Nibb31

I really would call Curiosity or the MERs "clumsy", but humans are also amazingly clumsy and slow. Look at how long it takes to do most EVA activities on the ISS. The Apollo astronauts could only venture 7 km from the LM because they were limited by life-support. Mars astronauts would also be limited to a range around their landing site. On the other hand, you can drop dozens of automatic rovers all over the planet to get a much wider variety of data, and they can keep going for months or years without having to go back to the landing site. So effectively you can cover a much wider area with multiple automatic rovers than with a single manned mission. I disagree. The "science" that humans would be doing on Mars is basically an extension of what the Apollo or ISS astronauts do: they tend to experiments, make observations, and pick up samples. The actual analysis and research work is still done on Earth. The science equipment and experiments are designed on Earth to minimize astronaut interaction. Most of the work done by astronauts on the ISS is maintaining the equipment that allows them to stay alive, running the experiments and transmitting the results to the labs on the ground who actually analyze it. A Mars expedition would be similar. A part of their work day would be picking up samples in a limited radius around their base/lander, running predefined experiments with the equipment they have, following instructions from the ground, and transmitting the results back. However, the major part of their time will be spent running the base, maintaining equipment, and keeping themselves alive, including all those human inefficiencies like sleeping, eating, cleaning, and performing other bodily functions. The equipment just to perform those bodily functions represents more than 80% of the mass of the mission. That's a major inefficiency that trumps any gain that you might have from having an human on-site. Robots are getting smarter and more mobile everyday. There is no reason a robot couldn't be designed to perform the exact same sample gathering and science mission or to return soil samples from much wider locations than a manned mission ever could. In addition, a robot doesn't get tired, it doesn't get sick, it doesn't need to eat or go to the toilet. It can cover a much wider observation area for a much longer observation period, which is important for siesmic or climate research. It doesn't need rescuing if something goes wrong and it doesn't need bringing back. A robot is only limited by the actual experiments and instruments that you add to it, but then so is a manned mission. Sure, it's a nice dream, but it's an expensive dream that's pretty much out of our reach for now. There will probably be a time when it is techically feasible, but the technology simply isn't ready yet, so I'd rather see us use the technology that we do have to reach goals that are actually achievable now. Achieving smaller goals today will help us reach the milestones that will make manned interplanetary expeditions possible tomorrow.

It would need more than a few days, and if it failed, you would need a backup solution or it would be shortened mission. You would probably want to send it with the base module on the previous launch window, ie. 2 years before the manned mission arrives. This gives you time to check out systems before you launch your crew. I don't think you'd want to send a manned mission to the poles. The temperatures would be too extreme and you would have trouble getting through the winter. Phoenix was crushed by the ice caps and even on Earth, Antarctic bases are a tough design challenge. Again, any sort of excavation or digging equipment is going to be complicated. It has to be autonomous, reliable, low-maintenance, with few moving parts, few consumables, capable of working at low temperatures for long periods of time and with no human intervention, and light enough to put several of them on a Mars lander... That's a pretty tough set of requirements, and even on Earth, it's not easy to do. But yes, I think that if we ever want to land humans on Mars, we will have to land a whole lot of robots to prepare the ground for them first. The problem is, what is the point of landing humans if you can do the same work with robots? If you can send robots that are smart enough to build a base for humans, then you can build robots that are smart enough to do the same science work as the humans without the hassle of building the base in the first place.

Duh. Let's just hope you're joking, right?

There are several reasons. The main reason is that you don't know how long the lander and rover are going to stay alive. The first thing you want to do when you arrive isn't to start taking hi-res 3D pictures that take hours or days to upload, just to find out that your rover died in the middle of the transmission and you lost everything. You don't want to switch on all your instruments at once in case you overload something. The first pictures taken are usually low-res quick snapshots to make sure that the lander is on the ground, that it isn't upside down or sitting on a slope. You don't need hi-res for this, but you need that info fast so that you can take corrective action if necessary, or figure out why the rover failed if it does stop transmitting. You enable the instruments and equipment in a sequence and you check power levels and to minimize any issues. They you do the other system checks, which were the main purpose of the "selfie pics" of the rover and lander: to make sure that everything is properly deployed, that nothing is broken off or obstructed. Again, you don't need hi-res for this. And then, as you gain confidence, you start switching on the more power hungry hi res cameras and periodically increase the data bandwidth to optimize transmissions. The hi-res 3D pics will come, but they will take a while to upload. This is standard procedure for pretty much all space missions. And don't worry, the rover and lander do have memory buffers, so even if it takes weeks to transmit the early data, it is still stored locally until then. Oh and don't forget that the Apollo pictures were analogic. The video pictures that were transmitted back live were pretty bad really. The good still pictures came from the Hasselblad medium format cameras for which the film cartridges were brought back and processed on Earth. In terms of resolution, analog is always better than hi-res digital. In terms of bandwidth though, it took 3 days to bring them back and several weeks to process them

