Off to Mars.
The astronauts or the idea?
President Bush asked congress for a bunch of money (billions over the next few years) with the goal of returning to the Moon, and eventually going to Mars. Nice idea, but it isn’t a serious idea right now, despite the propaganda.
The first reason I think this is nothing more than a PR stunt is because congress essentially cut funding from NASA for the upcomming budget. To do expensive stuff, you need funding. But beyond that (maybe they’ll start next year, after all) it’s simply a dumb idea at the moment.
If the US government (or any other government) is going to go to Mars, it had better have a pretty good reason for going. When we went to the Moon, the goal was to show up the soviets. We wanted to show to the rest of the world that our society was better than that of the soviets, and that they should side with us in the cold war. It was a way of winning the cold war without actually fighting a battle. But now there is little reason. There are only three governments which have independently put people into space. A dozen others or so have put people into space using the US or Russian programs. One one country has had a private individual go into space - the US. The US is on top of the world, so to speak. They no longer have anything to prove.
Science, or more precisely scientific research, is the current justification for going to Mars. But nobody has put forth the actual research that they want to do, and justified why they need to send people to do it. After all, robotic explorers, even with all of their faults, are a cheap way of doing a LOT of research. And any research which requires special equipment (such as deep core drilling) would have to be sent for mission sucess. It is a lot easier to attach some solar panels and computer equipment to your drilling equipment than it is to attach a human being and all of the support equipment needed for the human. It also costs a lot less.
The other issue which is being waved around is ‘our need to explore’ We spent billions going to the Moon, and now we are likely looking at trillions (yes trillions) of dollars to go to Mars. There is the argument of “spend the money here instead of there” which is valid. There is also the “don’t spend the money at all” argument. The question is one of “who’s need to explore?” Most people have never visited anouther country. Is this a way of averaging things out? Send 5 people millions of miles will average out with millions of people who frequently haven’t travelled 100 miles away from home? If it is your need to explore, then you finance it. Don’t spend my money for your need to explore. Unless I get to go to Mars too.
In order to sustain human life some distance away from Earth, there are four major resources which are needed: Air, water, food, and electricity. Having unlimited amounts of three will allow you to produce the other with relative ease. Being short two is very difficult to overcome.
There are two ways to manage the mission: send all consumables for the entire trip on the trip. Thus all of the food, water, air, and fuel requried to land on Mars and return to Earth safely would be on the initial flight from Earth. The other option is to send much of the resources required for the return trip ahead to Mars using systems similar to those used to land the current rovers. Those systems are fairly reliable, and show definite progress that things are being done. They are also great in that they can be done at the same time as the rest of the program (is spacecraft building) is done. The third option is to produce the required food/air/water on Mars for the return trip, thus saving us the difficulty of shipping it there ourselves.
Any Mars mission is likely going to be multi-segmented, much as the Apollo missions were - a large spacecraft will remain in orbit which will be responsible for going from Earth to Mars and back again, and the astronauts will take a much smaller descender down to the surface. This also means a smaller craft to come up again afterwards. With the consumables for the duration already on the surface, the descender can be much smaller. It also means more simplicity on arrival - the astronauts simply need to go and pick up the packages, though that may take some time if everything is spread over a 50km area.
But before anything like that can happen, we need to decide where on Mars we are going, and why. Neither of those two questions have been addressed. We will see real action when we start lobbing supplies at Mars in preparation for people to land. After all, event if it’s not considered to be critical to the mission, having spare food, air, and duct tape is always a good thing.