“Hey guys, why is this pile of potatoes still on the loading dock?”
Given how his “mind” works, I suspect this all started when he happened to catch The Martian and he said to himself, “Well there, how hard can it be? Just do it the way they did in the movie…”
That someone who is supposed to have been involved in construction projects would think (I’m using that term loosely) that a manned mission to Mars can be a matter of a couple of years… is proof of how much he understands the logistics of his own “projects” (I’m using that term in a derogatory sense).
Here’s how I think his mind works. If NASA told him it would take $200 billion per year for 10 years to get to Mars, he probably thinks if they got $2 trillion today they could launch tomorrow.
If I were NASA, in order to get massive funding for all of my projects, I would say “Hell yeah! We’ll start working on it right away!”
I would also change the color of the logo to RED, and change the logo to MASA (like a mash up of NASA and MAGA). Yeah, MASA, kinda has a ring to it, and fits in with the whole Trump worldview?
Ic, you just gave Huey Freeman another reason to call SDMB racist.
You’ve been watching “The Old Negro Space Program”, haven’t you?
The Martian is really well-researched. It actually might be feasible to do it the way they did. The only really big issue that’s hand-waved away is radiation shielding, and that’s mostly just a mass issue. Now I know “just a mass issue” is a kind of a dumb thing to say when you’re dealing with the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, but they’re using constant burn ion thrusters powered by a nuclear reactor in the movie (which isn’t anything we couldn’t do right now) and when you have the ISP of ion thrusters the rocket equation is much more manageable.
However, it would take a couple decades of really large budgets to develop the various assets required to replicate The Martian. At least. And beyond a point, more money wouldn’t make it go any faster.
…and 9 women can have a baby in 1 month.
Eh, honestly, this seems a bit contrived. It’s not like he slammed his fist down on the desk and fired NASA’s board for failing to indulge him.
The Apollo program put a man on the moon after 9 years, too. Yeah, the moon’s a different proposition from Mars; 4 days one way and 6 months one way are very different obstacles with an exponential increase in the amount of things that can go wrong, not to even start the discussion on everything that can and will go wrong with actual colonization once we got there. But we did one of those 50 years ago and technology has advanced, too. So I can’t really fault him for going in there and making damn sure that if NASA thought it was possible, money would not be an object.
I would do the exact same thing, if I was elected President.
Granted I would do it for the joy of it and listen to the NASA director telling me no once I made sure he was perfectly clear that I meant it. But if Trump accomplished it for PR, so what? It made Kennedy historical; it’s not a bad bet.
And it sure as hell would be nice if he got historical for this, instead of for starting another damn war to flog his popularity for reelection.
The Ares mission profiles in The Martian, and especially the interplanetary transport vehicle with its large rotating habitat are beyond what was anticipated in the NASA Mars Design Reference Mission 5.0, even assuming the nuclear thermal propulsion option. The Martian was an entertaining film, and by the standards of cinematic science fiction it aspired to a considerable degree of authenticity, but the scale of the program presented there (with five separerate missions) was on the order of several trillion dollars instead of the ~US$500B baseline cost for DRM 5.0.
And not to pick on the novel and film, which were entertainments, but the Watney character would have died long before he could have been rescued. Growing “poop potatoes” using waste as fertilizer was a clever plot development, but the soil of Mars is deeply infused with toxic perchlorates, and the solar power that Watney was dependent upon to power the crawler is sometimes unavailable during weeks-long global dust storms. I enjoyed watching Matt Damon “science the shit” out of surviving on Mars, but nobody should take the story as evidence of what is actually feasible.
Although computing technology has evolved and we’ve had significant advances in materials science as well as far more knowledge of human spaceflight physiology, many of the key enabling technologies—particularly in non-chemical space propulsion, habitat systems, and particularly entry, descent, and landing (EDL) methods are far from mature. The Low Density Supersonic Decelerator program was the best hope for controlled landing of payloads of >1 metric ton on the surface of Mars, but it encountered problems on both tests so far. (This isn’t unexpected; that is the point of running development tests, but it does show that there are some pretty significant limitations and it may not be possible to scale it up to the 30 MT or greater necessary to land a crewed vehicle safely.)
A crewed Mars mission will take nearly two and a half years, and will have to be essentially completely autonomous with no chance of rescue or resupply that isn’t planned and deployed in advance. I have worked on multiple adjunct studies for crewed Mars missions and it is apparent to me that we don’t even fully grasp all of the complexities because despite year-long missions on the ISS a crewed Mars mission is actually beyond our current experience, and will pose novel challenges (being outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, EDL, operating an ascent vehicle from the surface after a long duration stay, protection against the Martian environment, et cetera) that will require substatial engineering development.
Not only could we execute a successful crewed Mars mission by 2020 (or 2024), I’m not sure we could really achieve the planned 2033 Phobos mission and 2039 Mars surface mission given the current state of development without an enormous effort that would dwarf the Apollo program. Nor is it at all clear that doing so would be worthwhile; one lesson from Apollo is that “destination-oriented” programs with a limited focus don’t tend to engender support once they achieve the stated goals. The cost of the last three cancelled J-class missions would have been dirt cheap as nearly all of the hardware was built and certified; even adapting surplus hardware for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the abbreviated Skylab program was an uphill battle despite the fact that these were technically and scientifically valuable projects rather than just flag-planting efforts of the first Apollo flights.
Stranger
I didn’t mean the story of The Martian as a whole was plausible, just that the basic structure of the Ares program was at least somewhat feasible given a large budget and a 3 or 4 decades of development. There is no magical technology required, just a hell of a lot of engineering and development.
Why stop there? Let the people who voted for him go too, and raise the collective IQ’s of both planets.
We’re going to need a bigger [del]boat[/del] generation ship.
Somebody’s been reading their classic science fiction.
From Locrian’s link:
Oh, sir, you couldn’t be more wrong. C.f., this thread.
I think you dropped a “not” here.
Oh, tell me about it. What’s kind of funny is, this bible-kissing, god-fearing weasel is at least sending some discredit (and giving some praise) to fellow bible kissers that Trump might be trying at times, but isn’t very good and not very god loving.
According to his CNN clip, he’s not offended by Trump’s remarks about him because he knows Jesus. But I don’t think everyone who feels as Sims does are that forgiving.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/01/29/trump-tweet-cnn-interview-book-author-newday-vpx.cnn
Shit like this could help derail Orange-loving Evangelicals.
Kindly refrain from offending Martian bacteria.
Point taken. I apologize.