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Hey guys,

An interesting topic that has come up often in the news recently, with a number of both state and now private endeavours aiming to place man on Mars.

So what are people's thoughts on who will be first, because surely now it is more of a case of 'when' rather than 'if'?

Will it be the 'Mars One' project - I believe the first to leave (if their efforts go to plan), less than 10 years from now in 2022. Apparently recouping the money from sold television rights (estimating costs of $4 billion) - apparently 80,000 have signed up for the chance to make the journey, but will they make it?

Will it be Elon Musk's, founder of SpaceX, who has the critical number of engineering visionaries within the company to make the trip more likely to be a success (and safe) for the astronauts? Or rival company Blue Origins (with both companies apparently close to revealing re-usable first-stage rockets, estimated to make trips to orbit ten times cheaper)?

Will the first boot to step on the red planet belong to Commander Yu Xing of the People's Republic of China airforce? China has made massive steps forward in space flight - the 3rd country to make the trip into upper orbits with their own technology, their own space suits and now space station - they too have expressed a desire to reach Mars as the hyper-expanding Chinese Economy looks to throw money at anything it can.

Will it be the old man on the block that shows these new pretenders the way in the form of NASA - who perhaps will be justified in their comments of waiting for the technology to develop (for radiation shielding, and superior engine technology) to make the trip a success, perhaps even after earlier attempts have failed?

In any case - wondered what people's thoughts are on this, and especially what is likely to happen -And if not, why not, who, what and when!

Waste of money on a galactic scale.

My vote goes to whichever company isn't delusional enough to think that they can fund, design, build, test, and launch a Mars mission in less than a decade.

 Pacific wrote:
Will the first boot to step on the red planet belong to Commander Yu Xing of the People's Republic of China airforce? China has made massive steps forward in space flight - the 3rd country to make the trip into upper orbits with their own technology, their own space suits and now space station - they too have expressed a desire to reach Mars as the hyper-expanding Chinese Economy looks to throw money at anything it can.

I wonder how much of their designs were "borrowed" from other countries?

 Frazzled wrote:
Waste of money on a galactic scale.

Hey we have got to start somewhere! It's not like we can go straight to mining asteroids on the other side of the Solar System. Baby steps...

I am not really fussed about who gets to Mars first, only that someone does!

Also, I am baffled that 80,000 people want to go on the Mars One voyage, that's a no-return trip am I right? Pretty sure I would be bored after the first week, barring any giant alien worms of course..

Virgin Galactic is another contender ..and all 4 have been on this problem for the past 20 years or so ..

A law suit will win regardless of any waivers that were signed.

Getting there first isn't important.

Its establishing a permanent base of operations that's important. Getting some limited terraforming started.

Find plants that can grow on Mars and start from there.

I think Elon Musk has a good chance...

If China comes out and explicitly states "we're going to put a man on mars and plant the red flag on the red planet within X years" The US would necessarily 'one up' that, the President would put the boot to NASA, and we'd git are dun. If there's anything to go by our past history, its that we win space races.

Columbus was a a buffoon who got staggeringly lucky. And he wasn't the first to reach the New World either. His trip changed things in a way that other efforts to reach the New World didn't, though, because behind Columbus there was a new European economy with the ability and economic capacity to start making regular commercial journeys to the New World. Those trips made money, increasing the capacity to make more and more trips and so on. Before you know mercantilism is born and the world will never be the same again.

Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.

I challenge anyone to tell me why a trip to Mars would be more like Columbus and less like Armstrong.

 Pacific wrote:
Will the first boot to step on the red planet belong to Commander Yu Xing of the People's Republic of China airforce? China has made massive steps forward in space flight - the 3rd country to make the trip into upper orbits with their own technology, their own space suits and now space station - they too have expressed a desire to reach Mars as the hyper-expanding Chinese Economy looks to throw money at anything it can.

If the Chinese economy is still expanding in 10 years I'll be relieved, and also very, very surprised. Throwing money at a Mars mission is something that makes sense now, but I'd be shocked if there was still money in the coffers and political will to continue funding it in 10 years.

I just want someone to try it so we can see what happens.

Unless we start using monkeys again. People might not like that though.

Heh, imagine the Space Race happening in this age of Animal Welfare Nutters

 Commander Cain wrote:
Also, I am baffled that 80,000 people want to go on the Mars One voyage, that's a no-return trip am I right? Pretty sure I would be bored after the first week, barring any giant alien worms of course..

