If there are no political ads on Mars, where can I sign up?
By the time this thing is ready they could send smart robots.
Give them a World of Warcraft account and they won’t even notice they’re on Mars.
Which would probably buy just the toilet paper for a space mission. They are going to have to add a lot of zeros to those numbers to get anything like what is implied here.
100 years to travel 35 million miles? It takes just a few months to get to Mars. I think they mean nearest star.
Whut?
If they were building a new super-secret propulsion system that could far surpass current chemical rocket designs, then it would take them about 1 week to get to Mars.
An "advanced" propulsion system that gives us the ability to make one-way trips to Mars? What are they talking about? Using squirrel farts so it takes 10x longer to get there?
Can we send the DUmmies back to their home planet?
Heh, and they’re hiding space aliens in area 51. When friends asked me whether I knew where to find the aliens I always told them that the aliens were hidden along the Texas border. For some reason they took a long time to catch on that I wasn’t talking about space aliens.
No offense, I think it probably won’t work. Too small of a group, one or two people die and there’s not enough expertise left. Too many people, greater the chances of personality clash and factions developing. Leading to deaths and we’re back to scenario one (not enough expertise left).
Is NASA open to candidate suggestions?
They’re not going to get very far on $1.1 million.
That would have been a story!
Have these idiots ever heard of the moon? If you want to develop and test equipment to colonize another world, it makes sense to do it where you can rescue the test subjects if things go wrong. It’s also much easier to resupply them and change personell if needed.
Other than that, we can get to Mars with current technology and you'd have to assume that if Germany had won WW-II, human feet would have been on Mars again no later than around 1990.
“The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles.”
Um, at only 1,000 mph, you can go 876,000,000 miles in 100 years. Wow “journalists” suck at math. Or at English. Or both.
Now, at “space shuttle” speed of about 17,500 mph, you’d go 15,330,000,000 miles in 100 years, or about 0.26% of a light year. The closest star is about 4 light years away, and the closest known exoplanet is about 10.5 light years away. Even ion engines used on exploratory satellites aren’t nearly fast enough to reach those, so yeah, they definitely need a faster engine than existing ones.
PS Incidentally, at “space shuttle” speed, you could reach Mars in about 5 months if you timed the launch properly with respect to the Earth’s and Mar’s orbits. Of course, the shuttle isn’t designed for that kind of trip.
Can we volunteer people for this one way mission..maybe like the entire cast of The View, Jersey Shore and the Daily Show?
bump
These long distance space travels have been considered since the 1950’s by scientists and science fiction writers. Gerard O’Neill was a big advocate of them, and I remember attending a lecture of his that included multi-generational travel. I asked if “technological atrophy” in the culture would be a problem, since folks on the ship don;t have ‘real’ jobs that push their mental limits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill