[Igor Antunov]

1) No need to run, I'm easily in the top 3%.

2) Nazis are amateurs.

[Smertios]

Scientific bases would be far too costly. We can send robots. Mars is a dead end for human exploration anyway. Planetary scientists seem to be more interested in Jupiter's and Saturn's moons nowadays.

They wouldn't be more costly than bases on Antarctica. Especially considering the only costs will be to build them.

Robots have a huge future

Asteroid mining is not a viable business and won't be for decades.

You seem to think we will start building bases in Mars next year or something...

The first manned mission to Mars is probably a few decades away from us. Actually establishing a base there will probably take much more. And reaching the asteroid belt will take even longer.

And "stopping" at Mars makes no sense.

Of course it does.

Mars is relatively close to the asteroid belt. Placing refueling stations and storage rooms there would make things much easier.

Heck, we might even me able to crash a few asteroids into the planet to make it terraformable in a distant future.

[Igor Antunov]

I was admiring the sky last night, and I turned by sights on Betelgeuse. At max magnification (12 inch scope, ~500x) I was able to discern a round ball of red light. This star is over 400 lights years away, and is ~1,000x more massive than our sun. The prospect of seeing it as it was 400 years ago, and seeing it so closely, despite it being so far away just...inspires. There is no way we're NOT getting off this rock, big time. Too many people looking up at the sky these days-many of them will want off this rock. I couldn't stay up to see Mars, but despite its small size it is so visible at these magnifications, because it is so relatively close. Just 3 months away on current technology.

@ 300x



The little bastard is calling out to us.

[Rugoz]

They wouldn't be more costly than bases on Antarctica. Especially considering the only costs will be to build them.

Robots have a huge future

- You must be kidding, right? It will cost more or less NASA's entire human spaceflight budget ($8bn every year) to send a crew of 4 to Mars every 4 years. That's $8bn for every astronaut spending ~500 days on Mars. If humans ever land on Mars it will be like Apollo. A few flags and footprints missions until the novelty has worn off and the program is terminated.
- Yes, robots have a huge future, that's why human spaceflight makes no sense. Its a relict from the cold war. National prestige and "inspiration" are the primary motivations. Tourism for the super rich is the only viable market I can think of in the long term.

Of course it does.

Mars is relatively close to the asteroid belt. Placing refueling stations and storage rooms there would make things much easier.

Descending into gravity wells is generally a waste of energy and fuel in space. It would also dramatically limit your departure windows since Mars and Earth would have to align correspondingly. I also don't think stopping at Mars will save you much Delta-v for the remaining trip, since Mars' orbit is kind of similar to Earths.

[Igor Antunov]

Robots are useful for exploration and setting up the groundwork. Human spaceflight is absolutely necessary beyond that, for the same reason airplanes and trains are necessary. We just need to prep viable destinations. Mars, moon and the asteroid belt are absolutely viable destinations, they just need infrastructure. It would be so much cheaper colonization-wise (regarding the entire solar system) if we had a semi-self sufficient colony on the moon. The escape velocity alone would be a major bonus, like having space elevators here on earth. Deeper outer system colonization would become much cheaper. We would island hop, from moon, to mars, then inner asteroid belt and beyond. All the resources that would be utilized for further construction are up there. Critically, easy to mine deuterium is up there in the lunar regolith, something very crucial if we are to solve clean energy problems here on earth via fusion and expand our industrial capacity 1,000 fold in a couple of generations and obtain the capabilities to build interstellar ships which would need to represent a new scale of mega-engineering.

[Smertios]

- You must be kidding, right? It will cost more or less NASA's entire human spaceflight budget ($8bn every year) to send a crew of 4 to Mars every 4 years. That's $8bn for every astronaut spending ~500 days on Mars. If humans ever land on Mars it will be like Apollo. A few flags and footprints missions until the novelty has worn off and the program is terminated.

That cost is minimal. Like I said, you have a huge initial cost to build the base (including the cost to end the materials), then almost nothing to maintain the scientific bases.

Also, the 8-billion-dollar figure is valid only for current technology. The cost to send a manned mission to other regions in the Inner Solar System will decrease a lot as time passes.

- Yes, robots have a huge future, that's why human spaceflight makes no sense. Its a relict from the cold war. National prestige and "inspiration" are the primary motivations. Tourism for the super rich is the only viable market I can think of in the long term.

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad.” — The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co. in 1903

This sort of argument isn't new, really. Just like automobile and airplane trips were really rare and expensive in the early 20th century, but became common by the turn of the century, so will spaceflights become more common and less expensive in the future.

