Orion... America and Europe's first step to Mars, launches Today!

[Tierbook]

They better not mine a precious metal the economic impact could be fatal like the goldshock in spain when they got a hyperinflation due to the gold looted in the new world.

But still an interesting thought.

If they find one it would likely be one of the REM's.... the ones that bankroll China.

[Skroe]

How do they plan on getting back from Mars ?

I'll summarize briefly:

Step 0: Send several smaller missions to land on Mars to start building the base for people to live on. This will require robots and remotely operated construction vehicles.

Step 1: Send an unmanned logistics vehicle to Mars (MLV), with approximately half the Mass of the ISS. It's major component will be the Mars descent / ascent vehicle. In some architectures, the MLV is docked with Phobos, a moon of Mars that is a captured asteroid, that's used as a logistics launch pad.

Step 2: Construct the Mars Crew Transit Vehicle (MCTV) in low orbit. Vehicle is 2/3rds the size of the ISS. Probably 6 SLS launches.

Step 3: Send a crew of 4 on Orion to the MCTV. The MCTV then departs Earth on a 6 month trip to Mars.

Step 4: MCTV enters Mars orbit. Crew disembark from it in Orion. Depending on the Mission Architecture, it either docks with Phobos or docks with the MLV.

Step 5: The crew use the Mars Descent /Ascent Vehicle, detach from the MLV, and land on Mars. The crew spends 2 years on the surface. The MDAV's engines are methane based and the crew produce it as a fuel on their base (essentially the vehicle lands having used its fuel to land and they spend 2 years making fuel to launch it).

Step 6: MDAV is refueled after 2 years. The crew of 4 use it to launch.

Step 7: the MDAV docks with the Mars Crew Transit Vehicle, which then disembarks and returns for Earth.


As you can see from this, there is a very good argument for a Mission to Mars being one-way. We should send astronauts as volunteers to go there to live and lay infrastructure there for future missions and MAYBE return one day, but probably not. It's a discussion the country should have. Mars is not the Moon, and over half the mission complexity of a Mars mission is in the return trip.

Making Mars returnable becomes a lot easier if Phobos becomes used as a logistics hub for vehicle refueling. But that will take many, many, many missions to do BEFORE even landing on Mars. It might be a better way to do it (and it's without our technical ability to go to Mars, orbit mars and land on Phobos... it is not in our technical capability to land things on Mars larger than 3 tons at the present). So it really depends when do you want to land on Mars: earlier at great expense, ealier at potential loss of life, or later at more sustainable expense, or later with a garanteed return trip.

My preference is all the magical "I word" infrastructure, and turn Phobos into a home away from home, well before we step foot on Mars. Sure we could go to Mars without it (as laid out above), but doing Phobos will make allow us to start having infrastructure building on Mars one day.

[Rukentuts]

Why would anyone got to the Moon anymore.Maybe in the future when we have the right tech and its relatively cheap.

Asteroid - I understand.

NASA hasn't lifted anyone off from another celestial body since Apollo 17.

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<Snip of the mission schedule>

So much for warp drive by the late 2060s, eh?

[Masark]

So much for warp drive by the late 2060s, eh?

Late 60s? It's supposed to be early 60s.

[rhandric]

Late 60s? It's supposed to be early 60s.

There were also supposed to be Eugenics Wars between 92 and 96

[Skroe]

NASA hasn't lifted anyone off from another celestial body since Apollo 17.

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So much for warp drive by the late 2060s, eh?

Yeah haha. Well the chief problem is logistics.

Elon Musk put it best like this a couple of weeks ago: let's say it takes 100,000 people to have a functioning Mars colony growing every year. Mars and Earth are only near enough to send people for a narrow window every 6 months. This means if you want to send 100,000 colonists a year, within that launch window, you would need to launch 1000 rockets with 100 people on them each with in that window.

For comparison, the world in 2014 will have launched about 84 rockets, manned and unmanned. The most number of people on a single launch ever is the Space Shuttle with 7.

