Hopefully this will be the first in a series of topics centred on current affairs, or relatively current at least.

Have fun, I'll be watching,

Cris.

Edit:
Thought I'd better start it off, here I go:

I believe that with the current cost and associated danger with spaceflight there is no reason for us to go to Mars. It seems that it is little more than an issue to do with our need to have dominance over all that we can see, rather than for true scientific purposes. It is far more economical and sensible to provide for the people on Earth, rather than satisfying our curiosity and travelling for over a year to find little more than red dust and rocks.

Umm...you do realize it's physically impossible to go there right now, right? If we could go to Mars, you could bet your @$$ we'd already be there. However, it isn't, so we aren't. Also, if we could go there, I think it would be great. We could do tests right there and do more a more thorough search of the place to see if there was at some point life, or if there's a way to easily make it support life.
Think about it, one of the main problems (especially out east) is that we are incredibly cramped. If we somehow build a dome or something and put air and appropriate gravity levels in there, then people could live on Mars. As for the water, people could go to work mining the ice in the caps.
I don't see why we shouldn't put people on Mars. Sure there is the inherit danger involved, but there is that same danger in sending people out to orbit Earth, yet we do that. The main danger actually is landing again on Earth due to the atmosphere, not just landing. Mars has a thin enough atmosphere that a spaceship that can handle Earth, would land with ease on Mars.

Physically impossible? How so?

Right now there is no feasible way of getting there. In the future maybe, but now, no.

Are you familiar with Project Orion?


That's using tech from late 50s/early 60s!

That's for robots not humans. It's a lot more difficult to send a human into space than a robot.

I was under the impression that the technology existed, but isn't cost-effective enough to make it really possible- when its cheaper, maybe.

As for why we'd actually want to go there, there could be any number of reasons- the various scientific benefits, overcrowding, some huge natural disaster, or even a global thermonuclear war leaving most of earth uninhabitable.

Essentially the problem is in propulsion. Since we would have to carry all of our fuel to mars with us the entire length of the journey, you would need to expend most of it just to leave the earths atmosphere. Even if you use a space station as a refueling stop, you'd still have to be sending up the fuel to the space station. As long as we're using what we are currently, even a trip to the moon isn't practical.

As far as the actual people are concerned, even with a good method of propulsion, the trip would likely have to be one way as planning the return trip may waste space which could be better used for setting up shelters and sources of food/air/energy. Although realistically, there isn't much point of sending people at all until there are some methods to terraform the planet. And that we can do by sending unmanned craft.

It takes a good year and a half for a one way trip to Mars. And as previously mentioned it's unfeasible to land and pick up some rocks, nevermind colonize the place. I don't think that fuel itself is the problem: leaving Earth's gravitational field will of course require a lot of it. Maintaining momentum after that shouldn't require more than the odd correctional burn now and then. A point of concern is the psychological impact on the crew, who will be essentially stuck with each other for over a year in an enclosed space (here's to hoping the computer system doesn't go HAL to further complicate matters). Adding to that the bare necessities of life (food, water, waste disposal, entertainment etc.) To accomodate all that the ship would have to be HUGE, and most likely built in orbit. Of course we don't have any shipyards up there currently, now do we?. Suffice it to say, it will be a long while before a human sets foot on Mars.
2050 or later at best...but that's just my guess, so don't quote me on that.

The technology to go to Mars exists now. What is lacking is a big enough reason to go at this point. The project would cost a tremendous amount of money and take great determination on the part of the nation or group of nations footing the bill. Humanity is too focused on what's happening here on Earth right now to go to Mars.
I think (and hope) it will happen in 50 to 100 years when it will be relatively easier because our technology is more advanced.

Sure we could build an Orion right now and get there in a few weeks but it would be politically incorrect. The public outcry would be deafening. "What! The rapacious humans are going to pollute even outer space now!"

Ok, time to jump in as someone who actually has a clue about what they're discussing:



You could not be more wrong. It would be very easy to go to Mars, in fact we have already done so quite a few times. The technology already exists, it's just a question of getting the funding and scaling it up properly.



Solving the population density problem with colonies on other planets is just stupid. You'd have to be shipping people off Earth at an absurd rate (something like one launch every second, if I remember right) just to keep up with population growth. And that's just the problem of getting there, not even considering the difficulty of building large enough colonies to hold them all.

And as for "appropriate gravity levels". Artificial gravity is science fiction, not fact. Fortunately, however, Mars has enough gravity that people could (in theory) live there just fine.



You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. In landing a spacecraft, atmosphere is a GOOD thing, because you can use the friction to slow down and avoid splattering your passengers all over Earth's newest crater. And Mars has more than enough atmosphere to make aerodynamic concerns relevant, you'd have pretty much the exact same spaceship as you would for a landing on Earth.



Please stop saying things when you have no idea what you're talking about. The concepts developed for Project Orion included human-crewed spacecraft. One of the test studies included plans for a ship with a total mass of 8 million tons. For comparison, a modern nuclear aircraft carrier is only around 100,000 tons. If you can't see any way to include a human crew in a spacecraft capable of lifting the entire US Navy's carrier fleet into orbit, you clearly lack imagination.

Besides, anyone with a little knowledge of the subject knows that there is very little difference in sending robots and sending humans. The only technological differences are in the life-support systems, not the propulsion. If you need more thrust for the extra load, you scale the engines up, use multiple ships, etc. If anything, developing a human-crewed Orion would be easier, as the need to keep acceleration down to survivable levels would prevent the designers from using the technology's full power.