There's 80,000 people who want to go because there's way more than 80,000 people with lives that aren't all that interesting anyway, and continuing to be a bit bored is a small price to pay for an eternal place in human history as the first person to set foot on Mars. People remember Columbus hundreds of years later, and people will remember Armstrong and the first person to reach Mars hundreds of years later. Nobody will remember Bob the cashier at the local Walmart.

I'm 24, I hope to God I will see this happen in my lifetime, and hopefully some sort of cool permanent base on the moon.

I think it would be very cool, but I don't know if their is much economical gain in it. But I haven't really researched into it either

It's starting to get overpopulated here and we have the resources to funnel into this and colonize other planets in about a century.
Guys seriously out of 330 known exoplanets 30 are instantly habitable by humans if they wound up on the planet nude. 10% of planets are instantly habitable by humans. Yeah amazes me too.


edit by MDS (Mod)

I think we should send Arnie...he's just about done down here... Start the reactor Quaid!

First.

No relations to Jihadnik

Second

I say try the moon first. Like I mention before. We stand a better chance not building above ground structure and going the "Tunneling" route. Cheaper and better chance for a Mars mission without mass......bodies. I'm calling it. Its a one way trip to Saint Peter....Chuck Norris instead if he dies before the Mars Mission peeps

 sebster wrote:
Compare that with Armstrong landing on the moon, which ushered in an age of some other people taking government paid flights to the moon that petered out over time, ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives.

That couldn't be further from the truth. The Apollo program revolutionized computer development through its advancement and widespread use of integrated circuits. Without the R&D that came with the Apollo program in the 60s, our technology wouldn't be at the level it is today. They also invented fire-resistant materials for the the astronaut's suits that then used as the basis for the protective gear firefighters wear and emergency thermal blankets, common in first aid kits. They developed plenty of other stuff too (water purification systems, freeze-dried food, cardio-muscular conditioning equipment, etc.) that might never have happened unless the government threw money at it.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
That couldn't be further from the truth.

Only if you read the words 'materially different in our day to day lives' and think of emergency thermal blankets. I don't.

And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible, and your attempt to justify what they've accomplished by talking about spin-off tech undersells their achievements.

But the real point is to compare and contrast what happened when Columbus reached the New World, and why the same thing didn't happen when we landed on the moon. Given that, thinking a trip to Mars would be anything like Columbus' trip would be, simply, total madness.

The likely follow up to a successful trip to Mars would likely be nothing. Been there, done that, left a flag. The only way you'd see more and more trips and an expasion will be when someone figures out a self-sustaining economic reason for it. And at this point in time there isn't one.

 sebster wrote:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
That couldn't be further from the truth.

Only if you read the words 'materially different in our day to day lives' and think of emergency thermal blankets. I don't.

And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible, and your attempt to justify what they've accomplished by talking about spin-off tech undersells their achievements.

But the real point is to compare and contrast what happened when Columbus reached the New World, and why the same thing didn't happen when we landed on the moon. Given that, thinking a trip to Mars would be anything like Columbus' trip would be, simply, total madness.

The likely follow up to a successful trip to Mars would likely be nothing. Been there, done that, left a flag. The only way you'd see more and more trips and an expasion will be when someone figures out a self-sustaining economic reason for it. And at this point in time there isn't one.

I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."

I suspect you haven't really read what I've typed here. I am not, in any way, belittling what NASA accomplished, which is something you would have learned if you'd bothered to read what I had said "And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible".

And there is nothing, nothing magical about research when it involves space. All manner of research provides spin off technology. Take NASA funding and roll it some other technical endeavour and you'll end up with all kinds of spin off technology. Oh, and your assertion that miniaturisation of electronics would only have happened because of NASA is bizarre. A bit like claiming the New World would never have been found if Columbus hadn't sailed there.

And, once again, just to make it completely clear - I'm not criticising what NASA have accomplished. I think NASA are awesome, because pretty much every research institute is awesome. But that doesn't mean we should just pretend that putting a man on the moon changed the world. Because it didn't.

An idiot stumbling in to the New World changed the world, not because of anything remarkable about that idiot, but because of the economics surrounding that discovery - it was economically profitable for ships to travel to the New World, which in turn led to more and more ships, and it was economicaly viable to create new colonies, which in turn led to more and more colonies. The same circumstances are not even slightly when it came to the moon, and so trips stopped as soon as the government stopped paying for them. And that same situation is the case for Mars.

Pretending any of that isn't true by talking about spin off technology is nonsense.

