I'd be interested to hear some space dudes' opinions on Mars to Stay. Is that too sci-fi? In terms of budgets alone, wouldn't a permanent settlement require a hell of a lot more resources and support than a return trip? Obviously permanent settlement is better in terms of awesomeness, but would it really be feasible before we decided to just send some visitors?
(I've been reading
Red Mars and getting impatient that we're not on our way yet.
)
I tried reading Red Mars and I couldn't get into it. The characters just seemed too 1-dimensional or something..
The prospect of colonizing Mars excites me though, so I got maybe a third through.
hobbsyoyo said:
I actually do feel (and cite Robert Zubrin's works for this) that the first wave could very well be colonists with proper robotic preparation in advance, as Glassfan noted.
That's actually what they are sort of planning, at least behind the scenes.
I recently watched a documentary about NASA & Mars.. I think it was even on nasa.gov. I ended up spending a lot of time on there right after Curiosity landed. IIRC there is only one mission they have drawn up and planned (in the sense that they have the blueprints but no funding or approval) that *doesn't* require them to assemble a giant spacecraft in Earth's orbit.
That's the thing.. If you want to send people to Mars you're going to have to bring a lot of crap. First of all, you will need to either bring a return vehicle or a habitat of some sort that they can live in, and that would include all the life support systems they'd need to survive, along with which comes a lot of other crap. You also need to either bring fuel or bring something that can produce it. All that crap would be impossible to launch from Earth. The weight of the fuel required to achieve terminal velocity would just make it impossible.. So, if there's only 1 spacecraft carrying everything, you'd need to assemble it in orbit.. no way around it in a 1-stage mission to Mars
And that's what NASA was planning on doing when Bush (I think it was Bush) started that "Humans on Mars in 20 years" or whatever initiative, or whatever the hell that was. NASA came back with plans, a budget.. They were going to use the ISS extensively and build a large spacecraft in Earth orbit.. I forget the other details, but I believe there was a return vehicle involved, as letting people stay on Mars for a couple years (it's a couple years between good openings when you can send spacecraft to Mars IIRC) would be too risky.
So what happened was .. a lot of interest groups got involved. All sorts of side-projects got tacked on to the mission, everybody wanted to be involved, it involved more and more of the ISS, everybody's & their uncle's pet project was getting added on, etc. So it went way overbudget, and then the economy kind of started to suck and the plans were scrapped.
But a bunch of guys at NASA had another proposal. Instead of building a giant spaceship in Earth's orbit, they propose sending 2 missions to Mars instead, only the second one of which would be manned. The first mission would land a fuel factory on the surface, as well as a return vehicle. It would be launched straight from Earth. The second mission would have the Mars mission screw, and they'd return after a couple months on the surface in the return vehicle which by then hopefully had enough fuel to return home.
The reason this sort of thing wasn't initially considered was because (and again, IIRC) the technology to launch a bunch of people from the Earth and send them to Mars didn't exist.. The only way to do it would have been from orbit - you just needed that much fuel. I forget the exact reason - maybe it wasn't the technology, but a question of materials, or some other reason.. Can't remember..
If a mission took place in the next 20 years, that's probably how it would play out. The less complex, the better, and you can't really get less complex than that without getting into "future technology 6" type stuff.
I also seem to remember a 2nd version of the mission with 3 launches from Earth - one of them leaving a habitat on the surface, with other modules.. In that particular version a couple astronauts would stay behind, and then you could have another mission later to relieve them, bring more modules, etc., until the place starts slowly growing into a sort of colony.
That's how I see it happening, but you just have got to get started.. Maybe once the economy starts being awesome again NASA's gonna get more funding and there will be more enthusiasm about human exploration and colonization of Mars... or when China starts sending more crap into outer space and America starts competing at full capacity again.
As for why we care that the mission isn't launched from Earth's orbit - it would be incredibly complex and expensive to build a giant spaceship in space... We have tons of experience launching crap from Earth and it would be many times cheaper to do it that way instead
