Does U.S. Have the 'Right Stuff' to Land an Astronaut on Mars? A Galaxy Classic

"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct."

Carl Sagan

It only took eight years for JFK’s dream to land a man on the moon to be fulfilled, but plans to to land a man on is going to take just that little bit longer -24 years to be exact, but at least we know how we’re going to go about getting our astronauts there.

NASA is serious about launching the most difficult mission ever attempted by the human race - putting an astronaut on Mars. The voyage will cover hundreds of millions of miles and take two and half years roundtrip. It sounds like science fiction. To make it scientific fact, the United States needs to first flex its deep space muscles again on familiar terrain - the moon. It's called the Constellation program.

"The accuracy with which you need to target a landing site on the surface is like throwing a basketball from New York to Los Angeles and having it go through without touching the rim," explains Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity..

If the astronauts actually that shot, and if they land on Mars, they will face a deadly environment - radiation from solar flares, dangerous dust and temperatures that average 60 degrees below zero. And they’ll have to do it for up to 18 months, before the Earth and align properly again for a faster return home. No astronauts have ever spent that amount of time on an alien world. Neil Armstrong was on the moon for less than a day.

"And I think it’s more responsible for us to go to the moon, check out these systems, make sure the life-support systems, the space suits, the little things we need for these long voyages, work properly," explains Dr. Rick Gilbrech is NASA’s exploration chief.

During Apollo, the furthest the astronauts could ever venture out on their lunar rovers was six miles. NASA hopes the new rovers will let the astronauts explore 60 miles from their spacecraft. Technological advancements will help in another way. Think about this: There is more computing power in your average cell phone today than there was on any of the Apollo spacecraft that took the astronauts to the moon.

Another example of how the new missions might be different is the robonaut, which looks like a cousin of C-3PO. It’s an early model of a robot that might assist the astronauts with mundane and sometimes dangerous tasks on the moon.

NASA isn’t using the moon just to train for Mars. Next year, it will launch orbiters around the moon and then essentially blast the lunar surface. In the midst of the debris field, NASA hopes to find evidence of hydrogen, which could one day help fuel trips home for the astronauts. But will there be any missions for the astronauts at all?

The biggest obstacle NASA faces is money. One critic has called the Constellation program "Apollo on food stamps." During the 1960s, 4 percent of the entire national budget was spent on space. Today one-sixth of 1 percent goes to NASA.

Thanks to some new details released by NASA for their new Constellation manned mission, we now have an insight in to what the missions will look like.

A 400,000kg (880,000lb) spacecraft would be constructed, in space. Due to the necessity of a craft that can act autonomously of NASA control, make the distance, and provide for its crew for a 900 day mission, the size of the ‘marscraft’ is obviously going to exceed that of the current space shuttles.

It would take three to four Ares V rockets to launch the elements of the spacecraft in to a low Earth orbit.

A ‘minimal crew’ would make the journey to Mars, taking approximately six to seven months to traverse the distance. A total of 550 days would be spent on the surface of Mars, before returning. Sent every 26 months to the red planet, the crews would need to take up to 50,000kg of cargo with them. They’d need an ‘aerodynamic and powered descent’ and autonomy or at least asynchronous from NASA control.

However, sending the crew is not the only part of this mission. Where are they going to live? How will all their equipment make the journey? That’s why their mission will be preceded by two separate missions.

With a theoretical launch date for the manned mission to arriving in February of 2031, a cargo lander and surface habitat would be launched December 2028 and January 2029, respectively using two Ares V launches. Subsequently, the launder will arrive October 2029, and the habitat a month later; the crew will arrive August 2031.

The second set of pre-launches will occur in late 2030/early 2031, and anticipated to reach at the same time as the first crew. Thus, in the first quarter of 2033, the second mission’s crew will launch to arrive on by December, with the first crew having left January that same year, after a 17-month stay.

Will we see human settlements on Mars? Or is it all just a dream? Will the American public even support traveling to places humans can barely imagine?

Posted by Josh Hill with Casey Kazan.

