It seems like a failure of imagination to me that the main plan is to start off sending lots of people to Mars. People are heavy, they need heavy life support, they're fragile & they require complex infrastructure to survive. If any of that support infrastructure breaks or there's an interruption in resupply missions the people die. Probably they fight to see who dies first and waste valuable resources.
Yes people are very versatile but almost everything useful is going to be sent from earth for decades. If the plan for building human supporting infrastructure is well thought out we shouldn't need much versatility.
Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible. Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch).
This seems a far faster way to build a self sustaining mars backup civ. Bonus in that at some point this leads to self replicating self directed robots at which point send them to the asteroid belt & everyone can retire.
To that end anyone want to make a remote operated maker space? Buy some cheap land or warehouse. Ship in raw materials and see if we can build a robot factory by remote. Price of admission is sending a remote operated vehicle guess we can wire it up and broadcast it to the web. Hopefully that can fund someone to replace batteries when they inevitably run flat.
All the Mars programs have failed because they have lost momentum, not for technical or financial reasons. Your 'proposal' is not all that different from Lockheed's recent proposal, but neither would help humans get to Mars. Very few people are willing to stick with a costly program for over 20 years in the hopes that something may eventually happen; Apollo took less than 10, and it almost got cancelled.
Right so we need to send some heroic looking astronaut types asap to hold the world hostage for re-supply missions. I agree.
No doubt you also want an ever growing number of highly skilled people to build things since they will doubtless be faster than remote operated stuff from earth. Plus you may as well make use of the infrastructure you're building.
But beyond that I don't see why you'd send people who will have a very real chance of over-burdening your infrastructure and dying possibly taking down others with them.
Plus building a remote operated robot factory on earth sounds like awesome fun, surprised no one seems interested! I don't see what other open hardware & software project could make a bigger difference to human space colonization.
Round-trip to mars is between 5 and 45 minutes. "remote operation" is much more like automation.
The Curiosity rover has traveled 9 miles in 4 years and is remotely operated. That sort of statistic shows a little bit of how a human on mars could be many orders of magnitude more productive.
To be fair, we need to be able to answer the hard questions before making things a reality. Going to mars and making it habitable is not exactly something we have a lot of experience in, so there are a lot of questions but very little reasonable solutions.
I personally think we should go as soon as possible and I would love to see a lot more competition in this area. Maybe if China starts making major progress towards mars then probably the head will start rolling in the USA and maybe even Europe.
The proposal of a self sufficient makerspace here, were we can even place at the neighborhood (just make it a hassle enter the building) is something that is:
# Cheap;
# Possible to start now;
# Open to research by several people all over the world;
# Required if we want to go anywhere.
Whatever people decide to do on the space front, there are other fronts to act on.
Well I think a better use of the money is to develop the building robots we need for such an endeavor, test them out, then deploy them to third world locations is desperate need of safe shelter and massive construction efforts.
If we fully automate building residences, small administration buildings, and reclamation plants, on Earth then we can save we have sufficient tech to do it elsewhere all the while making this world a better place for those who are truly in need
I 100% agree with this. If we can make robots that can build things in 3rd world contries with minimal supervision then we can send those bots to Mars.
Humans simply require too many resources to survive. I believe Mars should be colonized by bots who terraform a small part enough for humans to survive.
Robots reduce labour costs in 1st world countries not 3rd world countries who have cheap labour. However I agree with the point you are trying to make.
"Dear 3rd world people, here is your crude roads and whacky houses built by our experimental mars robots, enjoy for free!"
That's not how the 3rd world works but the the idea is that those robots could do a) be perfected on earth and b) do something useful while they are at it.
> Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible.
This sounds like the "proving ground" stage described in the text.
> Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch).
This sounds like the "NextSTEP" program.
