Point noted. Certainly if money were no object, the knowledge gained would be tremendous. But I’d be interested if there is any kind of ballpark estimate for what such a mission would cost. I think the technical obstacles cannot be overcome and I’d rather know 100x more about the other planets with more unmanned probes than know 10000x more about Mars by sending humans.
I highly recommend reading this article about NASA. True, it doesn’t specifically mention a manned Mars mission, but its points are germane to the discussion. Those points being:
NASA was found in the 50’s, when the USA and Soviet Union were struggling for world supremacy. Establishing technological supremacy was a part of that. Showing that we could send crews of ruggedly handsome white male astronauts into space and later to the moon showed that we could equal and then exceed the communists, which made nearly all Americans happy.
But after we reached the moon, and the Soviet Union broke up, what was the point of space exploration?
Manned space exploration is more expensive than probes and robots. Not slightly more expensive. It’s enormously more expensive. Quoting:
Worse yet, putting a human on a spacecraft pretty much guarantees that there won’t be any worthwhile science coming from the project. Compared to robots, humans are sloppy, slow, and error-prone. With a rare exception or two, the experiments run on board the International Space Station, and before it, Shuttle-Mir, were of sufficient quality to win a medal at a high school science fair but fell far short of the “world class” research that space-station aficionados like to conjure.
Look through the list of experiments run on Shuttle-Mir or on the ISS and you’ll see that most of them are published in third- or fourth-tier journals, if they’re published at all. Compare that to the mountains of seminal publications (not to mention a Nobel Prize or two) coming from unmanned spacecraft, and the difference is stark. If you factor in cost, the comparison becomes outrageous.
For decades, NASA has been trying desperate publicity stunts to try to justify its budget: send Congressmen into space, claim to have evidence of life of Mars, exaggerate the importance of its scientific studies. A manned mission to Mars would be a great publicity stunt, but not much else.
Nope, don’t care either.
I don’t expect to see a real attempt in the next 35yrs anyway (I’d be almost 90).
Well, the Mars Direct mission championed by Robert Zubrin was in the ball park of $40 billion…this included space craft for follow on missions but it cut a lot of corners as well. I’ve seen estimates from between this at the low end and $500 billion at the high end (or some really ridiculous ones talking about a trillion dollars, though these usually have really elaborate tangential missions and craft, space stations, pizza ovens and soda machines). I think a good range would be something between $40-100 billion as a good ballpark. If you figure the average cost for a rover mission, including all the things involved in the mission is maybe $1-2 billion then you will get between 40-100 missions for the price. Of course, you won’t get them because we won’t spend the money on them that we would on a manned mission, so realistically you won’t get a 10th of that number in the course of a decade or two. The record for the current rover on Mars is 40KM…in 12 years. And that wasn’t 40KM inch by inch, but 40KM total driving distance. I don’t know what the estimate is for how much of that 40KM was observed, but I’m guessing it’s fairly low, since a lot of the time it’s programming the rover to drive from here to where the team thinks there might be something of interest to look at. If the camera just happened to be pointed in the right direction to see something interesting, and if someone was paying attention then they might stop to check something out along the way…if it wasn’t too dangerous for the rover and if the mission wouldn’t be overly compromised.
The thing is, the US could afford a manned mission to Mars and STILL do unmanned exploration of Mars as well as other planets. We are a rich country and if we can afford to spend $400 billion dollars on a new type of fighter plane we could afford a Mars mission that would cost $100 billion spread out over a few years. And nothing says we have to do it all alone and by ourselves…if we asked, we could probably get other space agencies and private industry on board to shoulder some of the costs. We have the most credible space agency currently, and the best chance to actually do such a mission. What we don’t have is the will to do it and to spend the money to do it.
I’ve read it. I disagree with it’s conclusions and with the conclusions you are asserting.
I agree that the ISS was about politics and publicity a lot more than science. But for the cost of the ISS we probably could have sent a manned mission to Mars by now, which would have been incredibly valuable, scientifically speaking.
Going to Mars might be a big deal as far as politics and publicity, and it would be expensive. But it would enormously scientifically valuable. It’s probably nearly impossible to overstate how valuable it could be to our understanding of Mars, the solar system, and planetary science in general.
So in answer to the question why spend the hundreds of billions to go to Mars, the two of you came up with this answer. With no sarcasm, what does any of that mean?