Once we realize that it makes no sense to pay for energy when we are being bombarded by energy from the sun at all times (which is mostly wasted, by the way), we will be able to build proper space elevators and make trips to the Low Earth Orbit not only cheaper, but much more common.

Robots (actually, 'drone' is a better term here) obviously will play a major role here, as they will in other aspects of human life, but it will still take several hundred years before we can actually automate everything. I didn't really finish what I was writing there (sorry about that, by the way). I was going to say that robots have a huge future, but that it's also a very distant future. As it stands now, making sensors, actuators, controllers and processors work in unison to make robots work in unreachable areas is a very complicated task, that is more likely than not to go wrong. That's why space exploration robots are often designed with lots and lots of redundant components. Just so we can be sure that they will remain operational even some systems fail. It's not like we can simply send the engineers to Mars to fix the problem of a rover, for example.

If even industrial factories, mining operations on Earth, power plants, oil platforms, chemical plants etc require constant monitoring by on-site engineers on Earth, I fail to see how areas such as asteroid mining would be different and be able to operate just with robots.

Robots, per se, aren't the future. Engineering is. And it simply includes robotics, but can't be completely replaced by it. At least not in the foreseeable future.

Descending into gravity wells is generally a waste of energy and fuel in space. It would also dramatically limit your departure windows since Mars and Earth would have to align correspondingly. I also don't think stopping at Mars will save you much Delta-v for the remaining trip, since Mars' orbit is kind of similar to Earths.

Again, you are thinking on terms of the technology we have available currently. If the idea is to use a rocket every time you want to leave the planet, then yes, it will be a huge waste of fuel. But fuel itself is kind of a waste there. Build a solar-powered space elevator and that problem is solved. And sure, that will still consume a lot of energy, but most of the solar energy available in the Inner Solar System is being wasted already, anyway. We have energy in abundance to do that.

And yes, having every trip to the Asteroid Belt stop at Mars would be silly. But the Asteroid Belt is, as the name implies, a belt. There will always be a bunch of asteroids really close to Mars.

Refueling stations could be placed in Mars orbit to avoid needing full trips back to Earth all the time. Of course, those could also be placed on the Asteroid Belt itself (and probably will be!), but it would be a waste not using a planet which is naturally there already.

We could even built larger stations on the Earth-Mars Lagrangian points.

The only issue here is shielding from both solar radiation and solar winds, but well, we might be able to deal with that, eventually.

[Rugoz]

That cost is minimal. Like I said, you have a huge initial cost to build the base (including the cost to end the materials), then almost nothing to maintain the scientific bases.

Also, the 8-billion-dollar figure is valid only for current technology. The cost to send a manned mission to other regions in the Inner Solar System will decrease a lot as time passes.

- Minimal?? Not compared to robotic exploration.
- $8bn a year is not for building the base, its for sending humans there on a regular basis, keeping them alive and bringing them back to Earth. The "base" is rather trivial.
- No actually it requires a lot more than current technology to be feasible. For example in-space cryogenic propulsion, solar electric propulsion with 100s of kw, life support systems that can independently operate for years, Mars EDL for large payloads, ISRU, etc. etc.

Build a solar-powered space elevator and that problem is solved.

...but it would be a waste not using a planet which is naturally there already.

But Mars isn't "naturally there". It depends on the target Asteroid and its orbit. There's no reason why Mars should be chosen as a staging point. In fact its a pretty shitty choice because of its high gravity unless you need it for a swing by.

That's why people talk about Asteroid mining. Asteroids have almost no gravity so you can easily "land" on them and use low thrust high ISP systems like nuclear/solar electric propulsion. Mining anything in space using chemical propulsion is hopeless and will never happen.

[Harmattan]

...

Mars for colonization is pointless. It would be too cruel even for death row prisoners (guaranteed claustrophobia, severe health problems because of the long-term low gravity, and isolation because of communication latency). No colonization without genetically modified humans. But we are not there and this may require us to engineer babies for this purpose (ethics !). Until then space is for explorers who want to leave their mark and only stay a few months, or poor souls you will pay a hell lot for 2 years contracts.

Mars as a mining base is pointless. There are just better alternatives.

Mars as a refueling station is absurd. In space you don't slow down if you stop the engines. So you burn everything early and by the time you reached Mars you already spent two thirds of your travel time and you do not have to spend a single additional Joule to reach the asteroid belt.



Space mining involves catapults, not spaceships. You pack the resources like a ball, form a thermal shield around it, strap a device to slow it down once it approaches/enters Earth, and you catapult that to Earth's oceans with a big railgun. That's the basic idea at least.

