Yes I would. The symbolism and the subsequent propaganda value it would bring to the authoritarian capitalist governments of Moscow or Beijing against liberal democratic capitalism of the West in itself would be of tremendous harm to Mankind, even without considering the possibility that the Russians or Chinese may use it to claim Mars as their territory.
This.
With a little bit of this:
I don’t think it would be nearly as important politically as that, but to the extent that it is (and no one would do it if it didn’t have any political value) I’d much prefer that the benefit accrue to a liberal democracy. But either way, the benefit to humanity would vastly outweigh the benefit to one particular country or regime.
Right now, a manned trip to Mars is impossible, and spending money on one would largely be a waste, compared to spending money on unmanned missions. But once someone has done it, they’ve obviously solved the problems that make it currently impossible, and once it becomes feasible, I think it should be done, even if a strict dollars-to-science accounting suggests the money should go elsewhere. The social value and PR for science would be enormous. And we shouldn’t be deciding between manned and unmanned missions, but between massive increases in science funding and more pointless wars. And we should be choosing science. (And development. We could cure malaria for what we spend on a few bombers. We could give everyone on the planet access to clean water for the cost of a few wars.)
A manned mission to Mars is to science investment what a new stadium for the Broncos is to infrastructure development. It is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, and your willingness to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on your stupid pet project is not something that would encourage future science investment. If you want a project with positive social and PR value, do something useful.
For example, you could exterminate measles. Unlike your plan, exterminating measles does not rely on people standing in awe of your white elephant to have positive social value - even if nobody cares you exterminated measles, the simple fact that nobody will fall ill with measles ever again means you have made the world a better place. And because it actually makes the world a better place in a concrete sense and not just in a “people will be happy it has been done” sense, it has much broader PR value.
Considering the enormous value to society, in both hard science, indirect technological development, and inspiration, of the Apollo moon missions, this seems to me to be a foolish assumption to make.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. I can recognize the great achievement while simultaneously being upset that it wasn’t the United States that did it. I’d be upset because I would view it as evidence that the U.S. is losing it’s competitive edge in the sciences.
I’m not an American and I wouldn’t care who continued to believe in space exploration. I would just love to see it launched for real. Sending a manned spaceship to the outer space or to a celestial body to do the job that a robot could do is not a good idea. In my opinion, genuine space exploration will not have started unless mankind has set up manned or automated outposts and colonies in the space areas it aims to explore. Due to a host of reasons, such effort is not likely to be successful unless it becomes a conjugated effort, made by, say, China, Russia and the USA acting together. Given the impossibility of such cooperation, I would advice space exploration fans to trim their hopes.
Not only would I be upset, I think Americans should cry themselves to sleep every night from embarrassment over having to hitch rides with other countries up to the space station.
I’m for the advancement of humanity and not sold on the concept of country, so to some extent it makes no bloody difference what nation does it, as long as humanity does it and nation states does not get in the way and hinder it. The only difference is that this should be shared with all humanity, and some countries (including the US) are sometimes not that willing to share. In this I would like to see ideally international cooperation and would take that over the US going it alone.
Good. Let someone else literally burn their money. Whatever scientific value comes of this still happens, and we don’t have to pay for it.
A bit of both here as well, for many of the reasons already expressed.
As for the value, I don’t think we as a species have to choose between short-term and long-term thinking. We can continue to work hard on our current problems while still working toward long-term goals. And AFAIC, “long-term” for H. sap. must include exploration and colonization of our stellar system as well as the eventual exploration and colonization of others.
You may notice that I mentioned curing malaria as a project I would support. Measles would also be good. Unfortunately, I don’t think it would have the PR benefit a manned mission to Mars would. I also don’t think we would learn as much, but by all means we should do it on purely humanitarian grounds. we have the means, and not to cure devastating and curable disease worldwide betrays a massive misordering of priorities. But we should explore space, too.
I’m not an expert and can’t evaluate the scientific value of a manned mission to Mars, but I can’t believe it wouldn’t be enormous, unlike a new sports stadium. It is the case that it would be tremendously expensive and that we could have greater, probably MUCH greater, impact for the same price.
