Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
In 2010, President Obama told NASA chief Charles Bolden that his foremost job was to: “ . . . find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” But last month, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said the agency’s primary focus is humans on Mars by 2035.
Is this another one of President Obama’s famous pivots? Are we pivoting to Mars, now?
Joe Doakes
We’re lucky he hasn’t pushed an expedition to land on the Sun.
Given that we don’t have any idea of what technology would be required to land a man on Mars, it’s worth noting that Obama’s newest charter for NASA makes no more sense, really, than the old charter, or the charter of landing people on the sun. As things stand now, sending a man to Mars would expose him to a slow death by radiation poisoning due to the solar wind.
Obama; lethally incompetent.
“We’re lucky he hasn’t pushed an expedition to land on the Sun.”
Don’t be so sure Mitch! He’s just dumb enough to believe that if we went at night, we would succeed!
Landing a team on Mars is an unrealistic goal.
After the Columbia tragedy they crippled the shuttle’s usefulness by restricting it to LEO missions where it could use the ISS as a backup.
But now we’re sending people to Mars? We can’t even get to the ISS, for goodness sake. If someone on the Mars crew gets sick on the way out or back they might die a lingering death with no hope of rescue.
When people spend a long time in micro-G their bones lose calcium. A lot of calcium. And it doesn’t come back when they return to Earth.
Thanks for the Muslim comment reminder. It was so bizarre and short-lived that I thought I’d hallucinated.
Perhaps once he can secure enough feathers to affix to his wax wings he’ll give it a shot. A lesser person would have made an equally as stupid ear remark …
PM: good point, but it’s an interesting fact that there is a way of protecting people from micro-gravity. You simply place the chambers the people live in on “spokes” that rotate fast enough to replace a large portion of gravity and require that they exercise.
Generating the electricity needed to generate a magnetic field sufficient to fend off the solar wind for a four year mission? That’s a bit more difficult.
Pres. Obama wants to reach out to the Martians to honor their historical contributions to science and space travel, even though Marvin the Martian’s stated objective is to destroy Earth.
At least The One is consistent.
Bikebubba wrote:
“PM: good point, but it’s an interesting fact that there is a way of protecting people from micro-gravity. You simply place the chambers the people live in on “spokes” that rotate fast enough to replace a large portion of gravity and require that they exercise.”
Not as easy as it sounds. Even advanced designs (a single pod and a counterweight attached by a cable) requires significant mass, and at ~$10,000/kg, it is difficult to get the mass into LEO. It would be difficult to make it stable through the velocity changes required to get from LEO to Mars and back. We could grab an asteroid for the mass, but the delta V costs of doing that are huge.
After Apollo, NASA floated a plan to build a von Braun style, wheel-and-spokes space station. It would have made Apollo look cheap in comparison. As a result we got the space shuttle as a compromise “first step” towards a permanent manned space station.
NASA is working under the budget that congress approved for a manned Mars mission. There are already complaints that its costs are sucking the air from the room, e.g., crippling worthwhile non-manned programs (like JWST). SOFIA has already been axed, eight years early (I have a friend who lost her job when SOFIA was canceled).
Calcium loss supposedly plateau’s at about with a bone density loss of about 30% after six months, but we don’t know if the plateau will drop again after, say, nine months. Once you are on your way, you can’t turn around and come back if something unforeseen happens. Anyone who returns from Mars may be in a wheelchair for the rest of his or her life. He or she will almost certainly have a life shortened by long term exposure to radiation.
PM; yes. Perhaps I should rephrase; doing a gravity replacement system is child’s play compared to an electromagnetic shield that would keep the guy alive long enough to suffer bone loss. :^)
Either way, yet another triumph for Mr. Obama putting science back in its rightful place, which apparently is “shut up while my political operatives make bat**** crazy plans that violate the laws of physics”.