60 Minutes Mission Video

Related Galaxy posts:

Exploration: Secrets of the Soil
Is There Life on Mars? NASA Goes Underground to Find Out
New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Life
Is there an Interplanetary Mars-Earth Microbe Shuttle?
"The Overview Effect": Is Space Travel Next Step in Human Evolution?
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -NASA's Phoenix Probe & the Search for

Comments

[chad]

imagine or survive

[Barrie O'Leary]

Just how could a crew live in cramped conditions for so long without getting so frustrated that they want to beat the cr-- out of each other? Maybe that will be one of the problems solved that could shower all humanity with a blessing unimaginable. The strides necessary in technical achievement will make what we now possess look like stage coach travel to the A380. I coudn't and woudn't want to go along for the ride but I won't pooh-pooh it.

[nepharous]

The world public needs to be educated about the need for Humanity to have a second home. We have built an entire civilization in a glass house with big rocks flying all around it with no insurance policy. Mars and Luna are the insurance policy. Also we need to discuss the growth of new cultures, technology and physical evolution that would come from this grand project. Heres the rub though. How do we do this in the context of Peak Oil? I'm worried that our procrastination over the last 40 years regarding space exploration may have wasted valuable time.
Nepharous

[Seymour Seeless]

If you want to explore Mars EVER it will take lots of risk and maybe a "shot gun" approach.
Time waits for no one.
Procrastination is a disease.
The equipment including space suits ,communications, computer ,power, propulsion will always be improved one more time by the time they actually take their first step and then people will say we must test out that "new technology" equipment on our Moon or a Moon of Mars and by the time they test out that new stuff somewhere other than Mars itself they will repeat the testing and waiting process ...chicken little never went anywhere.
It sort of like the D-Day invasion , you establish a foot hold on the beach and hang on tenaciously and
eventually you are supplied by better equipment but you have got to take that first risky step using the shot gun approach.
The volunteer astronauts of the past and present should make their opinion known on this because afterall , they are the doers not us .
I would pay more attention to what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and the other Apollo ,Gemini, Mercury and Shuttle Astronauts suggest than what you layman non risk taking proposers propose.
No exploration ever gets done by a timid civilization.
Look on it as a survival course where you survive with what you have on hand at the PRESENT TIME OR YOU PERISH.

[nepharous]

Amen brother!!!! When the first civilian seats open up i'm jumping on board.

[Astro11]

Cool, good to know dates and somewhat specifics on the whole layout. However who the hell wrote this friggen article? COMPUTERS HAVE SPELL CHECK FOR A REASON- "the launder will arrive " LANDER?? and thats not the only place. Also, REREAD your shit- some of these sentences don't even make sense- granted you can figure out what WORDS are MISSING, but what the hell- it was so frustrating to read this. I mean c'mon! THE very first sentence-
"but plans to to land a man on is going.." plans to to??? plans to land a man on MARS...wow how smart are we here at daily galaxy?? I know this isn't english class or whatever but if you're writing about intelligent, important, revolutionary happenings/ideas you shouldn't be making stupid errors.

[Coyote]

Impossible!

Do you realize that of all the Mars explorer craft of the last decade, most of them failed? Crashed. Disappeared. Outright failed.

Hubble was sent up with a defective mirror: custom ground to PRECISION SPECIFICATIONS. A work around was installed to “correct” the faulty mirror.

Anybody who has owned a computer knows how reliable they are. We cannot even build a space station that doesn't fall from the sky.

A Russian experiment to test the ability of astronauts to make such a long trip confined to a tin can ended in failure. The Canadian astronaut participating freaked when a Russian cosmonaut wanted a Xmas kiss and she was pulled.

If “the Martians” were trying to influence or delay the accumulation of human information, what do you think the results would be? Yes, very similar to the results we currently see in space exploration.

Or, if not, ...............proof that 21'st century American technology is crap.
Decadent.
Failing.
On the edge of the failure of our civilization.

Pick your poison.
I prefer the “Martian” scenario.

[Milander]

As with all things if someone told the World that a killer asteroid was going to hit in the next 30 years and could prove it we'd be in space, living in space and spreading around the solar system inside of ten years. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

[stargazer]

Thanks for the article, I can forgive the spelling errors. I agree with the concept that expansion beyond Earth is vital both for the inestimable value of human exploration of the solar system and eventually the stars but also to ensure the survival of the human race. Clearly, leaving all humans on one planet is an open invitation to extinction. Our planet's history is a litany of catastrophic events that gave rise to mass extinctions -- not all of which were caused by asteroids. Even now, we do not have the technology to assure that all or even a substantial number of humans would survive such calamities should they happen again.

Looking beyond the confines of our beautiful Earth is essential. With that mind, we also need to reconsider the extreme challenges that would be posed by attempting to create large scale human colonies on the Moon or Mars. I certainly don't oppose efforts to explore the Moon and Mars, however we should not underestimate the tremendous challenges and risks of trying to place a large human colony on either location and particularly Mars. The difficulty of sustaining even comparatively small Antarctic bases offers an important illustration of this. I think we should recall the brilliant proposal for space habitats put forward by Gerard K. O'Neill. While large scale space based habitats he proposed are impractical at the moment in view of the extraordinary costs of launching material into orbit from earth, those costs will dramatically and inevitably change as space based manufacturing and mining develop.

With the increasing capabilities of space based manufacturing and resource mining, I think the space based alternative will be shown to be cost effective and vastly superior in terms of human safety and comfort to any of the lunar or planetary colony suggestions. Bear in mind that these habitats can and I am sure will be mobile and could be placed anywhere in the solar system. As such, these habitats -- individually or in small groups -- would initially serve as the hub for exploration, resource extraction, and eventually manufacturing for a planetary system (e.g.: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune) or area of space (e.g. Kuiper Belt, Asteroid Belt) they were assigned. Eventually, major clusters of these habitats would become large scale self-sustaining human colonies spread broadly throughout the solar system. After that, we would need to start building star ships....

[marc]

Guys, learn to spell and learn to do the math. If the guys at NASA would be half as moronic as the authors of this article, they'd even fail to move the toilet paper to their ass.

[TribbleType]

We should definitely increase the budget for the space program. 1/6th of 1%? That's teeny. I think we should look into Nuclear Lightbulb propulsion to make the journey faster.

...one day...

[wise-ass]

-24 years.. shit we're already there!

[Domyresearch]

Cool stuff!

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[J]

Um, This article has SO many Grammatical errors on it...Fix those first THEN we can talk about landing men on Mars.

[J]

Thought I'd help you guys out.

"but plans to to land a man on is going to take just that little bit longer"

"If the astronauts actually that shot, and if they land on Mars, they will face a deadly environment "

"before the Earth and align properly again for a faster return home."

"They’d need an ‘aerodynamic and powered descent’ and autonomy or at least asynchronous from NASA control" What?

[A. N. Other]

I wish "writers" on the 'net could actually WRITE. WTF is this supposed to mean?

"If the astronauts actually that shot, and if they land on Mars, ..."

Come on, really, don't you guys have editors who are literate in English?

[JOhnny mAson]

OMGosh dude that is so cool!

RT
www.privacy-tools.us.tc

[msavoy]

I am every bit the romantic, science-fiction loving space-faring dreamer as there could be and consider space travel, exploration, eventual colonization to be nothing less than Mankind's ultimate, profound destiny, to one day inevitably be realized, but not any time soon.

I recently saw the Discovery Channel documentary on NASA's program to land men on Mars and was blown away by the sheer daunting, utterly mind-boggling challenges an undertaking of this magnitude involved, not the least of which was having to spend eighteen months on Mars, that left me shaking my head in disbelief of it ever possibly being successful, with the current woefully-inadequate state of technology as it is today.

Man will eventually travel to the stars, Mars will eventually be visited by Man but in my humble opinion
not any time soon.

[stXSD515]

Proofread your article before posting it.

[Dustan]

What a horribly written article. Have you ever heard of spell check? An editor perhaps?

I'm sure it's a great story, but it's ruined by the poor grammar used.

[420greg]

Beside the spelling and grammer, check your links also.

You have have an extra t in 'htttp' in the link to the 60 minutes video.

[claudio]

The exploration with manned crews of nearby planets is Good thing to plan......But the question is : 'Is technology mature enough ?? We can say is NOT it is still NOT.

1 only man appears too little...for a mission of that lenght.

How much materials shall the spacecraft take to mars to support the 2 or 3 men to live and survive ??

ENORMOUS WEIGHT.

NONE of the known spececrafts have that ability.

Spaceships with Nuclear engines have been infered...but no real test yet....may be in 30Y from now.

Costs : ENORMOUS...who will pay ??

Probability of Success : believed to be marginal at this time.

Good article
Regards

[Sirius radio]

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[replica watches]

Guys, learn to spell and learn to do the math. If the guys at NASA would be half as moronic as the authors of this article, they'd even fail to move the toilet paper to their ass.