http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-commits-to-heavy-lift-mega-rocket/ it's about time. off-the-shelf technology, 'easy' to slap it together.
Uh, no. You're confusing the Ferrari with the truck that delivers it to the dealership. This just gets a large payload into Earth orbit. It has nothing directly to do with a lunar or Mars mission.
When you are in orbit you're halfway to anywhere. The existence of a heavy lift launch vehicle is the primary gating item for a manned mission to Mars.
correct. the moon ship will be on the rocket (like before). the mars ship would either be on the rocket, or pieces of it, and the pieces joined together while in earth orbit.
Lol, no. You should look into the concept of delta-V and the rocket equation. But that's not even the issue I was discussing: It is a lot easier to design a truck than a Ferrari. The truck is indeed, low-tech, "off the shelf". The Ferrari is high-tech and custom. Everything relevant about the vehicle that goes to mars needs to be invented. One other thing that strikes me is that since the Mars vehicle hasn't been designed yet, how do they know how much the heavy lift vehicle needs to be able to lift?
Delta-V required to low Earth orbit - 10km/s Delta-V required from LEO to Mars capture - 5.3km/s Not if the Ferrari need never operate in gravity or in air. The design challenges are certainly different - but the hard part (i.e. the part that will tend to result in firey destruction) is designing the "truck" that can operate in 1G in air and still get you safely to orbit. Given that we do not even currently have a man-rated launch vehicle, that's a tough argument to make. I mean, it would be great if that were true - but currently that shelf simply does not exist. With companies like SpaceX it may exist soon. Well, with both the NASA and the Mars Direct reference mission data, they have a pretty good idea. And since any Mars mission will almost certainly be multiple launches, being over or under isn't a fatal mistake - it just means more (or less) launches.
correct. they will design the sub-assembly pieces to the specs for the heavy-lift rocket. assemble the pieces while in earth orbit, then send 'er off. gettin' someone to want to spend six months in a cramped capsule is the hard part. and i believe there've been lots of people willing to do that, but gettin' qualified people willin' to do it is something else. personally, i like the idea of one-way trips initially, setting up a 'retirement community' that could then become the focal point for future round-trips. that low g would be easy on the back.
Another consideration in an eventual manned Mars mission is an Asteroid retrieval mission, and put into lunar orbit. http://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/local/2014/09/02/nasas-asteroid-mission-critics/14950671/ and..... >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Asteroid-Capture Mission Will Pave Way for Manned Flight to Mars, NASA Says WASHINGTON — NASA's ambitious plan to snag an asteroid and put it into orbit for astronauts to explore should help put people on Mars, space agency officials said Tuesday (April 29). http://www.space.com/25690-nasa-asteroid-redirect-mission-mars.html >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Wouldn't it be great to see a fully participated in, International effort to put man on Mars. If that was seriously considered and undertaken, I could see a manned Mars mission within a decade.
I have nothing against any one way trip. In fact if it has takers [and it certainly has plenty of those] then I say go for it! http://www.mars-one.com/ http://www.mars-one.com/mission/humankind-on-mars
i have to agree with bill. let's take a familiar example, the saturn V class of rockets that took men to the moon: the saturn 5 had 3 stages plus the apollo payload (CSM and LEM) the first 2 stages boosted the apollo payload into earth orbit. the third stage boosted the payload to lunar orbit. the first 2 stages took 5,698,000 pounds of propellents to get to earth orbit, 100 miles alt. the third stage used only 243,000 pounds of propellent, and boosted the payload 270,000 miles. it took 20 times as much fuel to boost out of earths gravity well to 100 mile than it did to boost to the moon. so, yeah, if you are in orbit, "you are halfway there".
well space promises to get interesting within 5 years the manned dragon, skylon would be off the drawing board, skunk works promisses fusion within 5 years altough I take that with a grain of salt but theirs also a folding technique for solar panels that could deliver a larger surface area and more power. Virgin Galactic will probably be flying and if theirs enough money the next project of the ISS (apart from the VASIMR, inflatable module and visits from a manned dragon will probably be a inflatable ring named Nautilus-X... then theirs China Now hopping that NASA's budget doesn't collapse
There are to many things that need to be done before a manned mission to Mars ever happens. One is that the radiation levels over a 2 years period would seriously harm anyone that has no protection from it. Then what would happen if something broke on the craft, there are no spare parts to fix things with.
