Missions to the planets

[FourWheelDrift]

I've been watching a series on the Discovery channel about missions and future missions to the planets, with the usual problems of how to launch something from Earth with enough supplies to sustain a 6 month/3 years or more mission to Mars or further out to other planets.

Why are they still talking about problems of launching missions from Earth? The moon would be a better place to launch from with a lower gravity or better still from orbit itself. We need to be thinking ahead, it's over 50 years since man launched an object into space from Earth things have changed in every aspect of space exploration apart from the actual method of getting there, via a big rocket with everything attached to it.

That got me thinking, if a mission to Mars will last approx between 130-260 days travel plus time in orbit/landing and back you will need something substantial. Something that has been proven to sustain life for a long period and provide the space to store supplies, energy, space for the astronauts to move around in and landing equipment. So, if a planned mission might be in 10-30 years time what is to stop us putting engines on the ISS and flying that to Mars. We could send rockets from earth with supplies if needed.

Does the ISS have a limited working life span like Skylab or could it be used? If not could it be used to provide a place in orbit from which to construct a craft big enough to make the voyage, launching to Mars from orbit rather than Earth?

[Simpo Two]

Yes, but it won't happen in the forseeable future. No money, no public enthusiasm, still starving in Africa etc etc (and always be).

[FourWheelDrift]

It won't take as much money though as a new build spacecraft if they use the ISS. At the end of it's operational use it is going to either be ejected out into space, dismantled or burnt up on re-entry. The 10 previous smaller space stations that have re-entered orbit possibly falling on civilian areas the much larger ISS doing the same could be a little worrying. A final fling as the life boat/orbiter base of a future Mission to Mars will be useful.

Besides in the not too distant future we are going to have to start moving out for resources, the helium-3 rich gas giants will be a future target of energy sources and Jupiter's Moon Callisto is a good possibility for colonisation and base for the helium-3 mining operation.

[tank slapper]

FourWheelDrift said:

It won't take as much money though as a new build spacecraft if they use the ISS. At the end of it's operational use it is going to either be ejected out into space, dismantled or burnt up on re-entry. The 10 previous smaller space stations that have re-entered orbit possibly falling on civilian areas the much larger ISS doing the same could be a little worrying. A final fling as the life boat/orbiter base of a future Mission to Mars will be useful.

Besides in the not too distant future we are going to have to start moving out for resources, the helium-3 rich gas giants will be a future target of energy sources and Jupiter's Moon Callisto is a good possibility for colonisation and base for the helium-3 mining operation.

The ISS was not designed as an interplanetary spacecraft. It would most likely require extensive modifications for it to be able to be accelerated by engines to leave Earth's orbit. As it is designed to effectively be in a static orbit, the structure won't have been designed to cope the that kind of stress.

[grumbledoak]

Oh Gods, not the moonbase thing again.

If we actually want to do this. If we actually want to send those resources into space in preparation for that trip then the single stupidest thing we could do with them is to dump them back down a different gravity well.

[goldblum]

It won't happen for quite some time I'm afraid.No point going to Mars just because it's reachable! Any other planets out of our Solar System are so far away

that a journey to them is pointless until nearly-as-fast-as-the-speed-of-light travel is invented.And even then it would take many,many years to reach such a planet.

[Simpo Two]

goldblum said:

No point going to Mars just because it's reachable!

The same goes for the Americas, the South Pole, the North Pole, Everest and many others places. I see the Moon, Mars and beyond as a natural extension of this. 'Because it is there' (Mallory) works very well for defining human endeavour; Kennedy quoted it in his famous 'We choose to do these things and go to the other places because they are hard' speech.

But this time the will is lacking and civilisation and natural evolution is going into reverse. Rather than look outwards and explore, we look inwards and do Facebook.

The most likely candidate for a Mars trip IMHO is China; they have the resources, the people will cheer when they are told to cheer, and they will do it for national pride just like the US and USSR went for the moon. But the West? A busted flush I'm afraid.

Edited by Simpo Two on Saturday 8th January 20:13

[goldblum]

Simpo Two said:

goldblum said:

No point going to Mars just because it's reachable!

The same goes for the Americas, the South Pole, the North Pole, Everest and many others places. I see the Moon, Mars and beyond as a natural extension of this. 'Because it is there' (Mallory) works very well for defining human endeavour; Kennedy quoted it in his famous 'We choose to do these things and go to the other places because they are hard' speech.

