Nibb31

Why not ?

That depends. It's a bit of a waste to design an aircraft carrier and use it go shopping. Spacecraft are expensive, so an underutilized one is just as bad as an underperforming one. You design them for a set of requirements. If those requirements don't match the actual use, then you have pretty much wasted resources. The opposite example is Orion, which was originally designed for lunar missions (21 days of life support, dV and reentry speed calculated for lunar orbit). Since Constellation was canned, they are now trying to shoehorn it into a Mars architecture, where it really doesn't have much purpose, other than as a lifeboat. Consequently, it will ultimately cost more than if they had designed a spacecraft from the start for Mars missions.

Making jobs in the space industry isn't exactly without merit. Would you rather have those smart people sitting around unemployed wasting their experience, or would you rather have them working on something? It would be a bit of a shame for a country to waste all that brain power.

If we decided to send people to Mars, it would also take decades, because we also don't know how to make it work. We have some of the theory, and a few DRM ideas, but as with the above projects, it's development engineering that takes time. Large aerospace projects work in the same way. It took nearly 20 years for the F35 to fly. Orion has been in development for 15 years. Even a turboprop cargo plane like the A400M has taken over a decade of development. Those things are getting done, while Mars exploration is stuck with rover which take ages to reach their destination. You're confusing commercial R&D with fundamental research. There isn't much ROI in extraplanetary research so there isn't much private money invested in it. It's not going to change any time soon. Nobody foresees any direct applications of Martian geological science that are going to change our lives over the next 30 years. Curiosity has a pretty fine motor system in its robotic arm. There are impressive advances in robotics and AI all the time. There is no reason to believe robots are not going to get even better and smarter. Yes, but that vision is more of an extrapolation of existing technology. You're going to need much more development and even more robustness and reliability for a manned mission. It will always be cheaper to send people than to send robots. No idea. As I said, I'm not designing an actual mission. I was merely speculating over what might exist. I would imagine that advances in AI and factorisation of resources would reduce the number of people required to monitor each individual rover compared to today. But in your previous post, you claimed that they would revisit the same site for some reason. You need to make up your mind. Which is inherently true for a rover too. The reason you don't bring an instrument is due to payload margins, but if a robot is working with the same payload margins as a manned expedition, it can obviously bring more instruments. Manned missions will have their payload constraints too you know. There is no inherent difference in those points between a manned or a robotic mission. We send robots to fix pipelines or nuclear reactors. We have drones and teleoperated robots that can do microsurgery. There is no inherent barrier to imagining a robot that can do routine maintenance and easy swaps of equipment to prolong the life of another robot, especially if that other robot is designed to be serviced in that manner. Or you could design that robot from the start so that it is robust enough to survive 20 years on the surface without maintenance. It's just a matter of developing the hardware to fit the requirements. Current requirements are dictated by power production and weight, but if you increase those parameters to the same level as a manned mission would require, then none of that is inherently impossible. An unmanned rover wouldn't spring a leak it in the first place And it can also be designed to get back to base with a broken wheel. Again, there is no inherent advantage to a manned rover here. This is pretty much the only valid argument for sending humans to Mars: biological effects on the human body. However, it is a bit circular if the only reason for sending people to Mars is to study how to send people to Mars.

