…or indeed, if you think “Screw this, I’ll get there quicker if I invent the hover-board”.
The rover was used on three Apollo missions. And a lot of science was done throughout the program. The high point was arguably Apollo 15. See Andrew Chaikin’s book about the Apollo astronauts’ experiences - I consider it the definitive history.
Musk is out of his mind. there is no way that a Mars colony could be self-sustaining, for hundreds of years. Think of moving humans to Antarctica-except Antarctica is much more hospitable, and accessible.
Would be interesting to see a good comparison of how much science has been done via manned v. unmanned missions, and at what cost for each.
My bet is that unmanned would win in a walk, both on quantity of scientific results (not sure how you’d measure quality), and on bang for the buck.
And again, that’s because the cost of keeping us fragile humans alive and functioning while we are in space is enormous compared to the cost of keeping a machine operational in the same environment.
That quote indicates Musk is either wildly unrealistic or just plain dishonest.
It is difficult to firmly demonstrate a head-to-head cost comparison between the science of a (directly) crewed versus robotic (remotely crewed) mission because very little of all crewed missions have done actual science; even the last Apollo lunar landing (Apollo XVII) which was the only of the Apollo series to send a trained scientist was largely a sample collection mission. However, the overall cost estimates for a crewed mission to Low Earth Orbit is that ~90% of the effort is focused on protecting and sustaining the crew (versus the fairly minimal amount of protection required for uncrewed satellites and spacecraft) and for the lunar missions 98% of the effort was focused on the protection, sustainment, and safe return of the crew.
Missions of much longer duration and complexity can be expected to ramp up the degree of effort focused on preservation of the crew accordingly; as a first estimate, a cost proportional to mission duration can be assumed. The Apollo program, with development of the Saturn I/IB, Saturn V, Apollo CSM and LM, six test launches, and eleven crewed launches with a total of ~110 days total crew duration and less than 170 person-hours of EVA time cost approximately ~US$109B in 2010 dollars. A crewed Mars mission would have essentially five times the total duration, so even assuming the same overall level of complexity, an estimate of US$500B is entirely reasonable to develop the overall architecture for a single mission. Contrast this to the Mars Science Laboratory (“Curiosity”) which had an inception-to-landing cost of $2.5B. That means, even not assuming any economy of scale or improvements in technology, we could launch two hundred MSL-class missions to the surface of Mars for the cost of a single crewed mission. And while a conjunction-class mission would have astronauts on the surface for over a year (which the requirements to sustain and protect them from environments, as well as contingencies for various hazards), the Curiosity rover has operated for over three years and may continue to operate until the RTG power supply is incapable of delivering sufficient power to operate the transmitter or instruments. And of course, we don’t have to worry about returning Curiosity to Earth once its mission is complete.
Many advocates of crewed planetary exploration of Mars or elsewhere assert the supposed superiority of an astronaut in mobile speed, distance, manipulative capability, et cetera, which can only be claimed by assuming that astronauts function in a shirt sleeve environment without the encumbrances and limitations of pressure suits and against the hazards of near vacuum conditions, extreme temperatures, and destructive UV and unshielded cosmic radiation. As for capabilities, I presented [POST=14496683]a comparison between a human astronaut and the MSL[/POST] which demonstrates how capable the MSL actually is. The human-usable interfaces to that range of equipment would weigh as much as the entire rover itself. The low speed of the rover, often cited as a deficiency, is a result of the limit of power that can be generated from the RTG. Any crewed mission to Mars to provide even comparable mobility would necessarily require a massive power supply–likely an autonomous nuclear fission reactor–which would require significant development cost by itself. (The sometimes months-long dust storms prohibit reliance on solar power for any mission critical operations.)
Most planetary science missions, such as those to the surface of Venus or those to the Galilean moons of Jupiter, could not be accomplished with conventional propulsion, power system, and habitation technology at any budget level. Crewed missions to the surface of Mars are plausible–that is, a crew would not immediately die from environment or radiation conditions–but landing a crewed vehicle the surface of Mars (with a minimum mass of 25 T for a crew size of 4) turns out to be a daunting challenge; the existing technology for controlled landing of vehicles on Mars is limited to less than 1000 kg, and one of the major challenges that remains to be solved is the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) methods. The most recent attempt at proof-of-concept of what is largely considered the most economical method–the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator–the supersonic ringsail failed due to excessive dynamic loading during deployment.
As for returning to the Moon, much less using it for industrial purposes or “colonizing” it, there are numerous problems which no conventional technology may be able to overcome, including the physiological effects of long term habitation in low gravity, the extraction of sufficient resources to be reasonably self-sufficient, and most prosaically, the fine electrostatically charged dust which may post a health hazard and will certainly have deleterious effects on any moving mechanisms or exposed machinery (see NASA/TM—2005-213610/REV1 The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions, James Gaier, April 2007). There are scientific reasons to return to the Moon, and especially the polar regions that the Apollo system was unable to visit which may provide even more insight to the early evolution of the solar system, but in terms of science value there is little reason to send people.
Setting this aside, however, the real reason that the Apollo program was cancelled was that it was a fundamentally destination-oriented program; that is, its stated purpose was to go to the Moon. It achieved that purpose and immediately lost support in contrast to more pressing financial and political pressures. A crewed mission to Mars, even if it could be sustained for the two or more decades necessary to embark on such an effort, would almost certainly suffer the same fate if funded by a government program, and it seems unlikely that a commercial venture could bear the cost even by cutting costs in reducing testing or accepting higher risk.
The notion of exploration may be romantic, but the details of a successful exploration–where you get supplies, how to protect against hazards, what can be accomplished for a given budget at a certain risk–are hard technical and logistical problems which can’t be solved by hand-waving and bravado. The real path to crewed planetary exploration (insofar as it is possible) is to develop the technologies, processes, and infrastructure for extracting consumable resources from space objects (e.g. ‘mining’ asteroids) and long duration human habitation (radiation protection, simulated gravity, physiological adaptation to the space environment). Once we have the ability to extract resources and inhabit interplanetary space indefinitely, the marginal cost of going to Mars or any other destination out to the outer planets drops dramatically, and can be done repeatedly with greater capability and scientific return versus a single, massively expensive effort to perform a one-time leap to glory.
Stranger
The only direct compeitors is the Apollo versus the (more or less contemporary) Lunokhod programme..
Do you think a comparison can be made on cost effectiveness there?
AK84 I would suppose, however, that Lunokhod having been sort of a parallel plan and eventual fallback, while no real robotic surface exploration effort was made on the US side (and the manned effort becoming abbreviated almost as soon as landing was achieved), you may end up with apples and oranges.
Aye, there is a very thin line between visionary and wackadoodle. And they love dancing on it, don’t they, especially once they have the money…
There’s also the issue of planetary contamination. All probes sent to Mars are thoroughly sterilized, but the current sterilization standards are deemed to be insufficient for studying liquid water on the Mars surface. There’s just too much risk of Earth organisms being released into the Mars ecosystem, destroying exactly what we went there to study. Now imagine sending people to Mars - how are you going to sterilize everything that gets exposed to the Mars environment? That means sterilizing the inside of the airlock and the outside surface of the spacesuit every time, to higher standards than they currently use to sterilize unmanned probes.