Men on Mars: Why it won't happen soon

Wikipedia has an entry entitled "Manned mission to Mars." Since I started writing my thoughts independently of looking at it, I'm going by what I have written, with brief references to it.

Shorter take? Illustrations of such a trip look great, don't they? Well, drool away, because those illustrations are about as close as we're getting in your lifetime or mine to landing people on Mars, in my opinion.

There's three main reasons why that image is all we'll be seeing in the foreseeable future. They're called space psychology, space safety and space engineering.

And, most of those are connected with the idea that, at minimum, we're talking 1.5 years of travel, with distances far greater than lunar travel. And, the low-fuel journey, for one-quarter of what the "fast" trip takes, involves 2.8 years, more than half of that on Mars.

This will tax engineering, certainly tax human psychology, and without massive advances in shielding from cosmic rays, will kill astronauts -- not on the actual trip, but more surely, and with at least as much life reduction on average, as smoking two packs of Camels a day.

In short, until we address all of this, we're not even close to sending a manned mission to Mars. We're at least 30 years away, in my opinion, and that's plenty of time for improvements in robotics in particular, and unmanned spaceflight in general, to push that timeline back even further.

Details on the "why" of all of this below the fold, updated to reflect how NASA's current manned mission planning is woefully inadequate, starting with the spacecraft.

The Russians are landing on Mars!

Well,. it's not all Russians, and it's a simulation, but, a six-man crew will complete a 520-day "mission" Feb. 12. Darwin Day, as well as Lincoln's birthday. Nice timing.

Just a few problems with this, though.

While the story says communications were occasionally delayed to mimic actual spaceflight, it doesn't say how long. When Mars and Earth are in opposition, there's a 20-minute delay, one way.

And, this doesn't, because it ethically can't, test the effect of cosmic rays on humans. Or zero-gravity induced osteoporosis. Or many other things. At the minimum, before we send humans to Mars, we have to send test mammals of some sort into interplanetary space.

Hey Armstrong and Cernan, get a few clues

Stop looking at today's space program and its needs and goals for the future as though we were still in the middle of the Cold War.

1. As long as it's done in a spirt of cooperation, which has been the case so far, to the degree it's been needed, what's wrong with relying on the Russians more for transport to the space station?

2. Manned trips to the moon again is just your romanticism speaking. If we want to mine the moon for anything, that can probably be done robotically. As for a way station to Mars, the space station will work better for that if we don't do a direct shot.

3. s for a manned trip to Mars, whether directly or via the space station, on a number of grounds, we're not ready for that yet. We haven't tested astronaut psychology enough yet, we haven't determined how to do a robotic pre-human launch camp set-up, and a bunch of other stuff.

I agree that Obama is expecting too much, outside of low-earth orbit stuff, from the private sector.

Otherwise, no, you're wrong, and dated.

Food another tough hurdle for manned mission to Mars

Apollo and space station/shuttle food preparation, preservation and packaging just won’t cut it on the tougher interplanetary rigors of a trip to Mars.

NASA is both looking at new preservation techniques and sending an unmanned advance lander with a food cache.

NASA advisors think outside box on manned flight

Manned trips to Lagrangian points? Interplanetary ones, but no landings at first? Practice landings on Martian moons? That and more are all very interesting — if the money ever comes available.

Post-Apollo 11, Tom Wolfe rues no 1970s Mars shot

Oh, Tom Wolfe is right about one thing — in terms of rocketry, NASA was more ready to go to Mars as a piggyback on Apollo than today.

But, Wolfe is either woefully ignorant of, or deliberately overlooking of, how much we’ve discovered about the intensity of interplanetary radiation between then and now. (Shockingly, Stephen Hawking is, too.)

If we had sent men to Mars 35 years ago, with Apollo-level radiation protection, who knows what would have happened?

Also, we were clueless about the psychological issues.

Finally, NASA scientists knew post-landing “sterility” provisions for Apollo crews were woefully inadequate if the Moon had a actually had any life. That said, we are pretty sure Mars h as no bacteria, but, what if it has dormant virus-type life? Even today, we might not be able to fully protect against that being brought back to Earth.

At least Wolfe isn’t as triumphalist as someone like Krauthammer.

NASA lost moon video original

Fortunately, Hollywood came to the rescue, and even made it look better than original.

It was called “Capricorn 21.”

C’mon, Buzz Aldrin, don’t punch me!

Apollo 11 – a photo essay

Whether you’re younger than me, and don’t remember it, or need a start on your 40th-anniversary nostalgia fix, the Boston Globe has a big photo essay to take care of you. (Warning on download time — LOTS of large-size photos.)

