Posted 12/28/2011 1:58 am
With America rapidly sinking to 3rd world shithole status, I doubt it will ever send men to Mars. China will collapse due to over population and political upheaval. Russia is the nation on Earth that could pull this off in the near future.
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Posted 12/28/2011 1:59 am
You need a faster ship. Ideally, you'd need gravitational field in the ship. Barring that, biotech to prevent the bone loss and osteoporosis-like symptoms that emerge from prolonged time in space.
I've been thinking about this a lot. I think it will actually work as long as nobody fucked up the software and the units of measurement.
the hardware will have been tested within an inch of its life. these days embedded sensors can be put in the smallest mechanical part, so they will know if anything is wrong way before touchdown.
(assuming someone actually did their job during the testing phase)
those little rovers worked for years, despite having an expected lifetime of only a few months.
nasa has the mechanical engineering down pat. I think only one nasa mars mission failed.
I always wonder why NASA always announces they have power for like 6 months, and runs rovers for 5+ years. Either that is a sign of major technological imcompetence, or a sign we have something more advanced powering these things.
The hardware is sitting, ready to go, just waiting for government approval.
However, having a perceived gap in space serves the government better - because its hard to ask for extra dollars when you have a working solution sitting on the ground.
More likely it's a form of public relations liability coverage. It's likely to last longer than they say, and they limit the window of failure to something they can control.
The United States has a number of missions currently exploring Mars, with a sample-return planned in the near future. The US does not have a launcher capable of sending humans to Mars, although the Orion spacecraft, currently under development by NASA, could ferry astronauts from the surface of Earth to join a Mars-bound expedition in Earth orbit and then back to Earth's surface once the expedition has returned from Mars. NASA has used the Haughton impact crater on Devon Island as a proving ground due to the crater's similarity with Martian geology.[45] According to New Scientist, an argon plasma-based VASIMR rocket could reduce the transit time to less than 40 days
ALL the rovers and space probes are expected to last like 6 months - even the ones they put in orbit around Earth.
I can't figure out how on earth the Kepler mission (or whatever the damned mission is that spots planets) ran out of "coolant" in 2010, and still is functional.
Its Space. Its absolute zero. how the fuck can you run out of coolant?
Never heard of SpaceX? Or Boeing? Both have off the shelf technologies that are viable.
