Sunday, January 5, 2014

To Mars, or, not to Mars?

I am still trying to read again, "RED MARS" by Kim Stanley Robinson and I keep finding other interesting information.
Before we sent the machines to Mars we thought of canals on Mars that must have been made by intelligent beings.

Doesn't seem to be any manufactured ditches or running water and so far no Martians have stomped on our rovers.
But wait maybe some mud slides from some Martian summer melt.

If no upright Martians do we still need to go Mars with humans?
Do we just want the science fiction stories to become science fact?
The Space Review has an article, "To Mars, or, not to Mars," by Thomas D. Taverney.
I wouldn't want you to bother reading Robinson's Mars trilogy if you didn't think it would be possible to send humans to Mars.
Doing another Apollo type mission  where we just go spend a couple of days, plant a flag, and never go again doesn't look like a good business model either.
Maybe we should decide what the long range goal is and how best to finance any human exploration.
- LRK -

Mars base illustration
Sending humans to Mars, either for expeditions or for settlement, 
has long been an aspiration for space enthusiasts. But how can such 
as audacious goal be achieved? (credit: NASA)
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by Thomas D. Taverney
Monday, August 19, 2013


Every civilization seeks to achieve greatness and build monuments to be left to subsequent generations as high water marks of their value, demonstrating their essence, and providing a statement that its people were here. These monuments are crafted by the most important minds and shaped and sculpted by the most skilled hands. They are left proudly to their children, children’s children, and for some, scores of generations. The desire to build monuments and innovate is a fundamental attribute of human societies. The greats have left us with the pyramids, the Great Wall, the Panama Canal, the steam engine, railroads, skyscrapers, the screw propeller, the automobile, the airplane, and even cave paintings. Each wonder, each innovation, says that its people were here with their hearts, minds and hands. Great achievements advance the human condition and establish markers of important technical advances.

We are no different today. Over nearly sixty years we have broken free of the gravitational bonds that have anchored us to the planet Earth. Our satellites have visited all the planets, as well as asteroids and comets. We’ve left bootprints on the surface of the Moon. And although we have achieved many exciting innovations since that moment the flag was planted on the Moon over forty years ago, the Apollo landing remains the pinnacle of our achievement.

Now, as a nation and a people, we are confounded by a new question: To Mars, or, not to Mars? This is a not-so-simple query worthy of an intense national debate and soul searching. And for a spacefaring nation, it’s one that generates even more questions. Will it be worth it to go to Mars?

...

Mr. Thomas “Tav” Taverney is a Senior Vice President with SAIC. During his career he has been a true citizen soldier, serving both the Air Force and the civilian aerospace industry. Tav is a 1968 graduate of the Air Force Academy and has a Masters of Science degree from USC. He achieved the rank of Major General, and the final assignment of his Air Force career was as Vice Commander of Air Force Space Command. He has extensive engineering design and development expertise including direct program management of numerous space systems developments, chief engineer/scientist responsibilities, and general management of large organizations. In his reserve career he worked in space systems acquisition, on-orbit satellite operations, space support to the AOR, and launch operations.


NOTE; Don''t forget to read the whole article AND the comments.  - LRK -
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More discussion about financing such a venture (or adventure)
- LRK -

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  1. A small step for Mars settlement, but a giant leap of funding required

    Mars One, the private venture with plans to settle Mars in the 2020s, announced last week plans to develop a precursor robotic mission for launch in 2018. Jeff Foust reports on the announcement and the challenges the venture faces beyond building spacecraft hardware.
  2. ----
  3. There’s no shortage of audacious ideas for sending humans to Mars, particularly by the private sector. For much of this year, attention has been focused on Inspiration Mars, the nonprofit venture announced in February that proposed sending a married couple on a Mars flyby mission launching in early 2018 (see “A Martian adventure for inspiration, not commercialization”, The Space Review, March 4, 2013.) Last month, though, Inspiration Mars changed course, still seeking to carry out that crewed Mars flyby mission, but with the technical and fiscal support of NASA (see “Inspiration Mars: from nonprofit venture to space policy adventure”, The Space Review, November 25, 2013.)
  4. Inspiration Mars’s plans, though, pale in comparison of those by another nonprofit organization, Mars One. The Dutch-based venture seeks to send people to Mars, but rather than a flyby, Mars One would land them there—permanently, in the hopes of establishing a permanent settlement whose initial missions would be funded, in part, by selling media rights and with an astronaut selection process that has parallels to reality television shows. Some consider it visionary; others, insane.
  5. While discussion of the viability of such missions continues, Mars One took a small step last week towards its goal of humans on Mars. At a lightly-attended press conference in on a snowy Tuesday morning in Washington, Mars One announced it had issued contracts to two leading space companies to study concepts for an initial robotic mission that would launch in 2018.
  6. ...
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KIM STANLEY ROBINSON has written more than the Mars trilogy so you can see how I might be distracted.
- LRK -

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on The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson
Alternative Californias
September 16th, 2011
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is best known as a novelist of scale, a creator of complex futures and universes of sublime magnitude. His Three Californias (or Orange County) trilogy (1984-90), for example, offers three alternative visions — a post-apocalyptic pastoral, a dystopian satire, and a precarious ecotopia — of what California (and the world) might become, while the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07) depicts Beltway politics during a period of catastrophic global climate change. The Mars trilogy (1992-96), probably the major accomplishment of 1990s American SF, charts both the transformation of Mars into a planet habitable by humankind and the transformation of humankind (including our political, social, and economic systems) into forms fit for a new world. Even the standalone novels like Antarctica (1997), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), and Galileo's Dream (2009) are in the heavyweight division.
...
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"Green Mars" novella that came before the "Green Mars" in the Mars trilogy.
- LRK -

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Green Mars is a novella that, after being published in collections alongside other authors' stories, was published in paperback collected with Arthur C. Clarke's novella "A Meeting With Medusa" in 1988.
Despite the title similarity, it does not take place in the same universe as the Mars trilogy novel Green Mars, instead forming a sequence with the short works Exploring Fossil Canyon (1982) and A Martian Romance(1999) which describe a different terraformed Mars. All three works were included in the collection The Martians along with Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars, which shares a character.

Contents

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Well you can see why I am having a problem to re-read the Mars trilogy with so many other stories in the offering.
- LRK -

Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
 
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

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