Noting this image:
And using my Cray Multi-Parallel supercomputer, matching known features with flora and fauna structure, the program returned this:
The truth is stranger than fiction, is it not?
Posted on 07/05/2002 8:39:21 PM PDT by Will_Zurmacht
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."
He's dead on economically here. It would be dead cheap (comparatively) to just lug some asteroids slowly back to Earth orbit. Hey who knows, in a few decades (the time it might take perhaps to tug them back from the asteroid belt) we might not even be tempted to drop one on the Middle East.
On a side note, $20 Billion doesn't sound like as much money as it did a few years ago does it? You'd think the Russians are having some success with their Space Tourism thing- they could find enough techie billionaires to cough up a few billion a piece and just fund the whole thing privately. I don't know what the financial incentive for them to do so would be other than simply having the mission associated with their names and corporations. But there are plenty of super rich people and you never know till you ask.
Your credentials and CV please.
Because they can't do it themselves, either technologically or financially, so they want to hitch on to our coat-tails and get a piece of history. They don't want to be left entirely out of the picture like they were when *THE US* landed someone on the Moon. Not the West, not some international co-op, *THE USA*.
We can do a Mars trip on our own, too, if we had the gonads to try it. Russia can't, and they know it. I'm *so* sick with the socialists at NASA (and the Government in general) who squander our patriotism and knowhow in order to appease those who can't do what we can do.
Imagine the results if Kennedy gave his speech to go to the Moon and called upon the world to unite for the effort. It would *not* have galvanized the US the way his actual speech did.
Competition is a good thing. NASA and the US needs to remember that.
Tuor
Liar. We *could* do it. Stop looking for handouts and start working towards going to Mars. Compete, don't hold out your hand.
Tuor
That's not to say that we shouldn't develop the engineering side to be able to live more and more comfortably in Space, and to get around in Space, but without learning to offset gravity, the effort of just reaching Space will always be prohibitive.
The #2 goal should be developing engines or other means of propulsion capable of making at least intersystem travel more realistic in terms of duration. We can't take years to get to the outer planets if we are to be able to utilize them in any profitable manner. Months to a year, to reach most of the planets, seems to be the minimum for serious colonization/utilization of system-wide objects.
I don't think NASA is what will propel us to these ends. I think that private companies need to find a means of profit in Space, which would make them much more apt to devote the time and research to develop technologies that would enable increasingly useful/efficient means of space travel. To really make use of Space, we need to get a lot more people out there living in it, experiencing it, learning the various things that can go wrong out there and ways of coping with those dangers.
All that said, I don't think we'll be going to Mars any time soon. There are too many political considerations in no investing the time or money, or allowing corperations to do so, to make a trip to Mars or anywhere else outside of Earth's orbit a likely possibility, at least that's my opinion.
Tuor
My credentials are that I am sane. The guy you were citing obviously is lacking in that department. What he is doing is much like looking at clouds and making pictures out of them and, IMO, has about as much reality.
Tuor
Noting this image:
And using my Cray Multi-Parallel supercomputer, matching known features with flora and fauna structure, the program returned this:
The truth is stranger than fiction, is it not?
By the time OSHA is done with it, it will cost ten times that, and Russia's share will be 3%.
Bullshit.
New York's junior senator would definitely be in the front running.
Toward that end, I believe that a skyhook system is buildable. It would be expensive in that you would have to launch a total mass roughly equivalent to an aircraft carrier to construct one.
I agree with your later comment about cloud gazing. I can point out many faces I have discovered in the texturing of my bedroom ceiling. The formations on Mars are a result of our ability to falsely perceive patterns within randomness, esp faces. That and a good measure of wish fullfillment by individuals who want to see evidence of extraterrestrial life.
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