New Mars Forums

And thanks, Rxke, for that B&W picture of the impact marks. Unless they come up with a more plausible explanation, it is starting to look like Mars may be a planetary mud pile!

    Sure looks like soft mushy mud.   

I understand very well what Cindy has said because I've been going through all those same emotions ever since the initiative was announced.
    It may well be a sell-out to the military; that was my initial take on the whole thing and it may still be accurate. But I just can't take it at that level and walk away. I guess I've got a basically optimistic nature (though I confess to waves of pessimism at times! ) and I just have to hope that more good than bad will come of this.

    The Moon is a dry boring rock with little going for it compared to Mars. If it has any military significance, I admit I don't really know what that significance might be but I'm prepared to go along with the idea that somebody at the Pentagon does.
    What Dr. Zubrin has outlined is what I perceive to be his underlying confidence that he, and we as a group of like-minded enthusiasts, can show convincingly that the cheapest and most logical way to achieve a lunar outpost is as part of a human Mars mission, not the other way around.

    It may be that leaving a major component of the decision making process until 2009 is politically wise, especially in view of the opinion polls mentioned here which are going against the initiative at present.
    And, let's face it, the current U.S. space scene is a mess and a political nightmare after decades with no direction. NASA has obligations to the other nations involved in the ISS  and it has large troughs in various states, in which well-fed snouts have been snuffling for many years.
    There are vested interests which will probably not be happy to see their cash cows led to the slaughter. Far from rustling up political support, I'm beginning to think this space initiative (Mk. II) actually took some political intestinal fortitude to table at this time. A lot of influential people are going to have their noses out of joint because of this, which is probably attested to by some of the wildly inaccurate journalism we've seen of late. There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between Dr. Z's sober assessment of the costs of President Bush's plan and the preposterous $1 trillion dollar price tags bandied about by some media outlets, who've evidently prostituted their credentials as journalists for the sake of anti-Republican political or (even worse) monetary sentiments.

    Whichever way you look at it, we have no power; we can't force anybody to support a human mission to Mars. The Bush plan has opened a door previously locked and barred to us and that door is now ajar. I think we should stick our foot in that door and do our best to prise it open until we can squeeze Mars Direct, or something similar, through it. It may be the only chance we get.

    As a 'P.S.', I still think the space elevator is a dark horse in the background and may yet become a factor in all this over the next two decades. We'll see.
                                                 

Hey, Gennaro!
    Waddya mean: ".. let Shaun assume absolute power."

    What makes you think I'm going to sit around waiting for you people to "let" me assume absolute power?!!! What kind of a namby-pamby, sissified, effeminate ruthless dictator do you take me for?
                                           ???   :laugh:

[P.S. Vegemite tastes like sh** !!  I can't stand the stuff.
        I can put up with the occasional Fosters lager and a chat with a good-lookin' sheila by the barbie, though! ... When I'm not lying on the beach, wrestling with crocodiles, or taking over the world, that is.]
                                               

Very interesting stuff, Mundaka.
    What you say reinforces my view that Dr. Z has probably had the rug pulled out from under him by people within NASA who simply object to the fact that he came up with a quicker, cheaper and more practical plan to get humans to Mars than they did!
    Of course, it won't be simply a matter of personal sour grapes and jealousy. Let me think, now, what other factor could make people so antagonistic? Hmmm ... Ah yes, that was it .. money!!
    Why would anyone at NASA, chewing up $15 billion a year and talking about needing $450 billion dollars (now $1 trillion) to get a human to Mars, want to have someone prove that for only $3 billion a year, over as little as ten years, he could initiate a permanent human outpost there?!!

    Yup, it's no wonder he's as popular as a f*** in an elevator!
                                                :;):

"Hope springs eternal etc. ...", so maybe I'm seeing what I want to see, but it seems there's room to manoeuvre within this re-emphasis on human space exploration.
    I believe Dr. Zubrin is right to 'embrace' the new initiative because, as others have pointed out, better a vague humans-to-Mars timetable than none at all. Rather than say we want Mars Direct and only Mars Direct and we want it now, our best bet is to go along with what's on the table and do what we can, within that framework, to get the result we want.

    Who knows how quickly a Shuttle Derived Vehicle might be designed and built. I assume much of the engineering is already in the bag and most of the hardware already exists(?).
    Who's to say we won't be ready for manned lunar missions by 2010 or 2012? Don't tell me NASA couldn't do it that quickly if they had a mind to do it! Look at what they did in a similar time frame during the sixties.

    If this new modular program is ongoing in the background and everything we use for the Moon is adaptable for Mars, why couldn't it happen that by 2015 it becomes clear we have all the hardware we need for a manned Mars mission in 2018?

    How do we know what easily accessible resources might be shown to exist on Mars by robotic probes in the meantime? Water might be freely available to any astronaut with a shovel almost anywhere on the surface for all we know!

    All I'm saying is that 15 years can be a long time in space exploration. In 1960, nobody had been to the Moon; it was effectively pie-in-the-sky stuff. Fifteen years later, a dozen men had walked (and driven and even played golf! ) on the Moon and the whole notion of going there was old-hat and the means to get there had been abandoned!

    I think we should go with the flow and support President Bush and hope for the best.
                                       

I like your pragmatic approach, Dicktice!

    It looks like an adaptation of a favourite philosophy of mine: 'Keep It Simple Stupid !!!
                                            

Do you mean SBS? That's an Australian television station.
    They have brilliant news programs as a rule, covering news from all over the world in detail. Whereas most TV stations in Australia report sport for half of their 30 minute slots, SBS covers the important stuff the other stations ignore.

