That’s one hell of an added assumption. A year on Mars, versus a few days, would roughly double the time away from Earth (even allowing for the much shorter travel time you get for waiting a year to return), which would double the mass of the air, water, food, and fuel required to keep the astronauts alive.
If we’re comparing robotic missions v. the first (ETA: and possibly the only one, for a good long while) Mars landing, I think the proper comparison involves only a stay of a few days on Mars.
There is no possible projected mission that would have the astronauts on the planet for only a few days…not unless something radical changes wrt powered space flight. The more risky option would allow the astronauts to remain only 2 months (IIRC) and the less risky option would allow for them to be on the planet for a bit over a year. The reason is simple orbital mechanics.
XT is right - a mission to Mars is 3 years - a year to get there, a year to wait on the planet for Earth and Mars to reach the proper alignment, and a year to return. XT and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on the value added by man to the mission.
If we wanted to we would long before we had the technology to send a human to Mars. From a scientific point of view, a human is just a superb control system, which is unfortunately contained in a poorly designed incredibly inefficient package, which requires massive resources to maintain. In terms of scientific bang for our buck probes are the way to go. The only reason to send a human to mars is the vicarious satisfaction humanity would feel for having one of their kind go where no one has gone before.
Three years? Then the whole comparison is silly, because it just won’t happen for so long that we have no idea what we can do with unmanned probes by then. You’d have to send a small space station to Mars; you couldn’t expect astronauts to live Apollo-style for three years. The stuff to keep them alive for three years would have pretty substantial mass as well. And the number of things that can go wrong in three years…really, the whole subject is silly, like comparing the abilities of zombies and unicorns.
I wasn’t doing a bang for the buck comparison. If you are good with it taking decades or centuries to really probe the planet AND you want to do it on a small budget than probes are certainly the way to go.
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Three years? Then the whole comparison is silly, because it just won’t happen for so long that we have no idea what we can do with unmanned probes by then. You’d have to send a small space station to Mars; you couldn’t expect astronauts to live Apollo-style for three years. The stuff to keep them alive for three years would have pretty substantial mass as well. And the number of things that can go wrong in three years…really, the whole subject is silly, like comparing the abilities of zombies and unicorns.
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Well, they are to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the subject. To them things like quantum mechanics are equally zombies and unicorns. What’s the point of having a discussion if you don’t know the basics? You do realize (or maybe you don’t) that the technology to go to Mars and the feasibility of doing it aren’t fantasy, right? The REAL stumbling point isn’t that we can’t do it, it’s that it costs a lot…somewhere between $40 billion on the low end to a few hundred billion on the high end, by most estimates, depending on what all you wanted to do and the mission profile. That’s less than we spend on other things, but more than we (the US) is willing to spend on this particular thing.
Yes, a human can do more things than a rover can. But a human needs literally tons of life support equipment, especially for a three year mission. If we’re comparing a rover to a trained scientist on Baffin Island, the scientist wins every time. Now compare a trained scientist plus tons and tons of life support equipment, to 100 rovers.
A scientist doesn’t have to beat a rover, a scientist has to beat the dozens or hundreds of rovers that could be sent for the same cost.
Eventually the cost of a manned mission to Mars will be so low compared to the output of a vastly larger Earth economy that we can afford to do it just because it will be awesome. But the window when a manned mission was superior to an unmanned mission closed decades ago. Our ability to create better and better robotic missions is just increasing by leaps and bounds and shows no sign of limits, and our ability to build better and better rockets is only increasing incrementally if at all.
Even with radically better methods of putting each metric ton of payload on the surface of Mars it’s still going to be cheaper to send a rover. If you can just blast towards Mars in your Heinlein-style torchship you and your buddies built in the backyard and make it in a week (totally possible at 1 g constant acceleration), spend a few weeks sightseeing, and then blast for home then yeah, human scientists make sense. But such a ship isn’t exactly on the horizon.
