Can we? yes, technologically it’s no great feat, we could do it with current tech.
Be even easier if we stage and assemble the “Earth” launch platform in orbit.
Among other things it would allow leaving with more fuel payload.
Will we?
Well, it is a lot of money which is the biggest hang up i see.
If the mission has a return trip, i imagine that doubles the cost of getting there, or maybe more than doubles because now you need a landing module that’s carrying a lift module (like the moon lander)
If it is a one way trip, like the Mars One project proposes, that is an ongoing expense, maintenance missions, supply missions etc.
(Which could sadly be written off for financial reasons AFTER someone has already landed)
Someone has to give up some money to redirect existing funds towards that.
Aint no Govt agency giving up any money, and i dont think people at large would be overly good with a tax increase to fund it.
If money was no object, and this was NASA 1960? then yea sure.
But it isn’t and money is a big object.
I may not see 2030. A manned flight to Mars by 2030, maybe if they don’t try to land. A man landing on Mars by 2030, maybe if you don’t care how long he stays alive. A man landing on Mars and ever leaving the planet however long he lives in 2030, no way.
2030 ain’t happening IMO, but I should make it to 2065 or so and it seems pretty likely to happen before then.
Reusable rockets have now been proven to not just be possible, but that they achieve a net cost savings. Visiting Mars is about, more than anything, having a decent mass budget to work with. I anticipate that costs to orbit will drop by 10x in the next 15 years. You can pack plenty of food, water, shielding, fuel, and so on for the ride with this kind of budget.
That’s false. Even without special measures, the worst that happens on a typical trip is a mildly increased risk of cancer. The dose would exceed NASA guidelines, but is not even close to a death sentence.
I figure I have maybe twenty or thirty years left at best. In that time span, I think China will land a man on the moon (I expect that within ten years) but I don’t think they’ll put a man on Mars. And I feel every other country, including the United States, is currently behind China in advancing the frontiers of space exploration.
Every country on Earth is behind SpaceX in reducing the costs to space (Blue Origin will probably catch up, though). That will be the most important factor in landing a man on Mars. No national space program appears to have a credible plan for reducing launch costs, so they’ll have to rely on the private sector if it’s going to happen.
I don’t think Apollo technology would get an astronaut to Mars. The moon is 240,000 miles away. Apollo missions lasted around nine days - three days out, three days on the moon, three days back.
Mars is 34,000,000 miles away at its closest approach. You’d never be able to pack enough supplies in an Apollo capsule for a trip that long.
You have to separate the hype from the reality. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are making plans for private space travel and are working on it. But neither has caught up with what China has done.
What exactly has China done? Even the Indians are ahead of the Chinese when it comes to Mars. China has a credible (but expensive) rocket but no experience with Mars at all. They are doing some catchup when it comes to the Moon.
Anyway, I’m not talking about SpaceX’s Mars plans; just their ability to loft things into orbit on the cheap. A NASA/SpaceX partnership encompasses far more capability than China has in every respect.
Really, I’m curious why you single out China in particular. I don’t know that there’s a single aspect of their space program that isn’t being done better (or has already been done better) by some other party. Lunar exploration? Probes to outer planets? Space stations? Mars? Launcher development? No, no, no, no, no.
People often argue that going to Mars has no economic value or is impractical, but I would argue that the very PR value of it makes it worth it – that the Apollo landings on the Moon, for instance, had enormous cultural, historical, and political significance for humanity, especially Apollo 11 – and that that PR value alone makes it more than worth it. Plus, not everything has to be practical.
As for how it should be done – I like the idea of the “Mars Prize” suggested in the 1990s, whereby the U.S. government would announce a prize of a certain monetary value (for instance, let’s say, $50 billion) to be awarded to the first private company that can land astronauts on Mars and get them back safely to Earth, possibly along with accomplishing certain feats in between (i.e., gathering samples, doing experiments, etc.)
Apollo technology does not necessarily mean the hardware per se. You could possibly set up a mars mission in ten or twelve Saturn V launches, sending the lander/habitat, supplies and a propulsion fuel load or two to mars orbit on an early flight, then, once you are sure the stuff is there, in stable orbit, you could send a Skylab-size passenger ship on the next run (a couple years later). Remember that Skylab replaced the third stage of the launch vehicle. However, finding matching computer hardware would be a challenge indeed.
Current technology could be adapted to the task and could work quite well, even without having to invent a bunch of new things. But given that the design phase for something like a jetliner is close to a decade, just designing and testing the mission equipment is a daunting task. 2030 sounds very optimistic – but if there was life on mars, maybe there is oil there!
I think people are pretty indispensable. They can have ideas, jury rig equipment and take action based on noticing things, to an extent that is not practical with robotic craft. But they also pose problems. If you use the long cycle, they will be on mars itself for about a year, which means you need a crew (6~10) of smart researchers who are not going to rip each other’s throats out before the end of the mission. I see that as one of the biggest challenges to a mars mission.