Orion failed for two reasons: concerns over fallout and EMP caused by a surface to orbit launch, and various nuclear test treaties making development politically impossible. Nothing more.

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Please look at actual budget numbers before talking. Compare the budgets of NASA to the military. Here's a hint: the military gets 30x as much, with NASA's entire budget being less than 1% of the total for the US.

As for it being just a question of just wanting dominance over another thing, I suggest you read Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, it explains very clearly why we need to start taking space travel seriously.

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But there's a huge difference between a single large launch and multiple smaller ones. If fuel mass is the problem, you launch it in several trips, and assemble your Mars ship in orbit. It would be expensive, yes, but compared to a lot of the other things we've spent money on...

And a trip to the moon is perfectly practical... seeing as we've actually done it, this shouldn't be too controversial. In fact, the moon is easy, since the life support needs are unimaginably simpler. Getting there just takes a slightly scaled-up version of your everyday sattelite launch rocket.



A one-way trip just isn't at all realistic. Who are you going to get to volunteer for your suicide mission? Eventually you'd put people there to stay, but you don't send your first test of the system with no way of getting home.

As for terraforming, it's not very realistic, especially in the forseeable future.

EDIT: Sorry to doctor your post Peregrine, but direct insults are off as you know.

- Switch

I'd go in a heartbeat... I'd just need something to keep me occupied durring the flight... and that is much easier said than done. I'm sure they could probably find capable, trainable, (somewhat stable) people who can place the value in making a suicide run at the red planet above whatever physical burdens they happen to have here on earth. Hey, if you want your name to go in history books it doesn't have to be practical, it just has to be noteworthy.

Thankyou for that infusion of fact Peregrine, it was well needed. I realise now that I was wrong and opinionated, and that I needed to look further into the matter before speaking. I will attempt to refine my statements from now on.

It is possible right now, but it isn't completely safe yet. In addition to that, it would have no economical or military benifits for the country that would send a shuttle to Mars. Combine that with the high costs, and you know why there hasn't been anyone on our red neighbour yet. The only reason Americans went to the moon was to beat the Sovjets to it during the Cold War

Was it possible, I'd say: "Just give me a shuttle, a Dutch flag and I'll claim Mars for the Fatherland! Even if it kills me, if I'd be rememberd as the first human on mars, it is worth it! Dieing for your country is one of the most honorable things to do."

cya

Fritz

The fact is, we CAN go to mars, but it would cost over 875 BILLION dollars to do, and even at this great cost, there would be a 66% chance of failure, based off the results of only 5/15 rovers making it. The US could use the money so much better, like BOARDER SECURITY (eg a wall, u know what i mean) or hydrogen fuel cell cars.

1) Please provide some evidence for this $875 billion figure. Did you actually get this from a legitimate scientific source, or did you just invent it? How many years is the cost spread out over, and how many missions? What scale is this, a "plant the flag and come home" mission for one man is entirely different from a permanent hundred-person base.

2) Your failure number is complete nonsense. The rovers are of a completely different design, the failure rates of that design give only minor hints at how well a completely new design will work. Also note that there is a huge difference between a robot probe and a manned mission, a problem on a manned mission is much easier to fix. For example, something like the computer glitch that caused one of those missions to go off-cource and lose contact would hardly slow a manned mission, the crew would simply fix the software.

3) It's off-topic, but your idea of an $875 billion wall is just stupid, not to mention political suicide.

Maybe he ment some kind of Siegfried-line? Or a Maginot-line? Of course there is always the Iron curtain kind of wall. And if you make one surrounding the US (well, southern and northren borders) and then build thausands of superguns - like the german V3 or Iraqy supergun - to bomb the sh*t out of everybody who wants to cross the line.

That's what I would do if I had $875 billion to build a wall. The rest would go to my own pocket, well, a bank acount in Switzerland that is.

cya

Fritz

If we ever do go to mars, we should use it too put all our factories and things so that babies can be raised a "free range earthlings" and then do say 10 years of work on mars when they reach a certain age then come back to earth and make babies of there own if they wish... meh its one option anyway

[sarcasm]
Right, it wouldn't be expensive at all to ship all those goods back to Earth. Why aren't we doing that already? We can save a lot of money by sending our businesses there, because as everyone knows, a several thousand dollar plane is much more expensive and far more dangerous than a multi-billion dollar spaceship.
[/sarcasm]

A Martian colony would have a few advantages:

-- High enough gravity that there might not be significant physiological effects
-- Low gravity and thin atmosphere would make launches easier
-- Presence of
---- Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen (2.7% of the atmosphere. I'm assuming this would be enough to make extraction feasible.)
---- Iron, Aluminum, and Silicon, in the form of oxides
-- No environmental impact to worry about
-- Easier access to the asteroid belt


So, it might make sense to establish a mining/fabrication colony on Mars, and maybe a space station as well, for the purpose of asteroid mining.

Like in Doom...but without the portals to Hell.

If my theory, about the agenda, is correct then Humans, of a sort, have already been on Mars. Their activities facilitated the harvesting of much of Mars's resources. It might be quite enlightening to go back there and learn about the process that is currently underway on Earth. But, unfortunately, that could jeopardize the Earth project and will probably be prevented.