It’s essentially illegal. My latest column, about NASA in the movies and in real life, at USA Today.
4 thoughts on “NASA Can’t Go To Mars”
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It’s essentially illegal. My latest column, about NASA in the movies and in real life, at USA Today.
Comments are closed.
Read
yarchive.net/air/perfect_safety.html
to see how a senior NASA persons once approached this issue.
That pretty neatly summarizes Rand’s book, though the message was written decades ago.
Right now, going to Mars is not about human spaceflight.
We need a market in space for rocket fuel before it’s about human spaceflight.
So focus for next several years is exploring the Moon to determine if there is lunar water deposits which are commercially minable.
This is started with robotic exploration of the Moon and the development
of operational depots. Which leads to crewed landing on the Moon [to continue exploring the moon to determine if there is minable lunar deposits of water.
Once the Moon has been surveyed and a few crew landing, and have establish a few operational depots, then Mars exploration is about human spaceflight.
And that human spaceflight focus is to start a manned base on Mars, which several additional manned bases would be built on Mars over the decades. With having just the one base, the focus would using it to do mostly robotic exploration of Mars, and finding other locations which are better than the first base’s location.
So first mars base should not have much focus on ISRU [or mining and farming], rather one continues to explore Mars for location in which such things are best done. And first base can evolve into test small scale protypes for future bases.
Why do all of that lunar mining when SpaceX figures out the landing piece, they get this “already paid for” group of 1st stage rockets that can easily dump mass into orbit and come back and do it again.
If it has a 50% success rate at first….who cares? They will litter the gulf with a few exploded rocket bodies…but for the incremental cost of fuel, they can throw LCH4 and LO2 up into a single orbit.