I have maybe 15 years left. With the economy being what it is and the will to do things just because they are tough and we can being a little weak, I think not. Maybe say sometime after I’m gone – 30 or 40 years from now – sure. But not in my lifetime.
It has not been “proven” that “reusable rockets” provide a net reduction in launch costs; in fact the only orbital launch systems with even partial reusability/refurbishability which have only been practically demonstrated are the Space Transportation System (STS, colloqually “Shuttle”) and the SpaceX Falcon 9. The STS was demonstrably not cost effective for the payload it carried to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the real costs and savings on using the first stage of the Falcon 9 are unknown since SpaceX is a privately held company that has never released detailed cost figures. The initial projections on how much Stage 1 reflight would reduce launch costs started at an order of magnitude, then by 50%, then 30%, and they are now offering a 10% discount for using a previously flown stage off of their base manifest cost (which does not represent the entire cost of a launch, particularly if your payload needs a <10K processing environment, any special conditioning or monitoring, multiple coupled loads analysis cycles, et cetera).
The Falcon 9 family is unquestionably cheaper than United Launch Alliance (ULA) vehicles (Delta IV single core, Atlas V) but that is not at all surprising given past assessments that ULA costs were way out of line and ULA CEO Tory Bruno’s admission that they could cut launch costs by 50%. There is also the issue that ULA vehicles are subject to Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) Part 15 requirements versus commercial procurement under FAR Part 12 which the SpaceX launches for the Air Force were bought under (see Table 2 in this Government Accountability Office report for a summary of differences), and so comparing ULA to SpaceX costs is not an apples-to-oranges comparison, but it is clear that the cost estimates of SpaceX launches has increased from original conception and their cost reductions from reuse have diminished from order of magnitude to marginal reductions, which is unsurprising to anyone who has studied orbital launch vehicle costs as the bulk of the costs are neither in hardware or consumables but are in processing, testing & integration, and all of the other range and labor costs, which SpaceX has made some strides in reducing through automation and streamlined integration (e.g. horizontal integration and erection on pad, which is the way the Russians have been doing it for sixty years, so while it is an innovation for American launch services it is hardly novel). The advantage to SpaceX in refurbishment and reuse of a previously flown stage isn’t significant cost savings, but the potential for higher volumes of flights, provided that they can refurbish future stages without impacting their assembly line. The ultimate profitability of SpaceX is still in question, and a number of experienced financial analysts have expressed doubt as to whether SpaceX can be profitable without substantially scaling up their launch rate, but they’ve at least done the service of demonstrating that a new class conventional rocket launch vehicle can be developed with good reliability using commercial production methods at (presumably) lower costs than previous Air Force system contractors.
But this is neither here nor there in terms of the question of the o.p. The orbital launch capability and associated costs are the least challenging aspect of a crewed Mars mission. We can build a launcher with a 100+ ton lift capability to LEO, and we can do orbital integration of modules to build a large spacecraft, both of which are demonstrated capabilities (albeit at much greater expense than they should be). The greater challenges are building a propulsion system capable of both delivering this system to a Mars insertion orbit, and then returning the crew to Earth while functioning reliably without servicing for years on end; building a self-contained habitat that can function without resupply or any servicing that cannot be done by the crew and which provides sufficient protection against the hazards of interplanetary space (solar charged particle radiation, free fall environment, potential micrometeorite damage) to get the crew there and back; an interplanetary communications system with adequate bandwidth for a crewed mission with regular telemetry rather than relying on the obsolescent terrestrial Deep Space Network (DSN) and its restricted bandwidth; and most challenging, the actual controlled landing of tens of tons of payload and crew on the surface of Mars which is described by aerothermal analysts as “the most difficult solid body on the Solar System to land on” owing to having just enough atmosphere to cause dramatic aeroheating but not enough to provide useful lift at low supersonic or subsonic speeds.
The “EDL Problem” (entry, descent, landing) in particular is the most challenging of all; we’ve only landed probes and rovers massing less than 1000 kg (1 ton) and that is the limit of our capability with conventional aeroelastic deceleration systems. Attempts at developing novel deceleration systems, specifically the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), have failed to come to a workable solution, though I think they’ll eventually make an inflatable conically decelerator work. The alternative, an all-propulsive landing system, is plausible but increases the initial payload size and mass substantially in order to carry sufficient propellant, which increases overall costs significantly since we have to carry all propellant up from the surface of the Earth.
