So - we deploy robotic javalinas?
Hey, whatever you think makes the most sense. I kind of favor cybernetic land kraken, but each to his or her own.
Stranger
The OP didn’t seek my opinion since I am not an American, but I ain’t gonna let that stop me. 
I would actually cheer if any other country puts a human on the mars before the US because that’s a good way to debunk the American exceptionalism that gets thrown around a lot IMHO. Yes, the US has achieved a lot, but it isn’t going to remain on top forever.
American here. Emotionally, I’d be disappointed that it wasn’t America, but excited that someone pulled it off. I’d rather it another country do it, then it not happen at all. Logically, I’d RATHER another country do it. As awesome as it sounds, I just don’t believe its worth the humongous expense. It would just cost too damn much. Apollo was in a different time, and was worth it, IMO.
You literally can’t do a week long mission to Mars. You have two choices. The short stay and long stay. The short stay would have astronauts on the surface for 30-90 days, while the long stay would have them on the surface for up to 500 days. So, a week is basically not happening, unless someone designed a mission that they were only on the surface for a week while the rest of the time they just stayed in orbit looking down at the planet. The long stay mission is the less risky one from an orbital mechanics perspective btw.
Digging holes for a automated robot on another planet might be a bit more of a challenge than you think, but no one is saying that robotic missions aren’t cost effective. I’m saying that they aren’t the be all and end all, and that human missions have real value and worth. We can learn more in a single human crewed mission than we’ve learned in decades of robotic exploration.
Xema was responding to your assertion that a person could cover much more ground during a relatively short excursion than a rover can over its mission lifetime, an assertion that can only be considered valid if you are assuming the person operating either in a shirtsleeve environment (breathable atmosphere, habitable temperature) or supported by a mobile work/habitat platform which would be enormously larger and heavier than the 850 kg Curiosity rover and powered by some unspecified portable power source vastly more capable than the RTGS powered by radioactive decay of [SUP]239[/SUP]Pu. The real limitation on robotic rovers isn’t that they can’t go further or dig as well or better than a human operator; it is that we can’t deliver a sufficiently large or powerful rover with the current launch and Mars EDL capabilities. The same applies to a crewed mission but with much greater scale owing to the large amount of consumables plus the end-of-mission requirement to return the crew back to Eart and all of the hardware necessary to support them for the return.
You argue that a crewed mission “can learn more in a single human crewed mission than we’ve learned in decades of robotic exploration”, but only by comparing the very cost limited prior robotic missions done with existing technology and the payload and size limits of current launch vehicle systems like Atlas and Delta, compared to a massively expensive (several hundreds of billions of dollars) done with space access and assembly, propulsion, life support, and landing technology that is yet to be developed. And even the claim with these provisions doesn’t hold water; we’ve sent probes to environments which no crewed vehicle could tolerate with any proposed technology, including the crushing, lead-melting atmosphere of Venus, the lethal charged particle environment of the Galilean moons, and a no-return mission to Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper Belt.
Stranger
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Xema was responding to your assertion that a person could cover much more ground during a relatively short excursion than a rover can over its mission lifetime, an assertion that can only be considered valid if you are assuming the person operating either in a shirtsleeve environment (breathable atmosphere, habitable temperature) or supported by a mobile work/habitat platform which would be enormously larger and heavier than the 850 kg Curiosity rover and powered by some unspecified portable power source vastly more capable than the RTGS powered by radioactive decay of 239Pu. The real limitation on robotic rovers isn’t that they can’t go further or dig as well or better than a human operator; it is that we can’t deliver a sufficiently large or powerful rover with the current launch and Mars EDL capabilities. The same applies to a crewed mission but with much greater scale owing to the large amount of consumables plus the end-of-mission requirement to return the crew back to Eart and all of the hardware necessary to support them for the return.
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Ah, I didn’t get that. But, of course, with a base of operation, a human wouldn’t be walking for a week straight…they would walk (or more likely drive some sort of rover) in a given direction, explore, take samples, and then return to the base to do it again the next day. Perhaps spending that evening processing those samples or doing other things. They could cover in a few weeks of such missions all the distance and exploration the best Mars rovers has done in over a decade.
You are right that power is part of the problem, but the thing is that as you build bigger, more complex and capable rovers your costs are going to go up as well, bot in terms of the rover itself and in terms of what it’s going to cost to get it there. Rovers today are less capable, but they are also, as has been noted, far less costly.
