Martian Flag
Posted on 07/05/2002 4:32:40 PM PDT by irv
Russia Proposes Sending Team to Mars
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 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."
Someone, please prove me wrong.
Speak for yourself rooskie. If you had the money, I'm sure you'd keep the Mars glory all for Russia.
Next time, try the wodka without the coffee.
Don't believe that---the Russians have LOTS of space know-how. They "do" lack money. I think a joint program of NASA, ESA, and the Russians would be a great idea. Russians are really good at BDB's (big, dumb, boosters) for putting lots of mass into space.
They know they can go to Mars anytime and build permanent settlements since vast amounts of water have been discovered there. However, this Administration seems disinclined to do anything in outer space that is not directly related to national defense.
Number one: The technology and the engineering needs to be done to make space ships for relatively long time durations in space. This is similar, to sailing across the Atlantic. Also we need the life support Technologies for these durations to help make mining on the Moon or the Near Earth Asteroids more feasible.
Number two: If the Russians pay a third of the cost with Cheap Oil to the US and Europeans pay a third, then we can get three trips for the price of one.
Number three: I know several out of work programmers and computer scientists that can get a job ;-)
Number four: It will drive the Martian Environmentalists nuts!
I am writing a speech for toastmasters right now on this very subject.
I choose it because it is 'pose to be about something that we are passionate about.
Here is what I've got so far...
As a country we seem to be like the wife of an abusive husband waiting for her next beating.
Life has a certain feeling in the Western world of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
On top of it we have lost our technological edge. It was recently widely reported that the United States lost the title of the fastest engineered computer designs to a team of Engineers from Japan.
In fact they recently designed a Supercomputer that can process more calculations that 20 of our fastest computers combined.
Thomas Sterling, a leading super-computer designer at the California Institute of Technology, said: "These guys are blowing us out of the water, and we need to sit up and take notice."
We seem to teeter on our foreign policy goals.
Financially times are uncertain as well, everyone seems to be scared of losing their jobs. People realize that security doesn’t exist today as it did for their parents, when 30 years of working for a company brought one a gold watch and a healthy retirement check.
Just as at home our rest seems less restful, our enemies seem less clearly defined than they did in the days when there was just us and “the evil empire”.
What is it that we are lacking?
I ask you, the audience, and this isn’t a rhetorical question.
Yes, all good answers.
What we are lacking is a clear cut goal, and an initiative which harnesses our creative intelligence as a nation.
What should our goal as a nation be?
Well, survival is a goal and that seems to be what our goal has become. But like staying the number one global power, this is ineffective as a goal because it doesn’t give us any direction.
Motivation experts admonish us not to have a negative goal, Not I will not eat that ice cream and deserts but I will eat in a way to improve my health and my strength is better.
In looking for this national goal I am going to look at a national in our past that propelled us forwards.
In the modified words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out of landing a man on Mars and returning him to Earth safely.
Before you pronounce this idea as absurd, let me explain how this goal would address some of the concerns I mentioned earlier.
First of all, it is obvious to anyone that a strong American space program is the same thing as a strong America.
The military spin offs of space exploration are almost limitless. And it should be apparent that military technology proliferates.
If we rest on our laurels, our enemies will develop nuclear technology and missile delivery systems.
And the lesson of 9-11 is that our enemies are not resting on their laurels.
The driving force of the American economy is technological innovation. Many economists, while missing the massive fraud of the Clinton era, accurately said that the economy of the ninties was flat but the tech sector was so strong that it pulled the rest of the economy with it.
How did American become the world’s leading technical innovator?
I would argue that much of the impetus came as longterm spin off from the Apollo space programs and Reagan’s Star Wars initiative.
In addition to technology, many breakthroughs in the fields of engineering, medicine, plastics, aviation, and electronics came from these programs.
The problem currently is that corporations owe it to their shareholders to return profits in the current quarter. This stifles long term research and investment.
And since winning an election has become so expensive, politicians are more concerned about filling their campaign coffers than long term stragitey of anything outside political survival.
The investment in high tech research and manufacturing necessary to put a man on Mars would be a tremendous boast to the economy and have spin off effects for decades.
It would also help the increasing unemployment.
Also this is a ROUGH rough draft.
Rumsfeld may even be smart enough to understand the simple truth that EVERYTHING in space is directly related to national defense, because if we do not command space, then we have conceded the high ground to someone else, and thus thrown away our status as a superpower.
And WHERE exactly, do you think the hardware for any Mars expedition will be assembled, except at "that turkey"??. The "huge loses" (sic) are negligible next to the long-term benefits. So the space station costs a few billion bucks--that amount is not even a drop in the bucket of the federal budget. Hell, it's not even a drop in the bucket of the federal dollars lost to bad accounting practices.
I get tears in my eyes even today, just thinking about it.
We all seem to share the feeling that our country has lost some of it's purpose. I think sending a man to mars may give us back some of that if NASA could just remember to remind us of the adventure. In today’s social state terms the cost would not be prohibitive for the US to do alone, and if we have the money, we will by definition acquire the necessary talent.
for myself, I can't tell you what it would mean to me to be able to sit my daughter down in front of our TV and say to her, "Remember this!"
It wasn't "lost". It was MURDERED by a coalition of leftists, united largely by their hatred of the US (and themselves). That coalition was fostered by the Communist ideology, and has outlived the state Communism that financed it--becoming self-supporting through "tax-exempt foundations" like the P-yew (Pew) Foundataion and similar.
Now they infest all parts of our educational system, brainwashing the new generations of minds. One can only hope that there will be a "generational backlash" against them and their "group-think", as their ascendancy was a generational backlash against the WWII one.
Not only that, but together, they were critical in the winning of the Cold War.
Your list is fine, as far as it goes. However, these arguments have been made before and have fallen on deaf political ears. Fundamentally, the challenge to space enthusiasts is to concoct a politically viable rationale for a vigorous space program. National defense is certainly the right direction, but going to Mars has little value in that regard. Better to use a national security rationale to develop a cislunar space transportation infrastructure. If we can get that, the planets (all of them, not just Mars) become more easily accessible.
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