Despite claims by NASA and private outfits such as Mars One, we don’t have the know-how or funding to send people to the Red Planet, according to many scientists, policy experts, and one outspoken lawmaker. “To say we have put the cart before the horse is an understatement,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said.
Mars One’s flaws — too few spaceships, nonexistent life-support technologies, not nearly enough money, and, really, no good reason for going — discredit all Mars exploration plans, including NASA’s.
Despite claims by NASA and private outfits such as Mars One, we don’t have the know-how or funding to send people to the Red Planet, according to many scientists, policy experts, and one outspoken lawmaker. “To say we have put the cart before the horse is an understatement,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said.
Mars One’s flaws — too few spaceships, nonexistent life-support technologies, not nearly enough money, and, really, no good reason for going — discredit all Mars exploration plans, including NASA’s.
Not to rag on NASA too much as they do undertake many cool projects, but they are always going for sensationalist news to increase public interest. Most of what they do, while valuable to science, is actually rather boring to the general public and doesn't provide immediate tangible results. They are always needing to justify their existence and go for the big headlines.
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Most of what they do, while valuable to science, is actually rather boring to the general public and doesn't provide immediate tangible results.
Eh what? The list of things that were invented/first thought of at NASA is quite impressive for a department whose mandate on the surface appears to be the exploration of space.
Last edited by Dan02; 02-25-2015 at 02:50 PM.
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Despite claims by NASA and private outfits such as Mars One, we don’t have the know-how or funding to send people to the Red Planet, according to many scientists, policy experts, and one outspoken lawmaker. “To say we have put the cart before the horse is an understatement,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said.
Mars One’s flaws — too few spaceships, nonexistent life-support technologies, not nearly enough money, and, really, no good reason for going — discredit all Mars exploration plans, including NASA’s.
Is there something on Mars you're hiding troutman? You seem awfully antsy about the rest of us going.
Eh what? The list of things that were invented/first thought of at NASA is quite impressive for a department whose mandate on the surface appears to be the exploration of space.
I'm not saying it isn't impressive, but most of what they do isn't interesting to the general public, or at least headline grabbing. A lot of what they do focuses around things like tracking ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, energy conservation, remote sensing... things that just don't pique the imagination. When they need some positive press, they have a trump card that other agencies (like the EPA or Antarctic Exploration Agency for example) do not have and they definitely use it to their benefit.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
Given I'm in the nuclear industry and with a company that does do some shielding, I had the opportunity to go to a Radiation Shielding and Protection conference in September of last year. Much of the conference revolved around medical shielding but there was a key note speaker that helped design some of the instrumentation on the last Rover mission. Fantastic talk and he did talk about a manned mission to Mars.
In short, they'd love to do a mission but protection of the astronauts from some very intense radiation is necessary (heavy ion radiation, neutron radiation etc). While the craft was delivering the rover to Mars it was actively collecting the radiation exposures every step of the way. They are very high and in many case correlate with sun flares, direct line of sight to the sun etc. Any manned mission will be a tricky thing indeed as they'll need to minimize direct exposure to these radiation streams because they simply may not be able to effectively shield and still get a craft off the ground. It's a pretty major consideration. For many types of radiation mass and thickness is often the answer (hence lead and uranium shields). Mass and thickness does not play well with space travel aspirations. They had a target mass per dimension spec they need to get to and with current shielding doesn't even come close.
I say this because it relates to the concepts put forth on how to do it. You'll see a lot of small oval shaped designs. Part of this is to minimize footprint and exposure to the radiation (because you don't want daughter products which in turn produce directly next to the asrtonaut). Part of it is because one of the most effective shielding for neutrons and other types of radiation is done by the fuel itself. If you have an oval/spherical vessel it is easier to achieve this even distribution of fuel.
Anyways it's a complicated issue and it isn't going to happen anytime soon that's for sure.
At this conference I also learned why NASA astronauts tend to be middle aged white guys. Based on radiation exposure NASA has a metric that they will not increase the chances of cancer of an astronaut more than (i think) 3% more than the general population. Radiation cancers can appear decades after exposure and women and minorities tend to be disproportionately affected by radiation. So this leads to middle aged white guys because, and I'm not kidding, they'll tend to die of non-radiation issues prior to radiation issues becoming a problem (relative to the public).
Last edited by ernie; 02-25-2015 at 03:10 PM.
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In short, they'd love to do a mission but protection of the astronauts from some very intense radiation is necessary (heavy ion radiation, neutron radiation etc).
Good post, thanks! Yeah until we can manage a space elevator or some other way to get stuff into space on a much larger/cheaper scale it's going to be a huge challenge.
Might be easier to go to asteroids first to get the material necessary... That's one of the few reasons I could see wanting to make a base on the moon; to develop low or zero g processes for making the materials, parts and assembling space ships.
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So when they say it can "accommodate humans", is it for flight only, or can it act as a habitat? Since they're taking a vessel to Mars anyway, why not let it land and act as a potential future habitat a la the Mars Direct directive?
Landing on Mars is another problem, in that we currently don't have any way to do it. Curiosity had "seven minutes of terror" stretching what was possible to the limit and that was a 1 ton car.
Getting to Mars isn't just a challenge, it's currently impossible in many different ways and will require big jumps in many different areas.
Even storing all that fuel in orbit long enough to get everything ready is a challenge, depending on how long it takes to get everything into orbit, you could double the amount of fuel you have to lift just due to losses while storing the already lifted fuel!
Mars One has almost no money. Mars One has no contracts with private aerospace suppliers who are building technology for future deep-space missions. Mars One has no TV production partner. Mars One has no publicly known investment partnerships with major brands. Mars One has no plans for a training facility where its candidates would prepare themselves. Mars One’s candidates have been vetted by a single person, in a 10-minute Skype interview.
Last edited by troutman; 03-19-2015 at 09:04 AM.
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Next thing you know they're going to roll out a flashy power point to show how they're going to get to mars using a cannon, a ship with flapping wings and their chief pilots name will be Flash "Aaaaa aaa" Gordon
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The only non-profit that can ever pull this off is a governmental agency. And even then, it will probably take more than 1 of them to do so.
There's just so much money and organization required that it just doesn't seem realistic for anyone else. Considering this is a task that will probably take many Billions of dollars to pull of, there's really very little ROI for a private enterprise to even attempt this. And general non-profit organizations just will never have the expertise or money for anything like this (these Mars One people are selling t-shirts to raise funds for gods sake).
The only way I see a trip to Mars ever working is if the legitimate space agencies around the world work on it some sort of combined effort. It will still be amazingly expensive and difficult, but they are the only ones who have the expertise, and the willingness to put in the work without necessarily a monetary return, to pull something like this off.
What do the science minded here think about the "emdrive"? It seems kind of scammy but a NASA laboratory has reported multiple positives while testing it:
I actually read those too, and they made good points regarding the possible inaccuracies from the 2014 test that NASA did, but the article I linked to shows a test from 2015 they did that addressed a lot of those concerns.
From it:
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The Eagleworks team obtained EMDrive experimental force measurements in the torsional pendulum in a hard vacuum (~5.0x10^-6 Torr).
Quote:
Based on test data and theoretical model development, the expected thrust to power for initial flight applications is expected to be in the 0.4 newton per kilowatt electric (N/kWe) range, which is about seven times higher than the current state of the art Hall thruster in use on orbit today.
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