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August 04, 2005
To infinity and beyond!
Should I be studying? Yes. Should I be, if not studying, responding to Email from dear friends and family? Yes. Instead I though I’d take a bit of time to mention Mars again...
A week or so ago the GF and I caught a PBS special on the Mars Rovers. Those guys were fantastic! I mean, they had to debug their software with around a 10 minute communications lag. Fortunately there weren’t any bug-eyed monsters there, or else the lag-frag would suck.* Additionally, many of their problems stemmed from simply being unable to see what was going on; the cameras not being a quite high enough resolution. It occurred to me that the biggest problem was that there were no astronauts on Mars. How do we fix that?
First we need a presence in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Keep the station we’ve got up there, and build a couple more. A robust enough presence would allow for tourists to book passage and even stay up there a few days. I don’t know how much you’d be willing to pay for a night in space, but I bet if the price could be brought down to US$1,500/ night (Earth/LEO round trip not included) there would be enough takers for it to be a self-sustaining industry...
After that, we’d need to build the ships themselves. While light from earth takes at least 4 minutes, I think we would need about 9 months or a year to get humans there. Bringing them back home would take another 9 months or so. Not to mention the month or two there that would be required to actually justify such a trip. So, we’d need our ships to be need self-sustaining habitats before we sent them off. Not too self-sustaining, though. Every woman in the crew would have to be put on birth control.. Men too, if we can figure out how to do it reliably...
Out of all this, humanity would get (at least!) some knowledge of new forms of propulsion, new understanding of environmental concerns. New, light-weight but strong materials would almost certainly have to be invented. And, of course, this would all be a first step towards opening up a whole fricking new planet for human exploitation...
Something else to keep in mind: the asteroid belt is chock-full of the sorts of metals and ores which are running out here on Earth. Mars would be a convenient place to base an asteroid mining operation out of...
Of course, this all presumes the willingness of some government somewhere to foot the bill. The potential benefit to such a country would be enormous. Remember: Portugal decided not to pay for Columbus’ speculative venture, Spain decided to. Spain went from a 3rd rate power to a great empire almost instantly—and stayed there for several hundred years. Which would we rather be?
*this is a video game joke...
Posted by Andrew at August 4, 2005 10:21 AM
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Comments
On August 27th I will be climbing Mount Shasta to view Mars when he comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky.
Posted by: amberite at August 4, 2005 12:11 PM