No, you're doing it wronger even than billvon. You should be comparing the spacecraft system size and cost for a craft designed only to go each step because the next step is what make the rocket so much bigger. Here's how it works: Gemini 8, for example, took a 2 person crew in an 8,300 lb spacecraft (not including similarly sized test target vehicle, launched separately) on a 340,000 lb rocket, to an orbit of 86 miles, for 11 hours. The entire Gemini program cost about $7 billion in today's dollars, for 10 manned flights. For the Apollo program, the ascent stage of the lunar module weighed 10,000 lb and also carried a 2-person crew. Getting that 10,000 lb onto and off the moon required 100,000 lb of total spacecraft be placed in trans-lunar orbit (260,000 lb could be placed in low earth orbit (LEO)) on a 2.6 million lb rocket. The total cost of the Apollo program was $100 billion in today's dollars for 11 manned flights, 6 of which landed on the moon (one aborted). So to compare, for the same 2 person crew, similar duration and similar spacecraft size (for the final part of the trek), it took: -A rocket 65x larger. -14x more money. Gemini reached low earth orbit and practiced many of the procedures needed to "do" spaceflight (orbit changes, rendzvous, docking, living for more than a few hours, etc.). But in terms of the money or effort required, it wasn't anywhere close to "halfway" to landing someone on the moon. A Mars mission is similarly another order of magnitude larger of an effort than going to the moon. Billvon knows that: s/he recognizes that it will take multiple launches of a rocket bigger than the Saturn V to get a spacecraft to Mars. How many do you think? 10? 50? Either way, the point is the same: the program is an order of magnitude larger than the Apollo program. And so far, $7 billion has been committed, for one test-flight of the rocket. that's so small it can, for all intents and purposes, be considered nothing. The US is not working on a program to send people to Mars. You forgot to land on and take off from Mars; they aren't doing a flyby. Regardless, I said Delta-V and the rocket equation. Numbers provided above. Your logic is like saying the plane ride to Mount Everest gets you most of the way to the summit. Technically true under a certain way of defining it, but totally meaningless to what is important about taking a trip to the summit of Mount Everest. That's simply nonsense. Many of the things that need to be done are at this point mere science fiction. Things like sustaining a crew completely autonomously for a year or two. That is an enormous challenge. "The truck", on the other hand, has been done. "That shelf" contains drawings for and working production models of the Space Shuttle engines and solid rocket boosters, which will make up the propulsion systems of the booster. Did you read the article? There is no such data. The article points out that problem: There is no mission even in the planning stages at NASA. And Mars Direct, even if we assume it isn't a scam and such data existed, isn't NASA so it has no relevance to a NASA project: NASA did not base the size of the booster on any Mars Direct data.
Where do you get that? Sergei Avdeyev has gotten a much higher dose from his time in space than a Mars crew would get, and he's fine. Well of course they'd bring spares. Even Apollo had "spare" (redundant) systems.
Sure, radiation levels in interplanetary space are going to be a challenge. But work is being pursued for materials that can offer protection. The science of Nanotechnology I'm sure will eventually have some bearing on a manned Mars mission, and Astronaut protection.
3 per the Mars Direct plan. They effectively are. The Mars Direct mission profile requires the crewed vehicle to land on Mars, not return. And since Mars has an atmosphere and the vast majority of braking can be done aerodynamically, fuel requirements for landing are small. More like getting to the summit is the hard part. Sure, you have to worry about the descent (it can kill you just as dead, is just as far and requires just as much skill) but the energy requirements are lower. Getting to the top takes the most energy. Again using the Mars Direct reference mission, the habitat/lander is 28 tons at TMI. Compare that to the Apollo lunar module/CSM after Earth orbit departure - 44 tons. (Higher mass because the LM/CSM stack had to be able to not just get to the Moon, but take off and return to Earth.) NASA, who did a much more conservative analysis, specifies a total mass (lander+habitat) of 51 tons at TMI. We have sustained people in Earth orbit for a year and a half. If this is really a worry, just send someone up there for two years (or whatever duration of the mission you like.) So has landing on Mars. But apparently the details are tough, since we do not currently have a man-rated launcher, and would rather spend a lot of money to use Russia's launchers. Again, the launcher is the hard part. If we had the Ares V (or an Saturn 5 derivative, or a Shuttle based HLLV) then a manned mission to Mars would be relatively easy to plan. Sure, we have plenty of drawings on those shelves, including plans for a Mars mission. But there is a difference between plans on a shelf and hardware on a shelf that you can take and use. We don't have that.
You'd need a 2 sectioned spacecraft, one to orbit the planet and one to descend then back up again. That is a very heavy spacecraft plus the fuel needed for both craft.
The Mars Direct method uses two spacecraft. The first one (the Earth return vehicle) leaves Earth orbit after being launched on an Ares V-sized vehicle, aerobrakes, enters Mars atmosphere and lands with almost empty tanks. Just some hydrogen left. It then uses Martian air (carbon dioxide) to make methane and water with the remaining hydrogen. It then splits the water back to oxygen and hydrogen and re-uses the hydrogen. You end up with tanks of oxygen (for oxidizer and breathing) and methane (fuel for the return trip.) Once you get telemetry from the ERV that it's ready (full tanks) you launch the next two vehicles. The first one is a second ERV that also lands and starts making fuel. The second one is a crewed vehicle. The crewed vehicle lands near the first ERV. It carries only enough fuel to soft-land; after it lands its spacefaring days are over. It serves as the base for the remainder of the mission. The crew then gets out and checks out the first ERV. If it is ready to go (as it reported it was) then they start their explorations. If it has some unforseen problem they go to the second ERV (potentially some distance away) and check IT out, verify that it's making fuel, then they start their explorations. Months later they finish up their explorations, return to the ERV, take off and head back to Earth. The NASA reference mission is similar, but they make only oxygen rather than oxygen and methane because that's easier and less risky. Same idea though; if you don't have to carry all your return fuel with you, you get a huge reduction in weight you need during takeoff from Earth.