Before we get there, we need to fix major infrastructure for those missions, here at home. For example, Mars will require, small, highly self-servicing nuclear reactors to power any base or nascent colony. We are not producing the uranium or plutonium in nearly enough quantity to do that. There needs to be several major technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and 3d printing.

We're on the right track in every way, especially where you think the world was thirty years ago. Honestly, the original plan to send Man to Mars in 1980 would have likely been a death sentence for that crew. Things considered required for such a mission right now weren't even dreamed of then, in our naivete.

If I had to guess, I'd say we spend most of the 2030s doing Mars Orbit and Phobos stuff, and the the first Mars landing Mission launches in 2039. I'd say the second Mars landing Mission launches in 2045. And then I'd say the first "Mars to Live, and Not round trip" mission happens in 2052 or so. And that by century's end we have a small colony of a few hundred people living on Mars.

Consdiering this is what the ISS looked like in 2001, I'd call that a century well spent.

[Rukentuts]

How far were you with possible Mars mission in 60s/70s/80s?

Farther than we are now.

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And what exactly back then they didnt have that wouldve either killed the crew or sabotaged the mission.

Knowledge of the long term effects of spaceflight, for one. Technology wasn't as advanced (think power, etc.) for two.

[Tradewind]

I didn't even know about this, this is kinda cool and lots of cool shit in this thread too!

What is happening here?!?

[Puremallace]

Sort of wish NASA had a direct funding option for their Mars project. I would send them 20$ a month. Right now my tax money is going towards bombing Arabs fighting a civil war.

[Skroe]

How far were you with possible Mars mission in 60s/70s/80s?

And what exactly back then they didnt have that wouldve either killed the crew or sabotaged the mission.

I'll answer this with some history to put in context.

Do you know how Earth is commonly referred to as the "Blue Planet"? I'm sure you've heard that before. Well it's also extremely prejudicial. You see, we know it like that, and most of our parents as well, but their parents (our grandparents) lived their youth and early middle age knowing of Earth as the "Green Planet". Prior to the first color orbital imagery in the early Space Age, popular imagination thought that if you looked at Earth from "the Heavens" (as it was called more often than space at that time), it's vegetation, not it's water, would be the planet's defining feature. Science has long known that Earth would appear blue from orbit, but the general public was ignorant of this fact until it starred them in the face. Calling Earth the "Green Planet" today sounds ridiculous.

Why is this relevant? Because the Presidents of the Early Space Age - Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon - new nothing and cared little about space outside of a particular political lense. Kennedy for example, was a New Deal Democrat. He thought in terms of families, jobs, social democracy and health care. His most famous speech may have been one about space, but recording and transcripts show that he did not understand it, and cared little about it, especially compared to his "New Frontier" initiative and concerns like the Cold War. Johnson, being from Texas, was far more sympathetic, but viewed the Space Program mostly as carrying the martyr Kennedy's great legacy. Nixon despised Space Exploration. He was distrustful of the liberalism of the universities NASA worked with and saw it (completely illogically given its broad bipartisan support) as a Democratic monument to Kennedy.

The truth of the 1960s and 1970s Space Program is that while associated with Presidents, the Presidents in question had the involvement level amounting to a few speeches and general assent to it. Even when NASA consumed a larger share of the budget than it does today (5% at the time I believe?) Vietnam, the Cold War or domestical political concerns ate up President's day to day focus, but beyond that, these were men who grew up with Earth as the "Green Planet" and really didn't understand what their science advisors were telling them.

The reason it worked though, was because of Congress. If Presidents allowed Apollo and the other programs at the highest level. the House and Senate made sure it happened. An alliance of republicans and Democrats in both chambers made sure of that. Fortuitously, powerful and senior members of both parties were in states or districts that hosted NASA facilities and quickly became allies of the program. They protected it's funding, despite the Vietnam War, and defended it post-Kennedy and from Nixon, as best they could. And moreover they were laying the groundwork for missions in the 1970s and 1980s as they saw it, namely a "Space Shuttle" for Low Earth Orbit Operations and a 1980 Mars Mission (more on that shortly).