But I'm pretty sure you stopped reading somewhere in the second sentence of this post to start typing up a list of things NASA invented, so I really don't know why I'm still trying to explain this.

 sebster wrote:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
I don't need to justify their their achievements, those speak for themselves. We did what no other country has been able to do. You may belittle emergency thermal blankets, but the people who used one to stay alive after a devastating natural disaster might think differently. If you read the first example I gave, which was the miniaturization of electronics, instead of cherry-picking a less "useful" invention, you would know understand the point. No one in the 1960s thought that R&D from the Apollo program would usher in the era of laptop computers and cell phones, but it did. You cannot claim that finding a way to put a man on Mars and return him safely will offer no benefit to humanity other than "we put a flag there."

I suspect you haven't really read what I've typed here. I am not, in any way, belittling what NASA accomplished, which is something you would have learned if you'd bothered to read what I had said "And don't think I'm knocking NASA - what they've done is incredible".

And there is nothing, nothing magical about research when it involves space. All manner of research provides spin off technology. Take NASA funding and roll it some other technical endeavour and you'll end up with all kinds of spin off technology. Oh, and your assertion that miniaturisation of electronics would only have happened because of NASA is bizarre. A bit like claiming the New World would never have been found if Columbus hadn't sailed there.

And, once again, just to make it completely clear - I'm not criticising what NASA have accomplished. I think NASA are awesome, because pretty much every research institute is awesome. But that doesn't mean we should just pretend that putting a man on the moon changed the world. Because it didn't.

An idiot stumbling in to the New World changed the world, not because of anything remarkable about that idiot, but because of the economics surrounding that discovery - it was economically profitable for ships to travel to the New World, which in turn led to more and more ships, and it was economicaly viable to create new colonies, which in turn led to more and more colonies. The same circumstances are not even slightly when it came to the moon, and so trips stopped as soon as the government stopped paying for them. And that same situation is the case for Mars.

Pretending any of that isn't true by talking about spin off technology is nonsense.

But I'm pretty sure you stopped reading somewhere in the second sentence of this post to start typing up a list of things NASA invented, so I really don't know why I'm still trying to explain this.

Your original quote was stating that Apollo gave humanity nothing other than Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, which is wrong.

You claim to not be "knocking on NASA" but you follow it up by saying research in to space exploration offers no benefit, and you are simply wrong. There is no other way to put it, other than you have no clue what you are talking about. Our government funding those project because it had a problem to solve, and in solving it, we created a massive amount of economically beneficial products from it. Because the government pumped money into figuring out how to send men to the moon, entire companies were founded and fortunes were made. The exact same thing would happen by figuring out how to send a man to Mars, but people like you are too short-sighted to understand what that could mean for the technological advancement of the human race. It isn't bizarre to think that Apollo jump-started the quantum leap in the miniaturization of circuits, because it did and it has been fairly well documented. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the one of first computer ever built to use integrated circuits and became the basis of the fly-by-wire system (as well as proving what could be done with integrated circuits). Despite your claim that all we did was put a man on the moon, it is widely accepted that the Apollo program was one of the greatest technological accomplishments in human history.

We stopped sending men to the moon because the public stopped caring about it, again because like you, they were too short-sighted to see what we gained from the program. Other than pure human achievement of going to another planet, there is massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance human spaceflight. There are abundant minerals on other worlds that are extraordinarily rare or difficult to acquire on Earth that, if we found safe and economically sustainable methods of spaceflight, could be harvested and returned to earth. Not to mention the fact that it would put people to work in order to support an ongoing mission on the massive scale that would sending people to Mars would be.

The point is that if the US government had dumped the Apollo money directly into developing integrated circuit technology we'd have the same breakthroughs. And even without that funding we'd probably have them anyway, since the market clearly existed and research would go in that direction. The fact that the new technology was developed in the context of the moon was just a coincidence, and the actual presence of a man on the moon gave us next to nothing. Once we planted that flag there was little reason to continue going back.

Compare that with Columbus, where reaching the destination changed the world.

Other than pure human achievement of going to another planet, there is massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance human spaceflight.

There's massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance spaceflight. The argument that we need long-distance human spaceflight is a lot more questionable. As robotics technology continues to advance it seems less and less likely that sending humans on those long-distance trips would accomplish anything more than planting a flag for national pride. Meanwhile sending a human crew vastly increases the cost and difficulty of the mission. You have to keep the humans alive, burn obscene amounts of extra fuel to carry them and all their life support equipment, etc.

