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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

My wife asked "Why is this a big deal?", so I gave her a link to Handmer's 2021 explanation: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.

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Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct would have got "flags and footprints" on Mars without needing something like Starship. He worked on a version of SLS in 1989 in Martin Marietta that would have cost $1B and been ready in the second half of the 90s and would be retiring soon after many successful flight to Mars (and to the Moon), but instead we got SLS and Orion so we need Starship to get anything done.

The Mars Direct book is worth reading not only for things like transport and mission design but also a wealth of other good ideas about how to “live off the land” when we get there too. Truly worth reading for anyone remotely interested in space exploration

How does this differ from his other book The Case For Kats?

The Case for Mars is the book about Mars Direct

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars

Can recommend the book as well - its still not that dated and provides a very good overview of how not just a real missing to Mars, but also a sustainable settlement might look like. :)

Typo?

Didn't Von Braun have a plan too? Nuclear rockets or something.

The difference is that Mars Direct was a conservative plan, wrt rocket technology. It just used existing Shuttle parts and was meant to fly from Shuttle pads in between Shuttle flights. It didn't require developing anything new, that's why they were sure it would be cheap and fast, and flight rate would make it possible for it to be reliable. SLS is that idea turned into a jobs program.

Regulations are hard enough just using methane, I wouldn't want to be the one filling out the paperwork if that was a nuclear rocket.

Well I mean going to Mars isn't that hard per se, a fair few countries have done it... but carrying enough supplies and shielding to last people 2 years until the return trip and then actually getting back are way harder problems.

Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.

Getting to Mars is hard but not that hard compared to getting a large payload to Mars surface and back to Earth. Some people may assume Mars return is around twice as hard but it's orders of magnitude harder. And that's before even contemplating doing so with a cargo of humans and the necessary tonnage for them to survive on Mars at least 26 months.

Only the US and China have landed successfully on Mars. China achieved this in 2021. Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.

Other countries have sent satellites to orbit around Mars, which is not the same thing.

> Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.

Pedant mode: the USSR did land softly on Mars, but the lander got caught in a dust storm and was not able to transmit back the data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 ).

The european Beagle 2 probe apparently survived as well, but failed to deploy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2

But other than that, yeah, there are two Schiaparelli craters now on Mars. :P

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM)

I think that the number of countries reaching Mars (lander or orbiter) is in single digits and thus when talking about how hard it is to reach Mars and then come back, both of the scenarios kind of hold similar weights.

That seems like way too long an article for a non-enthusiast.

good point. we're geeks and do this kind of thing to each other. among normal people it might be rude.

she got me a while back with ink solvents. Monks may have been more illuminated making those pretty manuscripts than we appreciated.

If you toss it into Google’s NotebookLM, it’ll probably produce a much more accessible version of the blog that’s succinct and easier to parse in a few minutes.

That’s exactly what I did, and it seemed to do a good job of hitting the main points in about 13 minutes (which is much quicker than how long it would take a slow reader like me read this article).

I’m sure it still didn’t do the article justice, though.

Going to Mars is relatively easy compared to setting up a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars, which will be thousands of times harder. Many people don't understand the scale and scope of the biosphere services the Earth provides to humans free of charge, though, and forget that little of that exists on Mars, other than gravity.

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