Target Venus not Mars for first crewed mission to another planet, experts say | Hacker News Reader

Target Venus not Mars for first crewed mission to another planet, experts say

theguardian.com

62 pointsMrsPeaches63 comments

I've been wondering about the "experts say" part of a headline like this. Qualified people lending their opinion is an important piece of information to the context of the article, absolutely, but it also seems exclusive. It's not the opinion of the editorial board of The Guardian, however I also know for a fact that other "experts" would vehemently disagree. Would qualifying this as "some experts say" erode the confidence of the title and thus how sensational it is? Is it maybe implied in the framework of news titles that this is not a universally held opinion by "experts" so much as at least that of several?

Most likely the real reason is that articles with "experts say" in the headline performs much better than "some experts say" or "some experts wonder if".

The underlying reason for the higher CTR is that most readers want to engage with articles that are more certain than less and their inability to fill in the unstated uncertainty gets exploited.

I've come to the conclusion that "experts" is just a wildcard for journalists to quote random people. Of course every "expert" has to have some track record of the subject in question but there's no measure in qualification.

For instance having a track record of wrong predictions in specific economic questions doesn't seem to invalidate your status as an "expert". So what does? And what could an "expert" possible be if there are no usable criteria.

It’s part of the sea change that happened starting with social media but significantly accelerated in the 2010s. It hit foreign policy first, I think, but by now it’s a feature of reporting for basically everything.

> Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”[1]

Rhodes here is talking about geopolitics, but it extends to everything. So many news outlets don’t actually have many people with practical experience anymore, and so they call random people for quotes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-nov...

> The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.

And on twitter. It's pure cancer to journalism and "journalists" can't seem to help but do all their reporting from the comfort of their home browsing twitter for the "news" and takes all day. Honestly I think honest journalists should take an "Oath of No Twitter" to keep their jobs.

The jobs pay virtually nothing. This is the natural result of sucking all the revenue out of the fourth estate.

I don't get what the point is of a crewed flyby. The crew would just be cooped up in the craft the whole time with nothing to do except take measurements with instruments that could just as easily be done by a machine.

This isn't the Apollo era, we're pretty confident we can send spacecraft all over the solar system and keep humans alive in space for years.

There was, in fact, a plan in the Apollo Applications Program for a crewed Venus flyby, using the SIVB as a wet workshop for habitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby

It would essentially be an ISS mission with a few extra rocket burn stages and a different view.

Is a fully-assembled ISS capable of withholding torsional stress that would come from insertion burns?

Nobody is talking about doing an insertion

With a much different radiation environment.

> we're pretty confident we can […] keep humans alive in space for years

Are we? In outer space? Radiation, psychology/isolation, months away from any support in case of an emergency? My understanding is that there are a lot of open questions, and that even a mere fly-by mission would constitute a major new step in manned space flight.

Indeed, we should rather attempt sending such a ship in one piece to the moon first. Right now we would have problems actually assembling such a craft. Note how long and cost intensive it was to assemble a bigger space station.

Gateway program is such a baby step, assembling a base in moon orbit.

Ultimately, we would need an orbital facility to assemble bigger ships well without paying the immense costs of ultra heavy launches.

This is also why a moon base makes so much sense:

* short enough that radiation issues can be swerved.

* can build shielded moon bases (or dig them?) to protect people on the moon itself.

* can mine the resources for and build heavy, shielded ships on the moon itself and launch far more cheaply.

* can also build (on the moon) the shuttles needed to ferry people from earth orbit out to the moon, making it so that the only people exposed to any radiation at all are the first crew to arrive on the moon and stand up a moon base.

I'm not a super expect in space, but I'd argue yes. There is more radiation there, but we know how much and how to shield from it. The ISS does have an "escape module" descent craft allowing the crew to evacuate in a few minutes any time needed, but they've never had to use it yet. IMO that's a good argument that it isn't that big of a deal. Yes, it'll be a bit riskier for the crew in that there's no security blanket of a quick easy escape to Earth in the event of a real emergency, but well shit happens. I don't think there's anything going on as far as isolation that's really more severe than tons of other things that have already been done.

We have absolutely no experience shielding people from solar winds and cosmic radiation in any way that would be meaningful for an interplanetary journey. Even the ISS is benefiting from Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere.

