mars

[Cannon]

I know that no human has ever been to mars yet, but I read that manned missions are already planned.

But some people say it's gonna happen in 2020, some in 2035,...

Also they say that it's called Mars One and whoever goes there ain't coming back, and is building human colonisation on mars for the rest of his life.

What's the real truth, please tell me everything you know

[Tommygun]

Here is your best bet to see the supporters and detractors of Mars One:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/47036-space-Is-Mars-one-a-scam

Edit:

Also the Mars Society:

http://www.marssociety.org/

There are government plans too, but they come and go with elections.

Edited August 20, 2014 by Tommygun

[razark]

The truth is that we're 20 years away from sending people to Mars.

The sad part is that we've been 20 years away from sending people to Mars since the 1960s.

We have the technology to do it, but no one will fund it today. People are working on making it cheaper, but it will take time to get there. Mars One is a gimmick. It's never going anywhere.

Mars to Stay is the name of one model of going to Mars. Among others, it's been championed by Buzz Aldrin, a world famous boxer also known for writing the book on space rendezvous and an EVA during Gemini. (He might have done something else...) The idea is to send a colony without provision for bringing them back. (Isn't this how Australia got started?) It's cheaper, it's doable, and it's probably not going to be popular with the public.

[treejoe4]

I watched some BBC documentary on a potential Mars manned mission, one of the leading guys behind Curriosity said if real effort was put into it, it could be done within 10 years.

Can't really predict anything though, because it is 10+ years away and the amount of crap waiting to happen could mean anything between space tourism and 60% of this forum being drafted to fight the Chinese. Maybe if events like ARM and Skylon take hold, funding and popularity could make a Mars landing a 2020-2040 event. I'd rather return to the moon though.

But don't ever expect garbage like Mars One to ever work, regardless of the cost only 50% of Mars space flights have ever made it, no crappy little company is going to do it.

[TythosEternal]

Getting to Mars... Well, depending on who you talk to, we're either 7 or 70 years away from sending people. Let's break it down.

The first difference is public vs. private. SpaceX (I.e., Musk) says he'll do it by 2025 or so, come hell or high water, even if government funding is as scarce as a donkey's shaved ass in an Amish strip club. You be the judge.

For the serious among you, there's a lot of work to be done. The really sad part is, in my opinion, how little of it has really been done since the termination of the Apollo program. Nominally, ISS should be nothing but a big getting-technology-ready--for-Mars facility. In reality, it's turned into a big (though still useful, if only marginally so) session of Kumbaya-in-space. There are seriously big and real problems we still need to solve, like life-level radiation shielding and multi-year multi-person isolated self-sustaining space environments, that we could have solved if we had seriously started tackling them 30 years ago. I put this research, of fully-funded and properly managed, at 8-10 years. Since we are being realistic, though, that is more likely multiplied by a factor of 2 or 3.

Then there's the issue of space hardware--there and back again, if you will. This problem is the usual scapegoat, but a minor investment in orbital assembly technologies would have fixed this in as little as 3 years using existing launch vehicles. A sustained evolved shuttle pyrenean would have completely circumvented the issue of manned rating, and you could have skipped the process and used existing HLVs for every other component at a near-zero NRE, and you could start right away.

Descent/Ascent is another problem entirely. Fellow KSP players, you are more familiar with the details of the problem than most. We can't even use the Magic Bouncy Ball approach past 800 kg or so, and Sky Crane approach will never be approved for manned missions (far too risky, far too many likely and catastrophic failure modes). If you really want to enable there-and-back Mars missions, this is where your efforts will be focused, and why the recent LDSD test was one of the first indicators that NASA is actually getting serious about at least half of this problem. Ascent and return, at least, can be solved by automated and pre-placed transit of fuel repositories. I'd put these technologies at 8-10 years.

The biggest problem that remains, then, is the question of what to do while we're spending months and months waiting for a fuel-efficient return. Should we drill? Rove via buggy? Focus on the poles? Strangely, few people seem to have seriously thought about this issue, aside from the seed appeal of putting people there is the first place. It will probably be left up to the geologists, like Apollo, and the astrobiologists, which isn't entirely a bad thing. Still, I think some inputs from us engineers wouldn't be inappropriate. Another round of golf-off-Earth, anyone?