New Mars Forums

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*THESE PICTURES ARE COMPUTER SIMULATIONS
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(EDIT 25 dec: Hmmm, looks like there's a problem... Since Mars Exxpress arrived, this picture doesn't load anymore... pity)
(EDIT 27 dec: And it's up again!, guess they just removed the 'Express' tag...)

(EDIT 04 jan: Since Spirit landed successfully, these simulations are for MER-B, from now on...

Official explanation:

"The crash of Polar Lander, coupled with the loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter a few months earlier, triggered a major overhaul of the agency's strategy for exploring the planet.

The loss of Polar Lander was traced to an undetected software error that caused the rocket to shut down during descent. The Climate Orbiter missed Mars because ground-based experts mixed English and metric measurements to make critical navigation calculations.

Investigators blamed the lapses on underfunding and a compressed development schedule that didn't provide enough people to work on the programs or allow enough cross-checking for errors. "

Sorry, count me out, then... I'm not into web-design and all that.
interesting idea, though.

Hi, Borrowma, thanks for pointing this out, and of course: welcome to New Mars!

Weird, Reuters making all these obvious mistakes... I guess Reuters misinterpreted the fact that Beagle 2 has the highest mass/science ratio compared to other probes...

As explained here

That 'rocket' nonsense is a bit harder to defend, though... What were they thinking?

I'll just jump in and out to say that, indeed i related klingons with male... Believe it or not, but i never saw a single episode with klingons in it (except that 'civilised' guy)

I do not have tv...

ok, back to terraforming...

Here's more info...

Spaceref.

But i read an interview with Elon somewhere in wich he said the project was on the back burner... He's now concentrating on XCOR.

His reasoning went something like: "i wanted to do this 'life on mars' thing, but found no launcher that was affordable, so i decided to go and build cheap launchers instead!"

So, in the long run it might be better to have a cheap launcher, that way third parties can have a go at cheap Mars missions...

Good. Anyway it would be technologically impossible, there's not enough bandwidth to carry all that chatting about the neighbour's new ugly dress etc.  :;):

(I'm kidding, REALLY!)

Well, you know the British, keeping the stiff upper lip and all that...

BTW, X-Prize, sub orbital-tourist stuff is quite 'cheap' if you see John Carmack's numbers for his armadilloaerospace.com vehicule: (bold text is my doing)

"Just building the vehicle costs less than $100k, most of the money is in building multiple iterations of everything as you figure out exactly how you actually need to spend the money:
$ 6k 850 gallon fiberglass tank
$ 2k High pressure carbon fiber pressurant tank and regulator
$ 1k Honeycomb composite panels
$ 5k Aluminum fabrication for cabin
$15k Redundant parachutes, drogues, drogue cannons, releases
$13k Fiber optic gyro based IMU
$ 8k Unrestricted (supersonic / high altitude) GPS
$ 2k PC104 systems
$ 5k video, audio, and data communications
$20k Engine machining, catalysts, laser cut plates
$ 5k Plumbing, valves, etc
$ 5k Fastblock external insulation
For powered landings instead of parachute landings, delete the parachutes and add:
$ 4k Laser altimeter
$ 4k Wire rope isolator landing gear
You could trivially spend an order of magnitude more by just using "space certified" versions of everything, but the important point is that standard industrial versions of many things are perfectly adequate. In many cases, todays standard industrial practice is far ahead of the best that could be done at any price in the early sixties.
This is all with free labor for assembly and testing, but that is still only a couple hundred man hours for a full vehicle. We are expecting to destroy the first vehicle in some (unmanned) testing mishap along the way, and build another one mostly from scratch. That will take less than two months, depending on lead times for some items."

That, and the fact that his site has almost all the step-by-step instructions how to build your own craft... You don't need no 'real' rocket-scientists, just some good engineers... just read the instructions    how to build your own

I'd guess it's mostly politics...

Try to contact universities, science minister, or even the government by e-mal, or more 'impressive': written mail (looks more personal, everybody can fire off an e-mail, but real paper-letters, esp. from far away, stress the point you're serious...)

Ask for their opinion, or suggestions... I think local educational centres and busines would be ecstatic to know someone would want to do this...
Try to get your ideas submitted in big conventions, etc...

But as Bill White points out, LEO is quite a saturated mrket, so you'd either have to go directly for GEO (Difficult and expensive) or suborbital, X-Prize stuff... (Cheap and a good starting point to learn the ropes...)

Dar-es-Salaam... Maybe some X, or rather Y prize people would be interested. The investment should be lower than the big infrastructure used by NASA et al, but of course legally exporting rocket-science is always difficult. An Armadillo II type vehicule could be built in Africa, for a reasonable price, there's a lot of info freely available on the 'net, lately, so maybe this is the time to do something like that (yea, i'm a dreamer!)

Is there something like ESA in Africa (i mean universities and industry collaborating on bigger projects...)
If not, why (not)?

On Bill's 'idea' the problem with the location is that it's percieved as non-stable... politically. Too much wars in the recent past, no westerner big-money guy would want to invest in large-scale launch infrastructure, if not give some serious guarantees the region is politically stable.

Of course, The African countries should not have to wait for foreign bankers...