We have a few vague ideas:

* Thick plating. (How? Not like we can launch it, so we'd have to build the space craft in space using materials mined from e.g the moon or asteroids)

* An artificial magnetosphere, which researchers are still doing feasibility studies on. But there'd be a litany of challenges there as well, such as figuring out how to design it so that we don't see deleterious effects on electronics or people.

Moon jaunts were short enough that it didn't matter, but anything interplanetary will need this challenge to be solved lest we want our explorers to suffer excruciatingly painful deaths.

A crewed flyby? What is the point of that? Colonizing the clouds of venus is a good idea eventually, but it's certainly not a viable first target.

Just like the moon, we did not attempt to land there on the first go-around. Neil Armstrong was on Apollo 11. Apollo 4-6 were unmanned launches, 7-9 were testing the hardware with humans, mostly with "free return" orbits where even if the engines didn't start again, they would land back on earth in about a week. Apollo 10 was a wet rehersal that did everything except land on the moon#, including "parking" in lunar orbit, then starting up the engines again and going back to earth; finally Apollo 11-17 actually were "boots on the ground"

A venus flyby would be similar to Apollo 10 where they would go to another body, and then do a free return fly-by, maybe with engine assist, and return back in a year. Regardless of if/when we go to mars, there will be at least one "free return" mission before they attempt future missions that have a "parking orbit" around mars.

Going to Venus would allow us to simulate a mars free return trip, but in only 1 year (which would mean for a mars-class ship, a minimum safety factor of 3 (really, six) for fuel, water, air, food, medical supplies etc), instead of a 3 year mission with only a safety factor of 2.

#Apollo 10 was functionally identical to Apollo 11, to the extent that the only difference was that they did not provide enough fuel on the lander/ascent module to return to lunar orbit, to deter Apollo 10 astronauts from "going rogue" and attempting a landing ahead of schedule

Also, for completeness sake, Apollo 1 crew died during testing in a fire; Gus Grissom, Edward H. White II, Roger B. Chaffee

> Going to Venus would allow us to simulate a mars free return trip, but in only 1 year (which would mean for a mars-class ship, a minimum safety factor of 3 (really, six) for fuel, water, air, food, medical supplies etc), instead of a 3 year mission with only a safety factor of 2.

Simulate what ? Sitting in place ? We can do that on earth orbit. Engines running for long time ? No need for people aboard for that.

I think space is one of those places where you can appeal to unknown unknowns being a major risk factor and everyone agrees. But I personally think that the better option is to just do all of this on the moon. Making a human-habitable base on the moon, to me, still makes the most sense for preparing for habitation on other worlds.

Avoiding the need to wait 26 months between launch windows certainly reduces the degree of difficulty. Going from "oh we wish we had X that we didn't think of" to having it is literally almost 3 years on Mars.

It's not to avoid the difficulty, it's to make iteration safer and easier. Good luck seeing what failed if the craft that failed is flying somewhere between earth and mars

For one, leaving the safety of Earth's magnetosphere. We haven't really ventured far enough for radiation to not be tempered by Earth's magnetic field, from what I understand. It would shorten the duration of radiation and help study the effects on astronauts.

So, go to moon. No real need to go to another planet just to irradiate some astronauts and in case shit hits the fan they have chance of surviving

Precisely the goal of Gateway, of which Artemis/SLS are pieces.

Interplanetary space is significantly different environment, compared to low earth orbit, for spacecraft and crews. The only knowledge we have of humans beyond the Van Allen Belts is from Apollo, for relatively short durations.

> Engines running for long time ?

Not with chemical rockets. Perhaps you meant "engines sitting idle for years in interplanetary space, and then restarting reliably".

Really depends on the mission profile. If you are refilling in space for a "short" burn, it could still be longest in human history.

The whole point of Apollo 10 was to be the dry run for Apollo 11.

Doing all of that with no actual plans to land seems silly.

Anyway, with no plans to dip to cloud level.

Actually landing people on Venus could only be a disastrous mistake.

This guy has clearly never worked on the operations side of a business

>finally Apollo 11-17 actually were "boots on the ground"<

Nitpick: Apollo 11, 12 and 14-17 were boots on the ground. 13 had no boots on the ground.

They had the boots, and meant to put them on the ground. But Fred Haise would have suffered more terribly.

