[Will_Zurmacht]

I'm already packing....

If the Russkies beat us to Mars I'll eat my foot.... I guess they want "International Team"...hmmm

[medved]

ping

[don-o]

Listen. I love the Russian people.

But, a tryout, to qualify for a serious trip to Mars; first, put Ivan on the Moon.

Then, we'll talk.

Da?

[LibWhacker]

The Russian philosophy is: If you can't beat 'em, grab onto them and hold 'em back. I hope Dubya nixes the whole idea. We don't need them.

[UnBlinkingEye]

Bravo Russia!

And we continue to try to impose our will on the rest of the world. Shame on U.S. - God Bless George Washington and his Farewell Address.

[medved]

Aside from anything else Mars might represent, it is the one place you would ever be in which dialing 911 would do the least possible amount of good. It is hellishly unlikely, but not impossible that you might encounter rats or cockroaches or some such there, either in structures such as the Cydonia pyramids, or in subterannean places you might wish to explore and, due to the light gravity, a rat on Mars might weigh 400 lbs. Do not go to that place unarmed. Figure a FAL rifle with 168-grain ballistic tips would be about minimum.

[LRS]

" The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent."

Translation: Americans will foot the entire bill, but will not get the full credit for a successful mission...

[Brett66]

Russia was behind schedule and overbudget on it's part of the ISS, which isn't even completed. Where are they going to get the money for this? And where will we get the money? How can congress trust NASA based on it's horrible handling of the ISS after repeated cost overruns. How can we trust Russia after repeated delays and constant requests for us to give them money to build their part of the ISS? Maybe if Russia formally proposes this it will get us to seriously consider such an undertaking, but I don't see any political will to drive this. Unless there is something on Mars to make a manned landing urgent. </tinfoil hat> Paging Richard Hoagland, paging Richard Hoagland......

[Jhoffa_]

The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.

do it..

[UnChained]

Warning: Lengthy spiel follows.

A manned mission to Mars is nonsensical. I worked at NASA during Dan Goldin's reign there.

At one point he made an impassioned appeal for the vision of a manned mission to Mars as if it were the next logical step in man fullfilling his destiny of inhabiting space. But Mars is a dead end. I owe my perspective on this to the excellent writing of Larry Niven. Check out story "Into a Hole"


Interplanetary space, with it's unlimited hard vacuum and microgravity environment is what we should be trying to get access to.

We build large, expensive, and dangerous machines just to get away from the Earths gravity well. Is it a reasonable goal to want to decend into another hole that we will have to climb back out of again?

If Mars was made of emeralds it would be too expensive to retreive them to make the trip practical If you want scientific knowledge, unmanned probes could get more of it for way less money, recent probe failures notwithstanding.

There would be a symbolic purpose in men leaving footprints on a another world but I have a feeling that it wouldn't seem as significant as the Lunar landings were 40 years ago.

Mars isn't the stepping stone to the stars. It's a dead end project that has captured a lot of people's imaginations. When Goldin and Sagan made their pitches Goldin likened a manned mission to Mars as part of Man's biological imperative to explore and expand. Sagan hoped that we would find life or the remains of life there and vindicate his worldview. Goldin asked, "Where would we be if the explorers didn't wonder what was over the next horizon?" "Where would we be if the settlers hadn't risked long journeys in Connestoga wagons to explore the American Frontier?"

He ignored an obvious difference. The explorers and settlers were looking for profit. Either treasure or a better life for their families. Mars doesn't offer any profit at all. But space does.

If humans are destined to have a significant presence in space, that presence will NOT be launched from Mars. It will probably not be launched from the Earth either.

Lets assume that force fields and warp drives will defy being invented in our lifetimes. How then will we get a lot of space ships built and underway? Launching anything into orbit is expensive. We have to build powerful rockets that have to be made even more powerful to lift the fuel to lift the fuel...

These rockets are so dangerous that it takes an army of engineers and technicians on hand to carefully prepare the rocket for launch so it doesn't blow up on the pad.

What if the rockets were built from material that is already in orbit though? If a spacecraft never has to climb thhrough a thick atmosphere while achieving orbit then the need for large, expensive and dangerous engines is eliminated. A Spacecraft could travel anywhere with a low thrust engine and longer burn times. The bulk of a rockets mass is consumed just getting the payload above the atmosphere. Eliminate the need for that and payload goes up.