On Mars, you don't just pop on a suit, go outside, pick up a shovel, and dig away. EVAs are serious business. You're in space, in a hazardous environment, with an atmospheric pressure of 2% of Earth, it's similar to being in a vacuum. The ISS EMU suit typically weighs 140kg. Even on Mars with 0.4g, you would be carrying the equivalent of 60 kg. They are also stiff, because they are pressurized, so each movement requires more effort than if you were wearing a jump suit. Lunar EVAs were exhausting for the astronauts, despite the low gravity. Seriously I wish you good luck digging for hours with a shovel in an EMU suit. And there will never be more than 2 people working outside at the same time. The other crew members will be busy monitoring the EVA. On Earth, you have entire teams of people doing the health monitoring and following the EVA procedures. On Mars, with the time delay, that work will have to be done by the other crew members on site. And when you arrive, you want to prioritize your tasks so that you maximize the science return if the crew has to abort the mission early. You do the most valuable science work first, you don't waste time filling sandbags. No, if you wanted to bury a Mars base, the best way to do it would be with robots before the crew arrives. You could either design your base to have a mobile arm like Canadarm or Dextre or you could have a bunch of robots that could do the excavation work autonomously. It would still take a long time.

Sure, but they only needed to land on a runway because the damn thing had wings. A capsule can re-enter and splashdown or land anywhere. Absolutely. But then it would look more like the fully-reusable Falcon upper stage + Dragon concept. No need for wings.

Dig out a map FFS! There are no hills around Chang'e because they chose a flat area for their landing. And even if there were, it couldn't have a line of sight at 400km because of the curvature of the Moon. And yes, it would hurt. The rover has a potentially limited lifespan. It could break down tomorrow, so the priority is to get as much science out of it as they can, not to waste exploration time with stupid stunts. Nobody doubts that the Apollo landing sites are still there so there is nothing to prove. And Chinese scientists don't give a *£$@ what conspiracy nutjobs think. Here is a tip for visualizing the landing location and getting an idea of the scale. - Download Google Earth here: http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/agree.html - In the Google Earth, click the Planet icon in the toolbar and select Moon. - Enter the landing coordinates for Chang'e in the Search bar: 19.51° W, 44.12° N - Explore.

When you spend $200 billion to send highly-trained astronauts to Mars for 500 days, you don't want them to waste 200 days filling sandbags.

I'm not getting the OP's question. Space agencies collaborate together regularly. The main science instruments on Curiosity are made by ESA and the results are monitored and analyzed in France. ESA also had instruments on Phobos/Grunt. ESA is building the service module for Orion in Germany. JWST is going up on an Ariane 5. Soyuz is launched in both Baikonour and in Kourou. Most of the ISS USOS modules were made in Italy. Japan provided major instruments for BepiColombo. The same holds true for most large projects. Practically all space science platforms carry major instruments that are made and controlled by international partners. Actually, I can't think of a single large space exploration mission in the last 20 years that wasn't a major international cooperation effort.

Well, NASA disagrees with you there: NEEMO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neemo Desert Rats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Research_and_Technology_Studies Neutral Buoyancy Tests: http://www.geek.com/science/nasa-is-designing-a-lighter-space-suit-for-asteroid-wrangling-1579224/

Again, we don't know if we can extract oxygen and water from the martian soil. The traces found by Curiosity are not easy to get to and require a whole lot of power over a long time if you wanted to fill a full tank. You would need strip mining and refining equipment, which would end up being quite heavy in addition to the engineering complexity of making the equipment reliable, automated, and low-maintenance. It sounds nice in theory, but just like the rest of the closed-loop affair, it's at a TRL<1 whereas it needs to be at least 7 or 8 to envisage flying it on a manned mission.

