New Mars Forums

Here are my thoughts. The new manned space exploration is great, good move on Bush's part (First time for everything, I guess). Sending poeple back to the Moon and establishing permanent residence there will add on to our list of accomplishments in exploration. Additionally, we'll be able to get a phenominal amount of work done on Mars by sending people. I support this plan, even if I don't support the rest of his administration.

However, I'm not sure I like how it will affect unmanned exploration. The truth is, we can get more done in the short-term with robots than with people. It will be a long time before manned exploration of the outer planets, so robotic exploration needs to be supported right now. Unfortunately, I fear that this will take a back seat under the new proposal, thereby losing the public's interest.

In my opinion, we need to balance our space budget. I think we should focus on manned exploration of what we can do and expansion thereof, while also sending probes where we can't go. Wouldn't that be great to get pictures from the Europan ocean on the same day the first humans land on Mars?!

First off, 3:30 am? Do you guys ever sleep, or is that the daytime wherever you live? I've seen people in my time zone posting at 2 in the morning, now that takes some loyalty to the forums.

Anyway, I disagree with this statement. First of all, if you get a hundred people who are all rowdy, agressive, and self-leading you run into some major problems with personality. No one wants to take orders from anyone, and everyone just fights over who gets to lead. Trust me, I'm doing a science project right now with three other people who all want to be the group leader, it's not a pretty picture.

Secondly, a PhD is actually a pretty good asset either on Earth or Mars. I've heard some people saying things like it's only a glorified essay or that it doesn't mean anything, but I don't believe this to be true. A PhD shows that you've worked most of your body parts off for it and you are now among the top ten thousand people on Earth/Mars in that area. Running a Mars colony will require creativity and resourcefullness, not brute force.

So, here's my list:

1) Resourcefullness. The Mars colony will require some serious handling of resources to stay operational.
2) Intellegance. As I said above, brains over brawn are needed.
3) Creativity. No one should just be happy with the status quo. If one improvent brings, say, a 5% scrubber efficency that's huge.
4) Adaptibility. The colony will be doing everything physically possible to kill itself and everyone in it. Meanwhile the colonists will have to do everything humanly possible just to keep up. I anticipate that may McGyvered components will run the base pretty quickly.
5) Perserverance. I can not stress this enough. Everything will seem like an insurmountable obstacle, we need people who can handle this.
6) Ability to handle stess. It will be very HARD to run the base. Colonists need to know how to deal with this.
7) Good genes. It would be nice to get off to a good start. No people at heavy risk of disease, but light risk would be tolerable.
8) Adventureness. If colonists can see running the base as an adventure, hey, that's nice.
9) Ability to tolerate people, but be hard when necessary. Name of this trait says it all.
10) Mentally stable. We don't want anyone cracking up under the thought that one can never leave the dome without a space suit now, do we?

Come to think of it, are these traits really important. Except for #7, the second generation will not have been screened for any of these traits. It's just luck of the draw from there on out. My pick for an example of people is Shackleton's 1914 expedition. They had to live off of Antarctica for two years before going 700 miles in a lifeboat for rescue. That track record says it all. 

Don't mean to nit-pick, but I believe that the Da Vinci project uses a helium ballon, not a hot-air ballon. Heliums can reach a higher possible altitude than hot-airs can. A rival X-Prize contender, IL Aerospace, is using a Rozeire ballon, sort of a hybrid helium/hot air approach.

Unfortunately, there are several difficulties with using ballons to launch orbital vehicles. First, they have a limited lifting capacity and even a giant ballon like Da Vinci's can only lift a smalll suborbital vehicle. Second, they are a mess to clean up. That is, unless you throw them away every time, but that wouldn't be efficent now, would it. Finally, it would be very difficult to point the craft in the right direction to achieve the desired orbit. Orbits require extensive calculations to pull off, and if the ballon drifted too far from the equator before launch the rocket might not have enough fuel to reach orbit.

But, they're great for suborbital flights.

I'm pretty sure this point has already been made somewhere in the past, but wouldn't it be more cost effective to send as many missions as possible? Let's assume that 95% of a $70 billion budget went into pre-mission R&D. This means that the mission itself costs only $4 billion, and that seems far too high to me. So, if you launch only one mission, its $70 billion per mission for a total of $70 billion. However, by the time you launch five missions, the cost becomes only $18 billion per mission for a total of $90 billion. The deals only get better from there.

