Not to be a super pedantic jackass, but we've absolutely had the tech to put a person on Mars for 5 minutes and bring them back since the 70s. The issues were justifying it to brain-addled congressmen who were perfectly satisfied that putting a guy on the moon meant that America had won the space race once and for all, and keeping people safely on Mars long enough to actually justify the long trip, scientifically speaking. We've been at the point where it just started being feasible in the late 90s/early 2000s to start building mission plans. We absolutely could have a mars base right now if governments had taken the MARPOST, Aurora, and Constellation programs seriously.
Yeah. Nasa has good rockets but not enough money, and for all we hate on musk, space x has actually good engineers, it's just run by a insane narcissist. China has good space tech too, and is definitely improving quickly on that front
I mean SpaceX only got where it is by poaching engineers and design concepts from NASA and ESA, and just straight copped a bunch of russian engines and retrofitted them.
You seem to know more about this than I do, but how practical and doable was it? Cause Mars is really really far away. Like I guess you could throw a lot of rocket fuel at the problem but at what point is the time spent travelling just cruel to the astronauts?
I mean, yeah, that's sort of been the issue for much of that time, that the amount of science they could do on a short jaunt of a few days or weeks doesn't justify the many months spent traveling there, though there is science that can be done in transit (though it's largely the same things that can be done in orbit around earth, anyways)
There are a number of different proposed methods of doing it, on different time scales, but I really dig the ideas proposed in Mars Direct , which could have even feasibly launched in the 2000s.
Not to be a super pedantic jackass, but we've absolutely had the tech to put a person on Mars for 5 minutes and bring them back since the 70s. The issues were justifying it to brain-addled congressmen who were perfectly satisfied that putting a guy on the moon meant that America had won the space race once and for all, and keeping people safely on Mars long enough to actually justify the long trip, scientifically speaking. We've been at the point where it just started being feasible in the late 90s/early 2000s to start building mission plans. We absolutely could have a mars base right now if governments had taken the MARPOST, Aurora, and Constellation programs seriously.
Yeah. Nasa has good rockets but not enough money, and for all we hate on musk, space x has actually good engineers, it's just run by a insane narcissist. China has good space tech too, and is definitely improving quickly on that front
I mean SpaceX only got where it is by poaching engineers and design concepts from NASA and ESA, and just straight copped a bunch of russian engines and retrofitted them.
You seem to know more about this than I do, but how practical and doable was it? Cause Mars is really really far away. Like I guess you could throw a lot of rocket fuel at the problem but at what point is the time spent travelling just cruel to the astronauts?
I mean, yeah, that's sort of been the issue for much of that time, that the amount of science they could do on a short jaunt of a few days or weeks doesn't justify the many months spent traveling there, though there is science that can be done in transit (though it's largely the same things that can be done in orbit around earth, anyways)
There are a number of different proposed methods of doing it, on different time scales, but I really dig the ideas proposed in Mars Direct , which could have even feasibly launched in the 2000s.