Well, so would an unmanned rover. I'm also betting that part of thy "design to get out of such situations" will involve not driving too fast Well, most research takes time. Large fusion projects like ITER or things like LHC take decades to accomplish. We accept that. And what's wrong with getting things done in 30 years? Is there a race on? Is Mars going to vanish in 30 years? Are the geological processes that take millions of years going to suddenly stop any time soon? Not only safety. It's mainly about power consumption (the faster you go, the more power you need, and that is an exponential curve). The power available to Curiosity or the MERs is tiny. Solar power is limited on Mars, and RTGs are designed to produce a low output over a long time. It's also because speed is simply not needed. It would actually be detrimental, because you would miss a lot of details if you were going faster. Off the top of my head, I would envision some sort of robotic lab with a sample return stage and a small fleet of semi-autonomous rovers, designed to be serviceable with packed spares and maybe to tow each other back to the base to provide some sort of rescue redundancy. It could have an RMS similar to the ISS Canadarm or DEXTRE, and a variety of tools (maybe a high pressure blower or a brush, fluid valves for refilling whatever needs refilling, and a manipulator for retreiving samples from the rovers or fixing things). You could have some instruments on the rovers, and other heavier ones on the lab module. You could even have the robotic equivalent of a pressurized multi-purpose manned lab with test tubes, bunsen burners, and microscopes if you really wanted to... As for the Robonaut, you could stick it on the end of the Canadarm for the equivalent of teleoperated EVA activities. That is similar to what NASA is planning for the Robonaut that's on the ISS. Those are just possibilities of course, that I pulled out of my backside. There are plenty of robotic missions that you could fit on a 20 or 30-ton Mars lander if you had one, and by the time we have such a lander, robotics and AI will be much more advanced than they are now. It would definitely be cheaper and faster to develop than a manned mission. You could even deploy several of these for the cost of a single manned expedition. Yeah, which is good, so it can study the area more thoroughly at the same time. Sure, which is why my proposal above is probably not 100% realistic and also why the MER program sent two separate rovers. It's just to demonstrate that there is nothing that humans can do that robots can't do for cheaper, as long as you design them to. The best way to do robotic missions is to multiply you chances and instead of doing a single large robotic mission, you do hundreds of them. Zerging the damned planet with small MERs will provide a much more thorough exploration than sending a manned mission to a single location for a short period. Neither can a manned mission. If you didn't bring a certain instrument with you, then tough luck. You could jury-rig a makeshift replacement, but there is no reason why a dexterious teleoperated robot couldn't do the same. But they could. And that is not necessarily the best option for a manned mission either. You would probably also want to land further missions in different places, like Apollo. Well, same is true for a manned rover, yet you said that it would be designed so that it couldn't get stuck. So design your unmanned rover in the same way. Serviceability needs to be built in. Astronauts could only fix hubble because it was designed to be serviced by EVA. You can't repair something that isn't designed to be repaired. Of course, there are tradeoffs here. Sometimes, you need to just write it off. If it's a robot, well, it's a shame but we can send another one. If it's 2 astronauts suffocating in a stranded rover, then it's a tragedy. Yes, but if we decided to send people to Mars today, it would still take 15 years before they launched. You seem to imagine that we could do it next week if we wanted to, but large aerospace projects don't work that way. It would take more than a decade, and billions of dollars, to simply design a man-rated Mars lander and ascent vehicle. This is why Mars has always been 20 years away since the 1900's. I'm pretty confident that in 2030, we will still be aiming for a manned Mars landing in 2050. Ultimately, what does it matter if it happens in 2025, 2050 or 2070 ? Humanity is over 200000 years old and billions of people have lived and died on this planet without seeing people land on Mars. Have they been better or worse from it? I'd like to see a Mars landing in my lifetime as much as anyone here, but I doubt I will. Well, I'll get over it. Other than satisfying my selfish entertainment needs, it's no big deal if I'm alive when it happens or not.

"A little" won't make a dent in the positive feedback loops. Improvements in efficiency and productivity due to technology follow the laws of diminishing returns. They are logarithmic curves (the curve flattens as they increase at a slower rate). On the other hand, climate change and resource expenditure are getting worse exponentially (the curve goes up sharper, as they increase at a higher rate). It's a dangerous to bet that technology wins the race. I don't think it will be the end of Humanity, as in the Human species, but we have put ourselves in a situation of huge imbalance. Nature doesn't like imbalance and the laws of physics always tend towards an equilibrium, so there is bound to be an adjustment at some point. I can't imagine such an adjustment wouldn't inflict a huge blow to the economy, the demographics, our nation-states, and civilization as we know it. And a lot of people will be hurt.

