This is a very good article.
It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. Yes, a big rocket is necessary prerequisite for Mars. No, it is not the only problem you need to solve.
And also having worked with the reality of human spaceflight operations, we are just not ready yet to send a spacecraft into deep space for months on end. It's easy to throw out blithe statements that we "just need a big spaceship", or we'll use ion drives or some other such tech, but the reality is way more messy than that. We just aren't ready yet and we won't be for some time.
The large rocket adddresses basically all the problems.
Time between resupply? Well, you can just take a bunch of resupply missions with you. Most stuff is packed ahead of time, except fresh veggies and fruits, but deep freezers can keep the nutritional value of those nearly as well as being fresh.
Redundancy/reliability? Bring the spare pool with you instead of keeping it on the surface for resupply flights. Bring two different systems.
Long duration life support? Enough mass allows you to avoid it all together if you like. This still has not sunk in to most of the fairly educated people who opine on this topic. Simple life support systems are VERY reliable, and the advantage of advanced life support systems is they reduce mass. If you don’t need the mass reduction, you don’t need the advanced life support.
Far from medical care? Small crew sizes are a mass constraint. More mass means you can afford large crews with dedicated medical personnel. And the equipment to go allow with it.
Also applies to radiation shielding (mass) and even partial gravity (centrifugal gravity is well known as a replacement but for some inexplicable reason is avoided… and yea, even short arm centrifuge is useful and could be used on the surface… the disorienting effects are actually manageable, and while in space, a tether can be used to enable long arm centrifugal gravity with little Coriolis effect).
Transit times can also be reduced significantly with refueling. 80-120 day transits are feasible, not just the most efficient 150-210 day transits for long stay. The surface of Mars also has significant radiation shielding in spite of the thin atmosphere. The Mars rover Curiosity measures the same radiation equivalent on Mars’s surface as on ISS today. Mars rover Perseverance also demonstrated production of unlimited oxygen from the Martian CO2 atmosphere using electricity. Regolith could also be used to enhance radiation shielding. This is before discussing water mining (and even that can be done without touching regolith, just the air using the WAVAR technique… useful for crew consumption although this method doesn’t scale up to producing enough for propellant very well).
There is no a single hazard or obstacle to a Mars mission that isn’t at least partially mitigated by having a lot more mass capability, ie a big and cheap reusable rocket (capable of landing on Mars and aerobraking).
Well there is the "one-way trip" version which takes out some risk but trades the risk of losing 4 astronauts for the risk of losing 400 or more.
Since it's not plausible that you could bring anything back from Mars that would be worth enough to make colonization practical from the perspective of Earth, Mars colonists would always have to assume that the last rocket that was launched is the last that will arrive. From their point of view, they'd want to be able to manufacture absolutely everything locally as soon as possible.
It's one thing to say "we can make unlimited oxygen from the soil never mind the atmosphere", it's another to find a source of nitrogen or other inert gas that makes it possible to live in an atmosphere that doesn't make everything into a firetrap. It's one thing to spin the kind of science fiction that Gerard K. O'Neill did, but his disciple Eric Drexler realized just how bad the problem of 'advanced manufacturing' is and went off to follow his own El Dorado, writing a fascinating book [1] about a class of systems that 'just don't work' [2]
Not to say that the goal of "a population of 10,000 people being able to make everything that 8,000,000,000 can make" is unattainable, even if we can get it down to an advanced industrial base being supported by 10,000,000 people it would be a game-changer here on Earth. I can see paths there, but it's by no means a bird in the hand.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-P-K-Eric-Drexler/dp/04715...
[2] https://latecomermag.com/article/what-happened-to-molecular-...
The atmosphere of Mars is 3% nitrogen, so nitrogen can be extracted just from the atmosphere.
And I agree 10,000 is far too small for self sustaining settlement. A million is the minimum. Even 10 million would be a challenge.
It would probably be smarter to launch multiple payloads than have everything in one big payload, a fire can take out the primary and redundant supplies for example.