Humans in space always make things a lot more expensive. They need food, water, atmosphere, faster travel times but lower accelerations (no railgun), plenty of room and equipments (fitness/hygiene/distraction/sleep), gravity, communications, training, monitoring, garbage disposal, redundant systems, etc. For every kg of passenger you have a hundreds times heavier overhead. And you can't even sacrifice them and replace them with spare ones. Transporting humans is too complex and expensive, and no colony would be autonomous before more than a century even after you set up a base (our industrial processes are just too complex).

Humans may not be needed. Lil' Mars explorer did a hell of a job alone, and maybe we can also invent slower mining techniques that do not need humans. It's true that not having humans make things complicated, but having humans in space is complicated in the first place. Besides it will only take a few decades before robots are more autonomous than humans.

Spatial elevators are so far impossible to build. It has nothing to do with energy, it is a matter of materials. Steel will not bring us further than 2-4km tall, after that it will break under its own weight (or tension if you strap a counterweight in space). Maybe carbon nanotubes but it's a big maybe.



Photovoltaic energy is more expensive because it needs more labor. This is as simple as that: between its short lifespan, rare earth materials (labor), slow and careful crystal growing (labor) that takes a lot of water (labor) and energy (labor), it is simply easier to just pump oil from Earth.

Solar energy is not wasted without PV. It heats your house, the soil and the atmosphere, and it grows carbon storage devices (plants). Only a small fraction is actually wasted (< 30%) and a PV panel does not change it much.

We have more than enough deuterium on Earth. It is abundant in oceans, easily extracted, and we would need ridiculous amounts. You could easily power the world for thousands of years, provided you can make controlled fusion work (that's a "maybe").

[Igor Antunov]

Human civilization eventually (and inevitably) annihilated here on earth by stray space rock = more pointless and wasteful than anything cited above.

[Harmattan]

Human civilization eventually (and inevitably) annihilated here on earth by stray space rock = more pointless and wasteful than anything cited above.

I do believe in space colonization but only once we will have terraformed those planets and genetically modified ourselves. Before that colonization amounts to sending detainees colonize the Antarctic. Worse actually. This is pointless, we will not achieve anything that way.

You cannot rush things.


Btw, the Mars trilogy novel is almost a handbook to Mars colonization. It follows the process over more than one century and delves into Mars' geology and its other features. The lengthy technical parts can be repelling for some but it is still a very inspiring novel.

[Igor Antunov]

Btw, the Mars trilogy novel is almost a handbook to Mars colonization. It follows the process over more than one century and delves into Mars' geology and its other features. The lengthy technical parts can be repelling for some but it is still a very inspiring novel.

I have all three books. Sadly haven't read green and blue mars yet. Same author released a book in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_%28novel%29

Also very good they say.

[Smertios]

Sorry, people. I forgot about this thread, it seems. xD

- Minimal?? Not compared to robotic exploration.
- $8bn a year is not for building the base, its for sending humans there on a regular basis, keeping them alive and bringing them back to Earth. The "base" is rather trivial.

Where are you getting this $8bn a year estimate from? It sounds like a bit too much for just sending a crew there.

Unless you think I'm claiming we should start sending missions to Mars right away, which would be crazy.

- No actually it requires a lot more than current technology to be feasible.

Actually, no... We do have technology to build a ship and send a manned mission to Mars. The main obstacle right now is cost.

For example in-space cryogenic propulsion, solar electric propulsion with 100s of kw

There are other forms of propulsion which would be more expensive and less efficient, but would still be usable.

life support systems that can independently operate for years

That is feasible with current technology.

Also, keep in mind that by "currently technology", I mean that we would start now. Special spacecraft would be needed, and it could take a few years to design, build and test a prototype.

Mars EDL for large payloads

That's the one thing you might have a point. I really don't know. But I would be surprised if NASA scientists hadn't been developing such a system for years now.

ISRU

Completely unnecessary for early missions. It will probably be needed later on once we build a permanent base and need to stay there for lengthier periods of time.

What a great response! Rolling your eyes is always a great scientific counter-argument to scientifically valid projects like space elevators and solar power! (My turn: )

Space elevators are the best solution to overcoming gravity wells. And solar energy is not only the one that is more available to us in the solar system, it is the most wasted form of energy on Earth as well.

But Mars isn't "naturally there". It depends on the target Asteroid and its orbit. There's no reason why Mars should be chosen as a staging point.

Mars will always be close to a section of the asteroid belt. It obviously wouldn't be used as a unique storehouse for space resources.

In fact its a pretty shitty choice because of its high gravity unless you need it for a swing by.

