Doing all the ground work as it were in order to justify funding for Mars, for we can say we can do it then. There would be no nay sayers for We will have worked out the radiation potential for damage to crew, to have worked out the power requirement and types needed, the consumables of food, water and air regeneration as well as resupply capabilities and lastly the ship will have been designed for the journey.
Until Nasa can get the shuttle flying to finish the ISS we will not be able to do any of this without some contractors just say no to profits and doing the work needed.

12 November 2004   Since its launch in September 2003, the small but remarkable SMART-1 satellite has been silently spiralling its way to the Moon. In mid November, it will be captured by lunar gravity and next January it will reach its final orbit and start science observations. This week EuroNews talks to the SMART-1 AMIE camera team.

Once it enters into a near-polar orbit around the Moon in January 2005, SMART-1 will also become a science platform for lunar observation. SMART-1 will search for signs of water-ice in craters near the Moon's poles, provide data to shed light on the still uncertain origin of the Moon, and reconstruct its evolution by mapping its topography and the surface distribution of minerals and key chemical elements.

Hollywood films have dramatized an event that scientists say could one day happen. An asteroid approaches the earth, threatening the planet, and a team of daring astronauts travels to space to stop it. Some scientists and engineers say the films were not realistic, but that the threat is real.

In the 1998 film Armageddon, Bruce Willis and his team landed on an asteroid and used a nuclear weapon to destroy it. Scientists say the movie was not accurate in its science, but that its central premise was authentic. An asteroid could one day strike the earth with devastating results.

Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman of the foundation, spoke about its goal at the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. "To deflect an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015. And we're not saying to write a paper about it, to think about it, to talk about it. We're saying our goal is to deflect an asteroid, that is, to move an asteroid, to change its orbit, by 2015," he says.

This process would make it feasible to establish permanent manned bases on the moon sometime in the future.

US space agency Nasa has made available R82m to further develop the process devised by Shaan Oosthuizen, 28, who works for British Titanium in Cambridge.

Oosthuizen is a co-inventor of the Ilmenox process, named after the process' ability to produce oxygen from the lunar mineral ilmenite.

The process exctracts oxygen from moonrock, which are metal-oxides that may contain up to 30 or 40% oxygen.

A Ballute is a pressure-stabilized, inflatable membrane that provides a large, blunt, high-drag surface for aerobraking systems. Ballutes offer significant advantages over rigid shells for aerocapture and reentry of spacecraft by providing simplified packaging and lower total weight.