There are abundant minerals on other worlds that are extraordinarily rare or difficult to acquire on Earth that, if we found safe and economically sustainable methods of spaceflight, could be harvested and returned to earth.

Then why would you want to go to Mars? If you want resources you go to the asteroids, where you don't have to haul your minerals up out of a planetary gravity well before you can use them.

Not to mention the fact that it would put people to work in order to support an ongoing mission on the massive scale that would sending people to Mars would be.

If you want to create jobs in a useful way dump that money into repairing our crumbling infrastructure here on Earth. Space flight is difficult enough as it is without turning it into a giant welfare program.

Even if you wanted to develop the technology that would make a Mars mission feasible, the last thing you should do with it is actually launch a Mars mission. It's a cold, dry, poorly lit desert whose sole selling point is how hard it is to get there. If someone with more dollars than sense wants to spend their own money trying, fine, whatever, but it would be criminally negligent for the government to spend taxpayer money on this instead of on doing their bloody jobs.

I think going to Mars is, in fact, one of the only undertakings worth... um, undertaking.

I could have phrased that better.

But seriously, we do have an awful lot of eggs in our one little mote of dust basket, and there's an awful lot of rocks shooting around up there in the sunbeam. While I agree that our primary goal should be fixing problems on Earth I also think we should continue working hard to explore the rest of the solar system towards eventually being able to successfully colonize somewhere else. Obviously this is on a scale much longer than a decade, but the post count of a million starts with "FIRST POST!!1!", as the expression goes.

The point is that if the US government had dumped the Apollo money directly into developing integrated circuit technology we'd have the same breakthroughs. And even without that funding we'd probably have them anyway, since the market clearly existed and research would go in that direction. The fact that the new technology was developed in the context of the moon was just a coincidence, and the actual presence of a man on the moon gave us next to nothing. Once we planted that flag there was little reason to continue going back.

Compare that with Columbus, where reaching the destination changed the world.

There was simply no reason for the government to fund research, hence why they did not until the need arose. You're essentially making the argument that we shouldn't do or work on anything, because it will all happen eventually. That is a logical fallacy of the highest caliber. Space exploration has changed the world, for the better, no less.There is plenty of reason to go back, the most important being the advancement of human knowledge. Scientist continue to study rocks brought back from the Apollo missions to this day and new discoveries are still made. It may be altruistic, but it's no less important.

There's massive economic gain to be made by developing long-distance spaceflight. The argument that we need long-distance human spaceflight is a lot more questionable. As robotics technology continues to advance it seems less and less likely that sending humans on those long-distance trips would accomplish anything more than planting a flag for national pride. Meanwhile sending a human crew vastly increases the cost and difficulty of the mission. You have to keep the humans alive, burn obscene amounts of extra fuel to carry them and all their life support equipment, etc.

It's true, there are arguments to be made of the virtue of manned space-flight, the safety of the crew being the most paramount. Robotics are wonderful, true, but no machine we have created (nor will likely create) can compare to a human. There is a general consensus amongst scientist in every related field that the future of humanity is not here on Earth, so if there are problems to be solved, why not solve them? How does sicking out heads in the sand further mankind when we can solve our problems now?

Then why would you want to go to Mars? If you want resources you go to the asteroids, where you don't have to haul your minerals up out of a planetary gravity well before you can use them.

Gravity is less of a concern than you think, at least not on earth. Compared to an asteroid, Mars is a massive target and is perfect practice for making deep-space landings. Perfecting human spaceflight to neighboring planets is an important step to working out manned landings on something as small and remote as asteroids. Not to mention, the main asteroid belt is past the orbit of Mars, which makes going there even better. By establishing an advanced outpost closer to the source, you are making it easier to harvest; it's the same reason they build mining and lumber camps.

If you want to create jobs in a useful way dump that money into repairing our crumbling infrastructure here on Earth. Space flight is difficult enough as it is without turning it into a giant welfare program.

It's not a welfare program, not even close. A sustained spaceflight industry creates the demand for high tech, high paying jobs; something our country sorely lacks. It inspires younger generations to become interested in science, mathematics, and technology and encourages them to pursue education and employment in those fields. Over 60% of graduates can't find work in their field of study. Why study that stuff now when chances are, you'll leave college and get a job that has absolutely nothing to do with what you studied? That won't be a problem with in demand jobs in those fields. That isn't a "welfare program" by a long shot, that is actual job growth.