    However, it seems clear, at least to me, that they have a definite political agenda as well. Their position on the Iraq situation was that they opposed the war and they, in common with many other media outlets today, seem to take almost a perverse delight in reporting adverse conditions and American casualties in post-war Iraq.

    I've often had the impression that SBS is less than enthusiastic about space exploration too. I guess this fits in with their political position, in as much as many 'liberals' (left-wingers, whatever you want to call them) see economics as a zero-sum game and want as much money as possible directed towards social welfare programs here on Earth, rather than spent in space.
    That would be good logic .. if economics were a zero-sum game! Fortunately it's not, so stimulating an economy with a bold vision of future technological development will, ultimately, create more money for social welfare, not less. We can have our cake and eat it too!

    So the bottom line for me is ... I'm not sure about blackballing SBS. I don't agree with their rather outmoded politics, and I sure-as-hell don't agree with any Luddite opposition to space exploration (! ), but if you can ignore that about them, SBS does do a good news program (and good soccer coverage too)!
                                                 

I guess this isn't terribly important right now but, while we're waiting for some good news about Spirit, I have a couple of comments.

    Thanks, Cindy, for trying to get that 'what colours a human would see on Mars' thing for me. But when I click on your link, I can't seem to find what I was looking for.   

    Thanks, Rxke, for the 'why is the sky butterscotch?' link. But I've seen that picture of the Viking lander many times before and I have grave doubts that it represents true colour.
    If you look at the U.S. flag, you'll notice that the background of the stars is definitely purple, not blue as it should be. In addition, the red stripes are 'bleeding' into the white stripes.
    The way to eliminate both these discrepancies is to turn down the red saturation (blue + red = purple).

    In addition I have trouble every time I read that explanation of why the sky on Mars is butterscotch. I can understand why dust suspended in the air makes it look orangey-brown, I've lived through more than my fair share of terrestrial dust storms in the Australian outback!
    But one minute they seem to say that with no dust in the air the sky would be whitish, the next minute they're saying it would be blue, like on Earth.
    Then they go on to say the blue halo which is sometimes seen around the setting sun on Mars, is due to the light passing through more dust!
    I've seen the outback sky gradually turn from blue to pale orangey-brown to brown and then to almost dark, as a dust storm took hold. At no time did the Sun appear to have a blue halo around it! More dust meant more brown ... period!
                                             ???

    But maybe I'm missing something simple .. or maybe I'm a bit simple.   
    But anyhow, have a look at that red, white and blue U.S. flag in Rxke's link and tell me where all the purple's coming from. There's something wrong somewhere, right?

I agree with Cindy about the old Saturn V. It was an awe-inspiring monster of a machine and a technological wonder.
    If I remember correctly, the Saturn Vs never failed. Right off the drawing board, they did everything they were asked to do ... and in fine style. As most of you are probably well aware, the Apollo XII Saturn V was struck by lightning a minute or two (I believe) into its flight and still never missed a beat! The computer displays went nuts and somebody had to push a 'reset' button but the rocket itself carried on as if nothing had happened.
    That was one reliable vehicle!   

    And I get emotional too every time I see a film clip of one of the launches. When my family and I visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, they herded us into a launch control room full of consoles. After a brief talk, they projected a movie of the Apollo XI lift-off onto a large screen, with a nice loud sound track!
    By the end, I must have had something in my eyes because I couldn't see clearly ... !
    It was stirring stuff.
    Yup .. I love the Saturn V too.   

So hydrogen should be perfectly safe for dirigibles on Mars? Or did somebody suggest hydrogen might burn in CO2? (I never thought this likely, but ... )
                                       ???

Hi Ad Astra!
    Richard Hoagland is having a field day! The Enterprise Mission is implying that various manufactured items are strewn around the Spirit landing site, including machined metal objects.
    The idea, of course, is to insinuate that transmissions of such damning data had to be curtailed by those who don't want us to know about the high civilisation that existed (or still exists) on Mars.
    Naturally nobody has stopped to ask themselves why Spirit's landing site on the floor of Gusev crater should be scattered with twisted and broken scraps of metal machine parts. Or are they saying that the entire surface of Mars is similarly festooned with innumerable technological artifacts, so it doesn't matter where you land .. you'll find them?!
                                           

    Another article they produced recently, purportedly by a geologist, put forward the idea that the pointier of the Twin Peaks at the Pathfinder landing site (the one on the left in the photos) was most unlikely to be a natural prominence. Apparently it's a badly eroded pyramid!
    Again, nobody bothered to ask the odds of landing a space probe within sight of an artificial pyramid on Mars. How many pyramids did the martians build? Are they difficult to avoid? Did Beagle 2 perhaps impale itself on the pinnacle of one of them?!!
                                         

    On a more serious note, can anyone direct me to a site dealing with the Spirit photo which has been modified to show how a human on the surface would see the colour of the soil and sky etc.?
    I heard someone had done such a modification and, since nobody at NASA has phoned me yet to ask if I'd like to lead the first expedition to Mars and I'm unlikely to see the place first-hand (!! ), I'd like to see this 'natural colour' picture for myself.
                                         

Uh-oh.
    Looks like it's humble-pie time.
    In pulling Jetset's leg about the anomalous object s/he pointed out, I never dreamed I was also joking about something as serious as this!

    I hereby formally withdraw any comments of a flippant or jocular nature concerning Spirit's communications problem.
                                             

    I'm shocked and horrified at this sudden interruption to what was shaping up as a near-perfect mission and I'm praying for a swift correction of the fault.