Of course the rover would be pressurized, but if it gets stuck in the sand or breaks down at more than walking distance from the base, the rover's life support won't help them walk back. Two pressurized rovers is a hard safety requirement if you want to venture beyond a safe walking distance. A manned Mars mission won't happen until at least 2030. We already have self-driving cars and autonomous rovers. The "dune buggy" thing was sarcasm, since you seem to be obsessed by speed, but it's not much of a stretch to think that in 15 years we can have autonomous off-roaders that can drive around Mars terrain at 20km/h or more (if that speed was useful, which it isn't). And I don't see why you couldn't send an improved Robonaut or some sort of AI-assisted RMS to replace spare parts or perform routine maintenance. You could even at least partially teleoperate them. The latency isn't much of a problem because you're in no hurry and the stuff you're fixing isn't going to be moving around. You're talking about current rovers, which are fragile and designed to fit on an EELV. They are slow because of power constraints. They are fragile because they have limited redundancy. The number of instruments is limited by the weight of the platform. If you gave a robotic the same weight constraints as a manned mission, it would be capable of carrying more science payload than a manned mission, because it wouldn't have to carry all the life support and supplies to keep the squishy things alive. There's no inherent reason why a rover couldn't be designed to revisit a place previously visited. Nor is there an inherent reason why it couldn't be equipped with redundancies to make it more reliable, with a multi-purpose RMS to fix itself, and more lab analysis equipment, more sample return capability, and so on. Cheap and safe are pretty much of the essence. Once again, who cares if it takes ages. What's the rush? Mars isn't going anywhere. Actually doing what we can afford is much more productive than sitting around for decades dreaming about we might be able to do in a hypothetical future. Again, there is no glory in refusing to use the best tools for the job. We send robots to inspect nuclear reactor cores, collapsed buildings or underwater pipelines because they are the best tools for the job. It might be more "glamorous" to send real people to do those jobs, and their might be a small benefit in capability, but it would be simply stupid considering the risk and the cost.

Living like it was 1515 wouldn't do any good either. In the 16th Century, there were only about 500 million humans on Earth. We are now approaching 8 billion. We couldn't feed that amount of people with 16th Century technology and resources. Personally, I think it's probably too late to fight climate change. The feedback loops are already out of control, with warming releasing more methane than expected, glaciers melting faster than expected. Even the most pessimistic expectations have been surpassed. I don't think there is much that we can do at this point to reverse or even slow down the effect other than brace and ride it through. Does that mean we should keep on burning stuff to make things worse ? No. If the future is going to be as bleak as it seems, then it's not going to get any easier to extract stuff to burn. We should be saving resources instead of spending them at an increasingly high rate. Even though population growth is slowly leveling, the average wealth of the global population is increasing, which increases demand for resources. 8 billion people cannot all live like Americans. If they did, the entire planet's resources would be expended in a few decades. Some people cling to the hope that technology will come up with something that will save us, but what if it doesn't? This is really a race between a logarithmic technological advancement curve against a series of exponential positive feedback curves. We are already losing that race, and as the economical situation gets worse, the investment in technology and science decreases. When you run out of resources, your economy is in the dump, your and you are at war with desperate folks who are fleeing desertification and want your stuff, that is not the best time for investing in expensive new technology. Will we be able to invent clean fusion power before we run out of oil and civilisation gets overrun by the barbarian hords who want our water. What we should be doing is prepare for the changes. Climatic change combined with overpopulation is cause huge demographic pressure. There will be waves of migration, because in the grand scheme of things, borders and nations are only very recent and ultimately meaningless inventions. This will cause huge demographic tension and struggles for resources and influence. I can't really think of a peaceful way for those problems to be solved. The Earth is a closed system, and the World's economy is based on growth. If you stop growth, it collapses, yet it cannot grow forever. What we need is to invent a new economy that replaces the reliance on perpetual growth with a reliance on sustainable resources. The problem is combining a finite pool of resources with the human drive to improve their standard of living, to innovate, to explore. If the world's wealth is a pie, there are more and more people who want a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, there are only two solutions: a - Either everyone has to eat less pie b - You need to reduce the number of people who want pie Nobody is going to accept a, either in rich or emerging countries, because what makes us human is the drive to increase our comfort and safety, and that happens through wealth. In my opinion, the key is b, to peacefully solve the population issue (through education and contraception), by progressively bringing the human population down from 8 billion to say 1 billion (which is where we were in the 19th Century), we can all still strive for a larger piece of pie while reducing our reliance on growth. If we can't do that, well, nature is going to take option b in a non-peaceful way, and it's not going to be pretty.

