Robert Zubrin: how to go to Mars right now
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I'm not sure I can see NASA doing a one-way mission, but I'll be first in line if SpaceX or whoever tries it.
But it appears that while we have the technology to get to Mars today, we lack the impetus - something that the article addresses, but not wholly.
We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. It would be more likely that we would persue a manned Mars program if we had someone to beat.
As it stands, I feel it's more likely that a manned Mars program will be undertaken by the various commercial ventures out there than by any government.
That's half the truth. The rest of the truth is: We went to the Moon out of sheer terror.
In fact, the Moon trip itself was a side effect. The space race took the form of a race to the moon because "the race to the Moon" was a much more joyful marketing slogan than "the race to design and build the next generation of ICBMs that will enable cities and towns like yours to be destroyed with even greater precision."
Remember that the Moon race was conceived in the early 1960s. ICBMs were a brand new technology. Everybody knew that we had to build more of them, keep improving them, stay ahead in them -- they'd seen the H-bomb tests. People who had lived through the 1940s -- Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Nanking, Bataan, Dresden, Nagasaki -- naturally found it difficult to have faith in human decency and restraint; they all thought World War III was inevitable, and probably imminent. This was several years before the Cuban missile crisis and a decade before the ABM treaty.
But it was hard to stay cheerful when talking about the world's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals, so the space race was portrayed as a game to get astronauts and/or cosmonauts to the moon, and everyone had a lot of fun playing along. Enormous quantities of money were poured into rocket research, the military on both sides of the Cold War got their high-tech missiles and spy satellites and electronics, and in the end we got to watch some truly amazing pictures of people walking on the moon and feel proud. Smiles all around. A big win for everyone.
But the Moon itself was a secondary goal. A Macguffin. The Soviets didn't even bother to go, and their effort seems to me to have been rather halfhearted. By 1969 they had long since achieved the important goal anyway: Better rockets. The USA followed through but quickly got bored with the actual "moon" part. The Apollo 13 movie talked all about that: Mere months after the first moon missions, the remaining ones attracted scant public interest.
So I find the space race fascinating, and I understand the nostalgia for it, and I'm glad some good came out of the cold war, but I don't want to live through anything like it if I don't have to.
(If you have trouble seeing what I mean, here's an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624495 . People see the same facts and write completely different stories.)
When we talk about history we are not talking about a binary system, we're talking about experiences related through perspectives. There is rarely an absolute truth to history, and the longer back we go the less certain our understanding tends to be. The situation is even worse when we start talking about motivations.
In this case, the motivations of the space program weren't simply military, or rather, they were military to the military, but if you read about or speak to the people involved, you're not necessarily going to hear that. For some of the people, the moon race was genuinely about exploration and wonder, for others it was exploration used as cover for ICBM research, etc. It is very easy to conflate the motivations of the individual with the motivations of the institutions they are associated with, and this frequently ends up cheapening one or the other.
Very well put.
It would be a mistake to see the space race as something which was "only" about military ambition. It was about different things to different people, and it grew more meanings over time.
But, though there are a thousand different histories that can be written about any event, some historical perspectives are more useful than others for answering particular questions. For example, when you ask "how come the country was happy to write NASA a series of blank checks during the 1960s, but not since?" it's valuable to remember the military angle. In the 1960s the development of better space technology was understood to be a matter of life and death for millions if not billions. Now... not so much.
This seems like a really good way to evaluate historical scholarship (amongst other metrics, of course, unless Mencius Moldbug and Howard Zinn happen to be our greatest living historians.)
NASA: 17.6 Billion. TARP Bailout: 700 Billion.
Your tax dollars at work...
I'd love to see what a company like SpaceX could do if they had a yearly grant (qualified by demonstrable successes) of 25% NASA's budget.
Land 40 tons using a parachute????
And of course galactic radiation that is going to be bad for the crew (how bad is a subject of debate that I already had, so am not going to repeat).
The NASA Design Reference mission is essentially a modified version of Mars Direct, so I would expect reading up on this would provide solutions to these problems, or at least it will go into more detail than this brief article.
Spending resources on Mars now will only delay our permanent presence in space.
Manned missions to the Moon to set up a colony. Robotics for the rest of the solar system. It's the only way.
Want something valuable? Mine an asteroid for platinum, build fuel cells out of it, and undercut the terrestrial competition while cleaning up on the profit. Right there you've identified a competitive advantage (low-cost of scarce resources) to satisfy a growing market which exists today.
Last but not least, suppose that you would grant any spaceship landing in Mars the right to own all land within 250 miles. Sounds great, but why wouldn't they explore and mine the entire planet if they could?!? It's not like you have CCTV cameras on Mars to know what they're doing, where they're mining, etc. Hence, in a way that's a false incentive.
As far as companies mining the entire planet, sure they could, but they'd be poachers. The 250 mile area claim would have legal rights of ownership backed by earth governments.
The rule would obviously need to add some extra provisions to drive innovation. I dunno, require colonies within 100 years, or trips every decade to show the flag etc.
There is a reason that pretty much every single explorer on earth was financially backed by either a company or a gov't grant.