The stepping stones to the stars are the asteroid belts. In the belt you have an entire planet's worth of raw materials pre mined and sorted into piles. Imagine dispatching some robotic tug ships to move a 20 km diameter hunk of properly compositioned rock to low Earth orbit. Even if it takes decades to get it to Earth it would be worth it. An asteroid in earth orbit would provide the raw material for the waves of humanity's expansion. That is the next logical step. A manned mission to Mars would delay rather than further the colonization of Space.

[Flyer]

Russian space officials proposed an ambitious project on Friday to send a six-person team to Mars. . .
. . . to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.

Big plans are easy with other people's money.

[Tuor]

Russia Proposes manned team to Mars

Because they can't do it themselves, either technologically or financially, so they want to hitch on to our coat-tails and get a piece of history. They don't want to be left entirely out of the picture like they were when *THE US* landed someone on the Moon. Not the West, not some international co-op, *THE USA*.

We can do a Mars trip on our own, too, if we had the gonads to try it. Russia can't, and they know it. I'm *so* sick with the socialists at NASA (and the Government in general) who squander our patriotism and knowhow in order to appease those who can't do what we can do.

Imagine the results if Kennedy gave his speech to go to the Moon and called upon the world to unite for the effort. It would *not* have galvanized the US the way his actual speech did.

Competition is a good thing. NASA and the US needs to remember that.

Tuor

[Tuor]

"It must be an international project," said Vitaly Semyonov, head of the Mars project at the M.V. Keldysha Space Research Center. "No one country could cope alone with this task."

Liar. We *could* do it. Stop looking for handouts and start working towards going to Mars. Compete, don't hold out your hand.

Tuor

[RightWhale]

The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.

By the time OSHA is done with it, it will cost ten times that, and Russia's share will be 3%.

[The Iguana]

If they are taking nominees for the first six, I'll be happy to throw out some names.

New York's junior senator would definitely be in the front running.

[537 Votes]

If it costs twenty billion dollars to send six people to Mars, maybe we first need to work on transportation technology to drive down the cost.

"Did Columbus wait for steamships before he voyaged to America?" No, but it didn't cost him twenty billion dollars to go, either.

[RightWhale]

Upon further reflection, I think we ought to do this. Russia wants to do it, and ESA could contribute in several ways. Even if America pays all the ticket. We can land medved right next to the Face and get an onsite FReeper report.

Another article:

---

Russia calls for joint bid to conquer Mars by 2014

MOSCOW (AFP) Jul 05, 2002

Russian space experts invited their US and European colleagues Friday in launching a manned flight to Mars by 2014.

The conquest of the Red Planet "should be an international project" similar to the International Space Station, Vitaly Semyonov of the Keldysh Space Research Institute in Moscow, responsible for its space exploration programme, told reporters.

"Russia has excellent engines for lifting space systems and a high degree of experience in space medicine," Semyonov said, highlighting the record for the longest space flight, 437 days, held by Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov aboard the Mir space station.

Nikolai Anfimov, of the Russian space agency Rosaviacosmos, said Russia was currently building a new Angara heavy launcher with a 28.5-tonne lifting capacity which would be suitable for the project.

A manned flight to Mars would cost around 20 billion dollars, and Russia's share could be around 30 percent, Semyonov said, adding that the expedition could be launched in 2014 or 2015. It would require two space launches, the first involving a supply vessel with the launch of the manned spaceship to follow.

The crew would comprise six astronauts, three of whom would remain in a near-Mars orbit while three others embarked on the Martian surface for a stay of between 30 and 60 days.

A Marswalker vehicle, similar to its predecessor the Moonwalker used during the historic 1969 walk on the moon, would be used by the astronauts as a cross-country vehicle on which they could explore the planet's surface, the official said.

Igor Mitrofanov, also of the Space Research Institute, said the recent discovery that the planet's surface concealed large quantities of water had strengthened their belief in the viability of the project, because "water is a vital ingredient for a human flight to Mars."

Mars Odyssey, launched in April 2001, was the first step in the new US programme of planetary exploration, set up after the failure of the unmanned modules Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander which crashed on the planet's surface in 1999.

Russia is planning to launch a module of its own to Mars and its satellite Phobos by 2005, Anfimov said, though he admitted that current funding was insufficient and would need to be increased next year.

Anatoly Grigoriev of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, which specialises in space-related health issues, said that although the first manned expedition to Mars was unlikely to meet with bug-eyed monsters, the prospect of encountering some form of life could no longer be ruled out.

The latest data showing that there was water on the planet meant that life was possible at least for minuscule organisms," he said.

There was already evidence that micro-organisms, hundreds of times smaller than those on Earth, existed in cracks of the Martian surface, he said.