Yutu can't drive 1400 km. It has a range of 10km. The closest Apollo is 15 at 800 km.

Rubbish, the closest previous lander is Luna 17/Lunokhod 2, which is 390 km away. Apollo 12 is actually 1400 km from Chang'e. The Yutu rover is expected to function for 3 months with a planned range of 10 km. If the choice was between taking photos of old Apollo hardware and maximizing science returns at the landing site, then it's a no brainer.

Why do you assume there's anything wrong with the color balance?

I don't remember the USA operating any rovers on the Moon. The Surveyor probes were pretty rudimentary (which is quite normal, as they were developed as cheap demonstrators for the Apollo program rather than proper probes.) Also, both the Luna and Surveyor programs had lots of failures. 2 out of 7 Surveyor's crashed and only a handful of the more ambitious Luna landers actually landed. So yeah, China has achieved quite a feat by successfully landing on their first attempt, and they get bonus points for the rover.

You can orbit the Sun either prograde or retrograde, it doesn't matter. You're still orbiting the Sun at the same speed, only in the other direction. You still accelerate to raise your orbit and decelerate to lower it.

It's suicidal if you die of starvation or some other life support failure after a few months.

You can. I purchased the upgrade from Vista to 8 when it came out because it was only $19. Now, it's around $80 or $90 I think.

Yeah, because this is a different world than the 18th Century one. There are 10 times more people on Earth than there was back then. The economy is much more interconnected. Technology is much more complex. The reason there are regulations is because anything you do is bound to impact someone else. It's about living in society and giving a damn about others.

The thing is, only governments are willing to pay for space exploration. There is no money in it for the private sector.

It was proposed in 1959, so I doubt it.

A Red Dragon could (in theory) deliver something like 1 ton of payload to the Martian surface. Red Dragon is useless for anything substantial like a small habitation module or the heavy equipment you would need to build a permanent base. So forget it. The other techniques used for landing on Mars don't really scale up either. They are good for small probes, but landing large modules in the 20 or 30 ton range isn't really feasible with airbags (like PathFinder or the MERs) or skycranes (like Curiosity). Large heatshields for heavy landers aren't something that we have experience with, even on Earth. The largest thing we have ever brought back from space was the Space Shuttle, but a heavy glider is not an option on Mars. We could try inflatable heatshields, but there is a lot more work that needs to be done on those before they are operational for heavy loads or reliable enough for manned spacecraft. There is also a practical limit to the size of parachutes, and that limit was pretty much maxxed out on Mars with Curiosity. This means that anything heavier is going to have to use some combination of parachutes and propulsive deceleration, which is going to cost a lot in terms of mass. In addition, combining propulsion with a heatshield is a complicated affair, and added complexity means added risk, making some of these solutions unsuitable for a manned landing. I'm not saying it's not possible, but building a heavy lander for Mars isn't a straightforward problem and the technology readiness level (TRL) for those technologies isn't high enough to allow us to confidently risk lives on them at this point.

Yeah. I was just arguing against the idea that Mankind has invented something unique with economics. A species that is advanced enough to span multiple solar systems will probably see our economic system as inefficient, wasteful, and the root cause of most of our problems.

I find it hard to believe that a species capable of collecting the resources and developing the technology for interstellar travel wouldn't have any notion of economy. Surely they would need to have figured out resource management, which means that they must know the amount of energy spent to exploit those resources (cost) and the rarity of those resources. Technology requires that they must have mastered measurement and equivalence of physical properties of those resources. Currency is simply a measurement unit for value, which relates to rarity and cost, so it's pretty much an unavoidable notion to come up with. With currency comes trade, and with trade comes credit. - You can have 5 twigs in exchange for 10 seashells. - Can I give you the seashells next week? - Sure, but then it'll be 11 seashells, otherwise I might as well sell my twigs to someone else. It's pretty basic, and I really don't think it's anything unique to our species. Credit is as old as the notion of currency. It wasn't invented 500 years ago. It's just that the Catholic church considered that loaning money was a sin, which made it unpopular except in Jewish communities (which is one of the historical roots of antisemitism in Europe, but I digress). This changed somewhat with the Lutherian revolution: Protestantism was more open to the practice of loaning money, which is why banking activities grew through the 16th Century and why the United States is so entrenched in capitalism.

The 18th Century is over.