From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@idiom.com)
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 18:23:49 MST
Brian D Williams <talon57@well.com> writes:
> Actually I think we need to separate two ideas, the idea of a
> manned mission to Mars, and the idea of Mars colonization.
>
> In the Mars direct plan, after a voyage of 6 months, the team would
> spent a year and a half on the surface.
>
> Anybody think that is a bad idea?
Yes, I do. I'd much rather expend that effort on establishing a
permanently staffed base on Luna. Eugene Leitl made an
excellent point that the Apollo program would have served the
species better if it had been designed with the accumulation of
Lunar infrastructure on each mission in mind. I see no reason
why we should repeat the mistakes of Apollo on Mars when we
could be rectifying the mistakes of Apollo on Luna.
Of course, I'm not going to be satisfied until we have
permanently staffed bases and artificial-biosphere research
going on at Luna, at an asteroid, and at Mars and its
satellites. (Of course, even then I won't be satisfied, I'll
probably be thumping a drum for the industrialization of
Jupiter.)
But the extra appeal of Mars that you have been explaining is
more than cancelled out for me by the gravity well, the
distance/lagtime, and the delta vee. You can't reasonably
teleoperate robotics on Mars from Terra, which means that any
settlement there will have *much* less direct skill support from
Terra than a Lunar base would. There are so many technologies
that need to be tested and proven. If we do this on Luna,
we are far more likely to be able to rescue the victims of any
failures than we are on Mars.
I really don't think it's a good idea to spend anything but robots
on Mars until we have a continuous (preferably but not necessarily
permanent) population on Luna. That will be a good enough test of
long-term continuous artificial-biosphere closure that I'd be
willing to risk sending highly-trained human beings (the sort you
really hate to see get killed) to Mars. And frankly, I'd rather
see a near-Earth asteroid as steppingstone number two, for
similar reasons.
-- arkuat
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