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Get Your Ass to Mars. And Also Other Planets [Manned Space Exploration]
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
You are a PLUSH PROSPECTIVE ASTRONAUT with GOOGLY EYES and QUESTIONABLE COMPETENCE. You dream of one day setting foot on DUNA MARS.
Alas, the THRIFTY GOVERNMENT has deemed it IRRESPONSIBLE to permit a PLUSH PROSPECTIVE ASTRONAUT with GOOGLY EYES and QUESTIONABLE COMPETENCE to lead a manned planetary exploration mission. You are deemed UNFIT as an ASTRONAUT due to 'SAFETY CONCERNS' and 'PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS'.
Unsatisfied with this rebuke, you sign on as a VOLUNTEER TEST PILOT for the privately owned ROCKOMAX CORPORATION which has promised to fulfill yours dreams of setting foot on DUNA MARS.
Obvious exits are EXPLOSION, MISPLACED PARACHUTE STAGING and OMG THIS FLIGHT IS ORBITAL
What is manned space exploration?
As one might guess, manned space exploration is the act of sending space vehicles with a human crew payload & life support out to poke around on worlds that are not Earth. Given that we have multiple active international space programs, it's surprising how little manned space exploration we've done: basically, just the moon thus far, and only a handful of times. The overwhelming majority of our solar system has being explored via robotic proxies.
Do we really need manned missions anyway? What are the pros / cons of manned missions vs just sending rovers?
Alright; this is a pretty hot topic among both amateur space enthusiasts (like myself) and serious business space experts. I will try to provide some semblance of a neutral overview of either school of thought, but my bias is going to bleed into this:
As the landmark ED-209 v. Kinney case demonstrates, robots are merciless killing machines waiting for the slightest excuse to eradicate humanity tough & can remain reliably autonomous without requiring social queues, while humans are disgustingly meaty, fragile & prone to going bonkers. We don't need to provide rovers with oxygen, food, water, companionship or entertainment, and that removes a huge amount of cost from a prospective mission's design. We also don't have to bring our rovers home, while manned missions are expected to be round-trips - a round-trip is hugely complicated and expensive in comparison to just getting a disposable vehicle to a destination.
However! Robots on a disposable platform just can't do some really important, fundamental stuff than humans on a round-trip can. They can't do substantial digging or drilling; they can't recover materials to bring back home for a detailed study; they can't scale complex terrain; they move incredibly slowly in comparison to a human; they take long periods of time to store & transmit data (whereas a human can report initial findings on the ground immediately - we'd only have to wait out the transmission lag); etc. Basically, think of all the stuff you can do that an RC car cannot do. It's a lot of stuff.
Also, if we do ever want to get serious about deep space travel and/or exo-Earth colonization, manned exploration will be how we get our feet wet - allow us to better understand the challenges faced by prospective colonists and how to address those challenges.
I heard we are going to Mars maybe? Sometime? Perhaps?
We have been 'maybe going to Mars' in terms of manned missions for decades, unfortunately. Programs have been proposed and then scrapped on NASA's end over and over in a perpetual, "I am POTUS now, so fuck your stupid programs [Other Party]," cycle, because Democracy apparently isn't very good for space exploration. On the flip side, Russian & Chinese space programs have largely been flexed only as a means to find new military applications, because Dictatorships are also apparently not so great for space exploration. We may need to turn our governments over to merciless cold robots who murder humans for sport to finally get to Mars.
In fairness, heading to Mars - while the sensible 'next step' in manned exploration - is a huge technical problem. We need a fuel source that is sufficient to not only get there and back, but to get a lander onto the surface and then back up into an orbit. And this ain't like the moon; you have to fight through an atmosphere and much more substantial gravitational footprint to get your landing vehicle off of Mars. Proposed systems include what's known as an Orion propulsion system (the vehicle's drive would be an intertial plate against which fission bombs are detonated, with the explosions channeled out of an exhaust port), long term trips where maybe we have astronauts in a solar wind or ion drive propelled ship for 10+ years with a big cache of consumables & air instead of a big drive system, a 'reverse space elevator' that lowers & raises crews from the Martian surface...