I'd like to see you walk 40km in space suit on irregular terrain and in partial gravity. That would take you over 10 hours, which exceeds the life support of any current EVA suit. But again, what is the point of covering 40km in one day? Surface exploration is not about speed. There is no rush. The rocks aren't going anywhere. If you are studying geology, you need to actually go slow. What matters is recording as much data as you can and picking the correct samples in the area that you are surveying. To do that, you actually need to go slowly, not go rally driving or running a marathon. That's silly. You don't measure scientific relevance by mileage or speed. It's not a race. A manned rover's range is limited to a rather small radius around the hab module or the ascent vehicle and for each km that you drive away from the base, you need to drive back. The range of Apollo's LRV was limited by the fact that the astronauts had to be able to walk back to the LM if the LRV broke down. The general procedure was to drive out to the range limit, and then do the sampling work on the way back, so that as their life support diminished, so did the distance. With one rover, you are limited, for safety, to a radius of say a 5 hour walk (if you have 8 hours of life support). The furthest the Apollo LRV went from the LM was 7.6km. If you want to extend your range beyond that, you actually need two crews and two rovers, so that a second crew can drive out to rescue the first crew if necessary. So, if you spending 500 days surveying an area of 80 km², you are going to rapidly reach a point of dimishing returns. My guess is that you will have made 80% of your objectives in the first 30 days. Also, remember that humans need to drive back to their base, they need to eat, sleep, rest, which adds more constraints and limits their capacity. They have to monitor their life support equipment, their driving environment, their supplies. Their main mission objective is to stay alive. A robot has a team of 20 people monitoring the robot itself and every single centimeter of its environment with all sorts of sensors. While a human in a dune buggy, concentrating on his life support and getting back to base before dark, might drive straight by an interesting rock, a rover simply can't miss it. You could do all that with a robot too, if the robot was designed to do it. If you can land a 30 ton manned mission, you could also land a 30-ton unmanned mission, with several high-speed 2-ton dune-buggy rovers, spare parts, a central lab, a sample return rocket, and maybe even maintenance Robonauts to change the oil on the rovers when they get back. It would still cost a fraction of the cost of a manned mission, could cover more total kilometers (since that seems to be important to you) and would work beyond the 500 days of Zubrin's plan. One of the things humanity is good at, something that sets us apart from other known species, is that we use tools. Tools enable us to do things that we couldn't do, they enhance our capabilities. "We" are currently exploring Mars by using the best tools for the job, which are robots and telepresence. They are an extensions of our senses, just like we use binoculars or microscopes. When the best way to accomplish something is to use the proper tool, there is no glory is pulling a nail with your teeth.

A Shuttle is a a vehicle used to travel back and forth over an established, often short route. Orion/SLS is designed for exactly the opposite. Why would you want to call it a Shuttle? Also, there really isn't much in common between SLS and STS. Just about everything is new or reworked. The idea of a "shuttle-derived" launcher has been dead and buried for a while now.

None of those technologies have been capable of launching a rocket and reaching hypersonic speed on an SSTO profile. They are theoretical propulsion methods, not current or even near-future technology. And the way you describe them is just technobabble. And again, they are convoluted answers to a simple problem. Chemical rockets can nearly do what you want. In a hypothetical future cut off from economical reality, Skylon could do it. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a Falcon 9 could make it as the first reusable SSTO. It would have to launch without an upper stage or payload, and you would probably want to stick a heat shield on it have it reenter nose-first, but the dV on its own probably isn't far from what's needed...

