

Mars is hard - TriinT
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mars-is-hard

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BigZaphod
Frankly, I don't care if it _is_ hard. Nothing worth doing is easy.

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tom_rath
The question is, is a human Mars mission worth doing? Wouldn't a series of
missions building an infrastructure to use metal and water-rich asteroids do
more to establish a permanent human presence in space?

Given a fixed amount of time and research money, what provides the best return
for the next four decades?

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BigZaphod
It's pretty hard to quantify things like inspiration - and I personally think
that's a huge argument in favor of going to Mars. There's also the insane
technological advancement factor to consider. Apollo led to hundreds (if not
thousands) of advances in all kinds of fields of technology. It's hard to put
a price tag on that, too.

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tom_rath
Can you name a dozen of those hundreds (if not thousands) of advances? If you
can, try to identify those which wouldn't have happened without Apollo. The
harsh truth is there aren't any.

We've tried the 'get something great as a result of spin-offs' route before.
It disappoints every time. Why are people advocating it again with a human
'flags and footprints' Mars mission? Why don't we instead direct resources
towards an inspiring goal which delivers something concrete?

Given the choice, I would much rather today have a permanent LEO
infrastructure of a dozen privately funded Skylabs (from those same tried-and-
true Saturn V rocket parts) and cis-lunar tugs rather than the 'spin off'
soon-to-be-retired Goldberg contraption of Shuttle.

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dmfdmf
I agree the main point of this. An important economic point that is often
ignored is that anytime you take money by force and spend it on some grand
project the gains or benefits to individuals has to be less than the costs,
otherwise it could be done voluntarily. The net effect of these projects is to
invest in technology or create things that the society either cannot really
afford or for which there is insufficient demand at the time. It is true some
technology may come sooner than what otherwise would have been the case but
that just highlights the economic fallacy involved, and you can't point to
what was _not_ developed to prove the case because the resources went into the
Apollo project or whatever, one can only understand it via principles. This is
true regardless of the generally acknowledged inefficiencies of gov't
projects, which only makes matters worse.

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eru
And ever more tragic: This fallacy was (or is) often used in favour of wars.

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davi
excellent graphic linked in the article:
<http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/image/79352>

~~~
ars
A red color doesn't mean failure BTW. It means Russia, it's just Russia has
not had much luck with Mars.

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dangoldin
Russia/Soviet Union had some decent success with Venus though which is
supposedly more difficult.

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lunchbox
_By 1989, NASA estimated such a trip would come to half a trillion dollars_

I admit the idea of going to Mars is very exciting, but honestly, is this
where we want to be spending our money?

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randallsquared
I loathe the "stimulus", but if our taxes are to be spent in such sums anyway,
I think that the result should make a difference.

Replace all high emissions cars with electrics or hybrids.

Pay off _all_ mortgages in the country, while passing an amendment that
forbids the Feds from ever doing it again (otherwise, the possibility that
they'll do it again will distort the market even more than it would anyway).

Set up prizes for all kinds of space or research goals, like landing on the
moon, landing on Mars, first private individual on the moon, first full GWhr
beamed from a solar power satellite, first tonne of machinable superconducter
at room temperature, first, tenth, and thousandth tonne returned to earth from
an asteroid, etc. This has the added bonus that tax money is only spent if
someone makes it.

Or something else. But something that matters, rather than just paying people
to do a little more of what they're already doing, here or there, where they
went to school with the program administrators or whatever.

~~~
eru
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic>

