# Travel to Mars - compared to moon **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 17, 2019, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206 "2019-07-17T13:02:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/61 "2019-07-21T13:34:54Z")
> [@joema](#): > > By contrast it has recently become known that even tiny human exposure to Mars surface dust could be fatal since it is coated with toxic calcium perchlorates. It has yet to be explained how such antiseptic clean room conditions could be realistically maintained during a human Mars mission. > > Mars covered with calcium perchlorate: [Toxic Mars: Astronauts Must Deal with Perchlorate on the Red Planet | Space](https://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals.html) > [@JKellyMap](#): > > Perchlorates — wow, that sucks. Perchlorate toxicity, though serious, is greatly overstated as a problem for Martian exploration. We’ve got perchlorate factories on earth, and a pretty good understanding of occupational exposures and limits. In brief, perchlorate intake ~1 mg/day doesn’t cause any health problems as far as toxicologists have found out. Occupational limits to stay below this intake has been set to ~1 mg/m^3 in the air, and since Martian soil is about ~1% perchlorate, that basically means toxic doses should require a visible haze or film of dust. Higher doses aren’t instant death, either. Moderate thyroid disruption has been observed in humans exposed to much higher doses (~1000 mg/day for weeks). I suspect some basic measures like dusting off spacesuits in the airlock, sponging off the rest, and taking a shower afterward ought to be sufficient to manage perchlorate exposure. Perchlorates in waste water can be managed as well: soil bacteria on earth will happily consume it in the right conditions, which could be part of a standard waste recycling/composting system. The perchlorate problem is certainly worth careful study and engineering controls (more careful than some asshole googling [tox documents](https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp162-c3.pdf) with his morning coffee). But it’s far from a dealbreaker. All numbers from the linked tox documents, rounded and converted from mg/kg assuming an 80 kg body mass. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/62 "2019-07-21T18:18:04Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > Can we get past this false dichotomy? The current NASA paradigm _is_ to work with the private sector. That was NASA’s decision in 2009, to stop development of an orbital rocket for flights to the ISS, and instead take that money and invest in private companies. Even for the Artemis moon lander, NASA is mainly working as a customer and integrator rather than the developer. I was think specifically of the launches, not of making the hardware. Why do we need a not-so-small army of techs and engineers to launch a single spacecraft? Could not some engineering be put towards streamlining the process so we can reduce the number of people involved? I could be mistaken, but don’t they have about the same numbers involved in a launch today as they did 50 years ago? ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/63 "2019-07-21T18:57:46Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > I was think specifically of the launches, not of making the hardware. Why do we need a not-so-small army of techs and engineers to launch a single spacecraft? Could not some engineering be put towards streamlining the process so we can reduce the number of people involved? I could be mistaken, but don’t they have about the same numbers involved in a launch today as they did 50 years ago? I think reusable boosters will save a lot more money than firing some engineers. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/64 "2019-07-21T19:25:08Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > I think reusable boosters will save a lot more money than firing some engineers. True, but those are orthogonal. You could save money by doing both. Although you shouldn’t call it “firing engineers”. What I mean is to reduce the _need_ for so many of them at a launch. That means applying some more engineering to the entire launch process so that fewer people could do the same jobs. Making the hardware more robust in various ways, even very small ways, would help. Note that this process would likely be incremental, not some big drop in the number of people. Also note that privatizing it would not automatically do it. It’s just that private companies have more incentive to do this kind of engineering. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/65 "2019-07-21T19:35:03Z")
The OP also asked about economic rewards from the Apollo missions. Tang and Teflon come to mind…two toxins that don’t in fact do anything we couldn’t do before. For any technological breakthrough claimed to come from Apollo, can we ask, “how useful/important/worth it was it?” And “could we have got it just by working directly on the problem it solved rather than gathering fallout from Apollo?” And if we don’t count improvements for space and military applications, what was gained? Finally, can we ask what wasn’t done because of money spent on Apollo? I would guess that a useful amount of low cost housing might have been built, for example. Surely all of this could be factored into the questions of “was it worth it?” And “should we go to Mars?” ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/66 "2019-07-21T20:04:25Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > I think reusable boosters will save a lot more money than firing some engineers. You also avoid the problem of, “that was Dave’s area, but we figured, what were the odds of that happening? So we let Dave go and he’s not answering his phone.” ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/67 "2019-07-21T22:12:29Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > The OP also asked about economic rewards from the Apollo missions. Tang and Teflon come to mind…two toxins that don’t in fact do anything we couldn’t do before. Teflon was discovered in the 1930s, Tang invented in the 1950s. And to forestall anyone saying Velcro, that was invented in the 1940s. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/68 "2019-07-21T22:43:05Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > You also avoid the problem of, “that was Dave’s area, but we figured, what were the odds of that happening? So we let Dave go and he’s not answering his phone.” You missed the entire thrust of my suggestion. I wasn’t suggesting firing engineers at random or if their subsystem was thought too robust to fail. I was suggesting that one person could montor multiple subsystems, so you don’t have so many engineers sitting around each looking at a few numbers on computer montiors. Oh, and you are also almost totally ignorant of the properties and uses of teflon and how it was used in WWII. It’s far more than just a non-stick frying pan coating. ---
