Mars is hard | Hacker News Reader

Mars is hard

spectrum.ieee.org

22 pointsTriinT33 comments

Frankly, I don't care if it is hard. Nothing worth doing is easy.

But it is important to note the magnitude of difficulty so you can understand where a particular goal fits in among the rest.

Getting into Earth's orbit is difficult. I imagine landing on Mars would be something like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more difficult.

I don't see why it'd be so hard to land on Mars. We've done it there with automated probes and we re-enter and land in atmosphere all the time right here on Earth already.

1) Those probes don't come back. I assume we'd have to try to get the human back to earth. That requires sending enough fuel with the ship for two launches, unless they can process fuel on Mars.

2) Manned space missions require a safety factor of 2, where unmanned missions have lower restrictions. So it might technically be more difficult to accomplish the same thing just with a human.

I think if you time it right getting from Mars to Earth actually isn't so bad since Earth is in a lower solar orbit than Mars. Think of it as a big de-orbit burn. Of course you'd want it to deposit you into Earth-orbit (perhaps after some aerobraking), hence the need for proper timing, but on the whole much easier than trying to enter the higher orbit of Mars. Two rocket scientists I asked confirm this, but asked me not to quote them on it, so I'm paraphrasing :). Also, Mars' lower gravity makes achieving escape velocity substantially easier than on Earth.

Of course, it's still a not insubstantial amount of fuel, but it's not quite as bad as duplicating the trip up to get back.

Personally, though, if we shipped up enough stuff to survive, I'd be cool with a one-way trip.

I remember afew years back talking with a friend who was working at NASA at the time (Peter the Rocket Scientist!), who told me about a internal NASA conference/talk he'd attended - the speaker outlined the order-of-magnitude increase in difficulty of making a manned Mars mission come back home, and asked the audience how many of them would volunteer to fly on a one way mission to Mars - apparently about half the room raised their hands...

The PR effect of manned one way missions would be interesting.

An expert believes it's not that hard: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713585

It's interesting to read both articles because of the contrasting perceptions of the challenges a manned mission to Mars would pose.

I like this article better... :)

The question is, is a human Mars mission worth doing? Wouldn't a series of missions building an infrastructure to use metal and water-rich asteroids do more to establish a permanent human presence in space?

Given a fixed amount of time and research money, what provides the best return for the next four decades?

It's pretty hard to quantify things like inspiration - and I personally think that's a huge argument in favor of going to Mars. There's also the insane technological advancement factor to consider. Apollo led to hundreds (if not thousands) of advances in all kinds of fields of technology. It's hard to put a price tag on that, too.

Can you name a dozen of those hundreds (if not thousands) of advances? If you can, try to identify those which wouldn't have happened without Apollo. The harsh truth is there aren't any.

We've tried the 'get something great as a result of spin-offs' route before. It disappoints every time. Why are people advocating it again with a human 'flags and footprints' Mars mission? Why don't we instead direct resources towards an inspiring goal which delivers something concrete?

Given the choice, I would much rather today have a permanent LEO infrastructure of a dozen privately funded Skylabs (from those same tried-and-true Saturn V rocket parts) and cis-lunar tugs rather than the 'spin off' soon-to-be-retired Goldberg contraption of Shuttle.

You could start here for a list of a few Apollo-era spinoffs: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm That doesn't take into account the raw knowledge/experiences/technologies that were transmitted between NASA and the various private companies and universities they worked with during that era which no doubt influenced some of those 20,000 institutions later in history.

As to proving if the same technologies or products would exist without Apollo - that's just stupid and pointless. How about you try to prove everything would have turned out the same had we not gone to the moon? Has the private sector developed time machines that I'm not aware of?

So, down from 'thousands of spin-offs' to 13, all of which would have been developed on their own for the explicit purpose to which they were eventually put. None required the magic of putting a human on the Moon for their development and none required an up-front investment of billions of dollars.

The hope for spin-offs is a really horrible justification for a program. If you want to do something specific (say, establish a permanent human presence in space) why not do it direct instead of hope it results from a spin-off of something else?

Geez, dude. Why do you have to change my words (even within quotes!) and twist their meaning to win your argument?

I was never originally talking about corporate spinoffs - I was talking about raw technology, basic science, fundamental ideas and breakthroughs that Apollo helped develop. That got derailed nicely when I happened to provide a link to NASA's corporate spinoff page under the assumption that a reasonable person would consider that commercial products are simply applications of technologies - not a representative list of them! Now you've decided that I meant to say Apollo directly started thousands of companies?!

I didn't twist your words and I'm not talking about corporate spin-offs. To be picky, your exact quote was "Apollo led to hundreds (if not thousands) of advances". It did not.

There were no breakthroughs in basic science, fundamental ideas or raw technology which resulted from Apollo which would not have otherwise been achieved by a bit (not billions of dollars) of direct research in the fields of interest. You've not been able to identify a dozen (or even one!) of those advances you're so sure about.

