I ain’t going!
It’s going to take us well off-topic so I will just say I dispute that and I think most anthropologists would too.
…but it’s complicated. Definitely enough for a thread in itself.
I recall a chimp expert commenting that a football stadium full of humans have an afternoon of fun and the same stadium full of chimps would all but instantly devolve into a Battle Royale w relatively few survivors.
We’re very good at violence once motivated. But our threshold is higher than many other carnivores.
I’ve heard descriptions of the injuries inflicted on a human by an out of control chimpanzee. There was one case in Connecticut. Really horrific injuries.
Not sure I understand this. The heating by atmospheric friction is a significant braking mechanism on initial entry into the atmosphere. Also not sure why payload mass is a factor – the total mass of the Curiosity package was nearly 4 metric tons, and just the rover alone had a mass of 0.9 metric tons and it, as well as part of the spacecraft including thrusters with a total mass of much more than a metric ton, came down just fine under a parachute. And the Mars helicopter was certainly a workable example of subsonic flight.
What is your definition of “go to” and how “now” is now?
We could chuck a human into the side of the planet, at most any speed you’d want to kill the guy at, pretty much no problem. Getting to launch day might take a few weeks, maybe as much as a year, but certainly do-able.
Start a self-sustaining community with a non-zero chance of surviving for at least a couple of generations? If we have 5-10 decades of prep and the chance to run a few payloads there to test stuff out, first - with no concern for loss of life - we might be able to put something together. I wouldn’t want to be one of the people going, but we are ultimately just talking about throwing tin cans through the sky real fast, building a large shielded warehouse, and shipping lots and lots of dirt and metal.
It’s probably still fairly likely that they’ll all die off due to some unexpected flaw in the plan, but we’d have gotten there every bit as much as Roanoke Colony came to America.
Most of the mass of the Curiosity (and Perseverance) ‘package’ was the heat shield, the parachutes (which were required to slow to subsonic speed for the terminal descent phase), and the skycrane (required to soft land the rover as opposed to the inflatable tetrahedral balloon buffers used to land smaller the Spirit and Opportunity rovers). A much larger landed mass would require proportionally larger area (scaled to mass, so it becomes a 3/2 scaling) and some way to slow to subsonic speed that is larger than what parachute decelerators can be built to do.
The Ingenuity helicopter could fly (short distances) on Mars because it is extremely light weight. You could not build a helicopter system for a much larger mass because the rotor tips would have to move at supersonic speeds to generate lift, and while it is physically feasible to build a lifting body aircraft with enough lift to carry an arbitrary mass, it would have to be truly enormous to lift even a 1 ton mass at subsonic speeds in the Martian atmosphere, much less something like a 40 ton payload to a soft, controlled landing.
Stranger
I’m not sure we’re there yet. I’ll add my voice to @Stranger_On_A_Train .
For reference, I used to work for the crewed space program. I worked on Shuttle Program and a bit of ISS for spacewalk tools, and I worked on ISS health maintenance equipment, mostly exercise equipment to counter low gravity.
Just to take one but of that, consider countering weightlessness. The doctors have been working on exercise methods to protect against bone loss, muscle atrophy, and some other effects like visual-spacial and balance effects as well as general cardio health since first module launch in 1998.
The ISS uses several pieces of equipment to maintain the crew health. There is a treadmill system, a “bicycle” ergometer, and resistance exercise machine for “weight lifting”.
These are not small devices. The treadmill is a refrigerator-sized rack. The resistance exercise machine takes up about the same space as a full- sized weight machine you might find in a gym.
When I left the program 10 years ago, they were still studying long duration methods and protocols. They were also searching for funding to explore new concepts for long duration flights on, say an Orion capsule for an asteroid mission. Space would be highly limited like for the lunar missions. There’s no room for the kind of equipment we’ve been using.
Going to Mars faces similar challenges for space and weight. Despite heavy lift capability, you’re so talking about extensive assembly in space. The ISS launched first element in 1998 and didn’t finish assembly until 2011. Actually, another module was added in 2021, but it was not part of the original build.
That took dozens of Shuttle flights using the robotic arm and in conjuction with the Station arm once it flew, with 6 to 8 EVAs a mission. Very labor intensive and complex. There are ways to simplify the design considerably over ISS, but you’re still talking about some complex assembly, hooking up avionics and power systems and radiation and debris shielding.
But we can just make the station spin, you say. You don’t want to spin a 40 ft diameter cylinder to create 1g. The coriolis would be too high, and the gravitational effect would be too inconsistent across the human body for effective feel like Earth.
Take two modules and connect them with cables and spin the pair around an axis together. Now we’re back to extensive space construction to connect those cables, which will not be small. And it would require new untested procedures. Then there’s the little complication that cables in low Earth orbit can create electrical charge buildup.
Suffice it to say it’s not something that can just be thrown together. You would need an Apollo level (including Gemini) program to develop the new things beyond ISS experience.
And that does nothing for the time on Mars. That would be another extended duration mission in low gravity. We have no idea if the Martian gravity would be sufficient to keep most of the bad effects at bay, or if astronauts would need additional exercise program while on the surface, with presumably a different set of equipment, because the first set is installed on the flight system that wouldn’t be able to land.