“move heavier rocks”
“react to unusual circumstances”
“improvise”
“answer questions”
Can you try again with something of substance?
I’d love to go, and as a 53 year old guy, I grew up on Apollo.
But whenever the question of why go, we either get a) we invented Tang to go to the moon and all the other cool stuff, or b) a Star Trekian “because it’s there” answer.
There is no there, there as far as I can discern.
Sending a man to Mars would be very cool. I give you that.
As for the enormous, impossible to overstate scientific value of such a mission - where do you get that from?
The mission profile for Mars alone precludes the standard footprints and flags type photo op only stuff. We aren’t talking about them being there a few hours or a few days but literally over a year. It’s hard to even imagine the value of having humans on Mars for a year just poking around and exploring.
Yes, manned missions are a lot more expensive. That’s why we do unmanned missions. They are more risky as well. That’s also why we do unmanned missions. Yes, NASA has wasted a ton of money trying to justify itself…part of that is how our politics works and the fact that they simply haven’t gotten a concise long term set of requirements for mission that has been cohesive from administration to administration. Instead, they get constantly jerked around, given missions without funding then had them jerked away when a new administration or Congress comes into town. But while manned missions cost more, they can potentially deliver a LOT more in terms of science, exploration and engineering.
We would know exactly what Martian dirt and rocks are made of. Not mostly, but completely. We’d find any fossils that are there to be found, or any life. We’d find out what lies under the surface of Mars.
This is hard to answer only because there are so many potential answers.
What if we could land on a planet in another solar system? What would we find out?
I don’t know what we’d find out, but it’s not credible that the answers wouldn’t include “tons of interesting stuff that we didn’t know before”.
I don’t care who does it first, and that goes for solar technology too. Our leaders act as if China being ahead of us in solar is so all-fired important. No matter who makes solar cost effective, it’s going to be a huge boon to the entire world. Same goes for space missions.
Except some people are going to be the manufacturers, the job creators, and the profit-makers, and some are going to be the customers, and only if they can afford it. That does matter, you know.
China price-dumped their solar panels, and put Solyndra and their like out of business, while you guys were gloating over it. Whoever gets to Mars first gets all the benefits, just like we got a huge dose of technology and jobs from the space program.
Actually, a manned mission to Mars at the moment is impossible. Quoting from here:
There is no feasible way of conquering this problem in the near future. There are further technological barriers. As the Slate article mentioned, 4 percent of the astronauts launched into space by NASA have died due to mechanical failures. A Mars mission would be much longer and more complex than anything NASA has done with humans up to this point. The chance of failure and death would therefore be higher.
Couldn’t care less.
For that purpose you would need a pretty advanced lab. Why is bringing the lab to the stones easier than vice versa?
Are you sure? We have not even found all fossils on Earth yet. Mars is a pretty big planet. What could a small team of astronauts find during the short span of a manned Mars mission?
How deep. One meter? Two? How deep can you dig in a spacesuit? How many of those holes can you dig? In order to dig a really deep hole you would need machinery much more than a human.
I am not saying that a Mars mission would not ever find anything interesting. But a lot of the people who are actually involved in that kind of research seem to believe that unmanned missions find out more for the investment involved.
I’d think it was a terrific achievement for mankind and that country in particular. I wouldn’t care that the US wasn’t first because of bragging rights, but I would care that it may mean our space program has been devalued so much that people either don’t care or we’re losing the best scientists
Wow, no. Why would I care?
I’d be all for a sample-return mission, though this would be a lot more expensive than the current robot missions (if less than a manned mission). And I don’t think you’d need a particularly advanced lab (relatively speaking) if there were people – people are much more flexible and can do many more things than robots.
I don’t mean they would find all fossils – I mean that if there are fossils on Mars, it’s very likely that human explorers would find at least a few.
Humans can dig pretty deep with just a shovel, depending on the soil. They’d have lots of time. In any case, they could go much, much deeper than robots can go at present technology.
It’s a reasonable point of debate – and a lot of people involved in such research are on the “manned mission” side. I fall on that side too, based on the costs I’ve read of (which would be less than the ISS).
I would be slightly upset by the fact that my nation didn’t do it. But that would be more than outweighed by my great joy that my species had done it.
Yeah, exactly this.