The decline of NASA post Apollo is popularly associated with the fact that it was some sort of Cold War stunt and having beat the Russians, Americans and Congress didn't care. That's partially true. What really was the case was that in 1968, 1970 and 1972, those senior Congressmen and Senators who had defended NASA for the most part all lost reelection or died in short order. This left NASA with fewer powerful allies in Congress than it had ever had, and allowed Nixon to evicersate it in favor of the "cheaper" Shuttle.

Mars 1980 was a direct casualty of that. In the early 1970s NASA actually built a prototype nuclear thermal rocket called NERVA. It was tested and it was fired. This kind of engine will be required for any Mars Mission and in that year, it was planned for the Mars 1980 mission to utilize them. So even then, just under a decade out, NASA was having physical Mars-Mission hardware being built. But then it's Congressional sponsor, who defended it against cancellation year after year died, and Nixon gutted NERVA. The decay of the Apollo project post 1970 is stories exactly like this one.

I will say, we are closer today to Mars than then though, and here's why.

First, we didn't understand fundamental things about living in Space, or Mars in the 1970s. We didn't understand that planet, and what it would take to land in it's thin atmosphere (a very difficult problem) or live on it's surface that is bombarded with UV radiation. We probably had the technical means, as now, to send Astronauts there if we really had to. But we probably did not have then, as now, the capability to do it remotely safely or bring them home. Even something like landing on Mars... using a lunar style lander won't work. A capsule with retrorockets might not work in such a thin atmosphere. It will probably require some kind of large glider that slows itself down over half the planet. Problems like this weren't even imagined in the 1970s.

Now that said, 1970 did have the fully built and flight-ready and tested NERVA rocket engine. But that technology while not implemented, has been heavily researched again. Any Mars program will require it and it could be swiftly reproduced if need be. If we're to go to Mars in the late 2030s, we need to get started on this in the mid 2020s.

The biggest reason we're closer to Mars today than in 1972 is also in my view, the biggest reason the Orion / SLS detractors have everything wrong. In 1972, no one supported NASA in Congress. Today, NASA support is bipartisan, lead by powerful senior members of both parties, and iron clad. It's iron clad to the point that Democratic Senators and Congressmen have voted against the President's NASA budget proposal, every year, since he took office. The best thing that could happen to the space program, is for it to be run out of Congress, whose powerful leaders can serve for decades, rather than be associated with a single President's 4-8 year term. We have that today. In many ways the failure of the ISS to do anything useful really, the directionless leadership of NASA in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Constellation troubles in the mid-late 2000s, and Obama trying to turn NASA into a technology hub forced Congress to take control of NASA policy from the White House.

One of the common refrains of SLS / Orion detractors is that when a New President is elected everything will change, as it did under Obama, and Bush. Not this time. I think they have it all wrong. I think that Congressional Support for NASA is so strong, and it's general direction (even if they are unenthusastic about the Asteroid mission) so bipartisan and backed by such powerful people, that no matter who is President, the course will not change for NASA. If you want to go to Mars, a multi-decade affair, this is the most important development there is. And as evidence I submit to you: NASA's SLS/Orion budget has been increased far beyond even optimistic requests, every year since it started, even amidst sequestration and budget difficulties. And yet detractors are trying to convince us that the budget picture will get worse. It's nonsense.

So today was a great day, and we're closer to Mars than we've ever been because of it. We still have a long road ahead. In early 2018, we'll have the first version of the rocket that can take us there. This picture will be much clearer then.

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Sort of wish NASA had a direct funding option for their Mars project. I would send them 20$ a month. Right now my tax money is going towards bombing Arabs fighting a civil war.

NASA's problem isn't money, it's leadership. More money will not solve the issues challenging it. Today's success masks an unfortunate reality: NASA lives in a state of Civil War.

