I’m placing this in GQ because I believe there is more or less a factual answers based on our current understanding. If the mods disagree they can [del]kiss Uranus[/del] move the thread to a different orbit.
Over the years I have heard different things about a man mission to Mars.
Travel time: Six months to a year **one **way. Time on the surface: A few days to several months. Cost: up to and maybe more than a trillion dollars.
Other questions.
How many astronauts would we likely send?
If we start today and NASA gets the funding it needs, How soon would the astronauts actually be on their way?
How many missions would likely be part of such a program? (Just one would seem really wasteful.)
What would be the goal of the mission?
First there would need to be an over riding reason to send a man instead of a remotely controlled robot (a goal). Like, we found life and they requested we come. Or if we found out that landing on Mars in and of it self permanently makes your penis enlarge to twice it’s size. You know, important stuff; not just let’s go plant a flag.
In any case, it would most likely be a multiple nation mission, like the space station; although NASA would most likely try and control it as much as possible so that the US could maintain it’s lead in the male enhancement race.
I believe the current prevailing plans for a manned Mars mission would involve one-way travel, with astronauts setting up a base where they would live out the rest of their lives unless/until cheaper methods for getting them home are developed.
I believe they would have to stay several months so that Mars and Earth would be aligned for the return voyage.
Send shelter, supplies and fuel, perhaps the return vehicle before the astronauts to be certain everything arrives and functions.
Time on the surface needs further definition. Do you mean time alive, which would be until the food, water, and/or oxygen runs out? Or do you mean how long until their dead bodies are retrieved by a robotic mission decades in the future?
I’m as big a booster of manned space exploration as you’re ever likely to find, but the extraordinary cost, risk of radiation poisoning and loss of bone mass for the crew of a mission to Mars are all going to be major issues to overcome.
I think that unless we figured out a way for the members of the expedition to sustain their own existence with the materials already on Mars, that we would never send humans there. The logistics would be ridiculous, and the payload needed would dwarf anything we’ve launched into space so far.
I do support the idea mentioned in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” that it would be worthwhile for us to put all the world’s stupid and annoying people on a spaceship and then arrange for it to crash on Mars. But that’s a different question.
It’s dated now and Zubrin tends to downplay some significant problems with travel but “The Case for Mars” is a nice read that lays out what seems to me a reasonable approach
Use of martian resources to live and get back to earth
1a. In-situ generation of fuel and oxygen through some basic CO[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub] reactions.
Flying out your return vessel 1st
Having your oxygen and fuel ready before you get there
1.5 years of exploration instead of a week
Avoidance of a Venus fly-by and its attendant radiation risks.
Stranger likely has some better opinions on the whole thing but I enjoyed it. Actually maybe more than the technical discussion, I enjoyed the re-framing of the question from “going to Mars” to “establishing a new civilization on Mars”.