That said, throwing more money and gear against the problem will likely be the way to go. Besides, it doesn't actually have to be done all in one go, if the vision of SpaceX is that of mass production, they can launch a whole chain of Spaceship sized payloads towards Mars years before a human crew is sent that way, giving them supplies and whatnot on the way, in orbit, and on the surface. That'll require a lot of planning and automation though.
SpaceX has always mentioned sending multiple ships at once for redundancy, starting with uncrewed precursors sending supplies ahead of time.
This is irrelevant and completely ignores the OP. We've had rockets capable of going to Mars since the 60s. More rockets do not solve the problem. Cheaper rockets do not solve the problem. Please read the article.
Please read my comment. More mass makes solving virtually every challenge of Mars missions far, far easier.
Biggest problems are microgravity, radiation and lack of redundancies of various kinds. All are solvable by adding payloads.
The article doesn't really lay out any particularly difficult, let alone insurmountable, problems. In fact we even had plans to make it Mars before 1980 in the 60s drawn up by the exact same man who got us to the Moon. The reason we're not a massively multiplanetary species already is simply because of politics. Nixon defacto cancelled the human space program in 1972. After that we had to wait for the economy to develop to the point that private entrepreneurs could viably send us back to the stars, and that's where we are today.
Had we maintained the political will though there's no real reason we wouldn't have had a colony on Mars decades ago.
You haven't read the article have you? So far it looks like your comments suggest the answer is just FAFO. That certainly will be interesting.
Which flight-qualified life support systems have this reliability? This is a hope, not a fact.
I wonder why my comment got downvoted? I thought it was pretty thoughtful and addressed the comment and article’s claims pretty directly.
We've had a spacecraft in orbit around Earth for a quarter century with many astronauts having years of experience up there, including long duration stays of up to about a year. The idea that we can't do space with duration is silly.
Right, and that station is in LEO and getting resupplied pretty frequently.
We do not have any examples of space orne and isolated systems supporting human life for months, especially beyond the magnetosphere.
IMO.
They know darn well that we're simply not ready to sail into deep space. Radiation shielding, orbital manufacturing, computer autonomy, peaceful nuclear use, etc. Lots of needed hypothetical technologies, or requisite trust and social stability that allows for the use of those technologies are missing. They couldn't even get to work on it in some of domains.
We in the public all knew about that wall by the 1980s: the anime Mobile Suit Gundam(1979) literally begins with a space habitat declaring independence and creating a Bay of Sydney in Australia by gassing and throwing down a resisting habitat with a reverse swing-by at the back of the Moon. It's all overblown plot for a work of fiction, but also something everyone knows will happen eventually that no one has response strategies for.
So as the immediate "path forward", NASA put up a boathouse next to a small lake near the ocean under the pretense that long-term researches of effects of lakewater on human body are to be conducted, using surplus Russian cargo ships. We know what happens if we did row into the ocean with the boats we have or can launch from Earth, we die from radiation. They're not conducting researches, they're just trying to keep the boat makers alive until we sort out the trust problem needed to work on the work to follow.
Not a lot had changed on that front in the past few decades, other than that the aforementioned weak trust had started collapsing very recently. No way the world is going to trust the US with NERVAs and Lunar shipyards under the current circumstance.
We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft…
We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech. We had only barely launched an astronaut on a suborbital flight at that time! And yet 7 years later…
On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong.
I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.
> We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft…
The track record for successfully landing on Mars isn't that awesome:
> Historically, counting all missions by all countries, there has been about a 50% success rate at Mars — and the odds of successfully landing on Mars are only about 1 in 3.
> We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech
When JFK made the speech, it was in the middle if the cold war and there was a realistic fear that the "capitalist way if life" could be beaten by command economics of the Soviet Union in cutting edge science and rocketry, justifying the huge amounts invested in the space race. What is the impetus now? We're all about government efficiency in cutting the social-safety nets, scientific research, but we'll carve out a Mars mission "because it's hard"?
I'm sure this question has been addressed already, but why not try a 1-year moon base first? With a hot standby ready to either rescue them or drop a brand new habitat.
Not to mention launching to Mars from the moon is easier (in some respects, not all).