You have the Orion / SLS people, working on, enthusiastically, NASA's new space vehicle.

You have the Commercial Faction, who want to kill the above community and take all their money, convinced as if it's some sort of religion, that the only way to space goes through the commercial sector (as opposed to commercial and government doing two different things, which is what all reasonable people think).

You have the ISS faction, which sees itself becoming less relevant by the year and more challenged than ever to justify it's continuing existence given the ISS's bizarrely growing budget footprint but extremely meager rewards. This faction however, also supports a large community of NASA scientists, a powerful constituency. But given the chance, they would cancel Orion, and pretty much anything else, to protect the ISS (and thus their careers) through 2032 or beyond.

You have the Planetary Science Faction, which cries about how much money they get and always has been. And it's actually divided into: between the Mars Exploration Community, which demands every dime it can get and is essentially subsidized by NASA at this point regardless of the scientific merit, and on the other side "everybody else", who is frustrated they have to fight major wars to even get NASA to think about sending a probe or lander anywhere not Mars these days.

You also have the Space Science community, the great villains of the past 10 years, whose James Webb Space Telescope became the most mismanaged project in NASA history and has absolutely annihilated anything else Space Science is doing through mid next decade due to it's cost overruns. It got so bad that NASA directly took control of the JWST program from it's community, an unprecedented move. And despite this you know what they claim? 'We're being cut, America is abandoning its lead in space science". Why? Because these people stopped counting the JWST budget as their piece of the pie when it was removed from their control. In other words, these people are the worst of the worst turf battlers. Oh also, they'd love if there were no more manned space exploration too.

And lastly you have the Climate Change / Technology club clique. Normally marginal, they're empowered and led by a truly odious man named Doctor John Holdren who is Obama's Chief Scientific Advisor. Holdren's career focused on climate science, and he's made sure to push that, at the expense of everything else, in his tenure. The result has been attempts - blocked by Congress - to turn NASA into the Climate Change Agency (as opposed to the NOAA, where that research belongs) and get NASA only doing technology development. Why? Because he's inspired by silicon valley or some garbage like that.

More money will not solve this Civil War you see above. Strong leadership, firing dissenters and strong congressional mandates will. We have the latter in congress now, which has helped ratchet down the Civil War in the past year, as it has become apparent that Orion is not going away (the ISS lobby still needs to be put in it's place). NASA's current Administrator is the very definition of Worthless Obama Lackey that no one respects, and just like every other Department or Agency, the career managers of these centers and groups simply don't listen to.

The best change NASA could make would be to make it's Administrator a 10 year non-political post, like the director of the FBI. And then empower this individual to fire the people who make these failures possible. Not a single person lost their job when the JWST budget grew from $2 billion to $9.8 billion and fell behind schedule 6 years. Not a single person lost their job when the ISS community waged a guerrilla war against the Constellation program, right from the program lead's office apparently. Not a single person lost their job when the Mars Robotics Community skipped NASA leadership and went to Congress directly with their idea for a 2020 Mars rover (why? to keep the doors open until the government will pay for the more expensive Mars Sample Return next decade), in effect screwing the Titan Lander and Europa missions from submitting proposals (Europa will be approved anyway next year).

What NASA needs is not more money, but strong leadership and a firm hand. And it needs a legion of invested Congressmen and Senators (which it has).

[Trassk]

When you really think about it, getting a man made object to space, aside from being a truly remarkable feat, what crosses my mind is thinking how they overcome such limitations, the structure of the rocket being able to last in the rigors of outer space. Also bearing in mind whatever a shuttle is made from is limited by what we have on earth to make it from, and scientists can only calculate and test this in the limits they have to testing such material under strain.

It is still remarkable, and hope they manage to make it to mars, it would be a feat of mankind to see such a thing up close.

[imabanana]

Meanwhile, on Mars

[OzoAndIndi]

♫ Clap your hands if your name is on the data chip! *clap* *clap*

*clap* *clap*

Mine was, fellow traveler.