NASA Mars Now - Third Alternative To NASAs Mars Who Knows When Program

[SpaceTiger]

WB SpaceTiger!. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Thanks Evo! Good to see you all again.

I can only really speak about the scientific gains of such a mission and I know they would be minimal, at least relative to the amount of money that was spent. It's difficult to predict what the technological gains might be from such an endeavor -- perhaps there are some folks on here who are knowledgeable enough about the moon missions to say how much those stimulated new technological breakthroughs.

It would certainly be unrealistic to expect that landing a man on Mars would lead to a boom in space travel. The only way space will really become a "new frontier" is if people can make money off of it, and I find it difficult to imagine that commercial interests will pursue manned space missions anytime in the near future, regardless of whether we land a person on Mars or not.

 

[D H]

Welcome back, ST!

I can only really speak about the scientific gains of such a mission and I know they would be minimal, at least relative to the amount of money that was spent.

First off, we are not going to send people to Mars anytime soon. The technology just isn't there yet, and the cost/time to develop the requisite technology is extremely high.

We in the US like to make the government switch affiliations on a regular basis. One of the first things an incoming President/Congress does upon such a switch is to kill or revamp key (but not critical) programs developed by the other side. NASA's high-visibility programs fit the bill rather nicely. Republicans would have loved to have killed Johnson's social programs, but they couldn't. Apollo was a highly visible but non-essential Democratic idea. It was gone. The Democrats revamped Space Station Freedom into the multinational entity that it now is, and more lately, killed Constellation in part because these were Republication ideas.

A realistically funded human mission to Mars would be highly visible, rather expensive, and take decades to accomplish. It would have to survive multiple switches between Democrats and Republicans.Suppose the government did fully fund a mission to Mars and kept that funding intact for the decades needed to accomplish it. I beg to differ with ST's supposition. The scientific and technological gains from such a program would be immense. Space Tiger, rather than looking at how much money would be wasted on a mission of little scientific benefit, look at things from the perspective of the immense amount of money that would inevitably flow to space science as a result of such an endeavor.

Britain's Royal Astronomical Society has learned this lesson well. Britain had a forty year long ban on government funding of human spaceflight activities. The RAS was one of the key players in getting this ban placed. The law of unintended consequences kicked in big time with this ban. British space science decline for forty years, eventually making Britain #21 in civil (non-military) space exploration. Most of the paltry sum of money they did spend on space went across the Channel as obligatory payments to the European Space Agency. There are very few space scientists left in Great Britain. Going back to the lead sentence of this paragraph, the RAS was one of the key players in getting that ban lifted. Great Britain now has a fledgling space agency, the UK Space Agency. The person who ceremoniously pushed the button to signal the start of this new space agency was Britain's first official, government-funded astronaut.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Welcome back, ST!

Thanks, D H!

Suppose the government did fully fund a mission to Mars and kept that funding intact for the decades needed to accomplish it. I beg to differ with ST's supposition. The scientific and technological gains from such a program would be immense. Space Tiger, rather than looking at how much money would be wasted on a mission of little scientific benefit, look at things from the perspective of the immense amount of money that would inevitably flow to space science as a result of such an endeavor.

I don't see how this is inevitable... when Bush decided to pursue another mission to the moon, he ended up cutting the Hubble Space Telescope, the most important scientific tool to astronomy. Similar cuts would almost certainly occur in the pursuit of a Mars mission. As far as Great Britain goes, their contributions to astronomy have been immense for the last 40 years; the fact that their civil space program ranks low really has very little to do with their contributions to science.

That said, I really don't know what the technological gains would be. One can argue that such a mission could lead to advances in technology that enable the success future *scientific* missions. I certainly can't rule out such a possibility, but on the surface, a mission to Mars would be more of a political endeavor than a scientific one and it's difficult to see how science wouldn't suffer, at least in the short term (i.e. our lifetime).

 

[D H]

don't see how this is inevitable... when Bush decided to pursue another mission to the moon, he ended up cutting the Hubble Space Telescope, the most important scientific tool to astronomy.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that after the Columbia disaster NASA internally decided that the fourth Hubble repair mission was a no-go. There was no safe haven and no backup plan in the case of a launch problem. The decision to cancel the Hubble repair mission was largely an internal decision. Astronomers did exactly the wrong thing after that decision was announced. They went the political route. Politics was one of the key factors that led to the Columbia disaster in the first place.

NASA internally resisted that political pressure. They hurriedly developed a plan to repair the Hubble robotically. Many of NASA's space centers were involved in this plan. Only one problem: That robotic repair mission had too many unknowns, too high a cost, and there was a huge doubt as to whether Hubble could stay alive long enough for any repair mission, Shuttle-based or robotic, to have any value. The Aerospace Corporation performed an independent audit of the options ten months after the decision to cancel the repair mission and recommended that the robotic repair mission and the Shuttle repair mission be scrapped for technological, economical, and safety issues. They found that the best thing for Hubble was to let it die, and that the money needed to perform the repair would be better spent almost anywhere else.

NASA did cancel the robotic repair mission, but they bowed to the immense political pressure and did perform the final Hubble repair mission with the Shuttle. From a technological, economical, and safety perspective, that was one of the dumbest and luckiest decisions made by NASA to date. The only reason it went forward was because of politics. The only reason it succeeded was because humans , rather than robots, did the repair.

 

[AlexES16]

Because it is the man's purpose in life - to explore and conquer, and its also something to pass time with

Also, remember who brought you the Space Pen?

And another thing. Its time to take the money away from boys (financial sector) and give it to real men (science and engineering). Enough with those bailouts already. The people that work in the financial sector do not create 'wealth'. They are simply reselling what others made. The only actual value is created by engineers who make things, and its impossible to know what needs to be made until you've encountered a problem like getting to Mars.

Mars expedition requires air filtration systems, recycling, fuel from human excrement, all to highest standard and efficiency. Not to mention purification systems, genetically modified seeds that grow in most inhospitable conditions. All these things are useful on Earth as well. Radiation shielding, materials science, portable scanners, long range communication systems, high speed inter planetary Internet, the list goes on, and only limited by what we've already encountered.

Perhaps we'll find microbes there - makes us feel better about our own evolutionary stage, or perhaps we find water on Mars, could be turned into a backup 'Earth' in case we get hit by a meteor. You can't put a price on survival from extinction of entire civilization, all we've accomplished and will accomplish just by overcoming the 'how much will it cost?' factor. It costs us nothing to get to Mars compared to what it buys us - an accomplishment of a lifetime.

"In March 2007, NASA announced that the volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be sufficient to cover the entire planetary surface to a depth of 11 meters" - out of Wikipedia.

Dude! Thank you so much! at last i hear a person with a good asnwers about the economics and the progress in science dude!.

Watch this its about this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7cX...&p=8C3B60FC2884B800&playnext_from=PL&index=22

 

[funniew]

Oops, looks like I may have to kill this thread for a while because I just got a bunch of hard academic assignments that must be completed. I will continue this thread in summer. Then I will post my math that I believe shows why dynamics for Mars landing are different from that of the Moon. Following with my solution for creating hydrogen from carbon using a method I have termed reverse-nucleosynthesis I will post then too.

*To Be Continued*

PS: I doubt NASA will be first on Mars it will be either China, Japan or India with a token american scientist along for the ride.

 

[skippy1729]

I doubt NASA will be first on Mars it will be either China, Japan or India with a token american scientist along for the ride.

I wish them all Godspeed. When one of them succeeds the American people may wake up from their lethargy.

Skippy

PS I hope they do it without a token American.