Posted on 08/02/2013 11:50:38 AM PDT by drewh
Yesterday, NASA chief Brian Muirhead said that while he loves the idea of crowdfunded space flight, he doesn’t have much confidence in commercial missions to Mars and their ability to finance the expedition.
It was a direct blow at Mars One, the mission by Netherlands-based Mars One Foundation that aims to put non-scientist, non-engineer astronauts on Mars permanently to establish a colony.
“That is way beyond our capability to do today,” Muirhead said about Mars One.
Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp and his team fired back today with a movie trailer for a 54-minute film, One Way Astronaut. The film tells the story of the Mars One vision and several laypeople who long to make their lives on the red planet.
Pointing to the Olympics, a massive and hugely expensive undertaking with no obvious revenue generation built in, Lansdorp indicated that live-streaming video and other media from the Mars colony would make for riveting (and highly sponsor-able) material. Making a movie about the mission is just a small demo of what the end game would be for Mars One media.
The Mars One project began in January 2013. Its call for astronaut applicants initially saw more than 78,000 would-be space travelers sign up.
(Excerpt) Read more at venturebeat.com ...
Sure. Use ‘em for O-Rings. But then again, they’d probably fail. I dunno. Stick ‘em in the cargo bay or something. Never know. They might come in handy for something.
And you'll keep it and add some.
Musk is serious about going there, and at his current valuation of $5.4 billion, paying for his own ride to get there is not a problem.
He has the money and the equipment, and all the naysayers had to shut up the day Dragon docked with the ISS.
The logical way to create a Mars colony begins with sending a nuclear powered mining robot mission to the Moon. Its purpose is to mine an extensive horizontal tunnel system, to learn how to do it right to create a Lunar colony.
Then do the same thing on Mars.
The reason is that if there is a permanent habitat built on Mars, every mission that can take far more supplies and make the base a cumulative thing—always more and better. Eventually it will have what it needs to be self sustaining, even if it takes a hundred years.
The question you have to ask is this: Assuming for a moment that Germany had won WW-II... what would be the latest date at which human feet would have been on Mars? My own guess would be around 1985 - 87. The German Nazis had more than their share of ethical and philosophical problems, but they didn’t have this problem of missing CAJONES, which seems to plague NASA, and I can’t picture Hitler ever having told a German space agency that their main focus in life was to assist muslims with their self-eesteem issues.....
And while we’re at it, the enviro whack-jobs would be happy, because we’d only have about 3.5 billion people on planet earth. ;^)
I understand what you’re saying. We cater too much to people who produce nothing, and then punish those that do.
Our racial emphasis is as far off the mark in one direction, as Hitler’s were in another.
We should have told the race baiters to go to hell by at least the 80s.
“It was a direct blow at Mars One, the mission by Netherlands-based Mars One Foundation that aims to put non-scientist, non-engineer astronauts on Mars permanently to establish a colony.”
I can see a problem here, can anyone else?
If we’d have spent some dough deorbiting a few asteroids or cometary bodies onto the poles 40 years ago, the surface pressure would be the earth equivalent of around the top of My Everest. Still “death altiude” w/o supplimental oxygen, but capable of being dealt with with good thermal clothing and supplimentation for long periods of time...
I’ll pitch in if you change McCain to Holder.
76 thousand apply? I hope they were all demoRATS.
Give them all a oneway, free ride. We could actually save money by being rid of the fools.
According to NASA, Martian atmospheric surface pressure is from between 6 and 9 millibars. On Earth at sea level on average is over a thousand mb. The summit of Mt. Everest is about 300 mb.
The total mass of the Martian atmosphere is 2.5 x 10^16 kg (that of Earth is 5×10^18 kg). So to get the Martian atmosphere up to 300 mb, you would need to increase its density by 30 times.
And you need to increase the surface albedo and free frozen water and carbon dioxide. The material is there, I did the calculations for a paper I wrote on it in college 25 some odd years ago. Whatever you add via impacting bodies is bonus.
It will bleed off over a very long period of time, and the ozone layer is going to be pretty close to the surface, but like I said, you get it up to that and you’ve got something to work outside with.
I think you meant decrease.
Yup, good catch.
I might have to check that out, I always loved his collaborations with Niven.
Check out John Barnes’ Century Next Door series, Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, The Sky So Big and Black.
They read easy separately, I have read Candle and wanted to get the rest, but haven’t had time as yet.
Have you read Barnes’ Daybreak series?
Oh yes, it rocks! Still have to get the 3rd one. Great concept. Candle and another work called Newtons Wake introduced me to that hackable grey matter concept. Very interesting.
If they have apparently succeeded in growing meat, how long do you think it’ll be before they grow “generic” gray matter for something like data storage?
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