So, we are capable of sending a person to Mars. No new tech needed. A human is just cargo with some special requirements. Requirements we have solved already with numerous people living in space (even now). Say a human needs 2 kilos per day of water. 0.5 kilos of food. That’s about 900 kilos(ish) of supplies for one year. Add air…say another 100 kilos. That is half the weight of the Mars Rover which we put on Mars.
Whatever the numbers it is an engineering problem no matter how much you want to hand-wave it away. We have the tech. We have the know-how. We have the experience. There is no sci-fi to this. No “magic” needed.
Not saying it would be easy and certainly would be dangerous but, again to the OP, we could do it if we really wanted to and if cost is of no concern (with the caveat that the rocket(s) would need to be built…they are not lying around and ready to go tomorrow).
Establishing a colony on Mars is a whole other problem…a much bigger problem than getting there. I think also doable with today’s tech but super difficult. Still…an engineering problem. No sci-fi needed. Just loads of money.
The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover masses 899 kg and Perseverance masses 1,025 kg.
It is incredible that you have the unmitigated gall to accuse others of handwaving when this is exactly what you are doing in asserting that humans are “just cargo with some special requirements” requiring nothing but food and air, and yet you can’t even get basic and easily checked facts correct.
I keep reposting it because you have not addressed any of the issues in it. You accuse me if ‘handwaving’ and then whinge endlessly about how unfair it is when I repeat the problems of putting a human crew on Mars and returning them back to Earth.
Please answer this question. Have we put things on the moon? Sure, and not only that, but we put men on the moon, over 50 years ago. So we clearly in some sense “have the technology”, and today we have even better technology. So why aren’t we there again? Why, in fact, is it such a daunting proposition that it’s being approached slowly and incrementally?
So why aren’t we back on the moon? Getting humans to Mars is at least 100 times more difficult. If you can’t answer that then your argument has no credibility. It’s like saying that we could have built a modern, reliable 2025 car in 1910, because it’s really just metal, glass, rubber, and some other stuff that they had back then, so it’s “just an engineering problem”. Except your proposition is even more outlandish in its handwaving superficiality.
The problem is that you don’t understand what an engineering project is, or what its output is, which you characterize as “just” an engineering problem.
An engineering project, and particularly the multiple kinds of mega-projects that would be required here, is a massive synergy of existing base technologies to produce fundamentally new and potentially extremely complex sub-assemblies that are then integrated into even larger and even more complex completely new space vehicles and other major assemblies. These are all completely new technologies, and we don’t have them today, or anything even close. We might even need new scientific advances, like completely new materials maybe based on nanotechnology, that we don’t even have today.
No, not “Pot meet kettle…”; you have repeatedly asserted that all of “the tech” required to sent humans to Mars and return them exists, and when presented with a specific list of challenges that are beyond what has been demonstrated in human spaceflight technology you avoid addressing them except to present a facile (and incorrect) estimate of just the mass of consumables per person. You have literally not addressed any if the issues with EDL, power, dealing with toxic compounds in the Martian regolith, protection from radiation, assuring that astronauts will be able to physically function without aid after many months in freefall, the propulsion and logistical demands of assembling and sending a spacecraft much larger than anything ever built into a transplanetary trajectory, or any of the multitude of other issues that are substantially beyond the scope of current experience with human spaceflight and planetary exploration, and no, sending an uncrewed mobile platform that requires little power, no consumables, and will never be returned to Earth does not answer to any of those issues.
I said earlier in the thread, I believe we could land a man on Mars, but we couldn’t bring him back.
I’m not an expert, but I would expect that a significant problem would be the taking off from the surface of Mars. Do you know how much rocket power that would take? I certainly don’t. Less than it takes from Earth, but a lot more that it took from the Moon, though. How would you ever land such a vehicle on Mars?
Here’s a clue - we can’t yet send a probe to pick up samples, and then bring them back. It’s been proposed, but we can’t do it. We’d have to learn to do that first, before even thinking about doing it with a human.
I say chaps, this is getting a bit heated, isn’t it?
We can probably all agree than no new (fundamental) physics would be required.
But sure, a lot of engineering development. Likely possible if we were willing to throw unlimited resources into it. Like Apollo or the Manhattan project?
Going back to the OP, the question was, ‘send a team of astronauts to Mars’… and I think we could probably do that within a few years. Establishing a more or less self-sustaining colony is a very different question.
Most of these problems just come down to mass and the very unforgiving nature of the Rocket Equation. The same high school physics formulas apply to landing a kilogram or a kilotonne on the surface of e.g. Mars.
However, the actual details of how that effort scales up from a kilogram to a kilotonne are anything but high school level work.
As always, Randall Munroe has helpfully shown us the way. In this case about how scaling up in rocketry reveals … problems: Model Rockets | What-if.xkcd.com.
What spacecraft that already exists could you fly to Mars in? If you can’t point to it (the actual physical spacecraft, not just designs or whitepapers for it), then no, we don’t have the technology, and it hasn’t been invented. Maybe we’re really close to having the technology. Maybe we could invent the technology very quickly, if we were sufficiently motivated. But we don’t actually have it.
And, just for comparison, the Apollo Lunar Module, which only needed to sustain its crew for days, not years, and was, AIUI, exceptionally fragile (to save on mass) still weighed 15,000 kilograms, or more than an order of magnitude heavier than those rovers.
Looking at some of the proposed landing vehicles for potential future lunar missions, the Starship HLS is proposed to be ~100,000 kg, while the Blue Moon 2 is estimated at a launch weight of over 45,000 kg.
I think that @Whack-a-Mole is vastly underestimating the total mass of a lander which would need to meet even bare-bones specifications to safely get a crew to and from Mars, and the challenges of safely landing a vehicle with that kind of mass on Mars, as @Stranger_On_A_Train has attempted to explain repeatedly.
Well, Apollos 8, 9, and 10 all orbited the Moon; it was not until Apollo 11, when we actually landed, that it was generally considered that we had “gotten to the Moon.”
YMMV if you wish to be pedantic about it, but you, yourself, were talking about the masses of unmanned landing vehicles.
That’s like saying since we don’t have a built fusion reactor then we don’t have the tech for a fusion reactor. Nevermind it is on paper and one is being built. It doesn’t exist yet therefore we don’t have the tech and it has not been invented yet.