Nibb31

Which makes them more similar than different. In both cases, you can't go outside. You need life support to breath and a thick spacesuit. You are dealing with (near)vacuum, similar thermal conditions, and radiation. In addition, on Mars, you have the complication of dust and abrasion, which is going to wreak havoc with any kind of machinery. It still takes a much bigger effort to send the ISRU production and closed-loop life support equipment to support hundreds of people than it takes to send supplies and spare parts for 7 people. And once again, what for? Why would you want to put hundreds of people on the surface of Mars? It's a gargantuan effort that simply makes no sense.

I don't think that is an achievable price even for a couple of days in LEO. If we're lucky, SpaceX might bring down the ticket of a Dragon orbital flight down to $5 million. That would be 20 times cheaper than today's prices, which is already super-optimistic. It's hard to imagine a ticket to Mars ever costing less than several million dollars. Besides, a colony means a one-way trip for most people. The type of people who are desperate enough to leave everything behind seek a better life on another world doesn't intersect much with the type of people who have a million dollars to spare. Would you give up your life's savings to go and condemn yourself to spend the rest of your life in a tin can, breathing A/C air, drinking recycled urine, and eating hydroponic salad, and looking at the scenery through a tiny window? Would you be willing to give up going to the beach, outdoor sports, travelling, seeing friends and family, and feeling the breeze in your hair and the warm sun on your skin for the rest of your life? How could living on Mars ever be an improvement compared to spending your money on Earth?

Sure, but why the rush? Mars isn't going anywhere. And where is the political support to send people to Mars by 2025? And once again: WHY? What purpose does it serve? Yes and my point stands. I enjoy when he shares technical achievements and actual progress, but his starry-eyed tweets about colonies on Mars are nothing more than wishful thinking. You cannot make that claim when you have no idea about the economics of reusable HLVs compared to expendable HLVs. Reusability only makes sense when you have a high flight rate. Projected Mars missions with launch windows every 2 years, at this point, are nowhere near the flight rates where reusability makes any sense.

That would be an amazingly inefficient and dangerous way of exploring the planet. I would go with unmanned quadcopter drones or even blimps. But then if they're unmanned, why build a base on the surface in the first place? You see, people are going about this the wrong way. Instead of thinking "I want to build a base on Mars, now let's find a way to justify it", the rational way of doing it should be "Let's figure out what we want to accomplish, and then figure out how to do it". This is also why NASA hasn't gone anywhere in the last 40 years (and probably won't be going anywhere in the next 40 either), because they keep on concentrating on the next shiny vehicle that has no mission instead of focusing on a feasible mission and then on the equipment they need to do it. So what is it that we want to accomplish here, and why?

So much for exploration. Mars has a surface area of 144,798,500 km2 and you are advocating sending regular missions to explore the same area over and over again. Exploration will be limited to a 20-50km radius around the base, depending on the range of the rover and safety constraints (and then only if you have two rovers). If your first mission spends several months exploring that small area, you will have it pretty well covered. What would be the point of sending the next missions to the same place? Wouldn't you want to diversify your science results by exploring a totally different site that might be several thousand km away?

