
Why There's Still Not a Human on Mars - T-A
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151111-mars-mission-fail-history-astronaut-science/
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petewailes
The simple answer is, because it's really, really difficult, for a very
limited benefit.

Getting people to Mars is hard. Keeping people alive on Mars is hard. Getting
anything to work on Mars is hard. Manned settlement (which is pretty much the
only point of sending wetware there), would require underground buildings. (No
magnetosphere or atmosphere really to speak of in terms of protecting soft
squishy humans from radiation means you need to bury your buildings under the
regolith at the very least.

Beyond that, you've also got issues of power generation once you're there,
consumables and resupply (growing food at scale means lots of buildings, which
means some form of underground or buried village). Plus social issues involved
with sending people in a small can into space for several months, landing them
and enough stuff to keep them alive (because it's easier to land rovers than
humans, generally speaking).

Beyond that there's more subtle issues - comms takes a while. If anything goes
wrong, it's a very long way to send help. And that's before you work on
getting people back.

You'd have to plan a multi-month mission at least to just send people there
and back purposefully, or multi-year mission to make it really worthwhile.

And as it turns out, every single part of it is really difficult.

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iwwr
Kennedy's deadline: "by the end of the decade" was crucial. It became "the
president's deadline" and everyone rallied to fulfil it.

A human Mars mission now is comparatively less difficult than the challenge
that Apollo faced, with far superior technology, knowledge and funding. NASA
has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven. Mind you,
it's doing great stuff still with the robotic exploration program, but
undertaking a deep-space human mission involves the kind of determination a
bureaucracy on autopilot is just not capable of.

NASA is also more than anything a creature of the President and could respond
to such a challenge once more, given the chance.

~~~
troutwine
It's worth keeping in mind that a lunar landing was considered technically
feasible in a relatively short timespan by NASA planners _before_ the Kennedy
speech. All they needed was the cash, otherwise the timescale would stretch as
cheaper lift vehicles and techniques were invented (perhaps into the 1980s,
I've read). Kennedy acknowledges this reality in the speech: "accelerating the
existing space program".

Compare that to a Mars landing today. Here in 2015 we have many more unsolved
problems than the lunar landing planners did in 1957. How do you cope with
radiation? What about long-term nutrition? Gradual loss of vision due to
microgravity and loss of skeletal mass? Psychological issues? I sincerely
doubt that these problems are "comparatively less difficult than the challenge
that Apollo faced".

Apollo's key areas of advancement were in manufacturing and spaceflight
control. Life-support was disposable and mission durations were short enough
to make solar flares unlikely and skeletal degradation very slight. While it's
true that we have far greater manufacturing and control technology than we did
in the 60s that's only a small subset of the total technology we're going to
have to invent to get more than corpses to Mars.

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euyyn
> Gradual loss of vision due to microgravity

I'm interested on this, as I'd never heard of it before. Can you tell more
about it?

~~~
troutwine
Sure! It's been under active investigation by NASA for about eight years now:
[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1038.html)

We're fairly sure we understand the mechanism--there's an experiment ongoing
to confirm now, especially with regard to Commander Scott Kelly and his year-
long mission on the ISS--but we're not entirely sure what to do about it if
we're right. We're pretty well obligated for the next fifty years--give or
take--to microgravity environments for long-duration spaceflights for lack of
research into spinning toruses or tether systems.

Microgravity is a tough environment for a human to live in, physically.

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sampo
In Mars you have: gravity and solid ground, but you don't have atmospheric
pressure or comfortable temperature.

Giving up on solid ground, a floating habitat 50+ km above the surface of
Venus might have almost Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperatures, also
gravity, but lacks solid ground.

Is it sure that solid ground makes everything so much easier that colonizing
Mars would still be easier than floating colonies in the atmosphere of Venus?

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jonnathanson
Perhaps sending a crew to Mars will be trivial by the time we have the
technology and know-how to keep people alive, sustainably, on Mars in the
first place.

We could _maybe_ put a team on Mars in a few years, perhaps, but they'd have
to find a way to turn around and come back almost immediately. And we wouldn't
be able to follow up on that mission for decades. It would be a symbolic
effort at best, and a PR nightmare at worst if anything went wrong. The
risk/reward just seems so badly skewed in favor of risk right now.

Shame on us for the wishy-washy way we have handled our space program over the
last few decades, sure. But we are not suddenly ready just because everything
has been on an apparent pause for awhile. In the meantime, we should continue
sending robots up there and perhaps launching supplies and equipment.

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workitout
If I were an Astronaut, I'd rather see Pluto than Mars. If you managed to
figure out how to survive the extremes of Mars over an extended time, you
probably will already know what you need to survive Pluto long term too.
That's where it's at, the edge of our Solar System; a launch point for
intergalactic travel. Launch from Earth then keep hitting the engines to build
speed, cutting the travel time to Pluto from years down to weeks. Orbital
slowdown would also probably take several weeks.

~~~
ant6n
There's nothing much interesting at Pluto. And it won't ever be a stop-over
for interstellar travel, because stopping doesn't make sense. Also,
intergalactic travel won't happen any time soon.

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widgetic
Because his team returned with the spacecraft and spent more than 500
additional days in space to pick him up.

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ychen11
maybe because there is no restroom on Mars

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slicktux
Now, I was much too lazy to read the article, but reading through the comments
here I must ask: Why not send the necessary supplies, equipment, and
essentials now, on unmanned craft's, and once all the important items are
present in Mars we then send humans?

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mburns
That is indeed the first detail of the first proposal mentioned (Mars Direct).

It doesn't fundamentally change the equation, and loads the project with
upfront costs.

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throwaway420
NASA quite simply doesn't have the level of technology needed to successfully
fake this kind of large-scale mission yet.

Audiences today are going to expect much more than a grainy live feed that's
recorded with a potato level camera.

But I have confidence in NASA rising to the challenge and eventually being
able to fake this mission as well.

~~~
jcslzr
the fact that you have to make a throwaway to state the truth shows how fucked
up things are