All I’m saying in these threads is that human exploration has it’s place, and that humans in situ can get a lot more done than the current or projected rovers can do. If we spent the same amount of money on rovers that we would or could spend on human missions I agree, you could probably get as much bang for your buck as a human mission, but we aren’t going to spend the same amounts on unmanned missions that we will on manned. Given real world politics, if we REALLY want to explore Mars on a time table less than decades or centuries then we will have to send people there at some point.
No, I don’t see this as a race we need to win. I don’t see it as a race at all. But I do think it’s important and that doing so would be not only a great achievement for our species but would also improve our knowledge of the planet that is closest to us in environment and has the best change to find evidence of life that we can realistically get to to explore in depth.
No…I’m arguing that human missions have their place, and that on Mars a single human mission could and would learn more in that single mission than in all the previous rover missions combined. I don’t think that this is that controversial a position to take. I’m not arguing that it wouldn’t cost more…I’ve freely admitted it would cost more, though I think that the actual costs are debatable and depend on exactly what the mission is in the end. Like I said, I’ve seen a huge range in costs, depending on the mission and depending on where the acceptable risk is set.
I’m certainly not saying either in this thread or in any of the myriad threads we’ve had on this subject that human crewed missions are across the board superior in all space exploration or that we should always use only humans. I think that robotic exploration is a good thing, and as you note (and as I never asserted differently) there are many environments where humans simply can’t go, so our only option is robotic missions…and we should do those. I wish we did more of them in fact. But there are missions where humans could bring back more data if they were there, and Mars is one of those. We should send a human crew to Mars…and I think that, eventually, we or someone will. I agree with you that it probably won’t be the Chinese in the 2020’s, or probably Russia or India in that same time frame, but eventually someone will go. I just hope I’m still alive to see it. It will be funny to watch all the folks who think it’s a waste be shocked at how much we find, explore and learn from such a mission.
Again, the reason that the current Mars rovers make so little distance isn’t because they aren’t people, it is because they have so little power available to them. Spirit and Opportunity had only as much power as their batteries could store as absorbed from the small solar panels on their backs. Curiosity has a radioisotope thermoelectric generator which makes it able to function even at night or dust storms, but all of the energy generated has to be shared between all of its systems. A vehicle to carry a human would not only need to have as much power necessary to operate the vehicle at the desired speed and perform all of the other functions (communications, tracking, equipment, et cetera), but also enough to maintain a habitable environment.
Even for short duration LEO missions, the effort of keeping a crew alive is estimated to be at least 90% of the total cost and labor. For longer missions it is more like 99% compared to an equivalent uncrewed system, and with the additional burden of returning the crew at end of mission. Even just looking at the ground exploration segment, the cost of including provisions for a crew is at a minimum an order of magnitude more than a robotic explorer to perform exactly the same tasks, and with greater risk and lower utilization, not withstanding the need to return the crew at the end of the surface mission versus leaving a rover to continue to work beyond the planned mission duration. The notion that people can “do more science” than a sophisticated probe is based both on the misapprehension that a person in a pressure suit can perform at the same degree of proficiency as one in shirt sleeves, and that “science” is done by looking and touching rather than sampling and measurement using instruments which can as easily be mounted on a rover, and without the clunky human-machine interfaces needed to permit an a human explorer in an awkward environment suit to perform the same.
You are correct about one thing; there is definitely a place for human crew in any space exploration program. However, the place for that is in a control and data evaluation capacity. The cost, risk, and needless complexity of putting a human crew with “boots on the ground” not only adds nothing over an equivalent mass of robotic probe or rover, but also poses a threat of contamination in the case of looking for indigenous life, as humans are literally infested with bacteria inside and out. It may make sense to send a crew along with robot systems on extended outer planetary missions for local control and higher bandwidth of data, but even then only once we’ve solved the logistical, propulsion, and space physiology problems in a way that would make the accompaniment of a crew a cost benefit per quantity of science data throughput, not when a crewed mission costs the gross national product of a major European nation versus a few billions of dollars for roughly equivalent remote capability.
Precisely what is it that you believe a crewed mission can accomplish that cannot be performed by modern remotely operated semi-autonomous probes and rovers with equivalent available power and mass, notwithstanding the extra power and mass requirements for life support systems in a crewed mission?
