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House Committee Chairman Encourages NASA To Send Crew Flyby Mars in 2021


NASAFanboy

Should We Send A Crew To Flyby Mars?  

  1. 1. Should We Send A Crew To Flyby Mars?

    • Yes, Totally!
      95
    • Yes, But Should Delay (Probably not going to work, 2021 is the launch window)
      20
    • No, Too Risky (And think of the poor planetary scientists!)
      17
    • Unrelated/I Don't Care (Let America run its own affairs)
      3


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Antarctica has penguins. Don't you like penguins? Do you have something against penguins? ARE YOU A SECRET PENGUIN HATER?!?! :mad:

Penguins are good, but they simply don't attract public interest like a moon landing

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As fun as a flyby sounds, I as a member of the public with very little knowledge in the sociopolitical-economics of space flight would be about a hundred times more interested to see man land on an alien world, be it Luna, Mars, or a martian moon.

There's something enticing, almost romantic about watching those white spacesuits trek ever so heavenly across a terrestrial landscape with an alien sky hanging above.

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Honestly I think we forget about Mars and focus on its moons. They're much more useful and easier to exploit. Plus we can hollow one of them out and terraform the inside.

First you say easy and then you start about hollowing them out. Make up your mind.

Do you want to do easy things or really hard thinks?

Also, I doubt that the public would like it if Mars' moons would get hollowed out.

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First you say easy and then you start about hollowing them out. Make up your mind.

Do you want to do easy things or really hard thinks?

Also, I doubt that the public would like it if Mars' moons would get hollowed out.

I doubt that most people know Mars has moons, let alone care about them. But the martian moons are most likely captured asteroids. If we want to study asteroids we don't have to go out to Mars, we can just hop to a few near earth objects.

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Imagine the new story from any random new channel "NASA set out to destroy Mars' moons", because that's what they going to tag it with.

In other news, Impact probe creates new crater in pristine comet. Random booster scatters debris on the moon and probe pollutes Jovian atmosphere.

Really, nobody cares about these kind of things.

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I honestly believe Congress should just compromise and focus on building a base on the Moons of Mars.

It'll sastify the a Republicans because it's a Moon and we're building a base on it.

It'll sastify the bipartisan "Straight to Mars" group because it's around Mars.

It'll sastify Obama because it's a asteroid.

Win-Win. Or you could double NASA's budget and have NASA both land on a asteroid and build a outpost on the Moon while sending a flyby mission to Mars.

Simple.

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This is a bad idea

1. Very little scientific value: at best keeping humans alive for 500+ days in weightless space could be done at a space-station.

2. There is no flag planting no landing, nothing of interest, just two years floating, boring, the public won't care. Some pictures of mars, a space probe can do that, been doing that for decades.

3. If something goes wrong and we end up with 2 corpses floating around the sun, that it for NASA.

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It's far more valuable than you think.

For example; how does the human body react to being outside of Earth's magnetosphere. How well can they handle being real isolated.

I'm sure others could think up experiments that can't be done on the ISS. Also an added bonus of seeing Mars' moons(telescope) and Venus.

It also has less components to worry about, so less chance of failure.

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It's far more valuable than you think.

For example; how does the human body react to being outside of Earth's magnetosphere. How well can they handle being real isolated.

I'm sure others could think up experiments that can't be done on the ISS. Also an added bonus of seeing Mars' moons(telescope) and Venus.

It also has less components to worry about, so less chance of failure.

If you want to study the human body outside Earth's magnetosphere, it's better to do so in Earth's SOI. If someone onboard a station at lunar L1 or L2 gets sick, it only takes a few days to return to Earth, as opposed to months.

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It's far more valuable than you think.

For example; how does the human body react to being outside of Earth's magnetosphere. How well can they handle being real isolated.

It exterimly unlikely that being without the magnetosphere is going to cause problems beyond the need to more radiation sheilding. As fro "extereme" isolation, humans have done that, in submarines for months, in articic bases, on deserted islands for years. If we want to test extreme isolation we can do that on earth for much cheaper.

I'm sure others could think up experiments that can't be done on the ISS. Also an added bonus of seeing Mars' moons(telescope) and Venus.

It also has less components to worry about, so less chance of failure.

It also goes nowhere. Very little scientific return for the risk, simply a political stunt.

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If Planetary Science takes a hit then no. NASA has this obsession with Mars, even with a whole other solar system to explore. Dont get me wrong, I am all for a Mars mission, so long as Planetary Science gets an increase, or remains at about $1.5 billion. I however could see a manned mission exciting the public, and hence increasing the funding for all divisions of NASA.

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If Planetary Science takes a hit then no. NASA has this obsession with Mars, even with a whole other solar system to explore. Dont get me wrong, I am all for a Mars mission, so long as Planetary Science gets an increase, or remains at about $1.5 billion. I however could see a manned mission exciting the public, and hence increasing the funding for all divisions of NASA.

Why not Mars though? The practicality of sending humans to another planet are ridiculous anyway, given the time required. So if you forgo Mars, things quickly get more complicated.

Yeah, there's Venus, but then you lose a lot of the crowd appeal for the mission. Mars is simply a lot more interesting to look at, and it makes more sense as an intermediate stage before attempting a manned landing. Nobody's going to be landing humans on Venus in the near future, if ever.

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First you say easy and then you start about hollowing them out. Make up your mind.

Do you want to do easy things or really hard thinks?

Also, I doubt that the public would like it if Mars' moons would get hollowed out.

Everyone talks about colonies when talking about Mars. Why can't I when talking about its moons?

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Why not Mars though? The practicality of sending humans to another planet are ridiculous anyway, given the time required. So if you forgo Mars, things quickly get more complicated.

Yeah, there's Venus, but then you lose a lot of the crowd appeal for the mission. Mars is simply a lot more interesting to look at, and it makes more sense as an intermediate stage before attempting a manned landing. Nobody's going to be landing humans on Venus in the near future, if ever.

Why not? It's one of the few places in the Solar System where you can boil water, cook food, and enjoy a relaxing sauna without burning any resources.

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Why not? It's one of the few places in the Solar System where you can boil water, cook food, and enjoy a relaxing sauna without burning any resources.

For the half of a millisecond before you painfully burn away from the acid and get crushed by the pressure.

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Ok if it just a flyby then I say no, it would be a PR stunt and when is completed I could the current crop of mouthbreathers in the government patting themselves on the back say 'we dun it, now let's pork barrel defense some more'.

If we did a flyby and left a station in orbit there, empty of course, we would have a reason to back then use to continue onwards towards manned landings. The ideal mission is one that keeps political momentum going forward, due to investment to previous capital. If Apollo had used Von Braun's Earth Orbit Rendezvous vessel the Nixon administration would have had a harder time abandoning the existing infrastructure.

Just my $0.02

Regards.

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