Posted on 10/28/2010 12:22:55 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Nasa is planning an audacious mission to send a manned spacecraft on a one-way trip to permanently settle on other planets. The ambitious idea is known as the Hundred Years Starship and would send astronauts to colonise planets like Mars, knowing they could never come home. NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASA’s main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project. The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from Nasa.
‘You heard it here,” Worden said at ‘Long Conversation,’ an event in San Francisco. ‘We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund.’ He added: ‘The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.’ Worden said he has discussed the potential price tag for one-way trips to Mars with Google co-founder Larry Page, telling him such a mission could be done for $10 billion.
He said: ‘His response was, “Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2billion?” So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price.’
Worden also suggested that new technologies such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome could also be explored ahead of the mission. And he said that he believed the mission should visit Mars’ moons first, where scientists can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. He claims that humans could be on Mars' moons by 2030.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
If you read this article from the current issue of Popular Science:
The 123,000 MPH Plasma Engine That Could Finally Take Astronauts to Mars
They're working on a spaceship essentially ejecting a constant stream of heated plasma gas from liquid hydrogen that could take astronauts from Earth to Mars in only 39 days! (And Mars back to Earth in almost the same amount of time.) Because Mars has plentiful water beneath the surface, it means we can make liquid hydrogen on the Martian surface, refuel this spacecraft in Mars orbit, and return to Earth.
"You did the exchange rate in reverse. £1 million is about US$ 1,590,000"Thanks. That's different then ... only $9,997,633,000.00 to go? And I thought they had a cash-flow problem. /S
There's no place on Saturn or any of its moons that's anywhere near as amenable to colonization as Mars. In fact,Saturn doesn't even have a solid surface to land on.
My dream is of Europa or Enceladus. That's where liquid water is most likely to be found and hence, life.
LOL! I just didn’t want you to be accused of cooking the books to make them look bad...(8^D)
What did Mars ever do to you?
We’re gonna need a really big ship to fit a billion of ‘em on it. But, ok.
This should be promoted as a democrap utopia. An entire planet where there are nothing but democraps and libtards.
If it were promoted on this basis, even if we didn’t get rid of all of them, as long as they would take Soros, dumbo, biteme and the gang I’d pony up at least at least 10% of my net worth.
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