I bet in two weeks the world could come up with a plan to jart an astronaut into a target circle on Mars.
To point out the obvious: Mars is almost directly opposite the Sun (from Earth’s POV now) and a better time to go would have been some month’s prior to now.
Anyways:
- Could we do this instantly: (or by years end): NFW
- Unwilling: Somone’s gotta plant the American Flag on Mars and claim it for the USA in perpetuity. Satellites/rovers don’t count, according to Maritime Law. If they did matter, it’d have already been done.
- Nobody (I assume) is updating the orbital logistics, which may or may not call for a (gravity-assist) fly-about of the Moon everyday. Yet if we have a heavy-lift rocket (sometime next year), all systems go!
Depending on values of “safely back”.
Note that the Lunar missions has lasting health effects, and long duration missions in stations have had lasting effects.
One of the Apollo guys (I can’t remember who) has said when they were preparing to go, he mentally put the odds of success at 60%. I say that’s generous for Mars.
Right now we don’t have a vehicle, but with the expenditure of money we could come up with one with 2025 tech. We could spend heavily on specific development of equipment and maybe even fill in some of the missing questions, but a lot of it would be best guess with layered contingency plans and hope we hit it right. I think 60% chance of success including return is generous.
The travel time to Mars puts an additional burden on testing. Even with the Lunar program we did paralleling of steps, with the next vehicle in assembly before the results of this test are known. And that’s with flight pain time of a week or two. For Mars, it’s a year and a half there and back. We would definitely have to do a lot in near Earth orbit or the vicinity of Earth. There would still be some things we could only test on Mars. I’m thinking braking and landing, but there may be other systems.
Then there’s the radiation problem. For general ionizing radiation, we could rig some kind of shielding, such as layers of plastic in the walls inside the micrometeoroid shielding. But there’s the risk of a solar flare incident that requires substantially more protection, and that probability is much more significant than Apollo, which essentially just hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Then there’s the logistics of having enough supplies. Rendezvous with resupply vehicles in separate launches is the current concept, by places a lot of trust in those missions making it in a timely manner. I know, pre-launch supplies so if they fail you just delay the mission, but that’s a long wait for getting the presupply there safely before launching.
There’s no “one and done” shot. It’s a sustained effort with multiple coordinated launches over years just for the actual flight itself, without any of the design and testing phases.
My main point is the tech exists, today, to get a human to Mars and back safely assuming money is of no concern (which it would be).
Is it still dangerous? Sure. But the tech exists. It could be done if we really (really) wanted to and didn’t care about costs.
No, “the tech” to put a crew of live human beings on the surface of Mars, much less have any prospect of returning that crew to Earth, does not exist for all of the reasons stated in the thread above.
Stranger
Really? What tech is lacking to get us to Mars and back? What new tech, that does not exist now, do we need to invent to make it possible?
Have tou read the thread?
Stranger
Yes I have.
Then I assume you can address the specific issues starting with Post #61 and onward to support your assertion?
Stranger
Sure.
Post #61 assumes living there.
I suggested we can get there and back and the tech exists now to do that.
Setting up a permanent population there is a different question.
The OP is not about living there. It is can we get there:
ETA: ISTM the question is does the tech exist, today, for us to build a rocket that would get humans to Mars? I think that is an emphatic “Yes!” We have the engineering skill now, today, to achieve such a thing. Will it be dangerous? Sure. But it is possible with the tech/engineering skill we have today. Of course, it would take some years to build it. We don’t have that capability just lying in a warehouse, ready to go.
No, it doesn’t. It addresses basic issues of getting a crewed vehicle to the surface and sustaining a crew for even the modest duration of an opposition-classmission:
Stranger
No, it doesn’t. See my post #14, of which the relevant section is this:
I think we’re less able to go to Mars right now than we were able to go to the moon around 1960. I remember as a kid seeing diagrams from that era showing how a moon mission would work, and it showed substantially the system that was actually used a decade later – a lunar lander detaching from an orbiting crew capsule, landing on the moon, and then an ascent stage returning and docking with the orbiter, which finally returns to earth.
Of course as a kid, my immediate thought was “so they know how to do it – why don’t they just go ahead and do it?” Well, they did, but it took a very busy decade and three major iterations of space programs – Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo – to acquire all the necessary learnings and technology. In the case of a Mars mission, I don’t know if we even have that much of a high-level concept.
It’s extremely naive to think we have all the necessary tech to send humans to Mars and back because, like, it takes rockets to do that, and we have rockets, ergo, we have what we need! What we have is the ability to develop the necessary technology without needing major fundamental breakthroughs in basic physics, materials technology, or propulsion technology. But that “ability to develop” might take ten or fifteen years and would probably be the largest engineering project ever attempted by humankind. Right now we don’t even have the tech to get to the moon, FFS, despite having been there over 50 years ago.
So, we can do it. No new tech needed. Per the OP, we are capable of doing it. Now. Nothing new needed.
Thanks.
You either don’t understand what I’m saying, or are just trying to score points with meaningless word games. The question was, “do we already have everything we need to do it?” and the answer is “absolutely not – developing what we need would require the largest and most costly engineering project ever undertaken by humankind”.
I should also have thrown a “maybe” in there about needing fundamental physics breakthroughs; such a mission may well turn out to be impossible without a major breakthrough in basic science. We just don’t know without a thorough engineering study. Any other assumption is naive and nonsensical, consisting of cartoon-level concepts.
Can we send astronauts to Mars? Well, we have sent numerous probes and even rovers to Mars so we certainly can get there and even land on the planet.
Humans are just another cargo. Why can’t they get there? Humans have lived in space for well over a year already (at one go). I think the round-trip to Mars would be similar.
It need not even be one rocket. Send one or a dozen rockets ahead that they can rendezvous with to re-supply.
The OP asked if we can do it and we can. We have all the tech needed now…today. The rest is an engineering problem. No new inventions needed.
There is no fundamental reason it is not doable if, per the OP,
Whenever anyone dismisses difficulties by handwaving them away as just “an engineering problem” without explaining in any detail whatsoever the engineering involved, you can be assured that they do not know how to solve that problem, or indeed even understand the basic issues those challenges.
Stranger
Have we put things on Mars? (yes)
Have humans lived in space for over a year? (yes)
What “new” tech would be needed to get a human cargo to Mars?
I never said it would be easy or worth the effort. The question is can we do it now? (yes…we’ve already done it with other cargo)
(“Now” being a bit wobbly since we don’t keep rockets like that on hand…it’d have to be built which would take a long time but we could do it if we really wanted to.)
Stranger
Why do you keep doing that?
Have humans successfully landed things on Mars?
Have humans lived in space in freefall for over a year?
What “new” tech would be needed to get a human to Mars?
I keep doing it because you continue to ignore the issues outlined in it, and insist that as long as we have had astronauts in Low Earth Orbit for over a year (within the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere) and have landed payloads on Mars (at a small fraction of the mass necessary for a crewed mission, not requiring supplies, protection, or power to maintain habitable conditions, and with no provision for return to Earth) that any differences in scope, effort, or risks are just “an engineering problem” and that “the tech” currently exists to resolve all of those challenges without actually presenting any substantive argument or evidence to bolster this assertion.
Stranger