"NASA has already begun laying the groundwork for these deep space missions. In 2014 we issued a “broad agency announcement” or “BAA” asking private partners for concept studies and development projects in advanced propulsion, small satellites, and habitation as part of the newly created Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships or “NextSTEP” program. Six companies received awards to start developing habitation systems in response to that “NextSTEP” BAA. The idea is that these habitats or “habs” would evolve into spacecraft capable of sustaining and transporting astronauts on long duration deep space missions, like a mission to Mars. And their development would be achieved through new public-private partnerships designed to build on and support the progress of the growing commercial space sector in Earth orbit. The work done by those companies was so promising that earlier this year, we extended the NextSTEP hab program into Phase 2 and opened it up to new entrants. In August, six companies were selected to produce ground prototypes for deep space habitat modules."
The answer to all your questions is simple: our goal is colonization, not exploration. Without the people it will take a lot longer to see some non-obvious problems. And if you're sending a few people, you might as well send a lot.
That would be why I suggested building remote operated robot factory on earth first. So the humans here can see and experience the problems before they get to mars and have to wait for the next years window.
People who go there must be prepared to die. Yes, lives are valuable and fragile, but that's exactly why only after getting people there we have a reasonable chance to build some infrastructure. It will probably all cost much more tahn anticipated but governments are more likely to help then. It's just how it works, these people will be in the spotlight, and even if hundreds are dying for other reasons (like on roads), people will want to help those on Mars. Your plan is rational, but people are not.
But you won't see the biggest issues anyway - atmosphere, crazy temperature gradients, potential poisons in the soil, psychology of no chance of survival if something goes wrong. Trying to simulate Mars is indeed useful, I agree, but it won't give us the problems of the actual colony.
If any single failure means people die you are doing it wrong. The way to live on mars is to dig a bug tunnel network with a lot of redundancy and have robots build everything on or under the surface. Sure, this means the only thing you notice is lower gravity, but frankly people are well adapted for earth and poorly adapted for every other place we know of.
Sci-fi loves the idea of domed city's or little domed greenhouses, but frankly Mars is to cold for this to work out. You need to waste a lot of energy to keep stuff on the surface warm and deal with a lot of nasty radiation long term.
Nobody says the first mission to Mars will be humans. We will absolutely have to deliver some machines and materials first. Which is perfect for testing the rockets.
That's why I keep thinking we could start off by building a colony on the bottom of the ocean first, the conditions there are such that it might as well be a different planet. And certain things like maintaining pressurized containers and working in them 24/7 will have a lot in common with space missions. That, or space base on the Moon.
I can't agree more and I'm in for this warehouse idea. Surprising how many people on HN are sorta against it based on the comments in this thread. That's the single most rational thing we can do - simulate the environment, nail it with fast iterations locally, deploy prototypes to the Moon (why Mars? What's the difference?) and only then send further en masse.
Sending robots to establish infrastructure is one way to do it (and I think we should do as much of that as we can), but current robotics technology isn't very good when it comes to operating unattended in a harsh environment. If the price of shipping goods to Mars drops faster than the capabilities of robots to act independently, repair themselves, and construct new parts from raw materials improves, then sending lots of people to manage the machines is going to be the easier solution.
I would love to see more work on problems like "what's the smallest device I can send to another planet that's capable of making some kind of bricks and stacking them into vaults/domes that can be covered in dirt and then sealed from the inside to form a habitat?" or "can we build a robot that can assemble a personal computer from a stack of components in their retail packaging?" or even "what does it take for a general-purpose robot to be able to tie shoelaces?"
Yes people are very versatile but almost everything useful is going to be sent from earth for decades. If the plan for building human supporting infrastructure is well thought out we shouldn't need much versatility.
Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible. Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch).
This seems a far faster way to build a self sustaining mars backup civ. Bonus in that at some point this leads to self replicating self directed robots at which point send them to the asteroid belt & everyone can retire.
To that end anyone want to make a remote operated maker space? Buy some cheap land or warehouse. Ship in raw materials and see if we can build a robot factory by remote. Price of admission is sending a remote operated vehicle guess we can wire it up and broadcast it to the web. Hopefully that can fund someone to replace batteries when they inevitably run flat.