**Author:** ![Triskadecamus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b19c9b/32.png) [@Triskadecamus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Triskadecamus)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/69 "2019-07-21T23:15:24Z")
The question of societal benefit per dollar cost is not easily measured, even fifty years after Apollo. Fifty years before the completion of the Mars mission it’s yet another entirely open discussion, unlikely to be settled in a century. Each sheaf of decisions produces a separate sheaf of outcomes. An entirely robotic mission to establish an automated fueling station on the surface of Mars, and a locally autonomous information processing/transmitting system capable of direct Earth/Mars communication of petabytes per hour of data between at least three, and probably five communication targets would require huge improvements in many engineering areas. Each and all of those would have wide spread importance in the greater society. The benefit of adding humans to the mission is almost entirely political, and has no engineering benefits which could not be reached by commercial tourist efforts in near earth missions. But it’s the military implications that are being ignored in the argument to date. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2019, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/70 "2019-07-21T23:45:21Z")
I’ve heard it claimed that the medical monitoring devices invented for the space program were all by themselves worth more than the entire amount spent on NASA up to and including Apollo. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2019, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/71 "2019-07-22T00:54:00Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > I was think specifically of the launches, not of making the hardware. Why do we need a not-so-small army of techs and engineers to launch a single spacecraft? Could not some engineering be put towards streamlining the process so we can reduce the number of people involved? I could be mistaken, but don’t they have about the same numbers involved in a launch today as they did 50 years ago? A SpaceX launch involves a small army of techs and engineers as well, for quality control, testing, integration, more testing, monitoring, etc… That’s one reason why launching a reusable rocket still costs $60 million. Even when you are launching 20 times a year, there is a lot of work that just need to be done - and cheaper to just do it than to automate it. And you can’t really compare a NASA launch to a SpaceX launch, because there is no such thing as a purely NASA launch, and never has been. Every “NASA rocket” was built by private companies (contractors). The role of contractors have grown over time though - later Shuttle flights were mostly done by Rockwell (which eventually became part of Boeing). ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2019, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/72 "2019-07-22T07:13:29Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > A SpaceX launch involves a small army of techs and engineers as well, for quality control, testing, integration, more testing, monitoring, etc… All that testing etc. should gradually be reduced. They’ll eventually have extreme confidence in the rocket and there won’t be much more to learn about various systems and so forth. After 100 or more launches of the same rocket, it should get to that point and they won’t need that small army. Only the Russians have gotten to this point, with their Proton rocket. Their actual costs are far below what they charge NASA to carry astronauts to the station. It’s almost all profit for them. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/73 "2019-07-23T01:06:40Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > Teflon was discovered in the 1930s, Tang invented in the 1950s. And to forestall anyone saying Velcro, that was invented in the 1940s. So nothin’, then:) ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/74 "2019-07-23T01:28:52Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I’ve heard it claimed that the medical monitoring devices invented for the space program were all by themselves worth more than the entire amount spent on NASA up to and including Apollo. [The Apollo program alone cost $153 billion in 2018 dollars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs) when adjusted for inflation, not counting the Mercury and Gemini programs which were prerequisites for it. While I have no doubt that there were many valuable spinoffs from the space program, I find it hard to believe that the totality of such spinoffs – let alone medical devices all by themselves – could justify such an enormous cost. I’d be interested in seeing a cite for that claim, as I suspect it’s based on rather outrageous assumptions. FTR, I was incredibly excited about the space program as a kid, but these days I’m more excited about learning more about the universe, and I’m convinced that unmanned missions are in most cases the most productive way to achieve that. I think it’s another example of fact diverging from fiction in unexpected ways, just like we still don’t have flying cars, but no one in the distant past predicted anything like modern computers and the internet. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/75 "2019-07-23T01:49:14Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > That’s one reason why launching a reusable rocket still costs $60 million. It does not cost SpaceX $60M to launch a rocket–that’s the price they charge their customers. The Falcon 9 is only partially reusable, so some of those expenses are for the discarded upper stage. Finally, SpaceX [won a contract recently](https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-contract-to-launch-nasa-small-astrophysics-mission/) for $50.3M. That is for a very light launch on a reused rocket, and will have very comfortable margins. The low price comes from the high probability of recovering the stage with low wear. SpaceX is strongly incentivized to reduce their internal costs as much as possible–contrary to the cost-plus accounting that was more usual in the Apollo era. They’ve done a good job in reducing the required headcount in mission control. For example, they’ve been a driver in automating the flight termination system. No more dude with his finger on a big red button. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/76 "2019-07-23T14:25:14Z")
Did battery powered tools result from the Apollo program? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206/77 "2019-07-23T15:01:14Z")
For what it’s worth, that “I heard” was hearsay from a long time ago, and I’d have no hope of directly tracking down the source. So attach weight to my statement accordingly. And I don’t know why everyone always makes such a big deal about flying cars-- We’ve had them since 1903. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/travel-to-mars-compared-to-moon/837206.md?page=3)