Not counting Skylab and the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project there were only eleven (11) crewed Apollo missions with (6) lunar landings, and many of them had significant anomalies including substantial POGO issues, electrostatically charged lunar dust infiltration jamming mechanisms, and most famously the Apollo 12 lighting strike that resulted in John Aaron’s “Switch SCE to AUX” command which gave rise to the popular use of the term “steely-eyed missile man”. Apollo 11 lunar landing almost ended in abort when the LM computer kept glitching from overload with the infamous “1202 error”. And of course the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 pad test capsule fire which was due to bad engineering and management decisions in the design of the capsule system and communicating risks about flammability in an all oxygen atmosphere. There were plenty of near-misses and major problems during Apollo.
No, the statement that “there is no air, food, or water on Mars” is basically correct. I don’t believe there’s any usable liquid water, and the Martian atmosphere is not only extremely thin, it’s comprised mostly of CO2, and with enough CO to be toxic. It is not in any sense “air”.
Yep, plenty of near misses. And Apollo 1 was was a disaster- while still on the ground- and being tested. But we landed on the moon six times, with no deaths- just near misses and issues. With ancient tech. Even A 13 got back.
So, the failure rate leading to the death of the astronauts is pretty good the only ones in were the two Space shuttle missions- but there were 130+ successful mission. No doubt- being an Astronaut is a risky job, but by no means is it a death sentence.
It doesnt matter. There was even less water and air on the Moon.
I wonder what probability of survival and percentage of national GDP or whatever economic measure it took to commit the materiel for historic colonies. Of course, there was usually a preliminary expedition - a colony ship wouldn’t be the first to take a route. Nor the last, as colonies were usually continuously supplied.
As the Company of Scotland was backed by approximately 20 per cent of all the money circulating in Scotland, its failure left the entire Scottish Lowlands in financial ruin. This was an important factor in weakening resistance to the Act of Union
So that’s one salient example of, basically, a country that rolled the dice on making a colony and went bust.
And, of course, that’s attempting to colonize on the same planet. We may be able to make a guess about the level of investment necessary to colonize another planet; we know almost nothing about what kinds of returns to expect - and given transportation costs, they’re likely to be very low. If we could be assured of finding and decoding some kind of advanced Martian technology, information about which could be sent easily to Earth, that would perhaps be the one thing that might make it worthwhile.
But Fred Pohl’s already written about that, right?
One of the biggest ways to finance the New World colonies was via land and other grants. A company would be given the right to a big chunk of land, they’d sell shares in the enterprise, use the money to get ships, settlers, etc. and head off.
There’s all sorts of international treaty stuff that limits doing this with the Moon and planets. Plus it would be extremely weird that there would be anything worth grabbing on Mars that would pay for sending it back, even just to Earth orbit. Even the Moon is questionable in this regard. Sure, it has The Most Fabulous Object In The World: helium. But it’s probably too diffuse to make the whole enterprise pay vs. Earth extraction.
Very interesting about the Scottish colony, I’ll read up on it later tonight!
Per the hypothetical everyone on Earth is committed, so we can handwave away those political roadblocks. Still need the ROI though. Many years ago I remember Elon Musk of all people proposing to use Mars as a staging area for asteroid belt mining operations. Maybe that’s where the ROI comes from?
I am very much not an expert on anything science related. But he seems to think you can use Mars’s natural water and carbon dioxide reserves to refuel spacecraft. The SpaceX site has an infographic covering Earth to Mars and back:
That being said, I couldn’t find the article(s) where I read Musk wants to use Mars to stage asteroid mining operations. Here’s a recent paper on that topic, not related to Elon Musk. Here’s a one minute clip of him saying so from 2003. But then here he is in 2012 saying the main economic exchange between a Mars base and Earth would be intellectual property.
Well, I for one would be willing to pay extra to have all the Mars astronauts/space colonists talk with that helium voice all the time. Live-streaming (with the necessary lag) a rowdy Mars City town-hall meeting where everyone’s shouting at Elon Musk would be worth its weight in quatloos.
There’s no real rush and no real point to get to Mars first. I guess maybe silly nationalistic reasons, but those are pretty fleeting and the return isn’t worth it.
@RitterSport hit the nail on the head by pointing out the info in the book “A City on Mars”. I have read it and it’s fascinating, insightful, and quite frequently hilarious.
It was actually “Try SCE to AUX”. What is often lost in that story is almost no one knew what that switch was or where it was … except for Alan Bean who, through mere coincidence, was in the chair responsible for that switch. So while everyone in that air and on the ground was WTF is that!, he calmly reached over and flipped it.