Vote in Our New Inspiration Mars Poll
Hey everyone.
We’ve got a new poll up about Inspiration Mars. We’re asking whether NASA should refocus its work on Space Launch System and Orion to support Dennis Tito’s ambitious plans to send two astronauts around the Red Planet. NASA would need to spend about $700 million to support the mission, which would cost about $1 billion overall.
Please cast your ballot today! Remember: vote early. Vote often. Just vote, dammit! Vote!
In other poll-related news, Parabolic Arc’s readers have strongly supported the idea that Newt Gingrich should be brought back from his desired trip to space. A full 55 percent of you voted that he should make a round trip to space, with 45 percent in favor of making the voyage one way.
In a political race, that would be a very strong showing of the voters’ preference for one candidate over another. In this case, it’s a tad disturbing that so many people would shoot the former House Speaker off into a deadly environment with no hope of ever returning safely to the Earth. In fact, if only five votes had gone the other way, there would have been a narrow majority in favor of leaving Gingrich out there permanently.
More evidence, in my mind, that Gingrich’s quadrennial efforts to obtain the highest office in the land are doomed to failure. Just too much baggage. Not enough to prevent him from going into space, but sufficient to deny him election to national office.
11 responses to “Vote in Our New Inspiration Mars Poll”
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I just voted for the Mars mission. The romantic in me was doing the ‘thinking’. Then I thought about it. OOOps! First: more ammunition for the porksters on Capitol Hill and that very silly SLS. Then… we should be focusing on the moon. The moon is the stepping-stone to mars. Please subtract one vote from ‘yes’ and add to ‘no’.
I think a lot of us feel that way at first glance then reality sets in.. =(
“we should be focusing on the moon. The moon is the stepping-stone to mars.”
I’m curious as to how and why you make this determination.
The argument for ‘Moon First’ is; it’s a lot easier to get to, and get back from, than Mars. It’s long overdue that we return to our Moon. Recent indications of water on the Moon, make it attractive as an assembly point for fuel and hardware for going further afield. There is much to learn about potential colonisation and the Moon seems to be the most reasonable classroom. Learning the lessons much closer to home just seems to make sense.
The LEO to LLO and back trip should provide a good “test track” for spaceships that are built to travel through our solar system. ie. not enter atmospheres or land on planets. If we have a significant lunar presence, then there will be a demand for LEO to LLO and back regular transfers. This should drive innovation into this technology and also allow for a few vehicles to operate on the same route at the same time. When we want to build a spaceship to take us to Mars, there is an argument that it will be “better” to assemble it beyond the Van Allen belts and higher in the Earth’s gravitational potential, LLO will do fine, particularly if we can source some raw materials from the moon, and manufacture there. Launching our spaceship into space is then also much easier.
We should be able to share common componentry between the vehicles that take us to Mars, with the vehicles that take us to asteroids and the vehicles that run the LEO to LLO route. This sharing of componentry will reduce cost, and make sourcing spare parts easier.
There are a good few reasons why “doing the moon” first before we go to Mars, will set us up to establish a regular supply service between Earth / Moon and Mars. This regular service will be required before any “base” of significant scale becomes viable on Mars.
I don’t agree that the Moon is a useful or sensible or logical “stepping-stone” to Mars. On the contrary, it is a detour. Indeed, if it can be reasoned that the Moon is a stepping stone, then exactly the logic applies to low Earth orbit, which is even more convenient and is in fact essential as a way-point for regular Earth-Mars travel.
The only tiny glimmer of hope for the lunar argument is the possibility of water ice for fuel manufacture. However, even this is a second choice to LEO fuel depots supplied directly from Earth; which would be far easier and almost certainly cheaper (based on the assumption of a fully reusable supply vehicle).
The Moon is not Mars and is not similar to Mars in any useful way, other than they are both not Earth, but then neither is LEO or L1 or L2. I would suggest that the arguments for the Moon as a staging post to Mars are clouded by lunar sentimentality are seriously flawed reasoning.
The moon is a stepping stone to Mars — unless we just go to Mars.
I agree that the moon certainly could be a stepping stone, and a logical one at that.
But I also think that if we could go to the Moon 50 _years_ ago (by 2018), we can do a manned flyby of Mars today. And if we can do a manned flyby of Mars, thus proving the whole in-transit part of the trip, then we can do an orbital mission and landing on Phobos next. And if we can operate like that in Mars orbit, then we can next do an excursion down to the surface (perhaps from a base or staging point on Phobos). In other words, Inspiration Mars could be the stepping stone to Mars, I believe.
They want $700M in cash and kind from NASA? They expect SLS to be anything like on time and performant?
Stick a fork in them. They’re done.
If it was cancel the SLS and burn $700 million I would vote for it as it would still leave 2.3 billion per year for real programs. Unfortunately they want to use SLS which is a gigantic waste of money and effort. Use 2 Falcon Heavy instead and save $450 million.
It is a wastefull stunt, if it was to do repeat trips with a modular deep space ship that was added to after each leg and fuel depots set up in earth and Mars orbit, robotic re-fuelling of depot. Or testing insitue resource utilisation for fuel manufacturing then I would support it.
What happens if this mission does for Mars, what Apollo did for the moon? We send a pair of people around Mars and back, and when they return home, US politicians say, “We’ve done Mars, what’s next?”
There is a risk that a Mars trip would derail the political motivation to make further trips possible, particularly if the purpose of the trip was to demonstrate US daring is greater than that of the Chinese.
It might be better for the Chinese to beat us there so our politicians feel that they have to ‘one up’ that move.