Whatever a given enthusiast's pet idea is, it's way bigger and more expensive than anything we've done yet in space. And it would be tough to do substantial flight testing or any kind of shakedown cruise for a ship built for a Martian round-trip because of the time & scale involved.
Even if we got started tomorrow, it's pretty unlikely we'd actually get to Mars in the lifetime of anyone capable of reading & understanding this post.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't start tomorrow! We have to start sometime, afterall (well, unless you don't like space. In which case F U )
...What about a manned not-round-trip? I've heard people talk about that.
And now I will sigh.
Sigh.
Yes, there are quite a few proponents of a one-way trip. This alleviates a really substantial amount of cost & complexity from a proposed mission. But... it's one way. From a practical standpoint, we lose a lot of the supposed gain of a manned mission, since we don't get to bring anything home. From an ethics standpoint, we're cutting out an engineering & cost problem by sending people out to big spherical deserts where they will die when they run out of supplies (...more realistically, when they euthanize themselves with whatever method we send along for the trip). That seems really wrong to me, and I dislike the idea that this is where our space programs should take us.
What other places can we maybe go to?
There are plans on the table right now for assembling a re-visit to the moon, and maybe figure out if we can build a vehicle pit stop of sorts there to assist with further solar system exploration. There are also plans to try and land on nearby asteroids.
Way into the future, there are big questions that demand answers in the moon systems of Jupiter and Saturn; in particular, we ought to try and find out what is happening on the surface of Europa and Titan, where we have every reason to think that a lot of carbon-based activity of sorts is happening. Sexy pink and/or blue aliens? We won't know until we have a human there to do some drilling and take photos.
Way, way, waaaaayyyyy omg so far into the future, we might be able to terraform Mars by breeding some hardcore algae and planting it in the poles, and probably bombarding the atmosphere with CFCs. And maybe trying to wake up some of the volcanoes or something with a doomsday weapon. Then we would have TWO planets that we can fill with people that hate each other and/or wish they were living on the other planet because at least then they wouldn't have to listen to Obama all the damn time! Yay!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFsSo, space.
Wanna go?
With Love and Courage
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I'll keep my ass right here on the ground, tyvm.
But other people, y'know.
More power to 'em.
But space travel is perfectly save and dare I say even luxurious in some res--
--okay whatever.
It's pretty good. Do recommend. Can't wait for the movie.
Makes it hit home pretty hard just how freaking inhospitable a place Mars is, though.
There's a scene in the book where the guy is lamenting the fact that he can't use a Sharpie outside because the freaking ink would boil away before he could write anything.
I have the book, but i refuse to read even a single word of it until I've watched the film.
A one-way trip seems the most effective for a first manned shot. You don't even lose the ability to send samples back. Getting a few buckets of rock back is far easier than getting a person.
The key issue, as I think I've said the last time we had this thread, is surgical. I'm struggling to pull up numbers right now, but if you have a flight crew of six and we assume it's a round trip, then in those three years the probability of somebody needing some kind of surgery becomes really high.
One part of the issue is that you need to make sure you have some surgical expertise aboard, which means you're diluting the more relevant skill set or bloating the team. Minimal training with expertise support doesn't work due to the communication lag averaging at 15minutes one-way.
The other part is that surgery in low-gravity causes all kind of problems. Blood wicks out across surfaces, etc.
It's an interesting problem about team number and skill set that I don't think has quite been solved yet.
Also somehow entertain them for 3 years, which is probably not at all easy to do on really limited power supplies & with limited space.
I'm still not into ditching people on Mars to Die For Science, though.
