Posted on 05/22/2011 5:27:18 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Last week, long-time Mars advocate Robert Zubrin published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal saying mankind could get to Mars on the cheap within 5 years using SpaceX (News - Alert) hardware -- but was he serious, or just fishing for a debate? Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to drop a trail of bread crumb hints that it's build up infrastructure capable of supporting a long-term commitment to Mars.
(Excerpt) Read more at satellite.tmcnet.com ...
Interesting concept, having the astronauts be paid ticket-holders.
Could work.
But not a word about the radiation exposure. Twelve-month round trip in space. Eighteen months on Mars. That’s 30 months of hard radiation... a lot harder than on ISS.
Of course, you could mitigate that by living underground on Mars part of the time. But still. It’s a lot of radiation.
That’s why I’m a big fan of propulsion and shielding research.
I wonder how effective it would be to mix some kind of powdered lead into the foam that inflates the Bigelow modules?
When VASIMIR, a plasma rocket engine, gets perfected it could get the travel time to Mars down to about 39 days. There is a prototype of VASIMIR that is supposed to be tested on the ISS pretty soon.
If SpaceX makes it to Mars first can the company name it and claim it or blab it and grab it and own the whole planet?
Yes, Plasma rocket is the rocket for manned flight to Mars.
It’s still 39 days... times 2, plus the time on Mars... but that’s a lot better than a year.
As for the time on Mars, perhaps we could best prepare for that by landing earth-moving robots on the planet hand having them dig some big tunnels for radiation-proof living.
The story regarding radiation isn’t discussed much, because we are still so far away from an actual launch.
But it is a big, big story.
True enough. Standard rockets are horse and buggy stuff.
A typical trip to the moon is a few minutes of acceleration burning massive amounts of fuel, followed by a day and a half of coasting till you start accelerating into the moon’s gravity well.
There's no need to rush to get to Mars. It isn't going anywhere.
No. The US and 97 other nations are signatories to the 1967 "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies." The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet, since they are the Common heritage of mankind.
That was GWB’s vision for the Constellation/Orion program before Muslim Outreach became NASA’s primary objective.
Space X wont even have a manrated vehicle before 2020 much less something capable of going to the moon, Mars is totally outside their capabilities. They had pad failures that they have to fix before they can even haul cargo. I know, you haven’t heard anything about it because they are as transparent as the Obama Administration about what they are doing. If you watch a full video you will see some of the pad failures but not all that ocurred.
Ravenstar
Foolish not to go first to the moon and learn.
And you are 100% correct about that. It is necessary to lower the risk to acceptable levels.
Ravenstar
SpaceX isn’t a government so that means SpaceX can own it privately!
SpaceX and its owners are subject to US laws.
Can you go to Antarctica and claim it for yourself?
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