Manned mission to Mars 'necessary' for human race's survival: NASA chief

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo News


http://i.imgur.com/5zzYczb.jpg

At a recent summit in Washington, D.C., NASA chief Charles Bolden outlined the space agency's plans for a manned mission to Mars by 2030, calling it "necessary if the human race is to survive."

Bolden has described a massive effort the space agency might undertake to conduct such a mission: Start by lassoing an asteroid and bringing it into the moon's orbit by 2015. Then, astronauts could perform test missions on the asteroid, according to the International Business Times. The asteroid would serve as a necessary "proving ground" to inform NASA whether it is ready for Mars.

The former astronaut and Marine general's vision has drawn critics, among them some members of Congress, who would prefer NASA forgo the asteroid and go straight to the red planet, or use the moon instead.

Bolden explained in an earlier discussion the asteroid would not be the end goal, but the beginning step in a Mars mission. He directly addressed skeptics in Tuesday's summit, saying, "Get over it, to be blunt."

Ultimately, the human race will need to become colonists, Bolden said Tuesday. "If this species is to survive indefinitely we need to become a multiplanet species; we need to go to Mars, and Mars is a stepping stone to other solar systems."

http://i.imgur.com/c8kH08C.jpg

Bolden says he believes a journey to Mars is possible by the 2030s with modest increases to NASA's budget. Should the mission take place, it would likely last two to three years, the International Business Times reports.

[FBD]

fucking with the moon's orbit by "lasso-ing" an asteroid into its gravitational field, for testing? yeah, let's blacken the skies too, that's an awesome fkn idea. :facepalm: pretty please dont fuck with the moon, you idiots. Mars aint all its cracked up to be, at least the moon is spitting distance.

[DemonGeminiX]

I haven't read anything about this plan, but I can't see a purpose for using an asteroid as a proving ground when we could just use the Moon itself. If you can put a sustained colony on the Moon, you could iron out the kinks there and start planning the colonization efforts on Mars.

Of course there's a whole lot of research that needs to be done, if we want to be able to live comfortably. So much so that I don't see it happening by 2030. I don't think our technology will be there by then.

[Goofy]

Mars aint all its cracked up to be

You've been there? :shock: ........... actually, i could believe that :mrgreen: :dance:

[Griffin]

Why do you think the Martians abandoned it. :roll:

[Goofy]

Why do you think the Martians abandoned it. :roll:

They moved to Uranus? :-s

[Griffin]

no...that was the klingons

[FBD]

You've been there? :shock: ........... actually, i could believe that :mrgreen: :dance:

:lol: I'm not cultivated well enough to use the stargates just yet ;)

I was going to post one of the doorways from egypt....but bugger that - last time I looked for them, any of the real ones that contain certain bunches of heiroglyphs indicative of such, have all been basically scrubbed from the net...and anything purported to be any sort of stargate aint it, dont have any of the proper markings. curious.

[FBD]

You've been there? :shock: ........... actually, i could believe that :mrgreen: :dance:

:lol: I'm not cultivated well enough to use the stargates just yet ;)

I was going to post one of the doorways from egypt....but bugger that - last time I looked for them, any of the real ones that contain certain bunches of heiroglyphs indicative of such, have all been basically scrubbed from the net...and anything purported to be any sort of stargate aint it, dont have any of the proper markings. curious.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

http://i.imgur.com/F1bJMZn.gif

[lost in melb.]

I haven't read anything about this plan, but I can't see a purpose for using an asteroid as a proving ground when we could just use the Moon itself. If you can put a sustained colony on the Moon, you could iron out the kinks there and start planning the colonization efforts on Mars.

Of course there's a whole lot of research that needs to be done, if we want to be able to live comfortably. So much so that I don't see it happening by 2030. I don't think our technology will be there by then.


Agreed. forget mars until we know the moon back to front

[FBD]

we might as well work on a way to strip away 70% of Venus' atmosphere

[Acid Trip]

we might as well work on a way to strip away 70% of Venus' atmosphere

I'd like to see us try and terraform a planet before we start sending people there. Venus and Mars are good candidates.