Well NASA just started a new experiment to stick a six man team into a habitat for a year. Although, if you look at the crew, it seems it's less about ensuring it's possible and understand the psychology and more about habitat ergonomics. There's a guy in there doing a PhD in architecture. I mean, I'm sure it's useful for him, but he could gather all the same data from the outside. It would be far more useful to select viable astronaut-types.
Or possibly areonauts.
Mars One has proved there's no shortage of volunteers for that at all. I wouldn't worry. Plus, in the best case it provides a useful pressure to send them equipment to be as self-sustaining as possible, while firing occasional resupplies.
Just load up everything in their Steam backlogs ahead of time.
I mean, by the time such an expedition would take place they could all have phones with the entirety of re-released games from 1985-2005 on them, requiring very little solar power to run.
If not I guess you could probably fit a ton of books on them as well? Videos and recent games would be a bad idea though, because power consumption would be noticeable.
I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the book, but
The reason that robots can't do substantial digging or drilling isn't a flaw in the idea of a robot, it's due to the weight constraints of sending materials into space. Heavy duty drilling equipment is going to weigh a significant amount, and NASA is keeping costs down by using very highly engineered, lightweight robots. It will be viable sooner to send drilling probes than it will be to send a crew to do the drilling, because the weight consideration has to be overcome in either case.
I also disagree on the point about material recovery and complex terrain scaling. If we could add more weight to the robots we send, and these were goals of the mission, these are solvable problems that can be addressed far sooner than solving the manned mission issues.
On data transmittal, you can't compare scientific readings to human first impressions. A human traveling to Mars would also bring scientific equipment and have computational limitations such that if you compare sending back the same data sets, there will be no difference. And I don't think the human impression will yield valuable scientific data immediately, as suggested. The benefit to having a human on site is to direct the various instruments he has with him and possibly improve the quality of the data being sent back. Of course, it's also possible that he points the instruments to the wrong stuff, and we miss out on something important we'd otherwise have discovered.
Comparing stuff like the Curiosity Rover to an RC car is disingenuous at best. If we felt we needed to send a probe to an area with rougher terrain, we would design an appropriate probe such as a multi-legged unit designed to climb over such terrain.
I also disagree with the statement regarding travel speed. A human will be limited in travel to whatever habitat they bring with them, so unless the habitat is vehicle mounted, they will be limited to a very small portion of Mars. A robot may be slower in a drag race, but in the long run it can travel much further due to having no tether and having a much longer operational period. Opportunity, for example, has already traveled about 42.5 kilometers (26.4 miles).
Also, Mars One is a scam.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Nope. For me, reading the book first almost always ruins the enjoyment of the film - whereas watching the film first enhances the reading of the book.
So.
Gotta wait.
>.>
Those are shock fronts, where air compressed by the space vehicle is superheated & creates an almost blowtorch-like vortex.
For visual simplicity, KSP has the shock front entirely enveloping the vehicle; in reality, the front is actually several meters ahead of the vehicle. I dunno if we've ever created a significant shock front by going into orbit; mostly they happen as a result of aerobraking.
So yes, I am absolutely pro manned space flight, and if they allowed chubby civilians to be on a test flight to Mars you better BELIEVE I'd volunteer.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
You have never been more ready.
Your entire life thus far lived has all led to this moment.
You press SPACE BAR.
You EXPLODE.
You wish you had ADDED MORE STRUTS.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
These days things are getting more interesting due to more active private involvement, including the 800-pound gorilla in the room: SpaceX. Elon Musk is dead-set on developing and deploying everything needed to start a colony on Mars, completely without government involvement if need be. That whole Internet Satellites thing? That's the current plan on how to pay for it all: 3 billion customers at around $10 a month nets you more than a third of a trillion dollars gross per year, and that's overkill for NASA projections on manned mission costs by about a factor of 10. This Wait But Why: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars goes into some of this in depth (and I mean in depth; the audio version is more than three hours long; feel free to just skip to the SpaceX parts). If things continue lining up for SpaceX as they have so far, then Musk is setting up the first East India Company for interplanetary endeavors at previously unfathomable scales.
