Maybe because it was posted in ‘Great Debates’.
However, if this thread was meant to exclusively discuss science fiction type scenarios than by all means, lets jump on board the Starship Enterprise and fly to Mars for the weekend. I’ll bring the beer.
[QUOTE=Great Antibob]
Is the “cool” factor worth it? I say yes (even if I come down on the unmanned side of things), but there’s clearly a debate there, too.
[/QUOTE]
Yep, it’s definitely a debatable topic. Especially the parts about colonization and settling. The thread has kind of strayed from that, but I think that’s because it’s not realistic at this time (hell, a single manned mission doesn’t seem anywhere close to a reality at this time). The real debate is should we continue as we’ve been or should we push a manned mission…or, as a third alternative based on the responses in several threads of this type I’ve seen, should we not have any space program at all, and instead should we take that whopping >1% of our budget and spend it on (pick your favorite pet project or cause)?
-XT
If our goal really is to do some serious digging around on Mars and finally settle the life/liquid water in the past questions, then a manned mission is the way to go. I’m excited about Curiosity’s landing on Mars. If it works, it will be very very impressive. Its science and exploration? Not really. It’s pretty ho-hum. The contraption can still only scratch the surface, literally. An astronaut could jam a shovel into the ground and come up with 50 years’ worth of Curiosity-type sampling. Stick that astronaut on a nice Mars buggy, and they could cover miles in hours, not meters in years.
And give that astronaut a couple of ROV’s being controlled in real time and a fully functional lab and they are going to be able to do even more. And they are, more importantly, going to be able to do stuff that the mission planners didn’t think of ahead of time. If they find something they will be able to adapt right then to explore new lines of inquiry that might come up, instead of having to wait a few years or a decade before a new mission is built, launched and (hopefully) arrives to explore those new lines of inquiry.
Granted, the astronauts ARE going to eat and shit quite a bit, and that is seemingly an incredible downside, but when they aren’t fighting every second for survival (battling micro-meteors and Mars bugs that eat all organic material, to name but a few of the huge trials they will face according to Hollywood), they are going to be finding a huge amount more data than any probe, simply because there is a real, functional brain there able to do things in real time. To adapt. To overcome. To boldly go where no food eating, shit dumping person has gone before! 
-XT
I agree on all that, but, it means carrying a four-year supply of food. Can’t count on making a closed-biosphere thing work.
Well, that’s why you would send stuff ahead of time to be waiting for you, as well as bring extra with you when you go. I think you COULD grow quite a bit ‘living off the land’ as Zubrin says, but I expect that any sane planner is going to go with that as a backup, and plan to bring lots of extra. You will want that backup return vehicle as well. I think Zubrin’s Mars Direct mission profile, with some modification, is one of the better plans that gives us the best chance to make the mission work. Still be plenty dangerous though, no denying that.
To me the risk and the cost (which, IMHO is pretty minimal at even $100 billion, spread out over the years needed to prepare) are worth it. Not just for the prestige that would accrue on the US (or whoever does it), but because of all we’d learn and what a huge achievement it would be for our species. What I’d love to see is an international effort spearheaded by the US that gets a bunch of other nations involved. Sort of like Bova’s Mars books without all of the nasty international tension.
-XT
And if we’re gonna do this right, if the mission is to spend two years exploring a whole planet, plus a year getting there and a year getting back again, we should send at least a hundred people. Which means a big habitat-ship.
In an interview during an Apollo mission, Werner von Braun said he would send six ships to Mars in case any failed.
Another plan has fuel, rations, air and a return vehicle being sent first.
Yeah, but Werner was a bit of a strange duck about this stuff. He wanted HUGE spaceships, and hundreds of billions just building up the infrastructure even before getting started on going to Mars. At some point you just have to say that the risks are acceptable and go with it. Or not. To me (as someone who risks nothing more than my tax dollars, since I’m obviously too old and fat to go), ‘acceptable risk’ would be sending several unmanned missions with a return vehicle, supplies (including construction machines, habitat, food, oxygen, a nuclear reactor or something similar for power, and perhaps even some sort of factory to manufacture oxygen, hydrogen and other components for rocket fuel) and everything the astronauts would need for their stay (plus verification that it all arrived and is in place and ready), and then when the manned mission goes sending it all again with the astronauts (this is the deviation from Mars Direct, which, IIRC, had us sending the stuff ahead of time and then the astronauts going fairly light in a dash for Mars…I do believe Zubrin had a backup return vehicle though). If everything goes as planned then that’s great…you have all the stuff there for the next mission. If something goes wrong, you have a backup. If multiple things go wrong…well, that’s when you get into ‘shit happens’.
-XT
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
And if we’re gonna do this right, if the mission is to spend two years exploring a whole planet, plus a year getting there and a year getting back again, we should send at least a hundred people. Which means a big habitat-ship.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think hundreds is feasible. IIRC, the optimal number is something like 10, but that might have been from a Sci-Fi novel (even supporting 10 folks for 3-4 years would be a trial, at a guess). I don’t think that you’d need hundreds to really get good science done on Mars for the long mission…not given UAV’s and the like, as well as all of the other stuff we’d be sending with these folks. They might even be able to send along light air craft or lighter than air craft to extend the range of exploration teams beyond that of the rovers they would be sending.