Forty years after Apollo – No to Mars

Doorknob bless Buzz Aldrin, his overcoming his post-Apollo 11 depression and drinking issues, his efforts for space issues and more, but, perhaps even more now than when this argument was used against his own flight in the 1960s, we have too much to do here on Earth to even consider manned flight to Mars. Beyond that, we’re not close to working out psychological issues of that length of isolation, nor do we have any idea yet what sort of cosmic-ray damage astronauts would suffer.

That’s all true just for a manned trip; it applies in spades to his idea for a colony, which would surely cost at least $1 trillion to set up. (Buzz dodges price issues as well as technical difficulties.)

Euro-Russian astronauts did NOT simulate Mars trip

The six European and Russian volunteers who spent about 100 days in an isolation capsule claiming to simulate a trip to Mars did no such thing.

The journey is six months one way. Then, it’s either stay there for just a few days, or else about a year, unless you want a less safe, and longer than six months, return trip.

The New York Time, which has much more, also talks about the six as having simulated a trip to Mars, although it does provide the qualifying information, later in the story, about an actual trip to Mars which says the six simulated nothing, though future plans call for a 500-day confinement.

Another reason astronauts won’t go to Mars

At least not anytime soon, that is. Astronaut bone loss has been shown to be worse than previously believed, especially in the hip.

How bad? As bad as serious cases of osteoporosis on earth. Now take time on the International Space Station and change it to a trip to Mars in a crew capsule offering less, if not much less, room to exercise.

Picture a hip fracture from stumbling over a crater lip on the Martian surface

NASA as far as ever from men on Mars?

Questions about how far NASA is on both rockets and spacecraft for the future, questions about whether those questions have been stifled for political reasons — the internal NASA politics of NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, not BushCo politics — and questions about what options it has, show that NASA is an agency in search of a rationale, focus, mission and vision on the manned side of space flight (especially beyond the space station), and still struggling with all four of those points.

That said, Griffin is at the heart of much of the controversy, and appears too stubbornly invested in his own views on how NASA should approach manned flight. I think Obama would do well to replace him immediately.

And then have NASA take a look at that rationale, focus, mission and vision — a non-romanticized look. I think manned flight to Mars needs to be shelved for many, many years.

If NASA can’t fix a toilet right …

Why in the world should we trust it with manned flight to Mars? And, no, on the International Space Station, it can’t fix a toilet right .

Hawking still clueless about the problems with manned space travel

I’ve blogged about this before, but since Hawking continues to bring up the idea of trans-lunar manned space travel, it needs to get shot down again.

Recent research has indicated that current-level spacecraft are FAR from adequate to protecting humans from cosmic rays on a trip as long as going to Mars and back. And, already in earth orbit for six months, long-term astronauts have shown a tendency toward psychological problems rearing up in close, yet isolated, quarters.

It’s a year round-trip to Mars, and that’s if you just spend a couple of days actually on the planet. If you opt to have astronauts stay there until the next return-favorable alignment of Mars and Earth, you’re six months or so past that.

Hawking claims that, in terms of global dollars, this wouldn’t cost that much. Well, let’s address arresting global warming, and dealing with the non-arrestible effects, first.

Then, let’s take note of designing a spacecraft to be safe enough to go to Mars, and what we have to do to address psychological issues, whether through crew size, a psychiatrist crew member or whatever, and let’s retotal the bill.

Yes, Hawkins is a nuclear/particle physicist, and a cosmologist of some sort, too. But he is NOT an astronaut, a planetary astronomer/physicist, nor an astronautics engineer. People who believe that he knows what he’s talking about on this issue, take note that this is a good example of the fallacy of false appeal to authority.

We are not going to Mars for a while

Discussed in Discover more than a year ago but ignored by Stephen Hawking, it’s clear that cosmic rays will keep us from the Red Planet for the foreseeable future, Preznit Bush and his Martian pony not withstanding. The National Research Council says we ain’t making manned six-month space trips until NASA figures out how to protect humans from interplanetary cosmic rays and that NASA isn’t doing that right now.

The Earth’s bulk, atmosphere and magnetic field protect life from the solar radiation and the cosmic rays that travel through space. Astronauts have just a thin layer of shielding.

(Astronaut James) Van Hoften knows from personal experience.

“My introduction to space radiation came first-hand as a crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. ‘What the heck was that?’ I blurted out after seeing what looked like a white laser passing quickly through my eyes,” van Hoften wrote in the introduction to the report.

“‘Oh, that's just cosmic rays,’ said Pinky Nelson, my spacewalking partner and space physicist. The thought of extremely high-energy particles originating from a distant cosmic event passing easily through the space shuttle and subsequently through my head made me think that this cannot be all that healthy. The truth of the matter is that it is not.”

No, it isn’t. Six months going out and another six months back to Mars is a lot more than a week in the space shuttle.

Half-jokingly, Hoften said NASA should send older astronauts, since they will likely not live long enough before the full effects of cosmic-ray damage become apparent.