Missions to Mars are mostly planned with in-orbit refueling, so launching from the Moon would not be easier. The Moon in general is also a rather harsh mistress. You have 2 week long nights with absolutely brutal extremes of heat and cold ranging from -133C at night to 121C during the day, no atmosphere whatsoever, a fraction of the gravity of Mars, regular bombardment with meteorites and so on.
A Moon base will be a far harsher place than a Mars base. Mars is bizarrely similar to Earth - nearly the same length of day/night, similar axial tilt so similar seasonal patterns, nearly the exact same land area, and even calm weather. Notably the 'raging dust storm' in "The Martian" that was used to set up the crisis for the movie was one of the few things that was intentionally faked. The low atmospheric pressure on Mars means even the most brutal dust storm would feel like a slight breeze at most. It's also telling when you need to fake something to create a crisis, in an otherwise very hard sci-fi book!
There's nothing Mars analog at the Moon we can't or haven't already learned at the ISS.
This is exactly what NASA has had on its timeline since the Obama era ("Constellation"). Trump #1 didn't like the slow timeframe (get to the moon faster - "Artemis"). Current plan from Trump/Elon ("let's scrap the space station and the moon and go to Mars ASAP") sounds like an even more accelerated abandonment.
A big rocket is probably the biggest obvious hurdle. What are other people doing to get us to mars that is better than musk's approach?
No, the biggest hurdle is having astronauts survive the journey (health and successful landing/departure of Mars). It would be over 3 years in space to round trip to Mars with current tech. We haven't had an astronaut in space continuously over ~1 year...the body suffers tremendously in a low gravity environment and you would have to handle SO many side effects and redundancies in life support etc.
No, the big rocket is the easy bit which has been done many times before.
Designing a mission involving 1000 days in space with no prospect of resupply is the hard bit. And it's the likes of ESA and NASA that have visibly been spending money on research and testing for that bit, not the very successful private launch vehicle supplier and LEO constellation operator.
[flagged]
> It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context.
This is just the latest version of The Music Man and Marge vs. the Monorail.
Musk is serious about getting rich but not about going to Mars. It's always been a ploy to trick naive tech nerds into sacrificing themselves for the goal of "saving the world".
Tesla is a perfect example of this. A low-cost no-frills electric car would do a lot more for the environment than the vehicles produced by Tesla, which are luxury-priced and continue to (falsely) promise "Full Self Driving". The market is obvious: well-off tech nerds who are made to feel good about themselves that their luxury purchase, with cool technology, is "saving the Earth". (A similar strategy is used by Apple, by the way. Apple convinces people that buying a new iPhone every year or few years is "carbon neutral" and that it's somehow ok to eschew device repairability, upgradability, user battery replacement, etc.) We're told that the plan was to sell cheaper Teslas "later". It's always later. Yet other auto manufacturers have produced cheaper electric vehicles without the self-driving crap, and still for Tesla it's "later". So Musk has $44 billion to spend on Twitter but not on taking lower margins on Tesla vehicles?
We're told now, by Musk, that the biggest barrier to the Mars project is not, say, the gravity on Mars, or the radiation, but rather "the woke mind virus". Uh huh. Con man.
I'm not denying Musk's accomplishments, any more than I'm denying that Trump managed to get himself elected POTUS twice. But they're both con men, and their real goals—power, self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement—have never been the same as what they tell to their followers. They're surely among the best con men on the planet. It feels like all of the top con men are coming together now for the big heist, like Ocean's Eleven.
For sure; as the article points out, a viable trip to Mars requires a ton of investments yet, but Musk is currently helping dismantle NASA and the ISS, probably with the intent of sending more high value contracts to SpaceX.
Any stage in making a mars trip viable is a multi-billion dollar project. Actually arriving on or around mars has no value in itself other than the achievement and some science, but the runup will possibly make SpaceX the wealthiest company in the world. Or at least pull tens, hundreds of billions out of the US economy.
> Tesla is a perfect example of this. A low-cost no-frills electric car would do a lot more for the environment than the vehicles produced by Tesla, which are luxury-priced and continue to (falsely) promise "Full Self Driving".