-XT
What about the Saturn V do you not understand? 
Someone was overcompensating?
-XT
Quite challenging given Mars’ atmosphere (surface pressure around 1% of Earth’s).
The opposite is true. I can guarantee you that humans will not be on Mars in the next 50 years, because of the expense. I’m 50 now, so I’m not expecting it in my lifetime. If you want some serious digging done, have a robot do it. Do you think that we couldn’t make a robot that could sink a shovel into the Martian dirt, for about 0.1% the cost of having a human do it?
Yeah, but think of all we can get done with robots during the next few decades, while we wouldn’t even be able to start learning with human astronauts for another 50 years or so.
Robotic control technology of the '60s (Apollo era) was unbelievably crude compared to that currently deployed. If the robotic approach had been taken, I think it would have taken many more missions, spread over a longer period of time, to achieve equivalent results.
No. We should not include a Mars mission in our near-term planning, It diverts effort from the superior goal of developing a capability to exploit resources located in space. We should not set foot on any heavy body until asteroid missions are routine and useful structures are constructed from materials not lifted from earth.
[QUOTE=Xema]
Quite challenging given Mars’ atmosphere (surface pressure around 1% of Earth’s).
[/QUOTE]
Certainly…at a minimum you’d need a pretty big ‘bag’ to hold your gas in. However, you would have more options for gasses (oxygen and nitrogen, for instance, could both be used, and they are fairly abundant on Mars), and the gasses would be at lower pressures than a similar system on Earth. None of this is a show stopper…it’s just engineering. And there are always heavier than air craft using rockets if it comes to that.
[QUOTE=CurtC]
Yeah, but think of all we can get done with robots during the next few decades, while we wouldn’t even be able to start learning with human astronauts for another 50 years or so.
[/QUOTE]
Again, I’m not saying drop unmanned probes. However, at the current pace it will take that 50 more years of unmanned probes to get what we’d get out of one manned mission. Obviously, if there is no will to do a manned mission then unmanned is better than nothing. That’s not really the question being asked here, however.
-XT
I can’t accept that. If we had sent a human to Mars back in 2004 instead of Spirit and Opportunity, what could a human have done that the two rovers haven’t? Now we’re sending Curiosity there with some new instrumentation for detecting organic compounds and water, but that would be the same even we had sent humans in 2004 - they wouldn’t have had the instrumentation to do everything, and they couldn’t do the work without instrumentation (just eyeballing it doesn’t cut it).
Humans would have been sent with whatever instrumentation we had the foresight and budget to include, just like with the rovers.
[QUOTE=CurtC]
I can’t accept that. If we had sent a human to Mars back in 2004 instead of Spirit and Opportunity, what could a human have done that the two rovers haven’t?
[/QUOTE]
Even with 2000 era technology they could (and would) have been able to travel beyond a couple of miles radius from their landing site. They would have been able to do boatloads of additional tests that you simply couldn’t fit on something the size of both of those rovers combined. They would have been able to bring back samples for further study. They would have been able to move around independently, and in multiple directions at once, since there would have been several fully autonomous and trained humans, instead of one remotely controlled vehicle. Etc. Etc.
There is just no comparison. If we COULD go (if it was politically possible), I can’t see how anyone could even question that humans on planet for over a year couldn’t produce more data than 2 small rovers with limited space and power budgets. What they have going for them is that this is all that we could do at the time, politically…and maybe all we’ll ever be able to do, given folks like you and others in this thread, as well as the general public opinion about spending real money on our space program.
Why wouldn’t they? What do you think was the general ability of even a half decent lab in 2004? And why do you think that NASA wouldn’t have sent one, along with at least one astronaut who knew what they were doing? Seriously…I don’t see where you are getting these ideas from. What do you think NASA, in 2004 would have sent with the astronauts? Only a test kit the size of a kids car (or two kids cars) and some cameras?
But you might have noticed that the rovers have fairly extreme space and power budgets, and that they aren’t able to adapt really at all (this isn’t technically true, since they could be reprogrammed somewhat and software adapted). You couldn’t, say, take off the rovers limb and modify it to do something else on the fly while on Mars. A human COULD do that though. They could take a machine designed for one thing and modify it, at least marginally, to do something else. And a human could move a bit more than a few miles from the landing site, and if there were more than one human (which I assume there would be) they could move in different directions at the same time…and do multiple tests at the same time. And, since they would be self propelled and autonomous (unlike the rover) and are curious, they could, in theory at least, see more interesting stuff that maybe the camera or one of the folks monitoring it back on Earth might see.
-XT
We could have dug deeper than a few centimeters. I think that by itself is enormous. We would have human eyes over a microscope in real time- if we see anything interesting, we can take a picture while it’s happening, rather than at random.