Anybody for Mars?
All you seem to hear about in the space and NASA news now is Mars. There seems to be a huge interest in going to Mars.
I wonder what it would be like to take a 2 year trip without getting out of the car once to stretch out and go for a pee. The “experts” estimate that it would take about 9 months to get to Mars (if all goes well and if we take a shortcut across the orbit of Venus) . I think the worst part of the trip would be coming back since you know how long it too just to get there. So that’s 18 months of travel alone, I hope their stay on Mars is pleasant!
My question to people out there. Who would want to volunteer for this? If ever we find Bin Laden we could strap him (and maybe Bush too) on the rocket and send them away as punishment. I think he would have enough time to think about all the awful things he’s done. Ok, scratch that off since he would probably turn that bad boy around and crash it into something.
All jokes aside, here’s what one astronaut had to say….
For five months on the International Space Station, Linenger, an American astronaut crewing with two Russians, took solace where he could.
“I’ve been on submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the middle of nowhere, and it was nothing, compared to this,” he says. “It was a sense of being completely dislocated from humankind, and that is a profoundly different kind of isolation.”
That was five months. Can you imagine two years?
Money, how much of it does it take to plan and deploy something like this? In 1989 it was estimated that the costs would be around $400 billion.
Don’t you think the governments can find better things to waste money on? Perhaps governments should feed their starving citizens… That’s just a wild idea but it’s probably much more fun to be able to brag about being the first country to go to Mars! Like the moon wasn’t a good enough accomplishment. Speaking of which, the last time we went to the moon was in the 1970’s! Why don’t we go back there instead?
All the astronauts that went to the moon are now in the 70’s. It’s possible that in the next decade there won’t be any astronauts that went to the moon that are still alive.
Ok so finding someone to go might be a problem but I can also see the technology being a little bit of a challenge.
If you leave for 2 years you better not forget your tooth brush. I can’t help but wonder how big the trunk of this rocket would have to be..? Go to the store tomorrow and pickup everything you’ll need for the next two years. I don’t even think I would be able to estimate how much toilet paper I would need for the next two years let alone how much food.
There is no question that this rocket will need to be huge but apparently NASA, the Russians and the Chinese have the technical know-how to make something like this a reality. It looks like the one problem they are working on at the moment is getting back.
Yikes! one way ticket to Mars anyone?
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