You know why it’s bullshit? Because if it really could be done for $40B, that would be on the edge of what could be done privately. And since it’ll cost an order or two of magnitude more to get to Mars than to get back to the Moon, that would put a manned Moon trip well within what could be done privately. You’d get a Walton heir paying for it, just in order to be a passenger on the trip.
And hell, if a return trip to the Moon could be done for, say, $10B, it would have already been done by a number of countries, just to show that they could. For the U.S., that’s a rounding error in the defense budget; you could get the USAF to cut $10B somewhere else over the course of a few years, if they got to do it jointly with NASA, but get the primary credit.
Nah, nobody but a few dreamers believes we can get to Mars for less than a few hundred billion, and even that’s optimistic. The smart money would be on that blowing up to the trillions. That’s why we’re not going to Mars.
This exactly. It would be a stupid waste of money have them land and not get out, but it’s hard to deny that landing on a planet doesn’t count as going to it.
Minority view here, but I say that the Apollo Eight Astronauts went “to the Moon.”
I also can’t imagine a program that would send a manned craft around Mars without any landing. What the hell point could there be to it? To look at Mars from orbit? Never heard of cameras, eh? If you’re going to go 99.9% of the way, it seems pointless not to go all the way.
And I believe it will happen, but it might have to wait for fusion power and a few other technological advances.
You know why it’s bullshit? Because if it really could be done for $40B, that would be on the edge of what could be done privately. And since it’ll cost an order or two of magnitude more to get to Mars than to get back to the Moon, that would put a manned Moon trip well within what could be done privately. You’d get a Walton heir paying for it, just in order to be a passenger on the trip.
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sigh $40 billion is the low end of what it would (or might) cost NASA to do it. NASA, of course, already has much of the infrastructure in place and the ability to launch or contract out rockets to send stuff into low earth orbit. If you tried to build all of that from scratch to do a private trip (even assuming your ridiculous assertion that someone could raise $40 billion private dollars to do it were true) it would cost a lot more. I don’t think you grasp how much money $40 billion is…to any entity that’s NOT the US government (hell, even the European governments shy from tossing that sort of scratch around for something that’s not a social program).
China and India (and even the EU), of course, ARE building space programs and are building towards possible moon landings in the next decades, in theory culminating in a Mars mission. But, like those private investors, they have to pretty much building their programs from scratch, including all of the experts and infrastructure, so it’s going to cost them a lot more than it would for NASA to build their program today. You know, we actually have already BEEN to the Moon, right?
We could do it. But NASA’s budget is only around $17 billion dollars, and they have to pay for quite a lot out of that…there simply isn’t any money for something like a Mars mission. In order to do it NASA would need to have their budget tripled for probably a decade in order to make it work, and focus almost exclusively on a Mars mission. How do you think that would work out?
Says the guy who knows next to nothing about this subject. Trillions? You seriously have no concept of money, do you? And you have less concept of what it would actually take to go to Mars, what the real challenges are and how realistic it is or isn’t…do you?
That’d be difficult, as it is the single most central point of debate in the entire field. It’s like talking about nuclear power without anyone chiming in on the issue of nuclear waste disposal. (It’s like talking about Chili without the “beans or no-beans” controversy!)
When we send people to Jupiter no one will try to land, yet after going all that way I think they will say they’ve been to Jupiter. Although Jupiter consist of a system of planetoids surrounding the giant.
Going to Mars in any way we are likely to have in the near future would take so long it would really seem a wasted journey for people to go and not land.
If we wait long enough perhaps our criteria will change.
If we make our business to make use of asteroids then Deimos and Phobos may look like tempting destinations without any regard for the planet.
I took a train from Amsterdam to Paris, and back again. This means that I’ve ridden a train through Belgium twice, but I’d be very leery of claiming that I have been “to” Belgium. I could see it out my window, I sat down next to Belgians, but I never touched Belgian soil - nor did the soles of my shoes.
A man walking the surface of Mars has been to Mars. Anything less? Is something less.
You seriously have no concept of money, do you? And you have less concept of what it would actually take to go to Mars, what the real challenges are and how realistic it is or isn’t…do you?