Another way to get the whole thing paid for is to involve more than one country. If we could get the ESA, the Russian Space Agency, JAXA, and maybe China to pay for some of the cost it would be much more manageable. It would be important to look at good examples of international cooperation, such as the Concorde, not bad examples, like the ISS, as a referance.

Of course, a problem you run into under that setup is that every country wants representation on the mission. That's fine untill you consider that when you have ten (?) people from four different countries speaking as many different languages, you hit a psychological wall. That problem is furthur compounded even if everyone is from only two countries, ie the US and Russia. Then you get people splitting into two sides, in a worse-case scinerio splitting up entirely like the Lenonov and Discovery in the movie 2010. Still, it's not a bad idea for financing.

Look at it this way. Please allow me to go back to my Everest analogy. It used to be that only the elite, best of the best climbers were even able to scale Everest. Similarly, only the best of the best test pilots were able to fly spacecraft at first. Then it opened up, slightly, to allow scientists and engineers into space, just as Everest opened up to climbers of slightly lesser skill.

By 1990, some groups got the idea of allowing clients to pay money, on the order of $150,000+, to be guided to the summit. As it became more and more popular, the price went down, do around $50,000 by 1996. While under 400 people had reached the top by 1990, over 2,000 have now, putting down + or - $30,000. It's opened up so far that people have done crazy things now, like snowboard, hang glide, and para-glide down to base camp.

In short, space will probably develop the same way. Now only a few wealthy people of reasonable fittness have gone into space, but soon others of more limited means may follow. With any luck we'll pass the 1,000 mark (Of people in space) by 2007 or so. Under Bush's plan we could be back on the Moon shortly after, we should defenatley stay tuned to the future.

Two interesting scinerios, but what about this one that's (resonably) likely and will happen in the next four months or never. Okay, imagine if they finally fix that nagging airbag problem on Spirit and get it off and roving. With all the airbag problems lately, you'd think they kill more probes than they save.   Anway, Spirit then heads over to Sleepy Hollow, and what do you know, there's a rock right in the middle that shows clear evidence (From mini-TES) that it is sedimentary and formed in water. Yay! NASA scientist slap each other on the back and demand the RAT to open it up for some imaging.

Robot arm unfirls, the RAT scrapes away an inch of material off the surface. Wouldn't you know it, the interior is porous and shows signs of evaporating seawater. Excellent news, but it gets even better. The micro-imager pans down just a smidgen, and sees live, moving microbes. No doubt about it, they're alive and replicating, kind of. Within 40 minutes of exposure all have either died from exposure to oxides or converted into spore form. Now what?

So, NASA gives their case to Washington, and gets big articles in every magazine on the planet, that much is a given. Probably NASA would send a much more expensive probe to Gusev to try to examine the life more intensely and culture it in an internal lab. They'd want to send people, but there's always the possibility of leathal contamination. However, congress is finally convinced that its safe to go (The bacteria die in oxygen and temperatures of 0 degrees C+) and does so. Yippe!

Or what do you think would happen? ???

Oof, I've been really busy, so I only have time to make this one post today. Bad, bad idea with the Harrier. I don't want to discourage any creative thought or anything, but it simply wouldn't work. For one thing, the plane is way too big, you'd never fit it in a small enough capsule. Secondly, it would spend way too much fuel, 15 minutes of flight at best. Also, the Harrier's stall speed is about 160 mph on Earth, which translates into a 1,600 mph stall speed on Mars, which is about Mach 2.3.

What I intended for use of astronauts would be a plane more resembling a Pilatus Turbo Porter, superficially anyway. It would naturally be electric, with BIG wings, a big engine, and lightweight construction. It would be a two-seater, with room for recon gear, and have a stall speed of around 25 KIAS (Knots Indicated Airspeed). That translates into a stall speed of 260 mph or so on the ground in zero wind conditions. Hmm, this would be an interesting project for Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites.

With favorable winds, a well designed plane could take-off in a reasonable distance. The take-off and landing rolls could also be helped with aircraft carrier style catapults and arrester gear. Perhaps I should try to design a plane in X-Plane to do this, and then show you some screenshots, just for some trivial evidence that it works. 

Sorry, Cindy, but Huygens will only give us 1 and a half hours at best of images of Titan. That's alloting for a long 45 minutes in the atmosphere descending and the probe operating for 15 minutes longer than excpected. It only has 90 minutes of battery power, so whatever it's going to do it needs to do fast.