See sig below

That is wrong. Life support techniques, radiation shielding, ISRU, power production, dust mitigation and decontamination, partial gravity... These are all things that are common to Mars and the Moon, and are much easier to study 3 days from Earth than 6 months every 2 years. People are often tricked by pictures from Mars that make it look a lot like New Mexico or the Australian Outback. They see it as a desert that shares similarities with our own deserts. The colors make it look warm and hospitable. In reality, it is freezingly cold, the atmosphere is for all intents and purposes inexistant and the soil is sterile with no organic matter or minerals that can support vegetation. It has a lot more in common with the Moon than with Earth. - - - Updated - - - The only thing SpaceX is colonizing is Twitter. Beyond the PR, SpaceX is only going to Mars if somebody (NASA) hires them to. BFR/Raptor "development" is only to demonstrate that they can cater to the HLV market when SLS is cancelled. There is no market for regular Mars trips, nor will there ever be one any time soon. It will always be expensive, even with reusable MCTs. Colonization is a silly science-fiction induced pipe dream that SpaceX uses for PR purposes, and I really wish people would put a little more thought into it before drinking the Kool Aid. - - - Updated - - - It is a vast simplification to say that the technologies required for Mars Direct are available. There is a difference between "theoretical" and "operational", which is why NASA uses a scale called the Technology Readiness Level to rate various technologies. Systems like SLS or Orion are at TRL8. You need TRL9 before risking human lives on it. Technologies such as ISRU, which Zubrin's mission relies on, are around TRL3, which means that there is a long way to go before they can be deployed in mission-critical roles with no redundancy. It will take at least a decade or two at current funding levels to reach TRL9. Nobody is going to Mars with operational ISRU in a life depending role before then. And again, if we wanted to, we could develop the technology. It would be an enormous expense, but then so were Apollo or the Manhattan Project. The question is "why?". "Because we can" is a not a good enough answer when you have to convince millions of taxpayers. Heck, many taxpayers don't even want to pay for schools or hospitals, why would they pay for flags and footprints on another planet? They will pay for entertainment, but Hollywood produces better entertainment for cheaper. America had reasons for Apollo or the Manhattan Project. It was at war (hot or cold). There is no reason today to launch such a huge effort to go to Mars. As for the idea of a colony, that is totally premature. Take the ISS. It's Humanity's effort to keep 7 humans alive in space. It took a huge effort and decades of international cooperation to build, yet it needs regular maintenance and logistics flight just to keep those 7 people alive. To make a self-sufficient colony, you would need thousands of people, something on the scale of 150 times the effort that was needed to build the ISS. And you need the resources to fling all that infrastructure not just to 400km above us, but to another freaking planet. And who is going to pay for a self-sufficient colony on Mars ? - Elon Musk ? Even his pockets aren't that deep. - The colonists ? Only the Uber-rich could afford a ticket. But uber-rich people don't like to get their hands dirty and won't give up their lifestyle to spend the rest of their life in a glorified Airstream trailer. - Governments ? Why would they fund a colony that is bound to either become economically independant and turn its back on them if it succeeds, or become a liability that is going to cost billions just to keep the people alive if it fails. There is no winning scenario. No, colonies are stupid. The best we can hope for is a science outpost, but even that is a stretch. There simply isn't much science that can be done in a limited science outpost that can't be done for much cheaper, over a much broader area, and over a much longer time, with robots. The only science that you can only get from sending people to live on Mars is to learn how to send people to live on Mars, which is a bit too circular to be a proper justification.

JPL, the lab that coordinates the Dawn mission, isn't in the entertainment business. Their funding depends on NASA, which depends on the Administration, which depends on Congress. The general public's influence is negligible. The criteria for attributing funding is generally how much money trickles down into the national aerospace industry and how much science will be extracted from the mission. The science community doesn't care much for pretty pictures (they typically loath PR and teams that go overboard with PR lose credibility). What they do care about is publication of science papers.

The limiting factor on these probes is bandwidth. They pretty much all have to go through NASA's Deep Space Network, which is a series of radiotelescopes around the World that are tuned to communicate with deep space probes. Of course, due to the rotation of the Earth and other alignment factors, any single antenna can only point at a specific location in the sky for a short window every day. The DSN antennas are also used for radioastronomy so they have to be shared with other science institutions. Therefore, DSN usage is determined by the allocation of time slots for each project, including Dawn, New Horizons, but also all the stuff on Mars and even Voyager and Pionneer. Each mission gets allocated time slots depending on their priority, requirements, and budget, and they have to struggle to get their data through the DSN at the moment the DSN antennas are pointed at their probe. Science missions are not for PR. Missions like these are pushing the limits of technology, and the teams always assume that they might lose the probe at any time. Therefore the science data has the highest priority, and "pretty pictures" are reserved for when there is extra bandwidth and the primary objectives have been met. And of course, data rates are low due to the distance. We will definitely get some nice color pictures, but they will come later, after the important data has been received and processed.

That would indeed be pure democracy. I'm not sure it would work well in practice simply because the majority of the people aren't educated about law or politics, and most people aren't qualified to make decisions that concern other people. They can too easily be swayed by media-induced emotion or short-term motivation, and they don't necessarily see the big picture. Politicians have similar flaws, but at least they are dampened by administration, cabinets, and counselors. In a pure democracy, the first laws that would pass would be to ban taxes and distribute free beer. You would have people voting in Kim Kardashian for president. One week they would vote in the death penalty for speeding after a school bus accident makes the headlines, and the next week they would ban speed cameras. Then you would probably invade any country that is designated by the media as being anti-something-you-like. Look at how stupid the average person is, then you realize that by definition, half of the population is even stupider. Sorry, but I wouldn't trust the populace with the reigns of government or any decision making process.

Just get Microsoft Security Essentials for free. Those other antivirus just eat resources and none of them will protect you against idiocy.