Stranger
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Again, the reason that the current Mars rovers make so little distance isn’t because they aren’t people, it is because they have so little power available to them. Spirit and Opportunity had only as much power as their batteries could store as absorbed from the small solar panels on their backs. Curiosity has a radioisotope thermoelectric generator which makes it able to function even at night or dust storms, but all of the energy generated has to be shared between all of its systems. A vehicle to carry a human would not only need to have as much power necessary to operate the vehicle at the desired speed and perform all of the other functions (communications, tracking, equipment, et cetera), but also enough to maintain a habitable environment.
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Again, I’m not disputing that. Hard as this might be to believe, I actually do know quite a bit about the current on planet rovers and how they are powered. But let’s put it a different way…if we build a more capable rover with a higher power budget, won’t that increase the cost? Won’t it make the mission more complex as well?
Humans, if they went to Mars would certainly have more power…it’s part of that OMG cost you and others keep banging on about. That $500 billion price tag you asserted includes all that power stuff, as well as life support…right? Now, you could send similar power systems to Mars for the rovers to enable them to do more (along with advanced AI to be more autonomous no doubt, and better software for exploration, and probes, attachments and all the rest)…but then it would cost more too. It probably still wouldn’t cost as much as a human mission, but then it still wouldn’t be able to do as much as a human mission could, even with more power, and, of course, it would drive the cost up closer to the human mission…which means, in reality, we wouldn’t do it. Instead, we will continue to send incrementally upgraded rovers similar to what we already have there, and they will never have the same power budget as a manned mission would. Correct or incorrect?
I’ve already said some of this. What could the crew do? Well, they could dig a hole, take a sample, climb a cliff, observe more, document more, move more, think more, perform in situ experiments and be able to evaluate the environment and see opportunities for discoveries that the rover might miss, since the rover isn’t a thinking sentient being able to make judgement calls and evaluate a dynamic situation…all in a single bio-unit called a human, instead of (in theory) several robotic probes. Humans, on Earth or off, are more capable than even the most cutting edge robot currently available. And you aren’t going to get the most cutting edge general purpose robot for a robotic probe mission to Mars, since the idea is always to keep costs low…and take much larger risks with the mission, so that if it fails you didn’t just lose a $10 billion dollar probe, when we could afford to lose a $1 billion one much easier.
Yeah, it would cost more for a human mission, it would be more risky and all that…but if we pulled it off we could learn more in one mission than we’ve learned in all the missions to date. Additionally, I’m fairly sure that our human astronauts would also be taking probes, drones and robotic rovers of their own with them that they could manipulate in real time. Finally, though you are probably correct that we COULD build a probe that would or could do all these wonderful things, have more power and abilities, the question is WILL WE? We would spend the money and effort on a manned mission, assuming we ever got our thumbs out of our collective asses and did it, than we ever will, realistically, on robotic missions. If we don’t do a manned mission to Mars, we will just keep doing what we are doing…one off probes or robotic rovers that will give us some data in a very small area over years or decades. If they make it. If not, well, we’ll build another in a few years…maybe. I suppose to most that’s good enough…personally, I’d like to see us do more at an increased pace. For perhaps double the current NASA yearly budget over 10 years we could put people on Mars. Personally, even leaving aside the obvious science we’d get out of it, that’s worth the price tag at least as much as anything else we spend and waste money on in this country. And if we were smart, we wouldn’t do it alone…we’d enlist Japan, Western Europe and maybe some other countries or private industries in the venture as well.
JMHO and all that, but it’s not like I’m alone in thinking that a manned Mars mission would be worth doing. Even among your own peers and colleagues there isn’t an overwhelming consensus on this, even though on THIS board most seem to agree with you.
I’m not asking for vague, nebulous statements about what a human can do that a robot can’t; I’d like to see examples of specific tasks–other than cognative and interpretative skills that we can agree that even the most automous probes don’t and won’t have in the foreseeable future–that a human astronaut, encoumbered in a pressure suit, dependant upon life support systems and required to take periodic breaks to eat, excrete, and sleep in a habitable environment, can perform better than a probem. You agree that “it would cost more for a human mission, it would be more risky and all that,” but don’t acknowledge the scale; instead insisting that a crewed mission will obligate going to Mars or elsewhere instead of “one off probes or robotic rovers that will give us some data in a very small area over years or decades”. The reality, however, is taht we’ve neglected to fund or even support the necessary technology development for an interplanetary crewed mission.