It shouldn’t be either/or. We should do all these things and pay for them by cutting other spending on things I don’t like!
It’s also, curiously, not a list that contains any item out of the reach of a robotic probe using existing technology.
As for covering considerable distance: among the great weaknesses of a manned mission is the fact that it must concentrate on one small area, compared to how multiple robotic missions could visit a wide variety of sites (for a much lower total cost).
And the idea that humans are better than machines at digging seems quite hard to support, especially in view of how digging is done on Earth. Ditto for the idea that robotic probes are restricted to one camera that can’t look left. Or that they couldn’t be capable of climbing, or extracting samples.
Feel free to show me automated machines that could be sent to Mars that do any of those things then. In 14 years the record rover has moved 40KM…that’s about 24 miles. I’m guessing a human could cover that amount of territory in less than a week…on foot. That leaves over 52 more weeks to do something else. By hand (something no astronaut would be doing btw) you could dig a 3 foot hole in, oh, lets say an hour. No robotic probe to date can do the same. Oh, sure, you COULD build one to do that…but then it wouldn’t do other things. The human could dig the hole, walk the 24 miles and climb the wall in the first month and still have time to look around and maybe see something interesting.
If you wanted to build a probe to do all of this stuff you certainly could do it…but then, it would probably cost a lot more and you couldn’t use the argument that human exploration costs so much more then.
I would only be upset to whatever extent the event signaled that China or Russia were on the ascent (technologically, financially, militarily, etc) and the US were on the descent. I’ve spent time in China and have read enough about Russia to know that I don’t want either to be calling more of the shots in the world than they already do, at least not in their present forms.
I would not be the least upset if the EU, Japan, Australia, or some other decent, like-minded area made the same accomplishment. I would be quite glad, actually.
Not likely on Mars - that human requires complex life support, available only at the base. A week’s walkabout would either be fatal or require a mobile habitat (of enormous additional expense).
That argument remains fully valid.
The realistic manned / robotic mission cost ratio is at least 100:1 (and is probably much higher, when you consider factors like the challenge of surviving the 2-way trip). So you don’t build one robotic probe to do all things - you build a bunch of 'em, capable of doing whatever you fancy (digging holes being an example of a minor - almost trivial - challenge), and send them all over Mars, to any sites that look interesting. Later probes are designed to meet needs / exploit opportunities identified by earlier ones.
The lowest cost realistic crewed mission to Mars using the opposition class trajectory (with a surface stay of 30 to 60 days depending on Earth-Mars positions and propulsive capability) for a crew of 3 to 4 with an estimated probability of success of ~95% is around US$200B in current dollars. A conjunction class (500 day surface stay) for a crew of 6 is somewhere north of US$500B with the same probability of success. A dual vehicle-lander mission (which improves the estimated mission probability of success to about 98%) would run a cool US$1000B or thereabouts. These are actual no-frills cost rollups from the two adjunct studies of crewed Mars missions that I’ve worked on, not random numbers pulled out of the air by software entrepreneurs or optimistic-beyond-belief budgets based upon MacGuyvering a space mission that is several orders of magnitude greater in distance, time, and exposure to hazards beyond anything that has been attempted for a crewed mission to date. To give context, the entire Apollo program from beginning to end was about US$110B in today’s dollars. There is a substantial amount of technology development that needs to occur to facilitate a crewed Mars mission including long term space habitation without periodic resupply, protection from or biomedical mitigation of high energy cosmic radiation, advances in propulsion and power technology including genuinely portable, zero maintenance nuclear reactors, and most critically, the ability to controllably land a multi-ton vehicle from orbital speed.
Going to Mars isn’t just a twice as hard as going to the Moon, or 90 times as hard (the ratio of time to get to Mars versus the Moon) or even 350 times as hard (roughly the ratio of the difference traveled on a pseudo-Hohman trajectory to Mars versus that taken by the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon). It is many orders of magnitude more difficult. The duration and distance means that there is absolutely no possibility of rescue from Earth. Whereas the crew of the Apollo 13 mission could swing a pass around the Moon and make a free return trajectory to Earth after their on-board failure by using the LM engine for trajectory corrections, once a spacecraft bound for Mars leaves the Earth’s sphere of influence, it is gone for three years. Everything the crew may possibly need to survive for three years has to be carried on board, including air, water, and food. There is no stopping, returning, or getting any supplies or resources on the trip there or back. This argues for a fully redundant mission (e.g. two spacecraft, landers, full crew, et cetera), such that any catastrophic failure of a single ship is still recoverable as a mission and offers the potential to rescue the crew. Similarly, the duration the crew must survive on the Mars for over a year versus a few days on the Moon, and under a variety of environment conditions (such as dust storms and low solar incidence) which preclude solar power generation.
Mars is literally the most difficult solid body in the solar system to land a large crewed vehicle upon. It has just enough atmosphere to be a nightmare in terms of aeroloads, suspended dust, and entry heating due to ram pressure, with the lander going from purely inertial loads to hypersonic drag to the supersonic shock waves to subsonic form drag, but not enough (and not consistent enough) for reliable deceleration to subsonic speed or low speed gliding. The largest vehicle we’ve been able to land on Mars using aerodynamic decelerators is about 1 metric ton, and it simply isn’t feasible to build and reliably deploy supersonic parachute canopies of the size to land a 30 or 40 ton lander (the minimum size needed for a crewed mission). A lander vehicle of this class will have to use some combination of inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (ballutes or shuttlecock), a large regime configurable aerosurface, and propulsive landing. The AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets had a series of papers on this in the May-June 2014 (Volume 51, Number 3) journal, especially looking at retropropulsion systems that will probably be necessary for a lander of this class.
The other major challenges of operating on Mars include power, ground transportation, avoiding biological contamination, and just the logistics of maintaining a habitat in that environment. With the sometimes months-long dust storms solar power cannot be relied upon so the lander will have to have an electricity producing nuclear fission reactor and generator capable of operating for three years with essentially no maintenance. Several people have opined that a crew could traverse more distance than the current Mars rovers but have not considered the fact that the reason the Mars rovers go so slow isn’t because they’re robots but because they have very limited power budgets from their solar (Spirit, Opportunity) or RTG (Curiosity) power supplies. The same limitation applies to human explorers who won’t be operating in a shirtsleeve environment surrounded by an atmosphere rich in oxidizer to support an internal combustion engine. The problem of long distance travel without using petrochemical fuel has not even been solved satisfactorily here on Earth, much less in operating on another planet under harsh conditions and temperatures. Did you read about the erosive soil that is grinding away at Curiosity’s wheels at a greater than anticipated rate? That same abrasive dust is going to get in every joint of your vehicles and environments suits causing no end to problems and potential hazards. As we are crawling with bacteria that cover and infest our bodies, the challenge of not contaminating the surface of Mars with organic residue and organisms is essentially an impossible feat, which makes trying to identify any hypothetical indigenous life very challenging. And the logistics of supplying a crew for years with food, air and water filtration, and other consumables without resupply to a degree of comfort and safety that would be acceptable is actually a substantial problem in and of itself.
Mars isn’t even the most interesting destination in the solar system, either for science or the esthetic joy of exploration for its own sake; in fact, I’d argue that it is one of the worst (next to Mercury). It’s wind-blown surface, while tectonically inert, is heavily altered making it of limited use for understanding the early evolution of the solar system. If Mars ever held life it was probably very simple and almost certainly long extinct. The asteroid belt, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the ‘icy giants’ of Uranus and Neptune, the Kuiper Belt, and even blank-faced and moonless Venus are more interesting than Mars. The only reason we send so many craft to visit and explore Mars is that, aside from our own moon, it is the easiest large body in the solar system for a robotic probe to get to.
