May 26, 2002
NASA SAYS IT HAS FOUND huge amounts of water ice on Mars. This obviously makes the terraforming discussion in my TechCentral Station column a bit more relevant. Meanwhile, other reports say that NASA is planning a manned mission to Mars as a result. I’m sure that some people at NASA are working on plans, anyway. NASA has been refining the Mars Direct plan originally developed by Bob Zubrin and estimates that a manned mission to Mars could be done for about $40-50 billion in 1998 dollars — less than a tenth of what NASA had estimated in the early 1990s using a far more cumbersome approach.
Whether anything will come of this, I don’t know — but it’s certainly moved the issue off the back burner, where it’s been for quite a while.
UPDATE: Andrew Stuttaford has comments on this over at The Corner, and Rand Simberg has comments on his page, too.
np says:
Would you like to go if you had the chance?
May 26, 2002, 1:47 pmBrian says:
What is the long term feasibility of colonizing any celestial body other than earth? I donl’t think it would be very high, because anyone who was exposed long enough, or was born on the moon or say mars, would never be able to come back to earth, or board a spaceship or station that used standard earth gravity. (assuming using some sort of rotating cylnder.)
Figure any ship going there even using nuclear propulsion is going to have to use some sort of articfical gravity so the astronaunts bones don’t weaken too much. anyways thats my too sense. Would be nice to use mars for agriculture, than a full fledged colony.
May 26, 2002, 2:17 pmN.Z. Bear says:
Re: Brian’s comments, if you’re talking about *really* long term feasibility, who cares if you can’t come back to Earth? Weakening due to gravity is an issue for short- and medium- term missions more than for truly long term colonization.
BTW, do we actually have hard data that proves the whole ‘bone-weakening’ thing? It’s filed in my head in that category of ideas I’ve read in tons of SF novels but am not quite sure is actual reality…
May 26, 2002, 2:24 pmRand Simberg says:
I’ve commented on this at my weblog.
May 26, 2002, 2:24 pmPBR says:
I figure that we’ll see a situation similar to the colonizing of the New World. Governments will send expeditions out there, but it will be private concerns (mining companies) that will drive colonization of the Moon and Mars. Most of the initial forays into mining will probably be done by robotic and automated craft and systems, but they’ll need to be maintained by people, so initial numbers will be small.
As more infrastructure is built on the planet, more emplyees of the various corporations involved in mining and other practices will be moved there for various reasons. These people may or may not stay on Mars for long periods of time. They may go there for a short while, then return. Eventually, either a corporation or government will attempt to found a permanent colony on Mars. If successful, more colonies will be founded and we will eventually have a permanent presence on the planet.
May 26, 2002, 2:26 pmAdam Edwards says:
PBR makes some good points. However, he overlooks the following:
1. Europeans travelled around the globe out of dire financial necessity. Europeans needed spices to ‘salt’ their food over the long winter months but the Arabs had a chock hold over the spice trade. I don’t remember who he was (Vasco de Gama?), but the first European to travel by sea to India and back, with only a small trunk of spices, earned his investors investment back threefold… and the whole trip took something like three years!
2. That kind of return on investment didn’t go unnoticed and so, much more capital and thought we’re devoted to future trips, until travelling to India by sea became almost second nature and a whole lot faster.
Now then, is there anything on Mars that we really truely need? Something that will pay for the trip threefold if we we bring back just a small trunk full?
May 26, 2002, 3:15 pmaugustr says:
Why Mars? Other than it is there, any resources are presumably, more readily available in the asteroids. If a way is found to simulate gravity for long term voyages then the real destination should be one with greater potential benefits. Isn’t it true that one carefully chosen asteroid moved to earth orbit or nearby can provide most of the world’s mineral needs for many years.
Why add a gravity well to any benefits of exploration until truly cheap ways of reaching orbit are available.
We should be looking for near earth or lunar settlements for our tax dollars until capitalists can see a return for taking a chance on some ventures.
50 Billion could pay for a real space station, more general research and all the short term benefits of government spending. Keep government out of it as much as possible.
May 26, 2002, 3:17 pmPBR says:
I don’t think all that stuff I talked about will happen in the near future or even in my lifetime, but there is money to be made out there and I’m sure that eventually someone will go there to try and turn a profit. You’ve got a planet just sitting there full of minerals and ores waiting to be exploited. That fact can’t be ignored forever and I’m sure some enterprising individual or company will make a go of it early next century.
May 26, 2002, 3:31 pmJL says:
Could we see something like this being passed around college campuses?
http://synapseburn.keenspace.com/mars.jpg
May 26, 2002, 3:40 pmHoward Owens says:
What I’m wondering about is … could we have the beginnings of a new space race … with China announcing its plans to send men to the Moon by 2010, with the goal of mining the moon, once they get that done, won’t they want to go to Mars?
China, I think, sees space exploration as a way of proving they are as good or better than the West. If we set our sites on Mars, China won’t be far behind.
My concern is, however, is that our political leaders won’t have the stamina or vision, nor the competitive spirit, to make it happen.
As for profit motive — that will come. Some enterprising company will find ways to make money off of Mars.
May 26, 2002, 4:05 pmnp says:
How are they going to decide who goes where? I mean right now it’s relatively easy. Whoever wants to go to Mars, build a hotel and live there for a couple of years, is welcome to do it.
By the way, Scientific American had an article last year, or maybe already two years ago, how human like critters who grow up on Mars would look like (changes in bone structure and muscles mainly). So it’s not only Science Fiction, some of that was based on calculations/simulations, some on results from astronauts who lost years of their life and some bones plus muscles out there.
May 26, 2002, 5:22 pmmitch says:
I’m not sure if commercial enterprises on Mars would be profitable until the planet is terraformed. Large amounts of water would make terraforming Mars much easier. Because of the huge cost, and the fact that it might take a century or more, only governments would work on terraforming Mars. Once the climate is more comfortable, private businesses might go there. But to have a chance at terraforming Mars, we need radically better space transportation technologies. I don’t see NASA doing this. They seem devoted to big chemical rockets. A large part of the NASA budget should be directed away from general science, the shuttle, and ISS, and put into developing much better space engines.
May 26, 2002, 6:02 pmBill Magaletta says:
To actually colonize Mars with any sizeable number of people __in the near term__, however that’s defined (I’m admitting 200-300 years as near term), you need (1) a strong motive, and (2) cheapness of terraforming. You just might have (2), but I have a lot of trouble buying Glenn Reynolds’ idea that distributing the human race to avoid its destruction is a motive for the near term. It will develop over time, if colonization of other worlds occurs at all, but it can’t be the primary motive. I think that, when and if colonization occurs for other reasons, people will then say, “Hey, isn’t that neat, we got our eggs out of the one basket.” The only way it would be motive for the near term is if people and governments became obsessed with it, as they have with Kyoto-type measures, but obsessions aren’t a good idea, and it could come apart, anyway.
May 26, 2002, 7:59 pmAllen S. Thorpe says:
I think we should establish a base then send all the environmentalists to Mars with the assignment to protect its pristine purity. But no imports of food from earth.
May 26, 2002, 10:49 pmDean Petes says:
My father worked for NASA from a bit before Mercury through the Shuttle. Having heard some of the inside stories about close calls, political snafus and dealing with the lowest bidder, I still stand in awe that they got anyone to the moon on just Vaccum tubes & SLide Rulez.
No, I think I’ll keep my feet on the ground until they offer commercial flights.
May 27, 2002, 12:45 pmKasi Nafus says:
Interesting related item: US National Research Council has advised Nasa to not look for life if there is an expedition to Mars. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_579973.html?
menu=news.scienceanddiscovery.space
I wonder if this advice will be followed or ignored…? It could be argued both ways.
May 28, 2002, 1:29 amKasi Nafus says:
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell’s “Lucifer’s Hammer” gave an excellent picture of how quickly our society and techologies would dissapear in the face of a large-scale natural disaster. Within a generation, the idea of sitting at a computer browsing the net would be mythic. We do have the advantage of being able to predict nature’s course to a certain extent, but there are many scenarios that we would be powerless to prevent. In light of that, getting some of our eggs into another basket is a worthy project.
May 28, 2002, 1:38 amCRP says:
This is truly shocking! Do the folks at http://www.dhmo.org know about this?
May 28, 2002, 11:57 am