From the July 31st issue of Astronomy magazine: NASA is seeking volunteers for centrifuge experiment- 2 gravities for 22 hours...

CAN YOU SAY 'MARS', ANYBODY!!!

It will happen someday, but I'll believe it when I see it. No money in going to Mars.

-legrue

Its just basic research. We dont have the infrastructure to go to Mars.  We cant build a proper ship on Earth, and orbit it cause we dont have the ability to lift enough mass at once. And on the other hand we don't have a dockyard in space to assemble something sent up in real small pieces. And the least expensive alternative is to built everythng in space and we have NOTHING set up for that.

Propulsion never really has been a problem. The nuclear rocket engines we built in the 70's the first time we thought about going to Mars are more than adaquate. You just cant fire them in the atmosphere (requiring the ship to be assembled in space, requiring a dockyard, ect.)

What, they can't get any military test pilots to go for it???

2g for 22 hours.... man.... if they wanted to accelerate for 22 hours w/ a 2 g thurst.... now how fast would that be (I hate word problems).

I think I was born 200 years to early.... since I wanna go out there and see what's out there.......

1 Gee is 9.8 m/s^2.  There are 79200 seconds in 22 hours.  So after 22 hours, you would be traveling 776,160 m/s.  Converted to mph, it's 1,736,220 mph.z

I did the math! OH MY GOD!!! IT works out to a total delta vee of 1,554 kilometers per second...compare to Apollo's 10 meter/sec Dv!
Now, someone else do the math for a Hohmann trajectory to Mars...

I highly recommend "The Case For Mars" by Robert Zubrin... a very easy-to-digest book that makes a strong and feasible argument for a man-to-Mars mission within 10 years. I particularly like the irreverent way he talks about NASA burocracy. He even proposes several novel ways to pay for such a mission (gotta love the "Newt Gingrich" model).

Check it out.

... Jus' how friggin' kewl would that be!

Hey zoom how did you get the 776,160 m/s?
Okay that's 79,200 (seconds) times (9.81 m/s times 2)
79200 x 19.62 = 1553904 (meters/sec)divided by 1000 (Km/m)
equals 1,553 km/s

Zubrin is a con artist.

He wants a repeat of the Apollo program to go to Mars and when its over- we'll have what we had when Apollo was over, some pictures, a few neat rocks.

He won't care cause he will be collecting the fat penson and all the other bennies that engineers of the Apollo generation got when they retired and he is jealous of.

The crash program to get to the moon was the wrong way to go about it. Von Braun knew it, tried to talk them out of it, but finally settled for "half a program is better than none".

Had he been listened to we would never of left the moon. Because it would have been too easy to get too to have bothered stopping.  We would have had space stations, small, no bigger than Mier was but functional. One in orbit around Earth the other either in high lunar orbit or parked orbiting the Lagrange point between Earth and moon. The earth orbiting station would house a "space bus" to take people to the Lunar station where they could get a reuseable lunar lander and go to the surface. Everything perminent and/or reuseable in the system except the rockets used to lift stuff up. And even then, once all the components had been lifted up the big, expensive Saturns could be replaced by smaller, cheeper, mass produced ICBM based Atlas rockets.

If we had followed this approach, which might have taken a little longer, but in the long run cost less. Who knows what we could have done? One of the great 'could have beens' of human history.

With respect, I disagree with your position.

You apparently have not read Zubrin's book... it makes a far more credible case than you give him credit for.

Contrary to your assertions, he argues AGAINST the pointless "flags-and-footprints" Apollo-type mission (supported, incidentally, by the NASA burocracy in the now-infamous 90-day plan). Instead, he advocates an economically feasible and sustainable (not to mention elegent) colonization concept.

Even more interestingly, he makes a strong case for Mars as a better goal than the Moon on sound economic grounds; Mars has all the resources we'd need to sustain colonization (water, carbon, useful concentrations of valuable minerals etc.). In stark contrast, the Moon (which you seem enamored with) has nothing except cold hard rock.

Zubrin's analogies to the colonization of the New World are especially enchanting. Its a pity that his neat concept will probably never see the light of day because of the vested interests at NASA.

Mars is at the bottom of a gravity well.

And the Moon also has everything needed to build colonies around it- including water- and has no atmosphere and lower gravity to deal with. And its a whole hell of a lot closer.
Even if the target was Mars, the Moon would wind up colonized just to build the stuff to get there.

And having conquered one thick atmosphere and crawled out of a steep gravity well, why go back down another. Even if its not quite so steep and not quite so thick.

Eventually we'll get to Mars but, colonizing lunar space is more useful

Your point about increased work to escape Mars is a fair one... except that virtually unlimited fuel can be made on Mars from indigenous materials. The Moon is far less efficient of a mission as ALL the fuel you need to return has to be hauled up there. The math here is persuasive.

Actually, my main concern in this debate is the economic and political feasibility of a man-to-Mars mission. Being realistic, no Government is ever going to fund such a mission in our lifetime; its just too expensive and the political payback is too small. However, if an economic case can be made for going to Mars (as I believe it can), then private enterprise has a better chance of success using the Zubrin-model.

Read his book, and in particular about the Newt Gingrich concept for funding Mars.

PS - I have no relationship to Zubrin or his book... I just like the way he thinks.

We got pleanty of materials to make fuel with here on earth, doesn't help.

The biggest problem with Mars is that there is nothing there that is unique. Even the Moon has that problem to a extent.

If they could make He3-D fusion work and actually generate industrial power, then the Moon will be valuable.

But right now all the Moon and Mars have to offer is space, empty space, and the price for that is too steep right now.

I agree, ArmdLbrl! As Robert Heinlien said, Once you get into orbit, you are halfway to anywhere! What we need are medium (maybe 1 km in diameter; bigger than the ISS but far smaller than the O'Neil dream-colonies)size rotating space stations that would provide work and habitat platforms. Once these are operational, it would be seen that gravity wells are for animals and muslims; real men don't need gravity to tell them which end is up!

Did they say anything about how they plan to slow down?

StormSurge, you left out a conversion.  Meters per second doesn't mean much to most people.  That's why I converted it to miles per hour.z

Best Heinlein quote on this comes from one of his earlier works. Something like "Once we get to .99C, why not just keep accelerating and see what happens?"

Scott