Should We Run a "Virtual" Mars Mission?

[commasense]

One of the things I love about the Dope is the fact that we have members who are expert in any area you can think of, and who can provide the benefit of that expertise in clear, well-written English. Need to know about the art forms of the natives of the fourth planet in the Alpha Centauri system? Some Doper will tell you all about it, usually about 20 minutes after the OP has been posted.

So I was somewhat abashed when our resident expert on space travel, Stranger, seemed to shoot down my idea of going to the moon before trying to go to Mars. I didn’t know about the various Mars plans and their costs, and of course I had no way of knowing Stranger’s (no doubt reasonable) estimate for a moon base “capable of indefinite duration stays.” But, as usual, his post is extremely informative and helpful, even though it seemed to shoot down a pet conceit of mine.

RTFirefly then generously inferred more thoughtfulness to my post than I had actually given it. I was not, as he assumed, suggesting moon missions that would mirror the planned Mars trips, but was actually, as Stranger assumed, proposing a permanent moon base. But that was mainly because I assumed the current plans for Mars were also to set up a permanent base there, and were not the limited missions Stranger described.

Stranger’s post makes the $1 trillion cost of a permanent moon base look like a bad deal compared to the limited Mars missions that cost half that or less. But that’s apples and oranges, isn’t it?

So taking RTFirefly’s lead, what would the cost be for moon missions of 40 or 1,000 days, or for a “permanent” Mars base of the type you assumed for the moon, Stranger? We recognize, of course, that any such estimates can only be fairly wild WAGs. But you’re in a better position than any of the rest of us to attempt them.

@Little_Nemo

I think a better method is an animal text. You send a mission to Mars with robot probes and some dogs or monkeys. The robot probes can go out and conduct real research so the mission isn’t just a test. You can monitor the health of the animals for the duration of the mission and then return everything to Earth.

If you’re able to send dog and monkeys to Mars and bring them back to Earth still alive, you can figure you’re able to do the same thing with humans. If not, well, it sucks to be a dog or a monkey.

Even if the deaths of the animals wasn’t certain, I am quite sure that any such plan would provoke far more outrage and protests than a plan to send a dozen humans on a one-way trip that 100% guaranteed their deaths within a year. (I am just as sure that there would be no shortage of volunteers for such a suicide mission.) There’s no way that any plan that might possibly result in the death of any animal above the level of a tapeworm would be politically acceptable to any civilized government.

[John_Bredin]

@Trinopus

(I’m also afraid we’ll see a big and frightened recoil, come to awful day that someone dies in space. It will energize an opposition. The only good thing that could possibly come from that is a new emphasis on robot exploration.)

As opposed to the three Apollo I deaths and loss of two Space Shuttles with all aboard? I think the public & political leadership are not significantly fazed by the human cost of space exploration but its financial cost.

[Little_Nemo]

@commasense

Even if the deaths of the animals wasn’t certain, I am quite sure that any such plan would provoke far more outrage and protests than a plan to send a dozen humans on a one-way trip that 100% guaranteed their deaths within a year. (I am just as sure that there would be no shortage of volunteers for such a suicide mission.) There’s no way that any plan that might possibly result in the death of any animal above the level of a tapeworm would be politically acceptable to any civilized government.

You might want to sit down for this. The United States, as well as six other countries, has been sending animals into space since the 1940’s. While many of these animals survived, not all of them did. In some cases, animals were launched into space without there even being a plan to bring them back alive. And hamburger is made out of cows.

So I think you may be overestimated how unacceptable the use of animals in spaceflight testing would be.

[commasense]

@Little_Nemo

You might want to sit down for this. The United States, as well as six other countries, has been sending animals into space since the 1940’s. While many of these animals survived, not all of them did. In some cases, animals were launched into space without there even being a plan to bring them back alive. And hamburger is made out of cows.

So I think you may be overestimated how unacceptable the use of animals in spaceflight testing would be.

You might want to sit down for this: in the U.S. certainly, and perhaps in other countries, too, public attitudes toward animals, and particularly pet animals like dogs, have changed significantly in the past few decades. IMHO, that, plus the growth of PETA (which I in no way support), would make any plan to send a dog or other large mammal to an uncertain fate in space politically untenable in the U.S. and, I suspect, Western Europe.

And these days lots of people are eating less hamburger because they oppose killing cows.

Consider that the last (non-human) primate to go into space was sent up by Iran in 2013. Before that, Russia’s last flight with a monkey was in 1996. The last U.S. monkey flew in 1985. In the last twenty years, the only non-primate mammals to be sent to space (mostly by Russia) were mice, rats, guinea pigs, etc., and the only other vertebrates were frogs and fish.

The U.S. seems to have launched nothing but insects and other invertebrates for more than twenty years.

I haven’t been able to find any record of the U.S. ever sending dogs into space, even though the Soviets sent lots, many of which perished, as you noted. Perhaps this suggests that even in the 1960s NASA suspected that putting Spot on a rocket would be bad PR. Of course, the Soviets didn’t have to worry so much about public opinion.

For the record, I was not saying I agree with all of these more sensitive attitudes, only commenting on their existence. Do you agree that any NASA proposal to send up a dog today would be, at the very least, controversial?