Bush wants Mars

Holmes,Man on Mars? Nah, it's political & nothing more. Interesting? Yes. Exciting? Yes. Efficient? No. A colossal waste of money? Yes.Send probes. For the same cost you can learn a thousandfold(?) more about Mars by NOT sending people, & sending robots instead. Given this is true (quibble about the thousandfold if you will, but the point stands), and a finite & limited budget, sending a manned mission to Mars will actually slow down the aquisition of knowledge regarding the solar system, & that has to be a bad thing.Mark[Alcohol is having a bearing on my otherwise flawless spelling & punctuation, please forgive the stutteriness, punc. just aint my thang, soz [This message has been edited by mark24, 01-15-2004]

Holmes, I think it can always be afforded, the moolah is there, it's simply a matter of priorities. As to whether it is worthwhile, taking the word in the strictest sense, it will never be worthwile until space travel becomes an extremely fast & relatively trivial thing. By that I mean until we can get to Mars in a few days mitigating the need for a huge vessel able to keep the astronaughts alive for literally years, with all the associated costs & difficulties.. But human missions are still limited in scope because they can only use the equipment they take with them. It is going to be multi-billion dollar project to put humans on Mars, yet you can put a probe there for a few million (I dimly recall a documentary on Discovery that quoted 10 million pounds/probe for that particular vehicle). You can fulfil the number of potential missions many times over by sending probes for the less cost. Human missions do have greater flexibility, no question about it, but is that extra flexibility cost effective? IMHO it isn't even close. Why not build the buggers in space & get rid of the gravity problem altogether? We could drop the political crap & cooperate with China, of course. That would halve the cost of putting a Homo sapien on Mars at a stroke by sending one manned mission rather than two. There's something about national pride, patriotism, competition etc. that just seems out of place when talking about humans in space.Mark

---

"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall[This message has been edited by mark24, 01-16-2004]

Hi Holmes, Go for it! I disagree with my best friends all the time, makes for a more interesting night down the boozer. But a human mission IS a one shot venture too (even a shuttle would cost million/billions to go back a second time). It goes, performs it's mission, then returns at the planned time which by definition is resource determined. The problem is that a human mission may carry more equipment, but how much more? I'll venture not much since food, water, multiple redundancy of systems etc is necessarily going to take up the bulk of the mass. What if that task you had in mind required equipment? The human mission would be as pointless as the probe. The best that could be said is that they could perform the same task to more samples, but so what? They are geographically limited, anyway. Beyond that, unless the task involves something pretty trivial like hitting something with a hammer they are going to be pretty much impotent. But the cost of putting a single human on Mars dwarfs the cost of many, many probes. Assume a cost of 10 million / probe, & as you say 1/3rd fail, so 30 million/successful mission. Then assume an 11 billion dollars bill to get 2+ humans to Mars. That's 366 successful probes (of 1,100 sent), each potentially performing several tasks all over the Martian surface, whereas the humans are limited to within a couple of miles of their base.And we haven't even considered what would happen to a failed manned Mars mission.......Mark

---

"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall