No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

clark · 2002-07-30 10:28:52

http://www.space.com/news/mars_czar_020730.html

Dosen't look like the NASA leaders will be pushing for humans on mars anytime soon. It seems they would prefer to develop more of the neccessary technologies that make human space travel plausible and practical. It alsot seems they wish to be more prudent and collect more information regarding the compostion of mars and how the environement may affect the lives of future explorers.

Take a look at the article for yourself at Space.com

It is titled: Orlando Figueroa: NASA's Mars Czar Gives a Status Report on Red Planet Plans

PS- not quite sure where this thread should go, so feel free to move it.

Mark S · 2002-07-30 11:00:14

I read that and I'm quite mad. Whatever happened to Von Braun's vision of a man on Mars by 1983? America has lost its will to dream and to accomplish the grand feats that would immortalize our culture.

It will take nothing short of a discovery like life on Mars to get our stagnant space program to change course. Say what you will about Richard C. Hoaglund; at least he's keeping people interested in Mars. Polls show that only 35% or so of Americans want to put men on Mars. When interest is so low, is it any wonder why Mars is so low on Washington's priorities list?

Palomar · 2002-07-30 11:20:31

I read that and I'm quite mad. Whatever happened to Von Braun's vision of a man on Mars by 1983? America has lost its will to dream and to accomplish the grand feats that would immortalize our culture.
It will take nothing short of a discovery like life on Mars to get our stagnant space program to change course. Say what you will about Richard C. Hoaglund; at least he's keeping people interested in Mars. Polls show that only 35% or so of Americans want to put men on Mars. When interest is so low, is it any wonder why Mars is so low on Washington's priorities list?

*Oh yeah, I agree 100%. The last really exciting thing to happen, IMO, regarding the space program [or what passes for the "space program" nowadays] was the unveiling of the first space shuttle...in frickin' 1976, when I was 11 years old. I was 4 years, 2 months, and 2 days old on July 20, 1969...Apollo 11. With the continuing Apollo missions, then Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 [which caught my interest, but was relatively boring even to me], and then with the space shuttle [which could more properly be called the orbiting shuttle], I thought we were quickly on our way to truly bigger and better things. For the last 26 years we've had nothing but astronauts repairing or deploying satellites in orbit. That's important, but compared to actual missions to other planetary bodies it's ho-hum whoop-de-do.

I've been waiting a long time for NASA and the American people in particular to get a fuse lit under their rear-ends and get on to Mars. I'm 37 years old now, 1976 seems like a VERY long time ago to me, and YES it does get frustrating.

I've also mentioned my disdain for America's "culture" as it currently stands, and has stood for far too long -- I call it the Age of Regurgitation and Stagnation. Originality is basically dead in this nation. And this is besides the damned terrorist threats and related crapola.

--Cindy

clark · 2002-07-30 11:27:52

Polls show that only 35% or so of Americans want to put men on Mars. When interest is so low, is it any wonder why Mars is so low on Washington's priorities list?

Why should the american public be interested in putting men on Mars? How does that improve their lives? Shouldn't we be happy as citizens of America that the politicans are realizing that Mars is a low priority to the american public and thus ignoring it, thereby representing their constutiencies interests?

Originality is basically dead in this nation.

Not quite dead, more like bought and sold for profit then mass marketed to recoup the investment capital. Rinse, repeat.

Now where did I put my boy band CD...

Palomar · 2002-07-30 11:32:35

Why should the american public be interested in putting men on Mars?

*I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't say Americans SHOULD be interested in putting people on Mars. I'm just curious as to why they AREN'T. But, then, the more pessimistic side of me knows the answer to that.

--Cindy

GOM · 2002-07-30 14:08:53

I read that and I'm quite mad. Whatever happened to Von Braun's vision of a man on Mars by 1983? America has lost its will to dream and to accomplish the grand feats that would immortalize our culture.

I'm with Mark. Our lack of a real manned space program is very frustrating.

nirgal · 2002-07-30 14:30:43

Mark

Wasn't it 1981? :0 But I fully agree with you that the stagnation of the american space program is very frustrating. Maybe china's space efforts will help to get things going again.
BTW: Where did you get that 35% figure?

Phobos · 2002-07-30 20:23:28

We seem to keep going through these phases of optimism and pessimism when it comes to Mars. I think Congress just needs to stomp its foot down and order the people at NASA to get to it. Hell, 2020 seems like an overly generous target date in my opinion. Certainly we aren't that far behind technologically! Sometimes I get the feeling some of these people in power are just naysayers and cynics regardless of the possibilities.

clark · 2002-07-31 07:50:40

We put people on mars, then what?

nirgal · 2002-07-31 12:24:59

Then we settle it. Mars is the new world.

Josh Cryer · 2002-07-31 19:53:44

nirgal, clark doesn't quite buy that. Don't blame him for not applying the Laws of Thermodynamics to economy, though.

There may be a space race. Although I'm not confident it'll happen any time soon, I still believe it will be between China and the USA. China's GDP doubles every 10 years. Or at least, that's the trend that economists are seeing. So it's only a matter of time before they flex their economic muscles and say they want to go to Mars.

Whether or not it will be a race or corporative effort, I can't really say. Hopefully it will be a corporative effort, since that basically signals peace between the big superpowers. But then again, I wouldn't mind getting to witness a Mars Race, ala the Moon Race.

Phobos · 2002-07-31 20:42:06

We put people on mars, then what?

We continue sending follow up missions so that we can setup something of a permament science outpost there that will engage not only in science experiments but engineering ones as well so we can better understand how to utilize the Martian resources and bring about the colonization of Mars. If our species is going to survive with a high standard of living that sucks up energy and resources it'll be imperative that we learn how to develop extraterrestrial resources. If we're only doing a one time trip to Mars and then forgetting about it, it won't be worth sending people to Mars.

Crossman · 2002-08-23 15:14:15

Hi people,
This is my first post so please bear with me. I'd like to add some Canadian perspective here.
Firstly, for the time being, there simply isn't going to be any space race. China? Forget it. The entire world seems only too willing to wait and see if America is going to Mars. Canada, the Europeans, and the Russians will do studies for ever but not commit one real cent unless "America leads us". And it is clear your leaders are quite comfortable with that.
Those of us who want to see humanity moving out into the solar system had better get alot more creative. We who want this to happen will have to devise ways to create our own constituancy in which we control the purse strings. A muilti-national corporation of some sort that actually produces products people will invest in now, but that is owned by an organization that is commited to our goals, so that it can collect the profits. I would like to have government programs do the work for us, but how many more years can we go on watching the date of the first manned mission recede indefinitly into the future. ???

Phobos · 2002-08-23 18:43:16

Those of us who want to see humanity moving out into the solar system had better get alot more creative. We who want this to happen will have to devise ways to create our own constituancy in which we control the purse strings. A muilti-national corporation of some sort that actually produces products people will invest in now, but that is owned by an organization that is commited to our goals, so that it can collect the profits.

We definately need to get more creative with finding ways to finance spaceflight. I don't believe governments will likely strive to make space available to the masses since there's little incentive for them to do that. And on top of that, the current space programs seem to just spin their wheels and be perpetually 20 years away from their next major endeavour.
I'm hoping new technologies like the space elevator have a lot of early breakthroughs and become viable for business in the not so distant future. Space will definately be a lot more exciting when private organizations can routinely embark on interplanetary flight. I get the feeling it'll be awhile even though it's encouraging to see that there are a number of companies working on sub-orbital flights at least. It's a start.

Merp · 2002-08-24 01:48:03

Hi people,
This is my first post so please bear with me. I'd like to add some Canadian perspective here.
Firstly, for the time being, there simply isn't going to be any space race. China? Forget it. The entire world seems only too willing to wait and see if America is going to Mars. Canada, the Europeans, and the Russians will do studies for ever but not commit one real cent unless "America leads us". And it is clear your leaders are quite comfortable with that.
Those of us who want to see humanity moving out into the solar system had better get alot more creative. We who want this to happen will have to devise ways to create our own constituancy in which we control the purse strings. A muilti-national corporation of some sort that actually produces products people will invest in now, but that is owned by an organization that is commited to our goals, so that it can collect the profits. I would like to have government programs do the work for us, but how many more years can we go on watching the date of the first manned mission recede indefinitly into the future. ???

After doing some research on the net, I've been pleasantly surprised by 2 things

1) non-US government development in the space sector is tanglible and growing. ESA's Mars Express / Beagle 2, France's Netlander, Japan's Nozumi(sp?) and the Plantary Society's Cosmos Solar Sail project are all in the works right now.

Nasa is throwing money into a blackhole with the ISS at the moment. At the same time countries like China are developing a manned spaceflight capability while other agencies are targeting Mars with robotic science missions. The launch vehicle market is saturated at the moment, driving down prices. Russian infrastructure provides a cost-effective alternative to that in the US.

How long will it take the average US Congressman to realise that the US technical advantage is being eroded?

2) Nasa's Smaller, Faster, Cheaper approach is obviously not achieving our goals for human exploration, but it is providing an excellent scientific payoff. Does any one doubt that the confirmation of large permafrost deposits on Mars help our cause?

The highly successful Discovery and Scout class missions have introduced competitiveness into some parts of NASA operations. The New Frontiers program proposed by the administration will extend this to larger scale (<= $650m)missions. There is a problem, however, with this cheaper robotic approach to exploration of the solar system. As noted recently by the National Academy of Sciences, less money per mission means less technology development is achieved.

I'm all for NASA's scientific exploration of the Mars.

I have a question, however. If you are going to end up spending billions of dollars over 20+ years sending robotic missions to Mars, all the while NOT generating much public interest, culminating in a sample return mission, why not just bite the bullet - Develop a manned mission architecture that not only achieves the science goals, but that also pushes technology and human endeavor forward.

It is frustrating, but perhaps in the long run the lack of US progress towards moving man out of LEO will allow other nations to start catching up, and inadvertantly reignite some vision and drive within the US government. I blame NASA for a lot of the current situation, but responsibility must be shared across all industrialised nations.

--Merp

SpaceNut · 2024-03-17 16:51:50

What a dream it was 2 decades ago to be even thinking of going to mars.

SpaceNut · 2024-06-20 17:11:51

There has been a couple studies that indicate This new study could kill manned missions to Mars before they even happen

https://bgr.com/science/nasa-shares-pla … s-mission/

We already know that sending humans to Mars would take months-likely years in total. That's because our neighboring planet is roughly 225 million kilometers away, and scientists estimate it may take up to six months to travel there with current space technology. Sure, nuclear-powered rockets could change that, but that's a gamble we haven't quite worked out yet.

BB1oBgme.img?w=768&h=512&m=6

GW Johnson · 2024-06-21 09:51:55

There are always "studies" justifying why we cannot go. I've helped to debunk the cosmic ray excuse on these forums.

What the ISS has proven is that there's a whale of a lot more to microgravity diseases (yes, plural!) than the muscle and bone weakening we originally thought. It starts pretty quickly, and even with all the exercise gear, gets fairly threatening to health after something on the order of a year.

All that really says is that you do artificial spin gravity. Despite the design inconveniences.

It all gets down to a question of will. Do you, or do you not, want to go? If you do, we already know how:

Do artificial gravity and radiation protection from the giant solar flare events. Provide enough space for people to congregate, and to be alone. If you cannot do a closed ecology (and we still cannot, although we can do some pieces), just build it bigger and pack the stores. If you want to go, you will pay the price to do this.

Simple as that.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2024-06-21 09:52:43)

Calliban · 2024-10-01 16:42:04

SpaceNut wrote:

There has been a couple studies that indicate This new study could kill manned missions to Mars before they even happen
https://bgr.com/science/nasa-shares-pla … s-mission/
We already know that sending humans to Mars would take months-likely years in total. That's because our neighboring planet is roughly 225 million kilometers away, and scientists estimate it may take up to six months to travel there with current space technology. Sure, nuclear-powered rockets could change that, but that's a gamble we haven't quite worked out yet.
https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/ten … &h=512&m=6

There is 'going to Mars' with a relatively small number of people for a short mission and then there is settling Mars. The second is vastly more difficult. You see that big greenhouse structure in SpaceNut's post? To feed Martian colonists on a minimal vegetarian diet, you need one of those for every colonist. Even with a diet dominated by potatos, you will need about 2000 square feet to feed a colonist at Mars levels of insolation. That is 200m2 of heated, pressurised greenhouse. That isn't going to happen. It wouldn't be affordable even here on Earth. On Mars, it needs to be heated and pressurised as well. Is a Mars city of 1 million people going to afford a million of those heated pressurised greenhouses? No chance.

We cannot settle Mars until we solve the problem of growing food there. That cannot be done using conventional agriculture. We need to be able to deploy artificial photosynthesis to grow food with high energy efficiency in compact spaces. Fortunately, this does seem to be possible using acetate solutions.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-01 16:43:28)

Calliban · Yesterday 05:47:04

Mars is not a good place to colonise.
https://youtu.be/ymtTrwDKnuE?si=eRBNt_nePHppJRHi

The author of this video does make some valuable points. Colonisation will depend upon being able to make things that can be sold back to Earth. The moon is logistically better placed, being much closer. But Mars has far more carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. The moon is a better source of bulk materials, but it lacks the elements of life. The moon is a good place to establish mining activities. But a lousy place to actually live. Mars is further away. But it has more of what we need to live. Either way, we will be returning to the moon first. What we make on the moon will ultimately facilitate our colonisation of Mars.

Last edited by Calliban (Yesterday 05:48:36)

RobertDyck · Yesterday 07:13:56

NASA started studies in 1965 of how to use Apollo hardware to send humans to Mars. They got more serious in 1968. Principles of life support in documents from 1968 use the same principles that the US side of ISS use today. After Apollo 11, NASA said their next goal was Mars. The first human mission to Mars would be in 1981. Then they said 1983 (next launch opportunity). Then they said they'll get back to us. Problem was Nixon didn't believe in space; he slashed NASA's budget, used the money for a surge in Vietnam. That worked real well, didn't it?

In 1989 President George H. W. Bush said "we will go to Mars", and tried to set out a long-term vision for NASA. So NASA came up with details how to achieve that, and 90-days later came back with a report called the 90-Day Report on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars. Rather than listing cost per year, it gave total cost: $450 billion. Annual budget of NASA would only increase with inflation, no giant jump, but when you present it as total over many years, it sounds huge. Congress balked. So one NASA contractor, Martin-Marietta, had their engineers come up with a plan that would have a price tag Congress would accept. Dr. Robert Zubrin and his partner David Baker came up with Mars Direct. They presented it to NASA in June 1990. If that plan was followed, they would have had a human on Mars by 1999.

Here are some images of the 1965 designs.

RobertDyck · Yesterday 14:31:33

A number of features of Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct come from this earlier work by NASA. A crew of 4 astronauts, originally chosen because that's how many could fit into an Apollo capsule. Do so did not leave room for food of lithium hydroxide canisters for life support, so required a second mission module to hold them. A mission to Mars and back would require recycling life support, not just lithium hydroxide, but all that went into the mission module. Robert Zubin made a change: the habitat was much larger than an Apollo capsule, so didn't require a mission module.

This used rotation for artificial gravity, another feature adopted by Robert Zubrin. However, Robert Zubrin's design put all astronauts in one module (the hab), and the counter weight was the spent upper stage used for Trans-Mars Injection. This meant the cables for the counter weight could simply be cut, rather than reeling them back in.

When Robert Zubrin and David Baker pitched their ideas in June 1990, they encountered a problem. NASA personnel from Apollo days loved it, but personnel from the Shuttle era were used to 7 crew, so wanted at least 6 if not 7. Oops! Well, Mars Direct can be adjusted fairly easily to accommodate 6 crew, but that does increase life support, food, etc which increases launch mass.

GW Johnson · Today 09:20:53

This 1960's plan to use Apollo hardware for a Mars flyby ignores 2 fatal issues that were not very well understood back then: (1) the confinement effect of a crew living for months in a tight space (first demonstrated as a serious effect on Gemini-7), and (2) solar flare radiation exposure becomes rather likely, if you are out there for months-to-years. We know much more now, Zubrin was quite right to use a bigger habitat in his version. Every bit of extra space helps. Plus, in the 1960's, there was no recycling of life support materials. All the food, water, and oxygen for the entire trip had to be packed aboard "somewhere". There's no room in an Apollo CSM for that, not even with a bigger service module. It was a tight fit for 2 weeks support for 3 to the moon and back.

The artificial gravity thing at only Mars gravity levels is still an unsupported assumption, even today! Precisely because the experiments to verify its adequacy have never, ever been done! Until they are, the only level supported by evolution-as-evidence is 1 full gee. Anything else is an unethical or even immoral bet on human life and health.

There are huge developmental unknowns to overcome with cable-based spin systems, related to the transients of deployment and course correction burns, not to mention undoing the spin when the time comes. The traditional concepts for rigid spin systems are all very large, requiring the building of "Battlestar Galacticas".

Avoiding both of these perceived insuperable difficulties are why NASA has spent decades trying to figure out how to stay healthy in zero gee for more than a year mission time. But the available data so far says that will not be possible: we keep finding more and more bad effects of zero gee upon all sorts of body systems, way beyond just muscle atrophy and bone density loss.

No one has yet looked at baton spin. No one has yet looked at building large modules out of inflatables to be joined together (that can be launched deflated and folded tightly). No one has yet built a space station that spins in some way, to study how therapeutic reduced gee level might be (which ultimately drives your spacecraft design, by the way!!!).

This is the decades-long legacy of a technically-incompetent Congress micromanaging NASA projects to fit pork-barrel politics, instead of anything that makes any sense. And THAT is very most definitely NOT how a space program should have been run!

Ain't 20-20 hindsight wonderful?

GW

tahanson43206 · Today 09:37:14

For GW Johnson re history of Congress vs Administration re off-Earth exploration...

My understanding is that the Nixon administration would have pulled the plug on ALL off-Earth activity.

While some criticize Congress, they are reported to have made heroic efforts to try to save some small remnant of what had been a massive national undertaking.

Elections most definitely have consequences.

(th)

GW Johnson · Today 09:42:12

Nixon DID pull the plug on all human activity outside low orbit. Executive orders like that do not persist in perpetuity, we have recently seen that effect in action.

What I was pointing out was NASA goals being set by Congress to fit porkbarrel politics. That effect has persisted unchanged for decades, and it has shaped the space program for decades.

GW

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#1 2002-07-30 10:28:52

Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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Re: No Huamans to Mars anytime soon... - Space.com article re: future of Mars

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