On the other hand, despite the wavering support for crewed spaceflight (that has nonetheless dominated the NASA budget) we’ve sent several rovers, orbiting probes, and flyby spacecraft to many different targets and collected an enormous wealth of data–information that is still being reviewed and processed by planetologists a decade or more after it has been received back on Earth–without having to spend the time and effort how to figure out how to protect crew against the multitude of hazards. We can continue to do this–send multiple remotely operated probes–at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to send a crewed mission to even the nearest and least interesting planetary body. Such technical capabilities continue to improve by leaps and bounds while human physiology remains as delicate and prone to the hazards of space as it has always been; the only thing that progresses there is our understanding of just how hazardous crewed space exploration would be.
You seem to be of the belief that a successful crewed Mars mission would be some kind of watershed event which would then somehow spur on human space habitation and exploration. However, prior experience indicates that if such an effort was undertaken, even if successful, would serve to dominate any budget available for space exploration in general with a focus to develop the necessary just enough to meet the mission objectives. Such ‘destination oriented’ missions tend to result in progams being cancelled once they are of no political value regardless of success, witness both the US Apollo program and the Soviet lunar program, leaving us with a gulf in both practical capability (e.g. rockets too expensive to fly, spacecraft designed specifically for the mission that are not adaptable to other purposes) and political will.
A more ultimately sustainable effort is one that develops a cost-effective space access and in-situ utilization infrastructure to make accomplishing a multitude of different goals feasible and sustainable. In fact, if you really want a long-term crewed exploration program and a sustainble human presence, the support and development of uncrewed and autonomous capability, used to extract resources from Near Earth Asteroids and used to produce and fabricate propllants, consumables, energy resources, and structures. Once a self-sustaining space-based industrial presence is viable, going to Mars or any other destination inside the orbit of Saturn will be more a matter of logistics than technology development, with a cost that doesn’t include hauling every single resource up from the surface of the Earth at a cost that would make even a seasoned Pentagon procurement officer blush like a schoolgirl.
But we won’t be doing this with astronaut miners and construction workers; the costs and hazards are just too great, hence the need for autonomous capability. Human beings have never been defined by our raw strength, or resilance to environmental hazards, or impervousness to harm. We’re large-brained tool users who have from millions of years previous distinguished ourselves by applying intellect to develop tools and mechanisms in order to assist or perform the work for us without subjecting ourselves to direct harm. There is no reason that our solitions to operating and exploring in space–an environment far more hazardous to us than anything we will ever experience on Earth short of being at ground zero of a runaway nuclear fission event–should be approached any differently.
Stranger
Ok throwing this out.
What if say Curiosity tomorrow comes upon the remains of a Martian city or alien spacecraft.
THEN would it be worth the cost?
No.
Just pointing out that $240 billion is the estimated cost of eliminating extreme poverty (under $1…25 a day). $30 billion a year will end hunger. The U.S. Spends about $33 billion yearly on all foreign aid, only a portion of which is development focused.
When you are throwing around $10 billion, much less $500 billion, that is real money.
While everyone’s personal answer will differ – some will say yes and some will say no – I think the world would say yes. An alien city or spacecraft would prompt a massive exploratory zeal, especially among the competitive major industrial nations.
Would we have the smarts to man an “all-earth” expedition, or would each nation (or blocs of nations such as Europe) have to have their own? I’m betting on one bit international project. It’s 2001 (the movie) all over again!
Intelligent alien life is the only thing that would allow Mars to have any value at all beyond some obsessive need to hoard trivia, so I would consider that discovery a necessary prerequisite for a manned mission.
Dr. Von Braun proposed a $500 billion plan to send humans to Mars. the plan would not work, because it posited a Martian atmosphere thick enough to allow a glider re-entry /landing on Mars. however, if we did follow the plan (and assemble 10 mars ships in earth orbit, we could have a orbiting station around Mars. Suppose we sent a few people to the surface, for a few months, then went back into mars orbit? We would be able to keep a few humans on the surface for several years. We would still have the Mars-Earth transfer ships, so we could use them for decades. this would be expensive, but a viable plan. BTW, von Braun estimated 980 earth-earth orbit flights to build the Mars ships, so it would be very costly. But it would work.