Even getting all cars to be hybrids would be a huge win (either parallel or series / range-extended).`
Have you tried the latest version of FSD. I recently got a Tesla with it and it is about at the level of someone who has been driving for a few months. Has made one or two non-accident mistakes over the last few months but nothing serious. Sort of a dangerous uncanny valley I have to be careful of and not just forget I need to pay attention still (it tracks your eyes to make sure you look at the road most of the time but you can still zone out if you are not careful).
The proof will be robotaxis in Austin this June. I hope to be able to send my Tesla out to be an Uber to earn money when I sleep sometime late this year or next. Time will tell but we do have re-usable first stages and Starlink already and it is pretty great.
Maybe Musk has no interest in getting humans to Mars, but if this con man builds a rocket that gets cost to orbit in the $10/kg, con me some more please.
I don't see any problem in companies making huge profit. We live in a free market there is always an opening for new competitor to offer something at low price point that can be repaired. Nobody is stopping anybody to start such a company.
The reason nobody is able to compete because it takes lot of capital to bring new technology in market. If you cannot hire the best people you will not get the best technology. And no engineer wants to work at a company at pays less.
More profit buffers company from random market events.
We live in a capitalist society. Tesla/Apple are just a by product of the system.
Also, whatever Elon says is should be taken with a grain of salt. He is a salesmen. Hyping stuff up so that people buy.
Just to play devil's advocate, Isn't he getting the ball rolling? Put aside his unrealistic timelines, at least he's trying to solve the rocketry part of the equation. I feel like this extreme hatred is unwarranted.
I think this quote sums up the monumental difficulties nicely:
You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.
> The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery.
It just doesn't make sense to me to send humans. Exhaust the science collection of robots first.
It doesn't make sense to send humans except many humans want to go. Those humans are working on the project to go to Mars, not send robots to Mars. We can do both of course.
I would like people to start a civilization on Mars. I would like to go to Mars. I will pay for the privilege to do so or see it happen for othera. Maybe it will. There are many people like me.
I think people are more enthusiastic about robots than justifiable, because they see things like the Atlas robot and imagine that's the future. In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes, or in all probability would in 50 more.
The fundamental problem is that moving parts break. This results in things like rovers being exceptionally conservative in both their design and behavior, out of necessity. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 7 limited activations, which then took a team of scientists 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.
Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also, broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse.
Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.
----------
Beyond all of this, manned spaceflight is inspiring, extremely inspiring. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes. It'd be nice to live in a world where kids don't aspire to be friggin streamers when they grow up.
In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes
We can't be so sure. The probes have discovered that Mars has no channels and vegetation. That water is uncommon (then discovered that it is still there in some quantity). They found out precise atmospheric composition, mapped out all major surface features, observed the climate over decades. They discovered perchlorate toxicity of the soil for humans, something that would have been a nasty surprise to a manned crew.
Am not opposed to Mars expeditions in principle, it's an exciting thought. But I just can't see humans contributing all that much on the odd few landings, with a high chance of contaminating whatever traces of life there could be.
>The fundamental problem is that moving parts break.
So do human bodies, and the extensive life support systems they would depend on in space, which I think was the theme, more than anything, of this particular article.
The only unique think I can personally add here that we're probably a lot more comfortable with high failure rates for machines than even low rates of failure for humans.
This seems to be a problem with rocket/lander technology resulting in a ~900kg weight limit on Curiosity.
According to Internet searches, Starship can bright 100 tons to Mars surface.
A common large Earth backhoe seem to weight 20 tons, so with Starship you can just ship one and it will be capable of driving at normal speeds (up to 100km/h), excavating for meters and not centimeters, etc.
(obviously it would need adaptations since diesel engines need air that isn't present on Mars and EV batteries might have problems with the cold, but it would be a similar weight magnitude)
Big part of the problem is how big of a hurdle it is to actually send a robot to Mars. I imagine that once we have a cheap and reliable platform to reach the surface, we could iterate the robots much faster.
If you had a budget for one human mission, or a dozen new robots every two years, which one would you consider more beneficial?
> In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes
Robots will make a lot more progress in the next decades than humans will.
Also, it if takes us 50 years to send humans to Mars vs sending a constant stream of improving robots now, then robots win.
I’m not an AGI believer, but I think the time horizon for AGI robots on Mars might actually be shorter than the one for humans on Mars.