Again, you are assuming we would have to go down the gravity well. There is no reason why we can't use Mars gravity on our side and establish all sorts of fueling stations and storage sites on its orbit.

And once space elevators become feasible, we will be able to use the gravity well in our favor and use it as a storage site as well.

That's why people talk about Asteroid mining. Asteroids have almost no gravity so you can easily "land" on them and use low thrust high ISP systems like nuclear/solar electric propulsion. Mining anything in space using chemical propulsion is hopeless and will never happen.

No objections from me here. The only problem is that you are forgetting why we need asteroid mining in the first place: to build structures in space. Mining from asteroids and keeping everything there would be a huge waste of effort.

The future (and I'm not talking about the near future, this could easily take centuries) will probably see all sorts of man-made structures orbiting not only the sun (which is something more difficult to accomplish), but also planets, dwarf planets, moons...

Mars for colonization is pointless. It would be too cruel even for death row prisoners (guaranteed claustrophobia, severe health problems because of the long-term low gravity, and isolation because of communication latency). No colonization without genetically modified humans. But we are not there and this may require us to engineer babies for this purpose (ethics !). Until then space is for explorers who want to leave their mark and only stay a few months, or poor souls you will pay a hell lot for 2 years contracts.

I have a feeling you quoted the wrong person there, because I clearly stated that:

Well, I have to agree. There is little reason to colonize Mars. Just like there is little reason to colonize Antarctica. The environment is simply too inhospitable. That doesn't mean we shouldn't get there and establish scientific bases, though. Mars can even be a hopping station for ships transporting minerals from the asteroid belt.

Mars as a mining base is pointless. There are just better alternatives.

Not as a mining base. As a storage base.

Mars will always be close to one section of the Asteroid Belt, but not always close to the Earth (or other points in the Inner Solar System). As such, it is a great choice for a storage base for mined metals from the asteroids.

Mars as a refueling station is absurd. In space you don't slow down if you stop the engines. So you burn everything early and by the time you reached Mars you already spent two thirds of your travel time and you do not have to spend a single additional Joule to reach the asteroid belt.

Precisely why you will eventually need refueling stations in the future. You can't really slow down or stop the spacecraft without burning fuel. In the future, it's possible we won't even need any fuel to reach other places of the solar system, as we can always use a solar sail to do so. But you can't stop your ship without burning fuel. If you stop whatever engine you might have, you'll simply continue traveling in the same speed.

Placing fueling stations in the orbits of other planets would make space exploration of other parts of the solar system much easier, as it could help diminishing the payload you need to carry in your ship, bringing its inertia down. It's similar to the reason why we have so many fueling stations in highways across the world. That way, you don't need to carry a lot of fuel all the time you want to travel.

Space mining involves catapults, not spaceships. You pack the resources like a ball, form a thermal shield around it, strap a device to slow it down once it approaches/enters Earth, and you catapult that to Earth's oceans with a big railgun. That's the basic idea at least.

That's a terrible idea. Once we have multiple companies investing in asteroid mining, the last thing they will want is to have another company wait in the middle of the way stealing the minerals they catapult to the Earth...

We will eventually have sealed spacecraft to deliver valuable resources to other destinations in the solar system, pretty much like we do with other goods on Earth already. You don't see many mining companies who just build a conveyor belt system to send their minerals to the other side of the continent unsupervised, for example.

Humans in space always make things a lot more expensive. They need food, water, atmosphere, faster travel times but lower accelerations (no railgun), plenty of room and equipments (fitness/hygiene/distraction/sleep), gravity, communications, training, monitoring, garbage disposal, redundant systems, etc. For every kg of passenger you have a hundreds times heavier overhead. And you can't even sacrifice them and replace them with spare ones. Transporting humans is too complex and expensive, and no colony would be autonomous before more than a century even after you set up a base (our industrial processes are just too complex).

But needed, nevertheless. If we are not gonna send humans to outer space, space exploration itself is completely useless and a huge waste of time.

Humans may not be needed. Lil' Mars explorer did a hell of a job alone, and maybe we can also invent slower mining techniques that do not need humans. It's true that not having humans make things complicated, but having humans in space is complicated in the first place. Besides it will only take a few decades before robots are more autonomous than humans.

Again, that is a common misconception to how automation systems work. There isn't and there will probably never be an unsupervised automation system on Earth. Computers can't make decisions as well as humans yet, after all...

Spatial elevators are so far impossible to build. It has nothing to do with energy, it is a matter of materials. Steel will not bring us further than 2-4km tall, after that it will break under its own weight (or tension if you strap a counterweight in space). Maybe carbon nanotubes but it's a big maybe.

