A lot of what NASA is doing is going to undergo a rethinking in the next few years, I think.
7 thoughts on “NASA’s Approach To Mars Exploration”
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A lot of what NASA is doing is going to undergo a rethinking in the next few years, I think.
Comments are closed.
“The era that we all know and love and embrace is really coming to an end,” he said. “It’s important to recognize that the future is not going to be the same as the past.”
There has been not much to love.
If there had been as many missions to the Moon and got similar results, it would have been a failure/waste of time and money.
But I can’t say I have been paying much attention. I can say that various theories of ancient Mars oceans and scrapes pointing to life on Mars are not interesting to me..
Perhaps they have learned more about what causes Mars dust storms and how to stop them- or at least predict them better. That would be fairly useful. Or discovered stuff which allows more ability to land stuff on Mars, larger payloads and/or more safely.
But I am not particularly disappointed, as focus was never right, for instance I am more disappointed with Dawn and it’s exploration of Ceres. I guess part of it, is that I might have had unwarranted expectation and also maybe something will actually come of it.
But science has always been a slow process and having any hope of getting a faster process is unrealistic.
The problem with NASA is it’s about science- and the wrong focus of science- science in a general way rather science used to advance practical ends.
Basically we need a real Mars exploration program and the missions which have send to Mars over the years should have been focused toward getting a real Mars exploration program. and they were not.
A real Mars exploration will involve crew at Mars and we needed precursor Mars missions to allow this to happen.
And as article says we getting to point of wrong conclusion that Mars has been explored- though this wasn’t actually dared to be mentioned.
So we could get another future idiot President who instead of saying we have been to the Moon, might say say we have been to Mars.
So NASA needs to focus on finding resources in space. It needs to find or fail to find, minable lunar water. And then needs to find resources on Mars which needed for future Mars settlements.
NASA needs to support the Musk dream by doing the exploration that is needed before the dream ends up a nightmare of death and failure or worse, never even attempted..
The basic failure of science isn’t to be wrong, but to be uninteresting.
The same argument applies to any technological effort when it becomes unmoored from market discipline (read: reality checks on what people actually value).
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science
Paul D. wrote:
The basic failure of science isn’t to be wrong, but to be uninteresting.
I’d say rather, to be contrarian to the political consensus amongst the single-provider funding elite… Lysenkoism was not an endowment driven western phenomenon. Nor is the Climate Change catastrophism meme.
The problem with NASA is it’s about science- and the wrong focus of science- science in a general way rather science used to advance practical ends.
My view is that the problem has been that science has gotten short shrift from everyone up to and including the scientists themselves. For the funders, it’s status signalling on the cheap. They can’t spend less and still claim to be landing new things on Mars. For the various contractors R&D is where the money is and a fair number of researchers are in that category. Building single expensive vehicles optimizes for R&D spending.
Finally, what do we hear for complaints from the scientific community? Lack of funding. There are remarkably few complaints about the inefficiency of current approaches or the enormous delays in scientific progress these inefficiencies generate.
NASA like most people are lemmings. This new understanding is a direct result of red dragon in 2018. They should scrap their 2020 mission now and redirect it to a 2020 red dragon mission.
The same discovered understanding will occur when private companies are putting colonists on mars (this isn’t even a difficult prediction.)
Unprecedented? I don’t know. How many Surveyor and Viking missions were sent out in the 1960s? The main difference is these were rovers. But when were the Lunokhods sent to the Moon again? Late 1960s or early 1970s.
It’s fine to do satellite reconnaissance and use the rovers to explore interesting possible landing sites as a precursor mission. But as themselves they are way too limited. At one point to gather more data you actually need humans there.
Still I think Mars first is a bad idea. There are plenty of other orbital bodies which can be accessed with much lower delta-v and in much shorter trips which aren’t inhabited yet. I don’t see that much advantage in going to Mars first.
The advantage is mars is the only place other than earth that has all the requirements for industry in one place. This is not a little thing.
People that can’t see this obvious advantage just prove one other thing. They have no clue how colonization will work. Their plans amount to a base at most, not a colony. It’s very similar to flags and footprints thinking.
Colony thinking goes beyond the technical issues to cultural. Do we want the colony to have freedom of destiny or be subjects to a ruling earth? (That means the socialists and fascists that don’t believe in private ownership.)