So I see that NASA has just announced their newest Mars mission. If all goes well (yeah, right), five years from now the next exploratory robot (the "MAVEN") will launch to spend the next Earth year studying the atmosphere of Mars.
At this rate, by the time the universe reaches heat death we'll almost certainly be ready to choose and budget a committee to determine final mission parameters for the test reviews to articulate goals and concerns for evaluating factors to be analyzed that will be relevant to specifying a first manned mission to Mars.
If, that is, all goes well.
This is pathetic. Look, we can argue science all day and all night but out here in the real world, barring the discovery of sentient lifeforms who forbid our doing so, we've made the decision. We're going to Mars. And while more knowledge is nice and while science and technology will advance, we already know that we're going to need tons of materials, equipment, supplies, shelter, and so on, and I simply don't believe that none of it at all can be specified, built, and shipped yet. So let's start now.
I know that I've said variations on this before but the point remains valid.
Every year that we delay is another year that our society may fall further into depression, making funding shakier.
Every year that we wait is another year for storms to get worse and environmental regulations tighter, making launches more expensive, dangerous, and harder to schedule.
Every year that we wait is another in which some war or other crisis might cause the relevant organizations to say, as the U.S is doing right now about the ISS, "let's just pull back for a couple of years until things get more stable."
The longer we wait, the more we risk.
And even beyond that, the more materiel we get to Mars, the easier the other decisions get to make. Each payload delivered to Mars gets us closer to having a viable manned mission and to having a viable settlement. I'm not speaking just of what NASA can do but of what can be done by other countries, private corporations, or even universities.
It's time to start assembling payloads and launching them on trajectories to Mars. Okay, we don't know locations yet. Fine. Let the payloads reach Mars and wait in orbit until told where to land. I understand that landing location is part of what determines landing strategy and therefore the equipment provided to carry it out but it's not like each square meter of Mars would require a different approach to getting the payload down to the surface. Not to get all high tech or anything, but have we run out of bouncy balls?
As for orbiting, are we incapable of specifying a common communications standard and protocol so that orbiters can start to accumulate in parking orbits around Mars while we wait for humans on Mars to retrieve or call down those supplies? We know that the "space internet" is tested and that it worked. We've bloody well gotten IP v6 working up there, which is more than we can say for most of the internet down here. So we know that we have the means to handle, let's call it traffic control. We manage a far larger and less coherent population of objects in Earth orbit so this should be much simpler, speed-of-light delays notwithstanding. And, on top of everything else, each of those orbiters would become another node in the communications net around the planet. the more nodes in the network, the better communications gets for everybody.
Do we know that we'll need at least one robotic rover? We do. Somebody should send one.
Do we know that we'll need insulating panels? We do. So we should be getting a few hundred square meters of reflective mylar or equivalent out there. (Personally, I'm partial to a silverized kapton polyimide bubble wrap system but maybe that's just me.)
Do we know that we'll need at least one greenhouse? We do. Somebody should be working on sending robots to make clear panels from Martian materials. And dig tunnels. And make bricks. For crying out loud, can we at least send some goddamn food? It's utterly crucial. It's heavy, it's large. It's, to say the least, established technology. If well chosen and packed it can survive high G launches and years in orbit. Let's see if the University of Oregon will send five pounds of local salmon to wait in Mars orbit for retrieval. Betcha that if one farm state announced that they were launching a payload of their products, that around the world several dozen others would step up to the plate. And even if most of those missions never launched, they would end up funding research in storage and rocketry and all sorts of other things that we could stand to have more people taking their shot at.
Reading this, are you afraid of what happens if "that sort of people", people who "aren't real experts" were to take their clumsy steps into the world of launching rockets and sophisticated aerospace engineering? Yeah, whatever. I have a hell of a lot more confidence in a program run by a bunch of professors and students at, say, UW Madison than I do in what we already live with: programs run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the Saudi royal family. Go for it - tell me that Rupert Murdoch launching payloads the size of a truck, which he does on a regular basis, is less dangerous than a bunch of Research Triangle geeks getting the North Carolina government to fund a payload of twenty pounds of barbeque with some frozen blueberries and local corn. Or some pullovers made of some of that fine North Carolina cotton.
And, of course, all of the same arguments apply to a mission to the moon.
Every gram we send, every cubic centimeter of material we send, every item we can render "dealt with" makes it easier for the rest of the program to get done. So what the hell is everybody waiting for?
-Rustin
Comments