To address the question of the o.p., I’d rather we spent comparable funds more wisely on building a sustainable space infrastructure which includes in-situ extraction and use of space resources, space weather monitoring, deep space communications and tracking of potentially hazardous objects, and of course things like Earth climate surveillance, global telecommunications and navigation, et cetera that benefit the vast majority of people here on Earth than the narrow interests of a few Mars enthusiasts. Aerospace contractors will get the same volume of work, the developments will support and permit uncrewed exploration of a larger part of the solar system, and eventually, when we have a self-sustaining infrastructure which can support significant space habitation without pulling up basic materials and consumables from Earth at thousands of dollars a kilogram, going to Mars will be more of a logistical exercise than a massive and desperate technical challenge to be done at a cost of pennies compared to the many tens of thousands of dollars per pound it would cost us to try to do this in the near future. There is no need to go to Mars soonest other than to indulge the fantasies of a very tiny minority of enthusiasts; all the science we need to do for planetology and astrobiology can be more effectively performed by remotely crewed missions at a fraction of a percent of the cost and no need to recover and bring home the rovers at end of mission to no scientific benefit whatsoever.
There are vast opportunities in space–whole industries waiting to be born, the opportunity to warn and protect ourselves against cataclysmic hazards, exploration of places we’ve only seen about or gotten quick glances of as spacecraft zipped past at many kilometers per second, and ultimately, the chance to leave our delicate little world and experience the ego-deflating vastness that is the rest of the Universe, or at least, our immeasurably tiny corner of it–but virtually none of that is on Mars. Oh, and there aren’t any princesses or canals either. Mars is basically a big, dusty, virtually airless tundra with little to be said for other than of moderate interest to planetary geologists. Let the Chinese go there (they aren’t and won’t, but we can pretend so they can pretend); we can be sending elaborate missions to the outer planets bringing back a wealth of scientifically interesting data and beautiful pictures of non-dust-storm-ridden alien worlds at a fraction of the cost and still have enough money left over to do practical works in space that benefit all of mankind.
Stranger
Wouldn’t upset me at all. Let the Russians or the Chinese be the first to deal with an angry Martian and his Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
Yes, Stranger On a Train is a better man than I am.
No!
I think drones prospecting the Moon makes more sense than sending people to Mars.
psik
I’d be devastated.
USA! USA! USA!
Well, I’m kind of a ringer on the topic given my vocation and experience. That’s not to say that there aren’t alternative positions which have some validity, but the argument that we “must” go to Mars soonest, in order to win (what?), or that such a mission can be done with most extrapolation of existing technogies for a small fraction of what the multitude of extensive studies performed by working engineers and mission planners with person-centuries of direct experience with large scale space systems just because one enthusiast with a PowerPoint slide deck says that we don’t need to actually design or test mission critical hardware that has to operate reliablity in conditions and durations well beyond current experience is a demonstration of how little the general public understand space vehicle and propulsion engineering.
Certainly we could put some bodies in a tin can with a collection of spare parts and a prayer and blast it out of orbit toward Mars, but what we’ll get at the other end is bodies and no mission, because a dead astronaut isn’t worth as much as a Heathkit robot when it comes to space exploration. The reality of crewed space exploration is that the vast majority of cost and effort–a credible estimate is more than 90% to Low Earth Orbit, and even more to destinations above and beyond Earth’s protective magnetic embrace–goes directly to keeping the delicate organic organisms basically functional. We are so used to living in a world that seems purpose-designed to support us and give us every resource almost without limit or need to recycle, that we don’t appreciate how well billions of years of evolution has specifically adapted us to this particular environment and not at all to virtually any other set of conditions; not even the high altitudes of the Andes or frigid wastes of the poles, much less an airless vacuum or hard radiation of interplanetary space.
The notion that we can ‘beam’ around space clad in nothing more than spandex onsies blasting away with comically tiny projected energy weapons is about as fanciful as passing through a wardrobe into another reality or shrinking into a submarine capable of traversing arteries to clear a blood clot. Space, as the saying gows, doesn’t need us, and we either have to be able to make a very Earth-like environment that is self-sustaining for years with minimal maintenance and no supply, or alter ourselves to be more adapted to the conditions of extraterrestrial bodies and interplanetary space, a feat of adaptive engineering just short of creating synthetic life from inert chemicals.
Anyway, I’m holding out to go skiing at Cold Faithful or watching volcanos form at Loki Patera. Mars is just a vast expanse of dusty nothingness. Kind of like West Texas without the threat of random javalina attack.
Stranger