Russia Proposes manned team to Mars

Russia Proposes Sending Team to Mars Fri Jul 5, 3:58 PM ET By MARA D. BELLABY, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian space officials proposed an ambitious project on Friday to send a six-person team to Mars by the year 2015, a trip that would mark a milestone in space travel and international space cooperation.

Russia's space program hopes to work closely with the American agency NASA ( news - web sites) and the European Space Agency to build two spaceships capable of transporting the crew to Mars, supporting them on the planet for up to two months and safely bringing them home, said Nikolai Anfimov, head of the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building.

The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.

"It must be an international project," said Vitaly Semyonov, head of the Mars project at the M.V. Keldysha Space Research Center. "No one country could cope alone with this task."

Russian space officials said they are receiving encouraging signs of interest from NASA and European counterparts.

But NASA spokeswoman Delores Beasley said Friday that the Russians have not submitted any formal plan and that the agency would not comment on the proposed trip before then. Because of demands from Congress to scale back costs, human travel to Mars has not been on NASA's radar recently.

"We are still very far away," conceded Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of the European Space Agency's permanent mission in Russia. "But this kind of program is a long-term initiative for every space agency in the world," he said, adding that he held a meeting with Russian space officials this week to discuss the project.

Landing humans on Mars has long been a dream of Russian space scientists. But even in the heyday of the Soviet space program, when Moscow reported success after success, its attempts to reach the Red Planet were marked by failure. Soviet scientists began whispering about a "Mars curse."

The Soviet Union kicked off Mars exploration in 1960 by launching two unmanned spacecraft four days apart, but both failed even to make it as far as Earth's orbit. One resulted in an engine explosion that scattered debris and contamination over the Baikonur launch pad in one of the worst accidents in Soviet space history.

That was followed by repeated attempts and often repeated disappointment. The bad luck for Russia continued on Nov. 16, 1996, when the Russians launched an ambitious $300 million spacecraft, Mars 96, which they hoped would prove to the world that despite their economic struggles after the Soviet breakup, they could still run a first-rate space program. Mars 96 suffered an engine failure just after launch and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

Anfimov said that despite the setbacks, "we never stopped planning and seeking opportunities to reach our next goal: Mars."

NASA's Mars program, plagued by its own series of setbacks, got back on track earlier this year when the unmanned Mars Odyssey spacecraft entered orbit around the planet and began mapping the mineral and chemical makeup of the surface.

Anatoly Grigoryev, director of the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems, which works with all of Russia's cosmonauts, said Russia's plan calls for a cargo and a manned ship, which would consist of a commander, a second pilot, a flight engineer, a doctor and two researchers. Three members of the team would descend to Mars, while the other three would remain onboard the ship in orbit.

Grigoryev said the trip could answer many of the remaining questions about Earth's mysterious neighbor.

"Is there life on Mars? If there is, what kind of life?" Grigoryev said, barely able to suppress his excitement. "This would be historic."

Images returned from the global surveilance device in orbit around Mars the last several years have included an image of the main pyramid in the ring of pyramids to the left of the face which should have immediately ended all controversy over the question of artificiality:

To me at least, the pyramid is four sided and the four triangular sides are clear enough, and I've marked them with green lines. The other part of the image amounts to some sort of an enclosed corridor or causeway leading out from one corner of the pyramid, and then two nearly rectangular features at the end of that causeway, which may be doors or some sort of adjunct buildings. There also seems to be a line going from the Eastern corner of the pyramid to the two rectangular objects, which I've marked with a blue line, but I suspect that's just an edge of sand being blown up into a sort of an apron abutting the pyramid, and that the hollow between the pyramid and the corridor would naturally trap sand.

Nonetheless, there was little or no mention whatsoever in the press of this new pyramid image, and this was largely because press coverage centered around the new image of the face which NASA released:

This image was said to prove the entire controversy regarding Cydonia to be a bunch of buncombe, and to prove that the structures at Cydonia all to be natural geological formations.