Fully agree. If we're committing to multi-month crewed missions I think we should be planning for boots on the ground and setup of barebones support for long term habitation. In that situation you can send and land several loads of supplies in advance of the crewed mission, significantly improving chances of success. Landing the crew is risky but that's always going to be true, no many flybys you do.

> Colonizing the clouds of venus is a good idea eventually, but it's certainly not a viable first target.

Sure seems a _lot_ more interesting than Mars at least.

This was the original plan by Korolev and co, before the moon speech by JFK, and before the conditions on Venus became known. They wanted to figure out orbital assembly, and then circumnavigate Venus as the first step in the Solar System exploration. Hard to say how realistic it was, but modular orbital stations were an offshoot of that original vision, so it's been partially implemented.

Clickbait headline -- the proposal is for a flyby, not a landing.

Has anything that has landed on Venus survived for more than a "few" hours due to heat/pressure? Landing humans on Venus seems more of a very cruel and unusual death sentence rather than some sort of a viable science mission. Now, if I were on death row and they offered me the choice of needle, chair, firing rage, or land on Venus, well, I know which one I'd take!

Landing on Venus would be ridiculous.

However, Geoffrey Landis has (among others) proposed that we put an atmosphere-floating habitat "on" Venus. PDF: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20...

Abstract:

Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.

And, breathing air is buoyant.

N2 is only 13% of the atmosphere, but if my calculations are right, that means a very great deal more nitrogen than we have, just dissolved into a lot more air.

To terraform, release machines that crack CO2 in the clouds and drop diamonds. You release way too much oxygen, but that will bind to the surface minerals. Main thing is to keep the carbon from oxidizing again before you're ready.

Which is why <<I>> performed a flyby of the article and came directly to the comments.

“You’d be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission,” he said.

All of these "Not Mars" people always seem to fall into the same boat where they know there's zero point to sticking human beings and life support systems into an observation probe so they trot out this "it's good practice, guys!" horseshit. Scientific progress is not the point of putting the first set of boots on Mars any more than it was the reason for first climbing Everest. The point is to prove it can be done. After that you can quibble about the most efficient method of further human spaceflight development. It's like they're standing in the way of us learning to walk because they insist we figure out the best brand of shoe first.

Going to Mars will be among humanity's least revered achievements. There is nothing there.

The only plausibly valuable exports from Mars might be the engines that got your supplies there. With their bells cut off.

Among the least revered? You mean, below peanut butter and jelly in the same jar? If humanity is going to emerge out of the cradle, Mars will have to be the 2nd step. Right after Luna.

As we are out there exploring & homesteading, maybe we will realize what a gem the Earth truly is.

Gravity too low, too cold, weak sun, no air. Really, all Mars has is dirt, and that is corrosive. We could do much better building spinning cans to live in, out in orbit. Even Venus cloudtops would be a better place to camp than Mars.

Peanut butter reliably on the shelf certainly is a greater achievement than people on Mars would be, if we ever bother. When Elon quits hyping it, Mars will slip out of the collective consciousness.

How could first foot on an alien planet possibly not be a historic achievement?

The point is not and could never realistically be exports.

The point is to overcome the challenge and develop capability.

You can't learn how to live on another planet in silico

Until we've fully explored it, we actually can't know that.

Exploring Mars more means exploring other places less. Even means mitigating local environmental harm less.

With the advances in robotics and AI manned spaceflight may very well serve no scientific purpose at all. Machines can deal with the harshness of space better than any human crew.

We should seed Venus with microbs that consume amonia and the other chemicals on Venus, starting at least to make it habitable.

Why no stationary base on the moon?

Would you rather have a moon base or 10 probes exploring the rest of the solar system?

A moon base please.

Probes.

If I get any input, I would shave some part of the nearly trillion dollar US military budget and use some of that windfall to allow for both of the above options.

A moon base would make the probes mission a lot faster to develop and launch, in the long run.

How so?

By assembling parts of the probes and launching from there for example. It would require a lot of time initially, that's why I specified in the long run.

The hardest part in exploring our solar system is escaping Earth's gravity. Most of the fuel in our rockets and by extension, most of the rocket itself, exists to lift the actual spacecraft off the Earth.

If you can manufacture it on the Moon, you need a lot less rocket.

A crewed flyby is barely more ridiculous than a crewed landing.

Yea, because we need more harder problems to solve. /s

The title fails to mention that the experts in question were astrologists.

Not astrophysicists.

/jk

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