If they can start consistently nailing their landings - and they are getting close - we will have viable tech for getting really reusable rocket engines. This decreases the cost of getting into orbit by some crazy factor of like 60 or something.
Waiting for the eventual results of the NASA inquest as to why the first manned mission to Mars went liberate tutemet ex inferis to show that someone had Bad Rats in their library
Nobody is seriously proposing building a Project Orion-style vehicle for getting to Mars. Every mission design uses the same style of chemical rockets we used to go to the moon, only with more launches for the return vehicles, cargo modules, etc. Equally ridiculous is the idea that this would somehow take more than a human lifetime, even if we started tomorrow. With sufficient motivation and direction (i.e. similar to what we had during the cold war) it's probably a ten year project (from start to the first launch, anyway). With some motivation and direction (and stability from one congress/presidential administration to the next), I'd WAG it at twice that; maybe 2.5 times. But no serious progress has been made so far because NASA's priorities and resources are split among tens of different projects. You'd need to either cancel a bunch of those and realign priorities enormously (and lose out on things like our recent discoveries on Ceres and Pluto) or substantially increase the agency's funding. Neither of those has happened, so the status quo is essentially 'fart around in LEO while waiting for a propulsion breakthrough' as far as manned spaceflight goes. And we're not even really trying to get that propulsion breakthrough, either. Fortunately for us, there's still a lot of useful science, and even more useful engineering, to be done in LEO.
Anyway, as long as we're fantasizing, we might as well do it realistically. Here's the DRM 5, courtesy of NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf
[Edit: by 'propulsion breakthrough' I mean some dramatically cheaper way of getting to orbit and possibly of getting around within the solar system, not some kind of warp drive. Fusion rockets, or a practical non-rocket spacelaunch setup, or something like that. So, 'new engineering', not 'new physics'.]
...But we couldn't realistically expect a crew to make the journey to Mars in something like the Apollo capsule, correct? And even if we did, you couldn't use a system like Apollo's lander to get off of Mars (if we assume a round-trip, anyway).
And I thought it was basically thrust-to-weight prohibitive to get to mars with conventional liquid fuel rockets?
The answer is you send a crew that's a little nuts to start with, which NASA does have some experience with. Astronauts don't seem to have quite ordinary psychology, particularly in high-stress environments.
On the topic of Mars Direct, there's actually been a reworking for the Falcon Heavy on paper since 2011. While it would be still more challenging as far as fitting people into a small space goes, you could buy all of the launches for less than half the price of a conventional Shuttle launch. Here's the writeup from 2011, you may need to enter the link into google to get past they paywall (there are also videos of Zubrin giving talks about this version of Mars Direct).
You mean "hey once you get over there, send back as much gold and stuff as you can"
They avoid spoilers, for the most part, but there are some minor ones in there. If you want the tl;dr, basically:
We didn't have robots then and even then most crew would not like an actual suicide mission (as opposed to simply risky)
The thing is, we knew we could probably grow food and breathe the air when we hit another landmass in a sailing ship (the question was just 'can we survive the voyage without killing each other?')
Whereas we know anybody sent to Mars can't grow food or breathe the air. So we'd have to constantly send resupplies, without a single resupply mission fucking up. One fuck-up, everybody on Mars has to euthanize themselves.
I just don't like it. I can't provide a particularly rational or reasoned argument why; I just don't think we should be so desperate to plant our feet elsewhere that we forego the act of actually getting people back home after they've departed.
What if we sent death row inmates and life sentence inmate volunteers and any prisoner who wanted to do it?
Mars could be space Australia/Georgia
...Well, my concern there is what if we then find ourselves in the middle of a conflict between parasitic organisms with a collective hive mind and a group of xenophobic hyper-tech'd telepaths?
Kado does not understand reference.