More recently, Dr. Tom Van Flandern, a former director of celestial mechanics at the Naval Abservatory, and others have noted that the image which NASA and JPL released, aside from being a worst possible case in terms of viewing angle and lighting, had actually been "cleaned up" or something like that via the use of a high-pass filter which is a standard image processing device for removing detail. Van Flandern notes that the basic help function for Adobe's Photo Shop product notes:

High Pass Filter: Retains edge details where sharp color transitions occur and suppresses the rest of the image. The filter removes low-frequency detail in an image. Useful for extracting line-art and large black-and-white areas from scanned images.

Van Flandern notes that, as to JPL's motives in using such a filter device on this particular image and then handing it to the public, "we are left with an unhappy choice between dishonesty and incompetence."

When we consider that the raw image looks like:

and that the same image with minimal computer enhancement, which does not add any information looks like:

All of that is bad enough, i.e. it might convince people that NASA and JPL told a big, stupid lie to the American people and to the world. But it's getting worse; consider the new and more direct overhead image of the face which NASA released during May of 2001.

Click Image Above for Full Size NASA Images

Several things are clear. First and most obvious is that anybody still trying to claim that this thing is a mesa or any other kind of natural formation is dillusional. I notice several things, which I have indicated in the marked-up image below

First is that there is only one possible way to build such a thing, i.e. to pile up stones into the rough shape you need, large stones on the bottom and then progressively smaller ones, and then put some sort of a hard facing over the entire thing. You can see how this has been done in the image. On the left side from which wind and sand come, the facing is almost entirely eroded and, even where the underlying stone shows, everything has been worn smooth. On the right side, we can see that part of the facing remains, much of it having fallen off to the side in heaps. We can see the cutout in the facing for the left eye which I have noted, and we can see where the facing fell and broke away from the nose, which is what you would expect. We can also see the rough stones of the nose area, which have not all been worn smooth.

Second is that the megalith is heavily damaged, and has suffered more than one kind of damage. My guess is that the entire rock plate on which the megalith sits was picked up and slammed down, and that the megalith was deformed in the process. You can see the places where the hard casement has been pulled apart on the right side. The megalith has been compressed along the axis from lower left to upper right which I have marked with the blue line, and stretched along the other axis from lower right to upper left. The angle A between the line of the headdress on the left side and the line along the top is thus less than the original 90 degrees. The line through the center of the face has been deformed from the original straight line to the curved line which I have drawn. The basic shape of the mouth is still there, albeit moved to the left as I have noted. You can see where the outer casing has broken away from part of the outline of the mouth on the right.

You can see the ridge along the eyebrows as I have noted, you can see the indentation for the right eye and the outline of the left eye cut into the facing and still in reasonably good shape. You can see the rise for the nose as well as the area where the casing broke away from the nose on the right, and part of the remains of nostrils, and you can see the basic lines of the mouth.

Unless of course you're STUPID like the feebs at NASA who're still working triple shifts trying to convince the world this thing is a mesa. In that kind of case, no amount of technology will help. There has never been a cure for stupidity, and there will never be one.

A short while ago, Dr. Van Flandern and other associates gave a presentation at the National Press Club which may be viewed at Metaresearch.

Information has been coming in for two or three years now from the device presently over Mars. Massive evidence of Mars having been inhabited fairly recently has been accumulating. As Metaresearch and other www sites dealing with the subject note, this includes evidence of settlements:

Click on image for full NASA image. Note the terracing, and the rows of structures which are heavily weathered to the upper right of the image but which retain their rectangular corners on the lower left (leeward) side.

Other human faces have been found carved in the surface, e.g.:

Numerous other things intended to be viewed from off-planet have been documented at Metaresearch, Cydonia Files, and other sites.

What then drives the basic instinct of NASA and JPL to bury this story? One possible motive which has been suggested involves the division of funding between manned and unmanned space missions at NASA and JPL. But, more realistically, the major problem which the Cydonia findings presents to the people in these agencies is one of basic scientific paradigms. Nobody could build all of this stuff on this kind of a megalithic scale with space-suits on; the planet has to be habitable for Cydonia to get built. This is a huge problem, in that it would require a totally different basic theory of the history of our solar system from the one which the scientists have. There is simply no way, given the standard paradigm, in which Mars could have ever been habitable. It would always have been too cold, and it would never have had the gravity necessary to hold a livable atmosphere, assuming that gravity is the only thing which ever holds atmosphere to planets.