Yes, well, maybe logically speaking that would be true. Practically speaking hardly anyone blinks an eye when 'society' daily sends young (mostly) men into harm's way whether that be by employing them in known dangerous professions such as logging (etc.) or by sending them to war. According to the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, more than 526,000 people die each year because of the violence associated with armed conflict and large- and small-scale criminality [1] while the world just keeps on turning. Nobody would even blink an eye if that number changed to 525.000 per year by putting dangerous criminals behind bars and keeping them there or by eradicating some terrorist group somewhere nor would they loose sleep if it changed to 527.000 per year after some conflict somewhere flared up again. Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site. Seen in that light it makes a lot of sense to choose 1000 volunteers out of the millions who would show up if asked to go on a mission to Mars, success not at all guaranteed and quite likely to be a one-way trip for the foreseeable future. Mars has been explored by a multitude of probes and rovers so sending the next one, no matter how advanced, will not cause much of a stir. Sending 1000 people to Mars with the intent of establishing an outpost will 'rock the world'. If successful (which is not at all a given) it would be one of the greatest achievements of our species while a successful robot mission would just be another tick on the list.
[1] https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/world-develo...
>Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site
starting anything by throwing out the value human life seems like a bad direction.
I think the person you're responding to had a solid point, but he derailed it with his own examples. It's not about "throwing out the value of human life" but appreciating that risk is something that, in many endeavors, is going to remain relatively high even if you make every effort to minimize it.
When we went to the Moon, the obituary for the astronauts was written before they even took off. And the astronauts themselves felt they had somewhere from a 50% to 70% chance of success. Everybody was well aware of the extreme risks, but they still voluntarily participated, because they felt the achievement was worth the risk. And indeed those brave men inspired an entire generation to science and achieved what many believe was still the greatest achievement in humanity's entire history.
The first missions to Mars will always be high risk, because the fundamental issue is that you're always going to be doing a bunch of things that no other human ever has. There's just so many unknown unknowns there that we're going end up getting surprised by something. So all we can do is make sure we have highly capable people and try to prepare as well as we can. But in the end, even when you work to minimize risk as much as you possibly can, that mission will always qualify as 'risky.'
the reasons a person does something are important, because those reasons influence every decision that goes into doing that thing. the difference between the perspectives of "yes, we go into this knowing it is dangerous and that the challenge may be insurmountable, but we believe the potential rewards are worth that risk" vs "lives aren't actually worth much so why not spend them because we'll just waste them somewhere else anyways" is a gulf.
Conversely humans are absurdly bad at statistics - i.e. "an astronaut feels he has a 50 to 70% chance of success"...isn't a real prediction. It isn't based on any failure analysis.
The actual failure analysis and engineering was substantially more confident, because otherwise why go? 50% is a coin-flip, but those odds were already proven wrong by the missions before Apollo 11 anyway (since there was more then 1).
You're doing some improv here based on your intuition when history has a way of surprising us. So what was the "actual" failure analysis and risk percent? It didn't exist. "Mathematical risk analysis was used in Apollo, but it gave unacceptably pessimistic results and was discontinued." [1]
Of course there were working assessments internally and they generally put the figure at about 50%. That figure is from Gene Krantz's excellent book "Failure Is Not an Option." The reason you go is because you cannot find any other practical way to significantly reduce the risk, and are willing to accept the risk you end up with.
Also I feel you're somewhat denigrating the astronauts with your comment by saying their estimations weren't "real". These weren't just adrenaline junkies looking for a wild ride - they were extreme intellectual outliers with higher degrees in aerospace engineering and extensive backgrounds in the development and application/flight of all sorts of aerospace systems. Like that paper also mentions, "The only possible explanation for the astonishing success [of the Apollo Program] – no losses in space and on time – was that every participant at every level in every area far exceeded the norm of human capabilities."
[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...
The budget and general public interest will be 1000x greater if humans are sent.
“Robots explore Mars” is a daily news highlight.
“First humans land on Mars” is a global historical event.
Humans are extraordinary machines.
We are self-healing, regenerating, low-power, versatile, autonomous, and most of us have a pretty decent array of sensors built-in, along with some communications equipment that's capable of interpreting the signals from our sensors and transmitting that information to other humans in a remarkable variety of ways. All of these are approximate and relative of course, if someone replies with e.g., "but actually we're not as low power as...", it will be easy to ignore.
Specialized machines can do things humans can't, of course. No single human could have survived as long in the Martian environment as any of the rovers have.
But nobody has yet designed a machine that can do all the things humans can do.
Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck.
So, yes, from an engineering point of view, building new robots that can do things and shipping them to Mars to do those things presents a lot of very interesting technical challenges to solve. It's all endless puzzles and little unsung feats of science and engineering -- assuming there is a country left with both the will and the resources and the talent to pursue such things.
But from a human exploration perspective -- our instinctive drive, or compulsion, or whatever it is, that has spread our species across the entire planet -- no machine will ever quite satisfy the desire to have that experience with the sensors we were born with.
My enthusiasm for a human mission to Mars has waned quite a bit in the last few years, largely owing to its most vocal advocate. Still, all the same, I think we should acknowledge that robots are poor substitutes for geologists.
We should never have sent humans to Antarctica. We should have relied on binoculars from ships and maybe some blimps with cameras, right? I mean, what can a human possibly accomplish that a machine can't.
Also, we didn't "send" them, the early explorers and bases were done by people who wanted to go and do research there. We have lots of people who want to go to Mars to do research or who want very much to benefit from the research humans can do better on Mars than current robots.
In the spirit of xkcd 1232[1]...
What's the timeline on "exhausting all the science collection abilities of robots?" Ten years? Fifteen? There are a lot of potential future robot abilities...
If that's the case then what is the point?
If you think robots should do everything then you might as well retire the human race. Why even bother to live. Why explore the stars when you can get a robot to do it for you?
Don't miss part 1 (2023) for context.
https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
Seems like the most conservative approach would be to send the return vehicle first, empty. Once it's landed safely on Mars and all systems look good, it would be reasonable to send the human crew in a 2nd vehicle?
The mission plan has always involved sending a series of unmanned ships first. This is not only to deploy supplies and other necessities ahead of time, but to make sure we can actually safely land. People are kind of taking that latter part for granted because of all SpaceX has achieved, but it will itself be a historic event. We've never landed anything on Mars except tiny little rovers generally less than a ton each. And here we're talking about landing a rocket with a payload that will ideally be in the hundreds of tons, let alone the mass of the rocket itself!
I had the same thought, but this has no effect on necessary delta-V. In terms of risk, I suspect it's already baked in to his analysis at some level. The risk comes from human-time-on-planet or time-in-space, which having a return vehicle doesn't change.
Would love to see a (robotic) sample return mission, pick up some of the piles of specimens from one of the rovers.
Sounds potentially horrific to test with humans:
> able to communicate home by radio, but forced by unalterable cycles of nature to wait months or years for a rescue ship.
Eh, we've done it before. Read up on Magellan's circumnavigation, the colonization of Australia or the Shackleton era of Antarctic exploration.
Of course, the difference is that compared to the conditions that await on Mars, a roaring blizzard on Antarctica is a balmy spring day. The air may be cold but at least it's breathable.
An interesting and fun read along these lines that examines many aspects of colonizing Mars, is A City On Mars, by the Weinersmiths
Unfortunately, in spite of a lot of good material in it, it’s also deeply flawed.
The premise of the article is not completely correct.
Here's a mission profile created by NASA [1] that gets you to Mars quickly (185 days), lets you stay there for 30 days, then gets you back to Earth quickly (250 days). The departure date is 7-Apr-2033.
[1] https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE...
Aluminum is a poor material choice for thick radiation shielding, since it produces lots of secondary radiation and it's inefficient due to its high atomic mass. Polyethylene, which is nice and hydrogen-rich, is widely understood to be superior.
An aluminum hull is nice because it does double duty, but you don't need to make it thicker than the structure requires just for radiation purposes. Instead you would add internal shielding. It's also smart to use food (and the resulting waste) and other consumables as shielding, since you need to carry that mass anyway.
