So Its mars launch season again..

[Brian Gaff]

Where will the Iss be when the new Mars rover is launched?

As an aside, this Russian craft problem is a bit aof a strange one. They
can communicate with it at times, so one assumes its in some kind of safe
mode.
There does seem to be some kind of jinx on mars missions in general, the
failure rate for one reason and another is very high. I do have my doubts
about the method of landing used on this new lander as well. So many things
need to happen exactly as designed for it to not end up somewhere bad.
Brian

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[JF Mezei]

Brian Gaff wrote:

> There does seem to be some kind of jinx on mars missions in general,

In the "2010" documentary on the joint russian/USA mission to resurrect
Discovery which was in a decaying orbit around jupiter since 2001,
you'll understand that there are forces that don't want humans to
discover life on certain other planets :-)

So, the logical conclusion is that life exists on mars in certain areas,
and that any launch that would end up in such areas will mysteriously
fail :-) :-) :-) :-)



More likely: because of narrow windows for launch, those projects end up
with insufficient time to fix bugs and test everything.


The lesson here is that a manned mission to Mars should be given at
least 1 year of shakedown in orbit around earth to fix problems/bugs
before boosting itself out of earth's orbit to move to mars.

[Brian Gaff]

I was thinking about Mars as a manned destination, and my feelings are that
if you are goin to go there, you don't really want a set foot and return
mission. There are several reasons for this. Firstly at the current state of
the art on what happens to the body in microgravity, you will have some
weeks on landing when the humans will have to just build up their muscles
etc in order to do any work, thus you would perhaps need to pan for the
minimum time which is about two years or so on the surface. So first you
would launch your habitat with automated food and resource provision on
board and a spares store. You would need to get both on the surface and
working. Then you launch your humans. The risk here is of problems that
might be unfixable occurring on you habitat while humans in transit or on
the manned craft. You cannot resupply at these distances, so most problems
need to be fixable or the systems so robust they can cope with failures on a
massive scale.
The other problem of course is that you need to make some decision on
return. Do you provide a method or in effect send families to stay there.
I suspect in our current cultural state, we have to have the return, even
if crew rotation is proposed. thus at some point one needs to have the fuel
there to get a fair sized payload into orbit and way from mars. Not an easy
task.

Its a lot of work, and a lot of hardware and a lot of money.
Brian

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"JF Mezei" <jfmezei...@vaxination.ca> wrote in message
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[Brian Gaff]

As for your LGR theory, well, don't know about that. If we found life would
we actually recognise it, or would we be in the position depected on 2001 a
space odysy, ie not only not understanding what we found but not
understanding we had actually made life in the form af Hal.

Brian

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"JF Mezei" <jfmezei...@vaxination.ca> wrote in message
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[David Spain]

Brian Gaff wrote:
> I was thinking about Mars as a manned destination, and my feelings are that
> if you are goin to go there, you don't really want a set foot and return
> mission.

[etc]

Brian I think you have basically re-stated the Zubrin Mars Direct outline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct

If your transfer vehicle contains a centrifuge you can do gravitation
adaptation training (like PT only at varying degrees of gravity).

Long term I agree, you don't want a set foot and return mission. But short
term it really may depend largely on your transport infrastructure. If the
transport infrastructure can cut the cost enough to make Mars trips
"affordable" (admittedly for some as-yet undefined meaning of this term) it
might be that trips to Mars might take on a less one-shot forced stay-over style.

What worries me about Mars Direct is not only the cost, but lack of
contingency. A lot of things have to work right the first time and in the
right order once a crew is committed, otherwise you've build the most
expensive and spectacular method of committing suicide known to mankind.

Dave

[David Spain]

Brian Gaff wrote:
> As for your LGR theory, well, don't know about that. If we found life would
> we actually recognise it, or would we be in the position depected on 2001 a
> space odysy, ie not only not understanding what we found but not
> understanding we had actually made life in the form af Hal.

LGR? Little Green Robots? I thought it was LGM?

Brian vis-a-vis 2001, that is a shrewd observation about HAL. Wonder what the
monolithic intelligence would have made of "him" had his plan succeeded?

Anyway, discovery of life on Mars probably will look more like Andromedra
Strain than 2001. Minus the nano-scale photo-nuclear reactors. That'd sure be
a cool discovery, but not high on the probability scale. I'll stick with amino
acids.

Dave

[Brian Gaff]

Well did you ever hear some of the early journey into space shows the bbc
made. In one they had the martians being basically dead but their robotics
lived on and caused a lot of trouble...
LGRyou see.

Brian

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"David Spain" <nos...@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
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[Snidely]

David Spain <nos...@127.0.0.1> scribbled something like ...

> What worries me about Mars Direct is not only the cost, but lack of
> contingency. A lot of things have to work right the first time and in
> the right order once a crew is committed, otherwise you've build the
> most expensive and spectacular method of committing suicide known to
> mankind.

Oh. let's do a Mars Cycler instead. Maybe the Marriot people could run it
for us.

/dps

[David Spain]

:-)

A cycler would be a great addition for a Zubrin "all eggs in the Mars basket"
style program. Maybe an NGO *will* fund it one day. I have no problem with that...

Dave