But this time the will is lacking and civilisation and natural evolution is going into reverse. Rather than look outwards and explore, we look inwards and do Facebook.

The most likely candidate for a Mars trip IMHO is China; they have the resources, the people will cheer when they are told to cheer, and they will do it for national pride just like the US and USSR went for the moon. But the West? A busted flush I'm afraid.

Edited by Simpo Two on Saturday 8th January 20:13

I agree with most of what you say,after all if the human race is to survive our Suns' demise we must seek to colonise other planets..however we have several

million years to do this,and noone seems to think it worthwhile to spend several billion on a manned returnable flight to Mars for little practical reason.

Shame really.

[Simpo Two]

PW said:

there are plenty of very hard problems to to solve on Earth that would be a much better use of resources and be more inspirational to humanity as a whole than sending people to do a relatively poor job of looking at rocks in space simply to fulfil a few decades of sci-fi fantasies.

It's rather more than fulfilling sci-fi fantasies - it is exploration - but you could argue that all human endeavour is trying to fulfil a fantasy, whether it's going to Mars, biulding a boat or beating the Ozzies at cricket.

If we have to wait until all problems on Earth are solved before we can explore space, then clearly we will never do it because there will always be problems on Earth. There were lots of problems on Earth in 1492, 1909, 1912 and 1969, but sometimes you have to realise that there will ALWAYS be problems on Earth, even if we give ALL our money to poor people, and we need to get on and do something more interesting, constructive and productive.

Million of years ago we came down from the trees, learned to walk upright and then set off to explore the world. We did it because the genes that nature evolved for us want us to explore, to find out what is round the next corner. We still have those genes, but they are now mostly reserved for exploring Tescos.

[tank slapper]

PW said:

So long as the research & exploration is being done, I don't see the difference it makes between humans doing it in person or by proxy - I imagine most of the work in terms of analysis and discovery would be done on Earth anyway.

Human exploration isn't about efficiency. Can a probe tell you what it feels like to walk on Mars? Can a probe draw meaning from being further away from any other humans than it has ever been possible to be? etc.

[Zad]

Unfortunately the ISS is in entirely the wrong orbit to either act as a staging post or to be used to fly directly to Mars. Similarly, the Moon is not that far away from the Earth in terms of it's gravity well. You would not only have to escape the Moon's gravity but the remainder of the Earth's too.

I would think that any Mars mission would be assembled from relatively simple modules in the correct orbit, with an expeditionary crew populating it shortly before departure. Resources may well be sent ahead to Mars orbit way ahead of any expedition (lander module, food, extra medicine, air scrubbers for the return to earth).

I think China has a long long way to go, even with the political will. They are currently relying a lot on old Russian technology which, even at its peak, never got as far as a human lunar landing.

[tank slapper]

Zad said:

I think China has a long long way to go, even with the political will. They are currently relying a lot on old Russian technology which, even at its peak, never got as far as a human lunar landing.

Space technology is something the Russians are pretty good at - especially their engines. US Atlas launches have been using a Russian engine for some time, and they are more powerful and fuel efficient than the US engined version.

[Pigeon]

We need to sort out space elevators first so we can launch stuff without using bleeding ridiculous amounts of energy.

[Eric Mc]

Venus is a far more difficult proposition than Mars. The conditions on the surface are just too horrendous for any artefacts, manned or unmaned, to survive for long (as has already been proven).

Mars is far more do-able - and there is far more to getting humans onto its surface than just flag planting. Up to now, we have relied on robots for our Mars exploration and they have done a very good job. However, they do seem to offer tantalising glimpses of what MAY be going on on the planet but are too slow, weak and feeble to be able to really dig the dirt and get "stuck in".

What Spirit and Opportunity have done in 7 years, a manned team with a decent rover and supply base on the surface could have done in a month - as well as lots of extra stuff that the rovers are incapable of.

As far as Mars are concerned, within 10 years robots will have done everything they can on Mars and any further exploration of the planet MUST be done by boots on the ground and shovels in the boot.

And as an update, NASA have not been able to contact Spirit over the past few weeks so it does look like it may have expired. Opportunity is still performing well.