The standard scientific axiomatic scheme including the basic doctrine of uniformitarianism, evolution etc. etc. does not allow for solar-system-wide catastrophes within the age of man, nonetheless, that is precisely what we have here. Those newer face images are definitely modern people and not early hominids. Nothing involving modern people here, on Mars, or anywhere else figures to be millions of years gone by, and nothing capable of destroying the planet next to us and making a dead world of it would have gone unnoticed by our ancestors.

What we have here is another case of junk science, i.e. the theory of evolution and the doctrine of uniformity, destroying research and logical thinking amongst scientists. The science pages of our journals are filled by descriptions of NASA projects to search for microbes on Mars while studiously ignoring major evidence that they have found a city there, as if germs were important, and cities were not.

Warning: Lengthy spiel follows.

A manned mission to Mars is nonsensical. I worked at NASA during Dan Goldin's reign there.

At one point he made an impassioned appeal for the vision of a manned mission to Mars as if it were the next logical step in man fullfilling his destiny of inhabiting space. But Mars is a dead end. I owe my perspective on this to the excellent writing of Larry Niven. Check out story "Into a Hole"

Interplanetary space, with it's unlimited hard vacuum and microgravity environment is what we should be trying to get access to.

We build large, expensive, and dangerous machines just to get away from the Earths gravity well. Is it a reasonable goal to want to decend into another hole that we will have to climb back out of again?

If Mars was made of emeralds it would be too expensive to retreive them to make the trip practical If you want scientific knowledge, unmanned probes could get more of it for way less money, recent probe failures notwithstanding.

There would be a symbolic purpose in men leaving footprints on a another world but I have a feeling that it wouldn't seem as significant as the Lunar landings were 40 years ago.

Mars isn't the stepping stone to the stars. It's a dead end project that has captured a lot of people's imaginations. When Goldin and Sagan made their pitches Goldin likened a manned mission to Mars as part of Man's biological imperative to explore and expand. Sagan hoped that we would find life or the remains of life there and vindicate his worldview. Goldin asked, "Where would we be if the explorers didn't wonder what was over the next horizon?" "Where would we be if the settlers hadn't risked long journeys in Connestoga wagons to explore the American Frontier?"

He ignored an obvious difference. The explorers and settlers were looking for profit. Either treasure or a better life for their families. Mars doesn't offer any profit at all. But space does.

If humans are destined to have a significant presence in space, that presence will NOT be launched from Mars. It will probably not be launched from the Earth either.

Lets assume that force fields and warp drives will defy being invented in our lifetimes. How then will we get a lot of space ships built and underway? Launching anything into orbit is expensive. We have to build powerful rockets that have to be made even more powerful to lift the fuel to lift the fuel...

These rockets are so dangerous that it takes an army of engineers and technicians on hand to carefully prepare the rocket for launch so it doesn't blow up on the pad.

What if the rockets were built from material that is already in orbit though? If a spacecraft never has to climb thhrough a thick atmosphere while achieving orbit then the need for large, expensive and dangerous engines is eliminated. A Spacecraft could travel anywhere with a low thrust engine and longer burn times. The bulk of a rockets mass is consumed just getting the payload above the atmosphere. Eliminate the need for that and payload goes up.

The stepping stones to the stars are the asteroid belts. In the belt you have an entire planet's worth of raw materials pre mined and sorted into piles. Imagine dispatching some robotic tug ships to move a 20 km diameter hunk of properly compositioned rock to low Earth orbit. Even if it takes decades to get it to Earth it would be worth it. An asteroid in earth orbit would provide the raw material for the waves of humanity's expansion. That is the next logical step. A manned mission to Mars would delay rather than further the colonization of Space.

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