You're talking about crazy magical propulsion methods, yet you insist on jettisonning parts that quite easy to reuse even with current technology: heat shields, landing legs, and molten reactor cores. Why do you want SSTO in the first place? There is no such thing as partial SSTO. You are either SSTO or MSTO. SSTO is just a pointless label. The number of stages is irrelevant. What is relevant is the mission requirements. We are perfectly capable of making an SSTO rocket today with current technology. Mercury-Atlas was already "partial SSTO" by your standards, as it reached orbit by just dropping it's booster engines. The Titan first stage would also have been capable of SSTO, if only it had throttlable engines and carried a pointlessly small payload. We could do much better today with modern materials and throttlable engines. And if we had magical warp drive, no doubt we would also have magical materials that would allow more efficient chemical engines and lighter structures that would make SSTO viable. The reason we don't do SSTO is because the payload mass fraction is so low so it doesn't make economical sense, not because it's impossible. You're trying to find complicated answers to easy questions. In a hypothetical future with hypothetical warp drives, you can have any sort of hypothetical shuttle with another hypothetical propulsion system. In the OP you claimed you wanted current or near-future technology, yet you are suggesting science-fiction technobabble. Ablative laser propulsion or insane nuclear engines are just as hypothetical as the warp drive that you are starting with.

If you're exploring a planet around another star, you shouldn't count on ISRU to refuel because you don't know what you're going to find. If you want a multi-role exploration shuttle (Like the Ranger from Interstellar) this is not going to work. You need to land with the propellant to bring you back, Apollo-style. If you're assuming that your destination planet is exactly like Earth, then what you're asking for is the same as any Earth-bound launcher (refuel-launch-land empty). Also, my little finger tells me that scooping air at hypersonic speed to make more fuel than what you are spending to scoop the air at hypersonic speed isn't going to work. If it did, we would already be doing it. Then, you also seem to want SSTO, but you insist on dropping stuff. Sorry, but as soon as you drop something, you are no longer single-stage. And what's the point of claiming to be single-stage at all in that case? If you're leaving legs and heatshields on the surface, you might as well just go full Apollo with a two-stage lander. It makes things much simpler.

Yes, as you say, it would be faster, but at a huge cost. The question is what is the point of getting faster results and how much are we prepared to pay to do so. There is no hurry, so no real disadvantage in slower paced but affordable research.

Chemical SSTO is certainly possible if you have a throttlable engine high-thrust engine. It's chemical SSTO with re-entry landing systems and a usable payload that is pretty much impossible. I still think that if you are stuck on using SSTO, then VTVL (rocket+tankage+payload) is more efficient than a spaceplace (rocket+tankage+payload+wings+hydraulics+landing gear). Horizontal landing requires xtra hardware that necessary eats into your payload.

Human expansion has only happened on Earth. As long as there is air and water, you can live off the land just about anywhere without a continuous supply line with your base or a relatively fragile technological infrastructure. Humans have always migrated to improve their own living conditions, their own safety, and those of their children. Nobody is going to move to Mars for those reasons, so any analogy with past expansion simply doesn't apply.

You can do that by orbiting the Earth if you're high enough. Or around the Moon. Do you really think and interplanetary spacecraft is going to be piloted? We have been sending stuff to mars without pilots for decades. What's the added value compared to doing another Mars 500 mission in Russia or sending another probe around Mars.

I'm not sure what kind of input you are expecting from this thread. You seem to have it all figured out already, although none of that makes any sense with modern technology. First of all, a lifting body or spaceplane makes no sense for a multi-purpose exploration lander. By definition, you are exploring, so you don't really know what kind of atmosphere (or lack of) you will encounter. A space plane or lifting body would be pointless if the planet has an atmospheric density or composition that is different than Earth. You would be better off with propulsive landing and takeoff. You could add some sort of aerobraking device (parachute, ballute, inflatable heatshield) to save some fuel when you can, but you will still need enough dV to do a fully propulsive braking and takeoff if you have zero atmosphere. Now, to takeoff from Earth, you need 9000m/s of dV. With a multistage rocket, and a 100ton payload, this takes a serious heavy lifter such as the Saturn V or SLS. If you wanted the Saturn V to be an SSTO, it would have to be twice as big. But if you wanted it to takeoff AND land propulsively without aerobraking, it would need 18000m/s of dV, meaning that an SSTO version would have to be probably 4 times the size of a Saturn V. You talk about NERVA, but that isn't much of a high-thrust engine for leaving the ground. It was a low-thrust high ISP space-only engine. However, high ISP doesn't make it a miracle engine. That means that it needs less propellant. Something like half less. So using a magical high thrust NERVA engine with a magical nozzle that works efficiently at all altitudes, your 18000m/s dV SSTO rocket still needs to be twice the size of a Saturn V. So the whole idea is ludicrous. If you have magical warp engines that can send you to another star, then why bother with boring chemical propulsion for your shuttle.