What we really need is a follow-up to Huygens that's cheap enough to fit FBC (Or at least the same budget as the MERs) and will launch a plane/helicopter to Titan. An easy way to do this would be to launch a small probe that contained a nuclear generator and something to melt some of the icy crust with. Then you could fuel up the plane with oxygen and burn methane in the atmosphere for propulsion in an internal combustion engine. From there the plane could fly around taking samples of the air, examining rocks, and even touch down in the ocean.

It would be a nice idea if someone would pursue it.

I don't see what the problem is with exploring Titan. The moon itself is a friendly, as far as space goes, target, the only problem is that you have to wait so long to get there. Following a wasteful Voyager trajectory it takes three years, and the parsimonious Cassini trajectory takes seven. Who's gonna wait that long? We're not going there untill we get some more advanced drive system.

That said, Titan would be relatively friendly place compared to others. It's pretty much the only place off of Earth that you can walk around on without a spacesuit, just very thick clothes! My ideal Titan suit would consist of two layers of Aerogel-padded clothes on every square inch of the body, seals to make sure no cryogenic methane gets in, an oxygen tank and mask, and a faceplate with an image intesifier built in. The image intensifer (aka night vision) would be useful because noon on Titan is like twilight here.

Since you don't have to worry about pressure, the only components necessary of the standard spacesuit are the oxygen and warmth. Aerogel can make -100 dgrees Farenheit feel like room temperatrue, and multiple layers would do the trick. I'd say that you could probably wear as little on Titan as people need to wear to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Just make sure you never touch the ambient atmosphere, that's instant frostbite for sure!

Sure, a UAV would be great, but wouldn't it also be cool to bring an airplane people can actually fly in?   I thought of a way to make it work, too, that doesn't tax the (Over IMHO-)lauded Mars Direct plan too much. In the plan you're already sending some robotic construction equipment, right? So, just send some stuff equipped with gear to make concrete out of the regolith and then pave a 5,000-foot long runway. Granted, that also necessitates clearing away a lot of rocks, but some good robotics and equipment could fit the bill. With the runway you can save fuel (Not to mention reliability) by landing the Earth-Mars vehicle at the base like an airplane and also send a plane or helicopter with it to fly around in.

A helicopter would greatly increase a team's mobility around the landing area and give you more opportunities to look at interesting rocks. An airplane would allow you to create much more detailed maps of the local geology and get up closer to the surface than an orbiter can. Overall, aircraft look like a very nice way to get around on Mars (Or Titan for that matter), no one should leave Earth without them! 

I don't mean to nit-pick, but that would be Newfoundland, not New Foundland.  :;): 

I saw the national news recap of 2003 at 5:30 here in the Mountain time zone, is it just me or do they have very bad people selecting events to cover? For example, they mention the Kobe Bryan case, don't about 5,000 of those happen every year (with non-celebrities)? Someone actually said "Though 2003 was the year of the war in Iraq, other events happened as well," No! Really? The only science related item, the Colombia tradgedy of course, didn't even have the right date affixed to it. That is, unless it happened on January 28. ???

Anyway, happy 2004 to all. Perhaps a good New Year's resolution for NASA would be no more Mars probe losses, or an excursion out of LEO for that matter. Then again, you're supposed to make resolutions for yourself, hmm, let me think...

Another interesting phenomenon on Mercury I've heard of is that because of its highly eliptical orbit the sun sometimes appears to ballon in size as it rises then shrink as it sets. The apparent size change is caused by the fact that it is only 29 million miles away from the sun at its perigee and 43 million miles away at its apogee.

Its unfortunate that only one probe, Mariner 10, ever visited Mercury. In many respects its even harder to examine from Earth than planets like Neptune and Pluto. At its highest the planet only appears 17 degrees above the horizon, and at that angle Earthbound telescopes have to look through a lot of crudded-up polluted atmosphere to see it. Even the Hubble can't help, Mercury is too close to the sun to observe without damaging its sensative eyes. Hopefuly a new probe, Messenger, will give us some more shots of this extreme planet.

I wonder if there have ever been any plans to land people on Mercury circulating around anywhere. It actually shouldn't be too hard to reach, you can use Venus to brake and accelerate on the way to and from the planet. The only real problem is dealing with the intense heat on the sunny side. Jou could land at one of the poles and from there you could soak up all the sunshine you wanted to and still duck down in a valley to cool off. Mercury could be the third planet visited after Mars, after all, we'll need somewhere to go after the Red Planet.