Oh. Only 980 earth-earth orbits? What are we waiting for??
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
I’m not asking for vague, nebulous statements about what a human can do that a robot can’t; I’d like to see examples of specific tasks–other than cognative and interpretative skills that we can agree that even the most automous probes don’t and won’t have in the foreseeable future–that a human astronaut, encoumbered in a pressure suit, dependant upon life support systems and required to take periodic breaks to eat, excrete, and sleep in a habitable environment, can perform better than a probem. You agree that “it would cost more for a human mission, it would be more risky and all that,” but don’t acknowledge the scale; instead insisting that a crewed mission will obligate going to Mars or elsewhere instead of “one off probes or robotic rovers that will give us some data in a very small area over years or decades”. The reality, however, is taht we’ve neglected to fund or even support the necessary technology development for an interplanetary crewed mission.
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Then compare the amount of science and data collected in a few hours by the astronauts that landed on the moon to the robotic rovers sent to the moon…or, hell, to Mars. We are STILL doing science on the samples brought back from the Apollo astronauts, still using laser targets they set up, etc. Thus far, after over a decade, the BEST Mars rover (Opportunity) has traveled a total distance of 42KM on Mars. The Chinese rover on the Moon has traveled a total of 7-8KM (the best Russian rover on the Moon traveled around 40KM). In the few days men were on the Moon we traveled close to 35KM…and that was with stops to get out and look at or collect interesting things.
It would be a bit costly, yes.
Americans: Would it upset you if China or Russia landed on Mars before the United States?
Yes
And I suspect the majority of Chinese and Russians would be upset if we landed there before them.
I see no problem with group or national pride of artistic or scientific accomplishments. Pride is a very human trait and one that I believe pushes our species to greater heights (as long as pride is kept in check).
Yes, there are limits to what a country should spend to finance scientific projects, but to say we shouldn’t spend a significant amount of money for worthwhile endeavors because that money should be spent only for social causes is a bad idea that leads to stagnation. Spend significant money on both…as we pretty much do now. I foresee no time in the future when countries will have money to burn and no social ills, so thinking like that just passes the buck and can lead only to dwindling artistic and scientific achievements over time.
Sure a lot of public money gets thrown at junk science and that should be curtailed, but space exploration isn’t junk science. Space is our destiny and the further we go the sooner our species will have a secure future. My slide rule is infected with malware so my decimal place may be off, but according to my calculations, our sun will burn out somewhere between 5 months and 5 billion years from now. We better be in some other solar system before that happens. Let’s not put the onus entirely on our descendants to begin the journey toward interstellar travel.
Scientist 1: The sun’s about to blow, we’ve got to get to Kapteyn’s star quick!
Scientist 2: Well, thanks to our cheapskate ancestors; we haven’t even gotten to Mars yet, so that ain’t gonna happen.
Landing a man on the moon was a great achievement for all mankind and one to instill pride for us all. But, as an American I took a little extra pride in that accomplishment.
We also put the first man in space, too. It was erroneously reported at the time that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, but he wasn’t. It was this guy. It was erroneously reported that Ham was a chimpanzee, but he was actually a short, very hirsute American man who liked bananas.
The Europeans were certainly proud when their ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta finally reached its destination. It was indeed a cute accomplishment for those tiny countries. My mother was a WWII British War bride, so I bragged about being a Brit during that time (although I reverted to being American when, after the decade long journey, they putted the probe into a hole in the comet…understandable, given that golf originated in Scotland, I suppose).
On a bigger scale, I’m proud that our species is the one achieving space travel, not the birds, or bats, or flying squirrels, or flying fish. I would even have been somewhat dejected if proto-humans got to the moon before us (you know some homines erecti must have thrown rocks at the moon. Thankfully that propulsion system was inadequate to achieve orbit). We also don’t want whatever we eventually speciate into to be the one’s who first reach the stars. Space travel is our thing; a human thing.
I’d prefer a coalition of all nations to come together (NASA, ESA, etc.) and contribute what they can to land a man on Mars and beyond—making it a true global human achievement. But, barring that, America is my second choice. My third choice is Greenland. Imagine how giddy with pride those Greenlanders would be putting a man on Mars. And, being so acclimated to the cold, they’d just need a helmet with an oxygen tank, no space suit to keep them warm.