Romantic and astounding as it was, Apollo was a money-sink which delivered us nothing but memories. It was an awesome 'night on the town' and we would have done better by constructing permanent space infrastructure instead.

"If you can, try to identify those which wouldn't have happened without Apollo. The harsh truth is there aren't any."

Advances in various fields such as Integrated Electronics, Error-Correcting Codes, Communication Systems, Control Systems (etc etc etc) would have happened without the Apollo program, but the Apollo program was a major boost.

And a major cost factor.

Yeah, instead of investing in a project like the Appolo, which inspired millions and led to major technological advances, the U.S. should have instead used the money to make more napalm to burn Vietnamese civilians, and to support "anti-communist" dictatorships all around the Globe.

Sure, manned space flight might be a bad investment, but when half a million people are working towards the same goal then enormous momentum is created. This momentum allowed and forced various fields of technology to develop at a faster rate.

How about lowering taxes instead? That let's people put there money where they want it.

That would be good. However, the point I was trying to make was that the momentum required to advance technology at a faster rate is usually created by the government. I can think of the radar lab at MIT and the Manhattan project, for instance. The public has no immediate need for advanced technology per se, so I doubt that allowing people to put money where they want it would lead to such a fast development of new technologies as WW2 or the Apollo program led.

Please allow me to stress one point: I am against income taxes and big government. As much as I like the Apollo program, it was financed by the taxpayers who did not necessarily approve of it. In any case, of all the projects the U.S. government launched, the Apollo program was probably (one of) the most worthwhile...

Please compare the history of the industrial revolution.

I agree the main point of this. An important economic point that is often ignored is that anytime you take money by force and spend it on some grand project the gains or benefits to individuals has to be less than the costs, otherwise it could be done voluntarily. The net effect of these projects is to invest in technology or create things that the society either cannot really afford or for which there is insufficient demand at the time. It is true some technology may come sooner than what otherwise would have been the case but that just highlights the economic fallacy involved, and you can't point to what was not developed to prove the case because the resources went into the Apollo project or whatever, one can only understand it via principles. This is true regardless of the generally acknowledged inefficiencies of gov't projects, which only makes matters worse.

And ever more tragic: This fallacy was (or is) often used in favour of wars.

excellent graphic linked in the article: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/image/79352

A red color doesn't mean failure BTW. It means Russia, it's just Russia has not had much luck with Mars.

Russia/Soviet Union had some decent success with Venus though which is supposedly more difficult.

By 1989, NASA estimated such a trip would come to half a trillion dollars

I admit the idea of going to Mars is very exciting, but honestly, is this where we want to be spending our money?

It will more then pay for itself with increased interest in engineering and science. But besides that the US is throwing trillions at all kinds of unpopular things. I would much rather it be mars.

They wouldn't just burn the money as rocket fuel - that money would be used to create jobs and buy materials. From Wikipedia: "At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities." That's some serious movement of money there.

I loathe the "stimulus", but if our taxes are to be spent in such sums anyway, I think that the result should make a difference.

Replace all high emissions cars with electrics or hybrids.

Pay off all mortgages in the country, while passing an amendment that forbids the Feds from ever doing it again (otherwise, the possibility that they'll do it again will distort the market even more than it would anyway).

Set up prizes for all kinds of space or research goals, like landing on the moon, landing on Mars, first private individual on the moon, first full GWhr beamed from a solar power satellite, first tonne of machinable superconducter at room temperature, first, tenth, and thousandth tonne returned to earth from an asteroid, etc. This has the added bonus that tax money is only spent if someone makes it.

Or something else. But something that matters, rather than just paying people to do a little more of what they're already doing, here or there, where they went to school with the program administrators or whatever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

I would just like to point out this is what NASA estimates it needs for doing the job. I find that number quite implausible.

NASA should focus on developing one thing and only one thing: easy access to space. Call it Ares, Shuttle-C or Big Dumb Booster. NASA should also be given enough money to develop more than one family: the shuttle-C like thing that was shown a couple days ago seems quite wasteful compared do Ares I when all you want to do is to ferry 6 guys to LEO and doesn't lift as much cargo as Ares V, and could use some added power from the 5 segment SRBs that are part of Ares V, but can be operational much sooner than either Ares. Versatility and commonality are key here - you have to be able to assemble the best vehicle for your mission with common building blocks.

It seems to me that NASA is also committed to do things the best way imaginable when good enough should suffice. Maybe half a trillion dollars is what you need to fly a perfect, optimal, elegant spaceship made from all the most exotic lightest materials they can imagine, developed with all the latest technologies and a couple brand new ones thrown in. I can bet you can do a lot with much less money if you are willing to go with "good enough to go to Mars and back".

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