I think you misunderstood a diagram; grams of Al per square centimeter is a standardized unit of shielding in the literature, not an engineering choice.
Water is a big one. Missions to Mars will be carrying tons of it, and it's an absolutely excellent radiation shield.
I'm picturing that the safe way forward is to send a 1000 day duration mission to LEO which would remain autonomous except in case of critical failure. Probably a series of them.
The article was very misleading there. The astronauts will only be in 0g for several months, at most. After that they'll be on Mars with its 0.3g which will be much more similar to Earth. Valery Polyakov [1] stayed in space for 438 days which is dramatically longer than any sort of normal transit period to or from Mars. He not only suffered 0 major issues from such a stay, but even briefly walked on Earth immediately after landing precisely to demonstrate that he would be fit to work on Mars even after that sort of time period.
There were never any efforts to surpass that stay because it's completely unnecessary.
During the second world war the British not so famously (it's not like it's something you brag about) spent a lot of money and effort building extremely heavy tanks or assault guns designed to help a spearhead a breach of the Siegfried line. They turned out to be mostly unnecessary due to a combination of factors that can be roughly summed up as "quantity has a quality all its own" and the projects were steadily cancelled as the war in Europe wound down.
It's likely that some of these big unknown problems will similarly evaporate or prove to be easily solved once we actually do stuff like put humans in deep space ad on the moon for serious chunks of time.
a variable not covered: mental well being on the long voyage.
That's where a larger group helps versus the 3 men on Apollo, or 4 people for Artemis. Having a larger pool of personal will ease a lot of social friction. It's also likely that a laser comms connection will be readily available, that is a large part of why starlink developed laser link between satellites.
I expect before people go that SpaceX will put a small constellation of starlink satellites in orbit of mars. I could also see them putting a bunch of probes on a starship and having them separate in martian orbit, landing at candidate sites. The combination of the 2 will lead to a lot of valuable data to decide where humans will land first.
Around mars it's likely the satellites will be in a higher orbit, but there's no internet needing low latency there either, at least not at first. They could be a basis for a mars positioning system. If a lower orbit is used they could potentially use synthetic aperture radar to get high resolution scans of the surface. It's probable that many starships will already be waiting on the surface by the time humans make the trek out there. Presumably loaded with food, equipment parts etc... For how quickly the ships are fabricated we aren't looking at a scenario where ships are in short supply.
I reluctantly upvoted this for the wealth of scientific/engineering knowledge it contains despite strongly disagreeing with some of its conclusions:
--
In recent years, there’s been a remarkable division in space exploration. On one side of the divide are missions like Curiosity, James Webb, Gaia, or Euclid that are making new discoveries by the day. These projects have clearly defined goals and a formidable record of discovery.
On the other side, there is the International Space Station and the now twenty-year old effort to return Americans to the moon. These projects have no purpose other than perpetuating a human presence in space, and they eat through half the country’s space budget with nothing to show for it. Forget even Mars—we are further from landing on the Moon today than we were in 1965.
In going to Mars, we have a choice about which side of this ledger to be on. We can go aggressively explore the planet with robots, benefiting from an ongoing revolution in automation and software to launch ever more capable missions to the places most likely to harbor life.
Or we can stay on the treadmill we’ve been on for forty years, slowly building up the capacity to land human beings on the safest possible piece of Martian real estate, where they will leave behind a plaque and a flag. But we can’t do both.
--
1. SpaceX/Starship lower the cost of human space exploration by possibly two orders of magnitude over the Apollo/Space-Shuttle era
2. We can increase the amount of resources allocated to space exploration.
For both of these reasons, we absolutely can pursue both tracks.
I remained neutral on it since I also thought it was an interesting and clearly well researched article, but I think it leaned a bit too heavily on some somewhat inappropriate analogs to things like like with the ISS. It's a deteriorating old station where astronauts need to constantly prepare for orbital reboosts, receiving cargo, running commercial experiments, literally plugging holes more recently, and so on. This doesn't really translate meaningfully to the responsibilities on an interplanetary mission on new hardware.