And there is the rub; at long as we are having to carry all consumables up from Earth to orbit, the costs of such an effort are going to be substantial (on the order of many hundreds of billions of dollars), not just because of launch costs but because of all the associated tankage and handling that has to be done. If we were able to get at least a reasonable portion of consumables from space resources it would represent a plausible reduction in mission costs, and the same technology to support a largely automated resource extraction infrastructure would undoubtedly also make a crewed interplanetary mission easier and less risky.
The supposed “PR value” isn’t worth the cost of the flacks it would take to promote it. Quite frankly, the only reason the United States bore the cost of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program was to prove that the US could beat the Soviet Union in an area that they had an initial lead in. And despite the “enormous cultural, historical, and political significance” of the effort, the US public approval for spending on the space program has exceeded 50% only one year in the past almost six decades in which we’ve had a space program. As space history curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Roger Launius notes, “It’s contrary to what the space community wants to believe,” but true; most people don’t really care that much about space or sending a crewed mission to Mars, and certainly not to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
A “Mars Prize” of US$50B would in no way cover the costs of such an effort using extant or near term technology. Estimates for a practical crewed Mars mission with a high chance of mission success range from U$500B to upwards of US$1000B and while I’ve seen credible estimates of cost reduction for accepting greater risk an uncertainty for reduced costs, I have yet to see a plausible concept that would come in at under US$200B. At these kinds of costs we could pepper the surface of Mars from pole to equator to pole with increasingly sophisticated rovers and probes, covering far larger and more diverse area without any associated costs to return live crew or deal with the touchy publicity problem of astronaut mortality.
As for the arguments of why we must send people to Mars: once you sit down and consider the costs and issues involved, a crewed mission for the sake of doing any kind of practical science or exploration makes essentially no sense. There is often the complaint that the Mars rovers move so slowly and cover such little ground in comparison to a human taking a hike, but that misses the essential fact that this is comparing a rover powered by solar energy (‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’) or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (‘Curiosity’) to a human in a terrestrial shirtsleeve environment. In fact, the issue is one of power, and maintaining a single human astronaut in a habitable environment will take as much power in a few hours as the rovers consume in a year, notwithstanding all of the resources to feed, eliminate waste, and ultimately return the astronaut. The same is true for the limited explorations and excavation ability; a human astronaut is going to need powered equipment to dig more than a few feet below the Martian regolith. And while we can sterilize proves and rovers going to Mars and keep them in an inert environment until they arrive, we absolutely cannot do this with human astronauts whose flora will inevitably cover their equipment and pressure suit, as well as wastes that are expelled into the environment. Maintaining a clean environment to assure that we don’t contaminate samples taken from Mars is vastly more difficult–in fact, essentially impossible–with a crewed mission versus robotic rovers.
On the notion of developing Mars as an alternate to Earth, this as well makes no sense upon consideration. Mars as a solid body with at least enough gravity to keep an astronaut from rebounding into space (about 37% of Earths) might seem to be the best choice for off-Earth habitation, but the combination of factors make it ill suited: it has no free surface water or clean ice (what water we know of is locked in recurring slope lineae (RSL), a thickly saturated salt brine that is nearly impossible to extract water from; there are only a paltry amount of known nitrates necessary for growing terrestrial plants, and a deep perfusion of highly toxic perchlorates; the surface of Mars is subject to weeks or months long dust storms, which while not anywhere as violent as portrayed in The Martian, will block out all sunlight and may make landing or ascending very hazardous; Mars lacks a protective magnetosphere and the atmosphere is so thin that the destructive ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground will destroy most conventional materials use for flexible gaskets and coatings within a few weeks; and while there is measurable gravity it is probably not sufficient for long term human habitation or healthy childhood development.
Mars will never be another Earth in any substantive sense, and humans can likely not live upon it in any sustainable fashion without substantial changes to our biology. In fact, the best options for off-Earth habitation are habitats constructed from space resources such as silicates, water ice, and carbon fiber reinforcement, which could produce a simulated gravity and radiation environment comparable to the sea-level Earth surface at relatively modest cost once the initial infrastructure for extracting and processing space resources is established. And once we have that capability, sending people to Mars or other planets is less of a challenge of developing barely adequate technology in a costly and desperate effort to plant a flag and take pictures of footprints for the supposed “PR value” than an exercis in logistics.
I think we’ll eventually land people on Mars, provided we continue to develop our capabilities and resource extraction methods in space, but baring some revolutionary advance in energy technology, it won’t be in a couple of decades, it won’t be a on a fleet of SpaceX “Colonial Transporters”, and it won’t be because there is any profit to be made in going to Mars and extracting resources, nor will we be building huge colonies or terraforming the surface. We’ll do it out of intellectual curiosity and when it is sufficiently easy to do without spending the annual GDP of a major industrial nation to do so.
My vote was no, based on sensible analysis by someone who knows what they’re analysing, but isn’t a “Woo! Mars!”-cheerleader or a “Why bother!” naysayer.