 Ouze wrote:
I think going to Mars is, in fact, one of the only undertakings worth... um, undertaking.

I could have phrased that better.

But seriously, we do have an awful lot of eggs in our one little mote of dust basket, and there's an awful lot of rocks shooting around up there in the sunbeam. While I agree that our primary goal should be fixing problems on Earth I also think we should continue working hard to explore the rest of the solar system towards eventually being able to successfully colonize somewhere else. Obviously this is on a scale much longer than a decade, but the post count of a million starts with "FIRST POST!!1!", as the expression goes.

The flaw with your reasoning is that working hard to explore the rest of the solar system doesn't help progress towards meaningful colonisation. Meaningful colonisation, especially if you want the population to be mobile enough that you're not just doubling the chance of a catastrophe that kills half as many people, requires a technology base that itself makes the exploration phase trivially easy. It's like thinking you can get a head start on your trip to Disneyland by walking and getting picked up on the way, instead of just waiting half an hour until the car is ready.

But right now we have no car getting ready - are the technologies needed to undertake such a.. crap, I did it again - undertaking going to be developed short of actually trying to go? I.e. did the technology we need to get to the moon come about because we were trying to get to the moon, or did we go to the moon when our technology was ready? I think it has to be the former rather than the later.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
Your original quote was stating that Apollo gave humanity nothing other than Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, which is wrong.

Holy gak. You misread what I said the first time, so I quoted it for you again, and you still got it wrong. Here it is, for a third time "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives."

It's not like its long, the whole quote comes in at 18 words. My whole first post came in at 160 words, and that might sound like a lot, but The Very Hungry Caterpillar is 222. So there really just is no excuse for you to still have no idea what I typed. Just fething read it please, because I'm getting really bored of explaining to you over and over again that I haven't said any of the nonsense you keep pretending I've said.

You claim to not be "knocking on NASA" but you follow it up by saying research in to space exploration offers no benefit, and you are simply wrong.

It's in the clipboard now so it's just a simple ctrl-v to point it out again, so here we go; "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives".

And then compare that to what you're pretending I said "space exploration offers no benefit". For a guy who seems to really love science, you don't seem particularly inclined to read.

Our government funding those project because it had a problem to solve, and in solving it, we created a massive amount of economically beneficial products from it. Because the government pumped money into figuring out how to send men to the moon, entire companies were founded and fortunes were made.

The same could be said for any sufficiently difficult, research oriented project. Tech developments from attempting to build a hundred metre high Space Marine would have similar tech offshoots.

Despite your claim that all we did was put a man on the moon, it is widely accepted that the Apollo program was one of the greatest technological accomplishments in human history.

ctrl-v is really taking the work out of this; "ultimately leaving us with a remarkable human achievement, but nothing materially different in our day to day lives."

We stopped sending men to the moon because the public stopped caring about it, again because like you, they were too short-sighted to see what we gained from the program.

Actually we stopped sending men to the moon because NASA refocused on useful human achievements like advancing satellite technology, improving weather forecasting and all that kind of stuff. With their finite budget, they chose between developing space technologies that did something, and continuing to send people to the moon. NASA chose correctly.

Not to mention the fact that it would put people to work in order to support an ongoing mission on the massive scale that would sending people to Mars would be.

Employment as a reason to spend money.... uurgh. Just, fething think about what you just typed. Because it basically works as a justification to just spend money, and it doesn't matter what you spend it on because 'jobs'. Dig a hole, then fill it in again. You've got a job, therefore the program is worthwhile.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
There was simply no reason for the government to fund research, hence why they did not until the need arose. You're essentially making the argument that we shouldn't do or work on anything, because it will all happen eventually.

No, but advances in computing have happened very rapidly, without needing to be part of a plan to fly humans through space. It's a complete nonsense to conclude that some advances that happened as part of a space based research project could never have happened otherwise.

Robotics are wonderful, true, but no machine we have created (nor will likely create) can compare to a human.

Sbuh? How in the hell can you just declare that? Have you seen the future of robotics?

There is a general consensus amongst scientist in every related field that the future of humanity is not here on Earth,

Really? So there was like a study done, was there? They went around and asked a sample group of scientists in every field of scientific endeavour, and a majority in each group said 'the future of humanity is not here on Earth'. Uh huh.

It's not a welfare program, not even close. A sustained spaceflight industry creates the demand for high tech, high paying jobs; something our country sorely lacks.

The US is the largest hi-tech manufacturer in the world, by an order of magnitude.