Yes, but it would be pointless. If your going to spend 2 years going there and back, you might as well land.

Wake me up when they have earned $10 billion of pure profit. There is already a huge competition among ISPs around the world. It will not be easy to compete against fiber optics, vdsl3 and 5G radio networks. Lots of competition means lower margins, which means that it will take a looooooong time to earn enough money to fund a Mars expedition. And again, regardless of where they get the money from, it would be an investment not just a money sink. You only invest that sort of money if you expect a return on that investment, meaning that you still need to find actual customers that are willing to pay for tickets to Mars.

When the Apollo project was started, NASA had only just sent a Alan Shepard into the first American surborbital flight. They had committed to go to the Moon, but NASA hadn't even put a man into orbit. There were milestones that they knew they needed to accomplish before they could go for a successful moon landing. There were definitely arguments that we couldn't go to the moon until we achieved controlled orbital flight, EVA, rendez-vous, docking, high-speed reentry, extended life-support. These were seen as huge roadblocks at the time. Some people even thought that orbital rendez-vous was impossible with the computers that were available at the time. That's why it soon became apparent that they needed to launch Gemini as a crash-program in 1962 to develop these techniques, while development work progressed on the Apollo program that had started in 1961. It really is quite similar to today: we think that we can find solutions to the problems of a manned Mars mission in theory, but we need to actually test and develop those techniques before we send people on a 2 year expedition with no safety net. A Moon program is necessary to prepare for a Mars program exactly like Gemini was necessary to prepare for Apollo. There are many milestones that need to be accomplished before you could go for a successful Mars landing. The Moon is the best place we have to develop and test the techniques and procedures for outer-space surface operations. It wouldn't be a "redo of Apollo" any more that this: is a redo of this: Scott-Amundsen South Pole Station has a permanent occupation of 50 to 200 people. They don't just study the ice and plant flags. They do all sorts of research in an amazingly wide variety of domains. In the same way, the purpose of a return to the Moon wouldn't be to pick up some rocks and prove that Communism sucks. It would be to learn how to live on the surface of another planet, just like we are learning a lot from the ISS how to live in orbit.

Although is typically a major plot device in science fiction, I don't think that's so much of a real problem. Submarine crews go on extended tours for months without facing murders or mutiny. The ISS has also some long stay experiments, and we have already done plenty of long duration confinement studies on Earth (such as Mars 500). It's nothing that a proper psychological screening and a constant workload can't handle. If all else fails, we have pretty good medication these days.

For editing GoPro videos, what's wrong with GoPro Studio from the GoPro web site? For photos, I usually use Picasa to edit and sort them and Paint.net if I need to do anything more fancy with image files.

Of course not, but if for some reason you have to evacuate your outpost due to some technical mishap or if a crew member develops a medical condition, you're only 3 days away from safety. And if some critical spare needs being sent, it can come up on the next logistics or crew rotation flight in a month or two, instead of having to wait 2 years for the next launch windows to Mars. You also don't put yourself into an "ISRU or die" situation. You can develop and test your closed loop life support systems in an actual space environment while still having regular logistics deliveries as a backup. You can develop dust mitigation techniques, radiation shielding, study biology in partial gravity. If anything goes wrong, you can easily evacuate and return to safety. Going to the Moon is all about learning how to live on the surface of another world, developing the techniques to survive and learning from mistakes in a more forgiving environment. We have very little experience with this stuff, it's just too big a risk to put human lives on a line that we don't even know how to draw.

Yeah, nevertheless, most millionaires find better ways to spend their money than to permanently emigrate to foreign countries on Earth. What makes you think they would want to permanently emigrate to a trailer park on Mars?