A foundation thinks that it would be possible for private interests to fund a bare-bones flyby of Mars for a couple of billion dollars around 2018 or so. The crew would be a mature married couple. There would be no landing.
It won’t work. Eight months with no medical care, muscle atrophy, and no way to re-supply. It sounds good on the headlines, but to think it will happen? Not a chance.
SFC Schwartz
Obviously healthy people go longer than that without medical care all the time. Supply isn’t much of a concern, with good planning.
The record for the longest single spaceflight in human history is more than 14 months.
Right, but that was on a space station in low earth orbit, which offered it a good amount of radiation shielding, more than one other person to talk to, and, most importantly, the ability to be resupplied.
I’d rather see a one-way trip with landing. Send habitats and supplies first, then let an older couple permanently relocate there. Periodically send additional people and supplies, etc.
And cyanide capsules.
“…the group has yet to obtain funding for their mission…”
So all they need is to find someone to come up with a few billion dollars to fund their half-baked idea with no possibility of a return on the investment.
Basically this same story with a different group runs once or twice a year. It’s sort of embarassing that they keep finding a member of the press gullible enough to publish a story on it every time.
They lack ambition. This group wants to put a colony on Mars within a decade.
We’ve discussed this before. The answer is no.
The group that wants to put a colony on Mars would need, to get it done in 10-20 years, at least a trillion dollars. I’m serious. Not a billion, not ten billion; a trillion, the GDP of a good sized rich country. And it still might end in disaster.
Even flying someone past Mars would cost hundreds of billions. Just designing and building the rockets to send the spacecraft parts up is going to cost multiples of NASA’s budget.
Mars is not going to happen without a HUGE government effort.
While I agree it’s not going to happen, I’m surprised they specified a married couple. I would send mature lesbian doctors in a committed relationship. Depending on where they live, I guess they could be married.
According to Mary Roach’s book, where she cites some NASA stuff, women of African ancestry tend to lose less bone mass in extended periods in space than other gender/race groups. Also women tend to be smaller and lighter.
What is this concern with supply? It’s not hard to pack for eight months.
Funding is the significant practical problem.
I’d still like to see a soil sample return mission. I don’t know that we’d really gain anything by it, but it would be cool. I don’t know if we can even do that we could land a return vehicle in practice. We’ve had a number of plain ol’ probes that just didn’t go right. Maybe they got too close to Helium.
A realistic low objective mission to the surface of Mars with a four man crew could feasibly be done for under US$200B at a baseline probability of success of 98% with a few provisos:
[ul]
[li]The availability of a super-heavy lift vehicle in the Saturn V or Vulkan class with sufficient throughput to launch 5-6 payloads into GTO in the span of a few months[/li][li]Limited on-site mobility; exploration only within walking range of the landing site[/li][li]The use of compact nuclear fission reactors for power for on-board and on-surface power (at Mars distance a solar array to support the mission would be enormous and unwieldy)[/li][li]A willingness by the crew to be subject to levels of background (cosmic) radiation which exceed lifetime safe maximum limits, and the potential to be exposed to lethal levels of solar radiation[/ul]This assumes essentially off-the-shelf technology–no nuclear propulsion, beyond magical recycling efficiencies, or in-situ propellant manufacture–and a tolerance for hazard that exceeds that which NASA currently allows by standard (99% mission reliability for human-rated systems). You could up the reliability to the 99% level by essentially launching a second, parallel mission (at essentially double the cost, minus some fraction of the development effort) but it doesn’t work the other way; in other words, going to half the reliability (twice the probability of occurrence) with a mission probability of success of 96% doesn’t cost half as much; it only takes away a small fraction of the cost. Even the most optimistic, “let’s slap together a bunch of commercial off the shelf gear and say a few ‘Hail Marys’” approach doesn’t come in under US$100B. [/li]
As for actually establishing a permanent colony on Mars, we don’t even have sufficiently mature technology to put a good cost estimate on it. Despite the impression you might get from reading old issues of Popular Science or the ease with which it is portrayed on the televisor, it is sufficiently beyond the current state of the art to maintain a self-sustaining colony on another body that any estimate of cost or reliability is fantasy.
It’s not hard to pack for eight months for a cruise around the world, where air and water are freely available, food and medical support are available for purchase, and the Earth is nestling you in the warm comfort of the protective atmosphere. Packing for Mars, however, is a different beast entirely. You have to bring everything you will ever need during the 27 months with you-: food, water, fuel, air filtration, energy supply, et cetera. There is an excellent book on the topic, coincidentally titled Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach (Stiff, Spook) which details the current state of the art in space habitation and transit. Just the chapter on toilet issues is enough to put a damper on the enthusiasm for manned spaceflight with conventional technology.
On top of all of that, there is the issue of return on investment; a human mission to Mars or another planet is a flag-planting exercise. The real science objectives for any planned mission can be accomplished by unmanned probes and landers for on the order of 1% of the cost of a manned mission and that is an optimistic estimate just based upon time on station. In other words, for the cost and effort of one manned mission you could launch one hundred unmanned missions to achieve the same (likely much more) objectives, and incidentally a higher tolerance for risk and hazard, since you don’t have to return the lander or mourn over a lost probe. Unmanned missions don’t garner the same press and public attention, but from a return on science knowledge they are vastly more effective.
Stranger
Not if you count, as the most important science objective, the development of off-Earth human expansion itself.
They may want to wait a bit before committing to a Man mission to Mars.
You MONSTER!
Shoemaker Levy 9 impacts Jupiter awhile back.
Russia has been attacked twice in hundred years.
Now Mars?
Interstellar 911 call.
Hello?! I wanna report a comet attack!
Sir, could you be more specific?
Lady, those comets are impacting everybody up in here!!!
Hide your Mars, Hide Uranus!
Right. It doesn’t matter that we could get 100 unmanned missions for the price of a manned mission, when we will never get 100 unmanned missions in any case. The private space launch & tourism industry isn’t about to waste money on unmanned science missions to Mars.
If our goal is the human development of space, then humans have to go.
That isn’t a science objective. That isn’t even a mission objective. That is a vaguely defined overarching goal that is in no way satisfied by an individual flag-planting mission, or even a series of missions, any more than the Apollo program gave us the lunar bases and mining operations dreamed about by the generation of space enthusiasts that buoyed the Cold War era space program.
In fact, if what you desire is “development of off-Eath human expansion,” you should strongly support unmanned exploration and resource exploitation, as expanding knowledge of resources and the infrastructure to develop them at the cost and risk profile of unmanned missions will allow the luxury of manned exploration (and habitation, and tourism) to follow. Until you are able to develop resources in-situ, you are stuck with the premium of supplying all habitation by the tenuous and costly logistical chain that starts at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. Once you are able to mine and purify materials in space and produce the precursors to good (and some amount of manufactured goods themselves) then you can entertain the possibility of maintaining more than a handful of people at Earth orbit or beyond. If you have to ship everything up and out at an energy cost of ~60 MJ/kg, you are never going to develop a off-planet presence without some kind of beyond science-fictional transportation. Dreams and enthusiasm are all well and good, but practical development is sustained by feasibility, not the tide of popular enthusiasm.
Stranger