New Mars Forums

Just a quick note to say that I will be away for the next week. Don't all cheer at once, guys, but basically this means three things:

1) After Saturday, the main newmars.com website will not be updated for at least a week. Yes, I know this will hardly represent a deviation from the normal state of affairs, but I did just put up a new interview, didn't I? And there'll be another article up tomorrow as well.

2) Don't trash the forums.

3) If anything goes wrong, don't expect it to be fixed before I get back, since I don't intend to touch a computer while I'm away and I imagine that if I did, my girlfriend would break my hands (and that would of course be a bad thing).

IANATS (I Am Not A Terraforming Scientist) but the idea of transporting mass quantities of *anything* from one planet to another fills me with horror; the sheer expense and inelegance of the system shocks me.

I would say that a successful terraforming process would involve transforming the planet with as little expense as possible and causing the minimal amount of damage to its surface; speed would be useful but not essential. I don't know the exact quantities of nitrogen on Mars, and in fact I doubt that anyone knows *for sure* - but if at all possible, I would think the best way to increase the N atmospheric levels would be to free it from compounds already on the planet.

And if that's not possible, we should just go and aerobrake a suitable asteroid in Mars' atmosphere.

It's not too far off the truth. I seem to recall that the Space Shuttle's current design owes a lot to input from the military - it can carry out low orbital bombing runs over a large range of latitudes. Obviously that's not what it was made 'for' but I am sure that the possibility of using the Space Shuttle for offensive purposes was discussed at length.

While it might be possible to use the Space Shuttle as a cislunar transporter (I don't know whether it is or not), I don't think it's a good idea to make a spacecraft that fulfills all possible human transportation roles.

This is simply because getting up into orbit is a much different task to getting from orbit to the Moon - you need a huge amount of delta-V, you need high heat resistance for re-entry, you need wings, you need undercarriage, etc etc. Whereas if you want to go from orbit to anywhere else, you don't really need any of that.

At our current status of technological prowess at making spacecraft, it is neither economical nor efficient to specialise too much.

That said, I do agree that in the future there will be a role for spacecraft that can get you from the ground to the Moon in one go, for purposes of speed and comfort, perhaps.

As for the next RLV, I think that what is most important is that it should be cheap, relatively safe and have a quick turnaround. These properties do not necessarily mean it should be totally self contained; if they manage to figure out some way of making a spacecraft in two parts that is significantly cheaper than a spacecraft in one part, I don't think many people would argue for the self-contained craft.

Finally, I remember reading about possible uses of the Space Shuttle when they get retired. I can't remember whether this was fiction or not, but one scenario had the Space Shuttle being used as an orbiting weapons platform (fill it full of nukes out of harm's way). I don't agree with the use, but I do think that throwing a Space Shuttle into orbit for its last trip could see it living the rest of its days as a temporary space station or some similar thing.

The idea of moving Venus or indeed any planet using gravity assists is relatively new and I actually came across a thread on rec.arts.sf.written about it - here's the top of the thread, and some interesting comments by Geoffrey Landis.

Ah, I suspect I was reading an overly simplified account of the way in which the north pole changes in shape according to the seasons. Does anyone have a good online reference to exactly how the mass and composition of the poles changes with time?

Yep, it's SSI. If you go to the Templates subheading in the Admin Control Panel and click on 'Edit SSI/Email Templates', you can edit the format and path of SSI files showing various board statistics. You also need to go to the Options/Settings subheading, click on 'Board Options' and activate SSI file creation. Glad to be of help.

Using the 'delete' button should only delete the post you selected; each post has its separate identifier. If you're worried about losing both, make sure you have a post of its text in notepad or something, just in case it goes wrong (which it really shouldn't do).

Well, I know of at least one organization that caters for people who want to go to Mars - the Mars Society

(New Mars is the official online magazine of the Mars Society)

I would applaud any efforts towards getting more media attention for humans to Mars, but I think setting up another organization may be akin to taking more ferric oxide to Mars; i.e. not really useful. Indeed, setting something up like MSN Communities or YahooGroups for Mars users would be good, but it would involve a fairly large investment to work properly.

Setting up a website is easy (well, okay, not that easy) but it's no replacement for 'real' projects like the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, or the station in Utah. I do agree that there needs to be a better web presence for the Mars movement online, and I'm happy to offer New Mars' resources towards this - we have significant excess space and bandwidth for any worthwhile projects - but right now we need tangible projects and realistic goals.

I had another look at the Life to Mars website today, a full four months after my first post on the issue - and nothing has changed. While undoubtedly there is probably lots of behind the scenes manoeuvrings within the organization, it depresses me to see this potentially groundbreaking group hidings its activities.

It's just been pointed out to me that there was a *major* bug in the functioning of these forums in that you had to have posts 'approved' before they could be seen. This is actually a feature, really, not a bug, but I hadn't realised it was switched on and now it has been switched off on all forums. Consequently, there should be no problems in making posts anywhere and if there are, please message me.

In addition, it seems that people have been having problems registering - I've just done a forum recount and some other stuff, and if the problem persists, please email me.

I appreciate that there are some problems with the forums. However, all the posts are still there - if you go to the Terraformation forum, you'll find that Red Views is still present. I made absolutely sure that none of the posts were lost.

I don't know you're not staying logged in. Initially I had that problem, but that's simply because I was using Internet Explorer 6, which incidentally comes as standard on Windows XP. If you are using IE6, then you won't stay logged into the board. This is because IE6 has a policy of refusing all cookies from websites which means that these forums cannot 'recognise' you when you revisit. It's possible to turn this off by altering your cookie or privacy settings. When I did this, the forums started recognising me again. This is a problem with *all* websites visited by IE6.

Basically, I suspect that the 'not staying logged in' issue is down either to cookies, or whether you have checked the box that says 'Recognise me if I revisit' (or something like that) when you log in to the forums.

I'll have to check up on your post count though. It's very unusual, every other user appears to have retained their post count.

Your post isn't annoying, I think it's important that users of these forums should voice their opinions on how they are run.