Definitely carbon nanotubes. That's a technology we already have. In the next few years, it will probably start being manufactured on large scale.

Photovoltaic energy is more expensive because it needs more labor. This is as simple as that: between its short lifespan, rare earth materials (labor), slow and careful crystal growing (labor) that takes a lot of water (labor) and energy (labor), it is simply easier to just pump oil from Earth.

Wait, what? What is the labor cost to produce 1 kWh of electrical energy using solar power? Exactly zero.

Also, who said anything about photovoltaics? There are plenty of ways to gather the energy of the sun, including solar thermal plants, for instance.

Photovoltaic cells are still a bit inefficient, but that will change in the future.

Solar energy is not wasted without PV. It heats your house, the soil and the atmosphere, and it grows carbon storage devices (plants). Only a small fraction is actually wasted (< 30%) and a PV panel does not change it much.

Again, you are the only one talking about photovoltaics here...

And also, yes, it is wasted. The Earth reflects back to space ~35% of all the solar radiation it gets from the sun. 35% is a huge waste.

And that is only taking into consideration only the Earth's energy budget — that is, how much of the energy the Earth receives and sends back untransformed. I'm not talking only about the Earth here. The whole reason why Dyson spheres and other similar megastructures were designed was precisely because we waste more than 90% the power the sun irradiates to the rest of the universe.

We have more than enough deuterium on Earth. It is abundant in oceans, easily extracted, and we would need ridiculous amounts. You could easily power the world for thousands of years, provided you can make controlled fusion work (that's a "maybe").

If by "the world" you means "Earth", sure. But we are talking about long-term space exploration here.

I do believe in space colonization but only once we will have terraformed those planets and genetically modified ourselves. Before that colonization amounts to sending detainees colonize the Antarctic. Worse actually. This is pointless, we will not achieve anything that way.

You cannot rush things.

Colonization is the not only reason why you send people to space, though.

And the actual feasibility of terraforming is yet to be proven. Space colonization is much more likely to involve space habitats like the O'Neill Cylinder or the Stanford Torus at first.

[The Sabbaticus]

So they allegedly discovered a new planet in our solar system inside the Kuiper belt. Could be interesting, as the ancient <insert whatever> knew of this planet. /discovery channel victim.

But seriously, space keeps on getting more interesting.

[Igor Antunov]

10x more massive than earth? Sweet. Probably another gas giant, but it will have many moons, and tidal heating on some of them can be a thing. So exciting.

[Rugoz]

Where are you getting this $8bn a year estimate from? It sounds like a bit too much for just sending a crew there.

$8bn per year is NASA's current human spaceflight budget. ~$4bn of that goes to ISS operation. Once the ISS is retired in 2024, $8bn per year is the absolute minimum to get humans to Mars around 2040*. In current dollars of course, otherwise its hopeless. People vastly underestimate to cost of human spaceflight.

*NASA is currently trying to find a Mars plan that is feasible with its current budget (inflation-adjusted in the future), because it is unlikely get more from congress. The most recent plans target an initial mission to Phobos in 2033 and a Mars landing in 2039, with flights to cis-lunar space in the 2020s. After 2039 regular missions in a 4 year interval are planned.

Personally I don't think it will happen. I think if at all there will only be orbital missions to NEO/Mars (with teleoperation of robotic assets on the surface) because landing is a PITA and expensive.

Actually, no... We do have technology to build a ship and send a manned mission to Mars.

No we don't. Even with unlimited budget it would take at least ~10 years to develop the technology.

What a great response! Rolling your eyes is always a great scientific counter-argument to scientifically valid projects like space elevators and solar power!

Space elevators are like 50-100 years away, if they will ever be built. I see no point in speculating about such concepts. Space solar power is also a pipe dream.

Again, you are assuming we would have to go down the gravity well.

You have to capture into and depart from Mars orbit, which can cost lots of delta-v depending on your trajectory.

[Truth To Power]

It is just empty talk. There will be no base ever.

"Ever" is a long time. As technology improves, the economic case for a base will eventually become indisputable, and then private interests will build one. I'm betting governments will do it first, though, for strategic reasons: it's the ultimate high ground. Relative to the available technology, the difficulties will be no greater than those faced by the first humans to settle in Iceland, Madagascar, New Zealand, etc. Now, granted, it's quite possible that the first to arrive in those places did not in fact survive, and we thus have no record of them. But eventually the immigrants did survive.

[Igor Antunov]

I wonder if the recently announced nuclear engine test in 2018 has anything to do with these plans (because it would make travel to and from the moon very easy).