[FBD]

imho the challenges on mars may be greater in the long term, any efforts there will be relatively futile unless we can get a magnetosphere reestablished on the planet. Venus our big problem is there is so much atmosphere there its like a pressure cooker at the surface. but....where atmospheric pressure = ~1 bar like we have on earth, the temp is pretty much like that of earth. but at the surface there is 93 bar of pressure.

I think it's going to wind up proving easier to blow a lot of that off and chemically altering the atmosphere instead of somehow reigniting a magnetic dynamo on mars...

I think with out present tech, mars is more doable....but a waste of time unless we somehow figure out how to spin up its core, if its still viable enough to produce a dynamo.

[Pony]

I haven't read anything about this plan, but I can't see a purpose for using an asteroid as a proving ground when we could just use the Moon itself. If you can put a sustained colony on the Moon, you could iron out the kinks there and start planning the colonization efforts on Mars.



Plus a permanent colony on the moon could serve as a launching point to other planets. It's much more cost effective then trying to escape earths gravity.

[Pony]

I think with out present tech, mars is more doable....but a waste of time unless we somehow figure out how to spin up its core, if its still viable enough to produce a dynamo.

Pretty sure the core is cooled solid. I don't think it would be possible to get it going again. We can just move Venus further from the sun, modify the atmosphere, terraform and when the earth is no longer sustainable we'll just plop the moon in orbit around it and move the masses to Earth 2.0.

[Hal-9000]

Hodor! :x





[-(

[FBD]

Pretty sure the core is cooled solid. I don't think it would be possible to get it going again. We can just move Venus further from the sun, modify the atmosphere, terraform and when the earth is no longer sustainable we'll just plop the moon in orbit around it and move the masses to Earth 2.0.

I would be vehemently against any sort of moving objects of significant gravitation. I think Venus is well within hospitable zone, with the proper config. Moving it would just cause all sorts of unintended consequences.

[DemonGeminiX]

Venus' perihelion lies outside of the habitable zone. You're gonna have to speed up its rotation about its axis: its day lasts 116 days. That's a long time for vegetation to wait for the next sunrise. Also, you're gonna have to do something about the lack of a magnetic field and the closer proximity to the Sun. You have to reduce the amount of solar radiation the planet receives. That's a major contributing factor to its dense greenhouse atmosphere, even before you consider terraforming.

I'm afraid all Venus could be good for is mining for resources.

Furthermore, the idea should be to get out further away from the Sun, closer to escaping the solar system and moving to other systems in space. At least with the Moon-Mars idea, we could start mining the asteroid belt for resources to help us get out further. We could mine the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and get out to the Kuiper belt, do some mining there, get out to the Oort cloud, and move beyond.

[FBD]

:-k my bad, thought venus had a little bit more of a magnetosphere


It is important to note that, contrary to popular belief, dynamo theory does not credit the smallness of the magnetic moment to the slow rotation of Venus

[Noilly Pratt]

*Puts on cynical hat*

If you were a government-funded corporation and needed to keep existing (and therefore needed to have yourself keep your job) you'd say that continuing missions are critical as well.

[DemonGeminiX]

I'm sure they'd find jobs outside of the government agency. These guys are the best of the best. Elon Musk or Caltech or others would have no problem picking them up.

Best case scenario: By 2.8 billion years, it's all but guaranteed that the sun will increase its output of solar radiation on an order that will destroy all life on this planet, if life on this rock's not destroyed by some other means by that time already. So by that measure, we have time. Worst case scenario: in the past few days, it has been reported that asteroids we keep missing are constantly bombarding our atmosphere and we're overdue for a major cataclysm from space and from nature here on Earth. So maybe we don't have as much time as we think.

If humanity is to survive in one form or another we have to leave this planet in an effort to find and colonize others. We won't do it in this generation, nor in the next, nor even in the generation after the next, but we can lay the foundations and point the future generations in the directions we need to go in.

[Noilly Pratt]

I agree, DGX for sure. Just being real, as well.