Is our science far enough along to be able to figure it out? With time and money. There’s no conceptually impossible steps. But we aren’t ready to go with what we have.
And that’s just the parts I have working knowledge of, talking with people responsible for implementing those systems.
A lot of ISS experience would be beneficial, but by no means sufficient to answer all the questions.
I haven’t read that, but I have read Mary Roach’s “Packing For Mars”, and that convinced me that until and unless we can circumvent the speed of light, the moon is as far as we’re ever gonna go.
We are perfectly capable of sending people to Mars to die there rarther quickly.
Why would we want to?
And anyone willingly betting their life on the continued support of the US government is a special kind of idiot.
You’d be better off relying on the support of Martians.
Based on today’s SpaceX news we’ve got a bit more work ahead of us…
They’ve made some modifications to the Starship and the last 2 don’t seem to have the ability to stay together all the way through an orbital burn. Considering how many starship launches are needed to fuel on ship to Mars, there’s a bit of work left.
And I’ll g along with the discussion, too many things to be tested. Musk seems to like the “try it and see what breaks” school of thought, which is great for unmanned rockets, (not so great for Nuclear stockpile monitoring). It’s a different type of flying, altogether, when humans are aboard.
It’s a different type of flying.
This. It’s like the software companies that release their product and let the users find all the bugs.
There is a certain reasonableness to the idea that the government needs to be tolerant of failure during development phase and allow a certain amount without shutting everything down as a waste of money. There is a value to failures for highlighting problems. Of course those failures are better if they happen in development ground tests rather than in flight.
However, these failures impact more than just the test vehicle and Starship project. Those “unscheduled rapid disassemblies” pose a significant risk to commercial aircraft in the area, boats, and people on the ground, not to mention wildlife and the environment. So the government has a vested interest in preventing them, and in slowing down operations to review for safety.
Especially when rapidly disassembling.
The different approaches to design and testing are an interesting thing to compare.
Contrast SpaceX with Blue Origin. Or even NASA in the Apollo era. SpaceX’s approach arguably learns a lot from their failures. But I suspect we are seeing a crossover between the value in the idea. As things scale they become harder. The analogy with software starts to come to bite.
A large enough software artefact tends to contain a fixed number of bugs. Fixing one thing leads to unexpected problems, and new bugs. This is after all the easy things have been fixed. Sometimes there are intrinsic issues with the fundamental architecture or design. You code around them to mitigate the underlying problems, but the nature of the beast is that such fixes always create other problems. Then the proliferation of mitigation code makes fixing core problems essentially impossible to manage.
Is SpaceX now discovering design flaws deeper in the system that may well have been found much earlier with more exhaustive ground testing and rigorous design? Probably. The question then becomes whether finding these problems in flight is a more time and cost effective approach.
I am reminded that testing of the Saturn 5 was done with an “all up” approach. The logic being that if you launched a test mass on the first stage, and the test succeeded, the test mass was a waste of payload and you should have had the next stage there, so it could be tested. This varied from earlier testing of boosters. But turned out to a good call. Not every flight was issue free, but they learnt enough to put Apollo 8 on only the third launch.
There was significant ground testing of the booster in ways that SpaceX doesn’t do. OTOH, computational engineering is science fiction compared to the Apollo era. So engineers likely felt more confident with their designs. But as the envelope gets pushed such confidence is likely more and more misplaced. Ground truthing your models becomes ever harder.
And back to Blue Origin. They are very quiet. But the first launch of New Glenn does tend to suggest that a more measured approach might be winning.
It depends upon what your metrics for success are as well. I don’t think Elon cares about the cost of a loss. But he does care about the time. So, again, where is the time best spent? If you drink the Agile software process Kool Aid, you may have a different answer to someone working on mission critical real time systems.
I would guess that there are enough smart people at SpaceX that these losses won’t be much of a setback. But it would not surprise me that the different approach to developing ends up not gaining them anything.
Actually it reminds me of what I heard about the Soviets. That they secured an early lead in the space race between being more willing to risk failure/death and able to cover it up, while NASA felt obligated to move slowly and carefully. But that it was an approach that had decreasing returns as the issues became more complex and the cost of risking highly expensive rockets blowing up to test every little change became too great.
Also, a flaw with testing rockets by launching them is if they fail they tend to end up as scattered, burned wreckage which makes it much harder to figure out what went wrong.
I’d think this is the right answer.
If money is no object could we get humans to Mars and back safely with 2025 tech? Almost certainly. It would not be easy and would cost a helluva lot to do but I think we could do it now.
Can we colonize Mars and expect it to work? Almost certainly not.
If there was an existential threat to the Earth that we HAD to colonize somewhere for the species to survive such that ALL efforts on the earth were dedicated to that goal? Maybe??? It’d take years though. Not gonna happen tomorrow. And its success would be dodgy at best I think.
And the Moon would be a far better candidate for that anyway due to it being much, much closer.
If there’s an existential threat to Earth, the Moon may be too close.
As in, more like falling with style?