Similarly alot of his stuff about microgravity just handwaves away the fact that a lot of the mission will be spent in 0.3g. And, in terms of overall effects on the body 0.3g will almost certainly end up being closer to 1g than 0g. It'll make it much easier to do things like exercise and all the "normal" physics of things would be much closer to the environment we all evolved in, than in 0g where everything just gets super funky. In fact I wonder about the viability of simply wearing body weights while on Mars, something that obviously would not work in 0g.
The radiation stuff has also been pretty well researched and isn't likely to be a show-stopper, especially with normal measures for protection like using the water supplies as a shield.
Good point, we don't have to exactly follow the "astronauts in a small tin can, where everything must work flawlessly" way. With Starship (or its future iteration/successor) we can:
- assemble a quite large interplanetary craft in orbit, with plenty of redundancy in HW and supplies
- drop 50 tons of cargo on Mars beforehand: food (and/or food-growing necessities - packaged soil, hydroponic equipment?), medical supplies, etc.; so that in case of problems, astronauts can survive on Mars for years if need be
napkin for ion drive powered by solar - tech available today (and nuclear as the power source for the ion drive instead of the solar - tomorrow for Mars and beyond) - looks much better than chemical even for Mars. As SpaceX already using ion drives on Starlinks, and the SpaceX will be the one going to Mars, i'd expect that it will be ion drive.
Solar electric propulsion has great specific impulse [i.e., efficient use of propellant] but very low thrust. You're forever spiraling away from and then down into gravity wells.
It's terrific for cargo, but not viable for crews.
The author puts a Mars mission into a realistic perspective but also, I think there are people who are wired differently than they are.
I'm not a test pilot but I'm a licensed pilot and I'd sign up for a Mars mission in a heartbeat, even if there was a 70% chance of success.
We send people under the ocean for years at a time to live on nuclear submarines in arguable more dangerous and isolated circumstances and they don't blink at the opportunity. To be the first person on another planet? What an incredible, fantastic opportunity. I feel like we will need to return to a place (As a society) where we accept risks that push the boundaries of the human race. Something we had a lot of in the 1960s but not a lot of today.
> years at a time
I don't think any single crew deployment reaches a year.
> more dangerous and isolated circumstances
I think Mars is massively more dangerous and isolated. A submarine can plausibly return to port or surface to breathable air. There is no such option on Mars. Nuclear submarines are much larger than spacecraft and have much more room for comfort options. They have a much larger crew, and the knowledge that this happens all the time from many nations must be of some comfort.
> I'd sign up for a Mars mission in a heartbeat, even if there was a 70% chance of success.
I am pretty sure that your confident self would think a few times before signing the NASA paperwork with this number.
It wasn't about pushing boundaries, it was about beating the USSR.
“ We send people under the ocean for years at a time to live on nuclear submarines in arguable more dangerous and isolated circumstance”
Mars is by orders of magnitude worse than living on a submarine.
> arguable more dangerous and isolated circumstances
I guess technically anything is arguable, but this seems absurd. Sure there's pressure and cold, but a submarine can hold 100+ people and surface in 10 minutes.
Mars is 10 months away with maybe 10 people. There's no surface. You can't scrub oxygen from the water, hell there's almost no water at all. You won't be crushed by pressure but you'll be bombarded by radiation.
[dead]
"The closest thing humanity has built to a Mars-bound spacecraft is the International Space Station."
Mariner, Viking, Odyssey, MRO, Maven, MEX, TGO, MER, Curiosity, Insight, Zhurong, Perseverance, Ingenuity all over there like HELLO!?
But yeah, I know they meant to say "crewed" ... and the rest of this article seems accurate.
Has there been discussions on who to send on a "man"ned mission? Apollo had height and weight limitations for an average male, and now that DEI is dead, I wonder if it's more prudent to proritize sending smaller people (really light women) because sexual dimorphism seems to be a thing in the military.
Women tend to be substantially more susceptible to radiation related issues. [1] In reality though I think the main issue (outside of competence/merit) will be making sure people stay psychologically sound being tens of millions of miles away from Earth, for years. So in that case I wouldn't be surprised if they end up prioritizing highly capable couples.
She would surely be an awesome astronaut candidate, if she were alive today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc%C3%ADa_Z%C3%A1rate