
NASA reveals multi-spacecraft plan to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth - rbanffy
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/16/nasa-reveals-ambitious-multi-spacecraft-plan-to-bring-a-piece-of-mars-back-to-earth/
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valuearb
Or you can have a Starship land on Mars, have a human stroll out of it,
collect the samples, build an ISRU plant to generate fuel for return and fly
back with the samples.

Both are audacious plans, but somehow SpaceX’s seems the less audacious.

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tridentlead
Constructing a spacecraft capable of sustaining a human being for multiple
years, landing them with all necessary support equipment, building an ISRU
plant for which solid designs do not currently exist, and for which even the
principles are still very much the subject of research, launching and
returning is much, much more complicated than sending an unmanned spacecraft
or two to recover a sample. This is really not too far off from what JAXA is
already doing with Hayabusa 2.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa2)

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valuearb
Multiple rounds of aerobraking and landings in deep gravity wells is vastly
different than Hayabusa 2.

And Mars is eminently survivable for humans, far better than the moon for
example. Starship makes landing a few hundred tons of food, supplies and
equipment before the first crews relatively easy.

ISRU experiments on earth have proven the concepts already. We can figure out
ISRU details along the way, even if it takes a few extra synods and delivering
more equipment. we will be getting far more science out of a human landing
than robots can ever provide.

In fact, the first humans on Mars will explore more of it in a few weeks than
50 years of rovers have done. The first human to take a single shovel full of
Mars will have have dug deeper than than the Insight orbit has done in a year
of trying.