In a hospital setting, radiotherapy material would typically be packaged in some sort of shielded cartridge for use with the specific machine that it is designed for. Hospital personnel wouldn't be expected to manipulate the raw material by removing it and pouring it into vials and generic test tubes. In addition, depending on which country the folks who supposedly found the vial in a hospital basement claim to be, the probability of finding a test tube from Eastern Europe might also make the claim dubious.

Spacecraft aren't Lego. You can't just swap modules in and out. Look at how the Orion SM was supposed to be derived from the ATV. The result, far from straightforward, has taken years to develop.

I doubt Node 4 will be launched at this point. Launching it on a Delta or Atlas would require developing a service module and autonomous docking system, which would make it a whole new spacecraft. If it is used, it will be repurposed as part of the DSH.

Zarya belongs to NASA (built in Russia, but paid for by NASA) and is technically the USOS service module. If they go ahead with this plan, they would detach Zvezda from Zarya. However, Zvezda is getting old, so they would probably ditch it after transferring the newer modules over to the new station.

Console is in the living room and can be played by the whole family. It offers a shared experience with other family members. XBox Live gets you tons of free games to download, and even if they are a couple of years old they don't stop being good just because they are old. PC's are typically in bedrooms, for playing solo or online. They are also much more expensive. Not at all the same experience.

Enhancing the picture a bit, the markings read: TLOS ZAGREB ml in 20°C TLOS happens to be a manufacturer of technical glassware based in Croatia, so this is probably just a generic vial. I doubt anyone in a hospital would be using generic test tubes to handle radioactive material, fluorescent marker fluid, or any other pharmaceutical product. Smells hoax to me.

They don't use Procedural Fairings in real life. Payload fairings are typically a "one size fits all" affair because they are expensive to develop. Also, there might be secondary payloads below the main payload, support structures, or maybe even a small upper stage.

We already had this discussion a few weeks ago: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107595-DeltaV-savings-from-equatorial-Mountain-launch If a blimp doesn't have enough horizontal velocity, then I think that a mountain has even less. And it is typically much cheaper to launch rockets from a coastal wasteland than to haul them up the side of a mountain.

tldr; off-topic for this thread, and already discussed at length on this forum. Instead of asking "how to get to Mars". Try finding a compelling answer to the "why" question. Whichever method is used, it's a huge effort that needs a strong political commitment based on wide public support, neither of which exist.

And why would a signal going through a heliocentric relay at some random location in the solar system go any faster than a signal traveling in a straight line?

Not really usefull. You only get a blackout at night, and presumably any manned Mars mission will have at least one MTV in orbit that would serve as a relay. Combine with the other orbiters (MRO and any future missions), and there really isn't any need for a communication relay network. You don't really need 24/7 coverage. Apollo had blackout periods each time they went behind the Moon and it was perfectly ok.

That has nothing to do with why Apollo was cancelled. We have to focus on goals that can be achieved, not pipe dreams that will always be 30 years away. Returning to the Moon is something that can be done. We could probably even support a small semi-permanent science outpost there, something like Scott-Amundsen base, but on the Moon. We would learn a lot about building and maintaining off-world infrastructure, ISRU, operating equipment in "dirty" space environments, low-gravity biology and surviving beyond the Van Allen belts. There are all things that are much easier to study 3 days away than 6 months away every 2 years. Mars is pretty much out of our reach in terms of "resources and economic potential". There is nothing there (or anywhere else in space) that can't be obtained by easier and cheaper means on Earth. We could probably send a limited manned mission for scientific sorties if we wanted to (and we don't), but "Colonization" will not happen in this century (or even the next), because there really is no reason for it. It's nice material for science fiction books, but it's not an idea that has any roots in reality. There is no economical incentive, no political motivation, and no public support. Therefore, not gonna happen.

My first job in the early 90's was in a research center library where I worked on correcting databases on an old Data General terminal like this: Boring as hell. Luckily a friend showed me how to use it to access a Unix telnet account from which I could access NNTP Newsgroups and play MUDs. I spent a lot of my evenings lurking on the Star Wars forums and playing KobraMUD. I also used public FTP sites to get tons of freeware for my old Atari ST... The entire library of Atari ST software would probably fit on a CD these days. A few months later, we were all amazed with the release of the first Web browser: Yes, Yahoo! was the most popular home page in those days. There was no such thing as a search engine, so they basically employed an army of people to manually compile and maintain an index of all web pages.

It reminds of the Energia-Polyus launch. The 80-ton top-secret military satellite was supposed to do a 180 degree rotation to perform the circularization burn, but due to a silly programming error, it did full 360 degree rotation and promptly deorbited itself. Oops.