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Comment by jaaron | Hacker News Reader

Seeing just how risky the Curiosity landing was reminded me just how far away we are from landing on Mars. I now seriously doubt I'll see such a landing in the next 30-50 years.

And with respect to "we've already explored this planet, let's go to Mars" I'd offer the following: let's see someone successfully colonize the bottom of the ocean or antartica and then I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars.

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Operations in space tend to follow a pretty strict tradeoff between mass and complexity. The more mass you can throw at the problem the less complex the solutions you can come up with. In the case of the Curiosity rover the mass was constrained by the launch vehicle used (Atlas V 541) and they wanted to maximize the amount of payload dedicated to the rover systems, which resulted in the complex landing scheme. With a manned landing the system would be a lot more massive and generally far more straightforward.

With respect to the idea that we should colonize the bottom of the ocean first I'd say: why do we have to do only one or the other?

Landing the same rover using the same process on the moon would have been almost as difficult. The difficulty being in the skycrane assembly and not having the option of manual control. A manned mission would be landed more similarly to landing the Eagle on the moon, and would have the option of realtime manual landing. It wouldn't take 14 minutes for the crew to find out if it landed safely or not.

That's true, but don't forget that the skycrane was necessary because it's Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to be a problem, but thin enough that you can't just use parachutes, and the gravity is high enough that only lightweight things can use airbags. Skycrane seems great...but even it is not good for something as heavy as a manned landing. We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.

> We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.

yet. Always tack on "yet." ;)

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