Mission to Mars.

[Death Mage]

Ok, so NASA seems to be planning to go to Mars lately. Great, about time they started doing something historic again. But I've just got one question.

How are they going to get our people back?

I mean, this isn't like a quick trip to the moon. The gravity on Mars is roughly 1/3rd Earth's, right? So what would make escape velosity on Mars? And how are they planning to achive that with a craft they can land easilly? We planning on laving our trash there, or are we gonna take the whole rig back? And they're obviously going to need a craft other than the Shuttle (I'd hope!) to get there, what are they going to use?

Or better yet, how would you guys handle these problems?

Also, we've got an International Space Station floating around, why aren't we working on an International Moon Station yet? How would one of those be built for the utmost of safety?

[Chuck]

Don't bring them back. It's too far to go to just come back. The money would be better spent sending back samples. They should set up a permanent base and send a resupply mission every couple of years and replacement personel as needed. The resupply missions would be a lot cheaper than sending people for each visit and could include the latest equipment for performing new experiments.

[MacadamiamaN]

Also, obviously we're either leaving our trash there or in space...

However when Bush loses this year's election I don't see the mars mission making much progress.

[Dread Pirate Westley]

Mean escape velocity on earth: 11km/sec
Mean escape velocity on Mars: 5.1km/sec
But should we really be spending money on a trip to Mars when we still have to fight terrorism?
Surface gravity on Mars is roughly 2.5x that of the Moon.

NASA and other agencies do not have a good track record in recent years of landing unmanned craft on Mars. Not sure how good an idea it is to send a manned craft there.

[wordcross]

Unmanned landings are automated and usually pre-programmed. Manned craft would be able to troubleshoot if problems arose. I doubt that it will happen, though.

About the moon station, it would probably be more feasible to do a mars station. Conditions there being less temperature extreme than the moon, and having the propensity to be more earth-like. The only current problem is distance. Mars is a helluva lot further away than the moon, as is well known, so any emergencies would have to be handled by a mars crew until help could arrive, which would take a lot longer than shuttling something to the space station or the moon.

If NASA had the funding, they could undoubtedly make a great deal of advancement in space travel and station technology, but that's not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.

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Sheep 5!

[Legend of Tenshi]

Building the transport in space would save on fuel expended when leaving the earths atmosphere. A nuclear fission drive is what we need for propulsion

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I'm looking for a good sig, wanna help?

[Vinny]

There is actually talk about setting up a Space Station in Moon orbit as lauching point for interstellar travel.

And some weird Larange something point, the midway point between the moon and earth that is always in the same position in relation to the two orbiting bodies.

[Vinny]

now that I think about it, it wasn't NASA talking about these things. I saw this on CSPAN a few months back. Those projects were brought up as plausibles future projects for civilian-base funding, private sectors with NASA backing.

[Death Mage]

Hey, more power to the private sector if they manage to pull something like that off.

And as for the timeline on this Mars thing, I'm sure it's still decades away. I was just hearing about how they were currently working on one of the problems for the five-year trip, and it got me thinking. And nothing hurts to plan now, even if action doesn't take place for a while.

Maybe a giant trebuchet.....

[Vader]

Well Bush wants a Moon Base, but that is not going to happen.I heard the sme CSPAN report on the Moon Orbital station, what private company can afford it? I don't even think Gates could afford it, plus if it failed there goes all the $$$. The Mars base if very unlikley until we can find a faster way to travel through Space. The Sci-Fi theories about light speed or warp or whatever are all good, but until it is a fact and not a theory then Intra let alone Inter stellar travel is nothing but Sci-Fi. it's that simple.

Now if we could tesseract that would be something.....

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Duct tape is like the force they both have a light side and a dark side and they bind the universe together.

[Death Mage]

Just curious, how much did the ISS cost? Does anybody know?

Now find out how much AOL paid for Time Warner.

[MacadamiamaN]

Oh I'm sure Gates could afford something like that. I was actually surprised when I heard that the mission to Mars recently (with the 2 robot landers) only cost $900 million. Granted it would take more for humans - let's say 10x more - the Microsoft Corporation could easily handle it, many times over.

[Death Mage]

Let us also not forget that corporations are in the money making business. They could figure out not only how to do things a little cheaper, and maybe even make a profit at the same time.

[Vader]

I'm sure that Gates could afford it if he wanted to but the risk is too great. If it failed then like I said before all that money is lost and as was said by someone else private Corps. agenda's, typically, is to make mony not lose it and right now it a losing situation.

[MacadamiamaN]

Microsoft has something like $50 billion cash. What do they have to lose? (short of $50 billion)

[Death Mage]

Big corps, and especially CEOs of corps like Gates or the Ikea guy have so much money they need to find ways to SPEND it. I mean, what the hell do you *DO* with almost fifty billion in wealth? You buy up other, smaller corporations (you know, like major media giants such as Time-Warner, ABC, NBC etc.), or fund projects like that.

[Ghost Post]

Microsoft has large quantities of cash to survive revenue-less periods, not fund space travel.

[Vader]

RSA is right. Making $$ is like a drug once you get addicted to it you do not want to stop.

[Lepton]

To kick a dead conversation:

I'm fairly confident the mission to Mars concept was an excuse for cutting funding to current NASA projects. No one expects a mission to Mars, nor a return to the moon. They simply are not feasible for a government that can't scare people anymore with the threat of Communist mutants. In the mean while, there's no longer a much-needed service mission to Hubble, there's no longer an active launch participation in the ISS, there's not even a shuttle programme. Heck, NASA isn't doing *anything* anymore except sniffing it's own butt, thanks to the current administrations political decisions.

If we want to get ourselves back into space, we need to investigate concepts like the Space Elevator - a carbon nanotube filament that stretchs into orbit. It would be tethered by whatever hunk of junk we can manage to get into low orbit (the ISS, maybe?). It would be a technological challenge, but a fairly straightforward one. More importantly, the challenge would be something that we could do here on earth. Furthermore, the applications of cheap carbon nanotubes (the most obvious engineering offshoot) are incredible. The stuff is stronger than steel or spiderweb.

And so on.

[wordcross]

as far as the private sector goes, one must realize that a large part of the equipment that goes into any space-travel is lost. In liftoff the rocket breaks into sections, then the shuttle breaks off completely and that's all you've got left. That's just for orbiting. If you want to go land on another planet, or moon, you have to get back off, which requires more spent equipment (or would on Mars, anyway).

So basically, a private company would have to do 1 of 2 things: 1) Put up with the cost of losing equipment with every expedition or 2) find a way to make space travel feasible without losing much if any equipment.

As things currently stand, the private sector would have to find some way to get people to pay them, with rides to the moon or whatever, and charge megabucks for it, just to cover expenses.

If a company did undertake such a thing, it might revolutionize methods of space travel and streamline the process, but it's not likely to happen soon.

Companies like Boeing are looking into Atmospheric skimmers as passenger planes. Not quite a rocket, but close. They'd fly up high enough to actually "skim" the atmosphere, and speeds could quite quickly get ultra-fast, for global travel in a fraction of the time.

But even this sort of thing is a long way away from being commercialized, and that would just be the first step in a long process. Space Stations for refueling might come next. Then the station could be outfitted for passengers to get onto, probably with food and drink to buy (this is a company out to make money, after all) and it would be like a stop-over.

so yeah, depending on how long the U.S. lasts as a superpower, Space travel might start becoming more commonplace, but it's going to be after most of us are dead and gone, imo.