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…
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.
The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.
Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it.
People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong.
Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.
The biggest problem is that people have really lost the ability to think big. There's always infinite reasons to not do something, and there will never be a perfect time. So at some point you simply have to choose to push forward. Like Kennedy put it:
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Talk about hyperbole.
The moon mission has been prepared for before that speech took place. It wasn’t just starting from scratch and hitting the moon in 7 years, instead the speech was more public disclosure of a deadline that looked achievable but would hit after his presidency (1960 + 8 being less than before the decade is out: 1970).
The biggest problem is we already did the easy stuff. Playing tag with the moon is unbelievably easier than a permanent moon base or landing on Mars and getting back to earth.
Saying we'd be on the Moon in 7 years was not something that looked achievable except to the most fanatical of enthusiasts. To the average layman it would have sounded no less impossible than me saying we'll have a man on Mars in 7 years from today. And landing on Mars in many ways will be much easier than the Moon. Not only is the terrain broadly more hospitable, but you have an atmosphere to enable aerobraking which simplifies both landing and braking and enables various options (like some sort of parachute staging or backup). The biggest and really only complexity with Mars is its distance. Outside of that it's easy mode.
That’s a meaningless yardstick here. People at NASA definitely thought hitting that target was achievable before the speech.
> Landing on Mars
Landing isn’t the issue. Get people there alive and having enough deltaV to get back is.
It was a mission they dedicated themselves to, and humans have this way of making things happen when we actually set our minds to tasks. A reality that's often been lost in modern times as we have mostly moved away from pursuing, let alone achieving, great things in the real world. One of the many reasons to get humans on Mars.
[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...
The Apollo missions got unbelievably lucky in that none catastrophically failed despite multiple close calls. However, if you’re willing to try multiple times the odds any mission being successful is much better than every mission being successful.
IE: Six missions landed on the moon. If they each had independent 50% odds then six heads is a long way from impossible ~1.6%, but at least 1 head is quite likely ~98.4%. I doubt we would have tried for a 6th mission after 5 failures in a row, but the point is definitions of success matter a great deal here.
Similarly failures improve odds of success in the future because you learn from mistakes and success means the system is functional eliminating some risks.
On that specific launch, which is another way of saying they believed the project had a very good chance of having someone walking on the moon. Failure there wouldn’t even mean people died, just that they didn’t walk on the moon and then safely get back on that mission.
Had the Apollo missions failed you would obviously be arguing, using the exact same data, that they 'knew they never had a chance.'
No, an earlier post argued that 6 successes doesn’t mean the odds of success on every mission was high. “Got unbelievably lucky” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130343
The exact opposite position after 6 failures would be that the odds were good that at least 1 mission would have succeeded.
Obviously, things aren’t actually completely independent, but 6 lunar landings could have successfully been completed with a huge range of different odds. 50% odds of success on the first launch isn’t inconsistent with 6 successful launches or 6 failures, it’s just not enough data to really narrow things down.
Again, I’m addressing the point “getting them there alive”. Unquestionably, we know how to get crew to Mars alive, and even for the full mission duration, radiation isn’t even in the top 10 of the hazards that could actually kill them during the mission. (It’s a long term hazard, comparable to lung cancer if you’re a cigarette smoker.)
Note that the magnetic field only deflects lower energy galactic cosmic rays which have a lower gyro radius than the real whoppers. The magnetic field is less important to overall radiation shielding than the earth’s atmosphere.
On a long-stay Mars mission, that adds up to 12-18 times the accumulated GCR exposure compared to a six-month ISS increment.
In fact, look at Table 2. It shows that at ISS, the dose from the SAA is about the same as the GCR dose, so by ignoring trapped radiation, you’re manipulating the result by a factor of 2.
It’s possible people spending significant time on the surface of mars would recover, but that’s more speculation than proven.
Going beyond that is not really meaningful since that's far longer than any normal transit to or from Mars, which is the immediate target.
Living on mars at 38% earths gravity is believed to make things worse over time, so no you can’t just consider transit times independently. On arrival they would likely be fine inside a habitat. But trying to walk around in an Apollo 11 era 180 lb pressure suit in 38% gravity would be nearly as strenuous as walking around on earth and we’d like them to be able to work not just take a few steps and sit down. It’s possible to reduce that weight, but needing to carry oxygen tanks means there’s quickly a tradeoff between lighter weight and less time outside.
Now, for an extremely brief touch Mars and come back while burning a huge amount of fuel to make a shorter trip sure they’ll survive. But start talking a 3 year mission and things don’t look good.
Back on Mars they'll be able to quickly regain their motor skills coordination, as well as strength/bone density. So it will be effectively equivalent to Earth in this regard - actually it will be even better than Earth because the reduced gravity will probably send the overall adjustment time down from a couple of days to a couple of hours, especially with a normal duration transit.
> stuck on the ISS for going on 9 months now
Stick right next to earth and all the medical care they would want on landing. That’s the difference they don’t need to be functional on earth.
> regain motor skills and coordinate
Meaning they’re nearly helpless for a significant period on landing. That’s a massive safety concern and limitation on mission profile.
> as well as strength/bone density
There’s serious concern around retaining let along regaining bone density on Mars. 38% g isn’t a well studied environment here but it’s a long way from earth and likely to result in significant bone loss up to a point. Meaning their trip back is now significantly more risky.
A hypothetical 500 day mars mission is ~1 Sv optimistically which is something like 5% fatal cancer risk. A 3 year mission you’re well above that even before considering solar storms etc.
I think many would sign up for a mars mission especially as treatment improves, but there’s only so much wiggle room here.
The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion exposure is that it has a different mechanism of damage, not captured by that paradigm.
With the current worldwide ageing demographics, it would have the added benefit of providing an awesome feat to inspire seniors across the world to not go gentle into that good night, showing old age should burn and rave at close of day.
> you’d be developing new technology all along the way
Aerospace does not work like this. Hardware does not evolve until launch, it is frozen in time to allow for testing and flight qualification for subsystems, and systems as a whole.
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.
People who don't normally follow space may be confused by recent things re: Starship because the media is being intentionally deceptive, as usual. These are not normal flights. They are purely experimental flights, mostly expected to fail, to gradually work the kinks out of the system. It's the difference between hitting compile and launching something to production.
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"?
Which political order are we in an existential battle against; Russian-style oligarchy or or Chinese-style state-controlled capitalism? It appears we're losing on both those fronts, any "space race" to Mars would further emphasize the point, AFAIAC.