[Simpo Two]

PW said:

I think a lot of people have built up the expectation that space exploration consists of people waving cheerily at each other on the surface of Mars because that is what all of the predictions of the last 50 years have been illustrated with. That is the fantasy I'm talking about.

Sometimes fantasy is more fun than drudgery. More fuel tax Sir?

PW said:

Are the exponential increases in costs & complexity worth it for a picture of a man on Mars, rather than a robot?

There are excellent reasons for sending humans instead of robots, described in full by Robery Zubrin in his fascinating book 'Mars on Earth': www.amazon.co.uk/Mars-Earth-Robert-Zubrin/dp/15854... It also details all the various options for the best way to get there. Humans travel faster, see more stuff more quickly, have brains and make better decisions, for starters.

I agree that sending a human to Mars doesn't make 'sense' any more than it made 'sense' to send one to the Moon. But what is the point in sending a robot? If we are being sensible, then it would be more sensible to spend the money, as you suggest, fixing up Earth, than sending a robot to Mars to dig up a teaspoonful of soil and possibly not definitely probably maybe find no signs of life.

Simpo Two said:

If we have to wait until all problems on Earth are solved before we can explore space, then clearly we will never do it because there will always be problems on Earth.

PW said:

We don't have to wait, we are already doing quite a good job of exploring space.

We've taken some nice photos of planets, at a cost of many billions of dollars.

PW said:

The issue is whether spending exponentially more money on it so that a handful of people out of 6 billion+ can look at something in person rather than on screen is worth it.

You're really not getting this 'exploration/pushing the frontiers of the human race' thing... I think we will have to disagree. The world is a money-go-round; the money paid to the rocket scientists and all the other tens of thousands of people involved will go back into the economy. The money has not gone, it is simply moved from one place to another. But in a democracy the people have to be behind it, and after 30 years of increasing introvertion and 'look at the starving Africans' news items they're not interested. And that is why we will go precisely nowhere.

PW said:

Technology has come such a long way, even in the last 10 years, and the fantasy will become reality eventually.

We had sufficient technology in the 1980s. That's not the problem, what's lacking is the will to do it. Martin Luther King didn't say 'I have a fantasy'; he said 'I have a dream'. Same thing, different spin. World peace and riches for all is a fantasy/dream; getting to Mars is a practical reality.

PW said:

I just think that insisting that space exploration has to be done with people in space ships is currently too much of a compromise, and would do more harm than good as other research would be cut to fund it.

That's right; there will always be people dying of disease, illness and poverty. But the biggest single problem facing humanity is population, and nobody's stopped to wonder what will happen to the population and the Earth's resources if everybody lives to be 100. Disease, illness and poverty are a fact of the human condition and always will be, and the sooner we come to terms with it the sooner we can go forwards not backwards.

Edited by Simpo Two on Sunday 9th January 10:22

[croyde]

My children always look at me non-plussed when I say that I watched a man walk on the moon when I was 7. They can't figure out that if that is true why are there not cities on the Moon and colonies on Mars.

I wonder that too.

[Eric Mc]

PW - there is more to "return" from human endeavour than just monetary or even scientific "return".

There is also inspiration.

Humans are inspired by watching other humans. We can't help it - it's in our genes. Watching a robot achieve something, no matter how well it does its task, will never inspire the public in the same way.

Kennedy knew that.

[Simpo Two]

Eric Mc said:

Humans are inspired by watching other humans.

Indeed, but all they see now is 'The X-Factor', and grab a hairbrush to sing into

Nope, the world has changed since 1969, that's for sure. In terms of achievement I think the 20th century will be the definitve century for mankind; I know the 21st is young yet but all I see is 'apps' and other stuff that looks whizzy and is fun to play with but doesn't really do anything useful. My neighbour showed me her iPad today - you can hold it up to the stars and see the stars.

[jmorgan]

As I understand it they were aiming for the moon before Kennedy, he just gave them a nudge and impetus and I think set the need that got the funding and maybe if he had lived might have carried less weight.

[Eric Mc]

jmorgan said:

As I understand it they were aiming for the moon before Kennedy, he just gave them a nudge and impetus and I think set the need that got the funding and maybe if he had lived might have carried less weight.

The Germans were aiming at the moon in 1942.

What Kennedy did was give their ambitions the green light. He also motivated the American public and the Senate and Congress to support the effort.

Edited by Eric Mc on Sunday 9th January 22:27