Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

NASA’s Mission To Nowhere

5 Comments

Francis seems to suffer from a lack of imagination:

Space analysts said planning and executing a manned mission to Mars would take years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

French wants NASA to head in that direction, and he sees next month’s Orion launch as the inaugural milestone in a long journey.

Still, he’s circumspect.

“Unless we build the rockets and test the spacecraft needed to get into deep space, sending humans to Mars will remain a dream for centuries to come,” French said. “Whether Orion will be the vehicle, and whether it will survive the brutal budgetary cycles of Washington politics for the many years ahead that it will need to be funded, is impossible to say. It’s hard to imagine any other method succeeding.

Space historians often suffer from this malady.

5 thoughts on “NASA’s Mission To Nowhere”

  1. I can think of other methods succeeding. Dragon capsules + Bigelow habitats+ Falcon heavies+ either a revived, more modern NERVA, or let’s go for Franklin Chang Diaz’ VASMIR. Astronauts could be gazing down into the Valles Marinesis in ten years.

  3. That article was actually a fairly good assessment of where the industry stands today, at least for North America. I guess French didn’t know of or has forgotten NAUTILUS-X. Not surprising, really, since NASA hasn’t done anything else with the design besides post a powerpoint slideshow on Google Docs.

  4. I’ve become a real skeptic about this send humans to Mars idea.

    Mars is very different from Earth — and it is a long ways away. Trips to the Moon 45 years ago took about a week. Trips to Mars — with present technology — could take as much as a year. Yes, I know about proposed technologies that could shorten that time considerably. We don’t have those kinds of vehicles today.

    How is Mars different from Earth? It doesn’t have a strong magnetic field. That means it is not protected from solar flares the way Earth is. Those solar flares will kill people who are exposed to them. Those solar flares have also damaged considerably the atmosphere of Mars. Atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars is only 1% of that on Earth. Astronauts who stepped onto the surface would need to wear spacesuits much like those worn by Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Then there is the gravity issue. Is there enough gravity to keep humans healthy? We need to investigate that issue as well. Rand, you have written an excellent book Safe Is Not An Option. Yes, people have died and will die doing space exploration and development. But we don’t want to send people to places where they will die quickly no matter what we do.

    How would having humans on Mars help humanity? People have made a case for humans on the Moon doing things like build space based solar power satellites and even contributing to the development of O’Neill colonies. I recently reread O’Neill’s book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. It still makes a favorable impression. Yes, things like that are farther in the future than what many of us thought back in the 1970s and 1980s. Going to Mars is also far in the future — and what would people on Earth gain?

    I may write some more on my blog about this. A few years back I did write a bit about this after The Economist came out with their end of the space age issue. The End of the Space Age? is a bit of my thinking on what they said.

  5. Chuck, you always make good, to the point arguments, and bring up some great questions in this comment. May I debate these questions on your blog?

Comments are closed.