IamLEAM1983 said:
I remember having a hard time actually believing anything that came out of Mars One's PR goons. They're handling the permanent isolation of a group of humans on some hypothetically reacheable planetoid - albeit one that takes decades to reach at currently attainable speeds - with the kind of disregard for sensible behavior you find in reality shows.
I've gone over some of their released memos on Mars One's website, and the feeling I get is one of incredible naïveté. Everything is framed as though NASA is just sitting on the tech needed to make the trip viable, or as if their corporate backers actually came from the Marvel and DC universes (as in, they'd be helmed by genius billionnaires just itching to pull an Elon Musk).
There's a lot of "Yeah guys, it's gonna be awesome!" in the subtext, but it's like watching kids brainstorm homebrew RPG rulesets: there's a lot of glee involved, a lot of confidence - but zero understanding.
My take on things is that it isn't so much a scam as the most egregious case of horrible management and terrible foresight imaginable. For God's sake, their business plan included funding the mission with the returns from the reality show's broadcasts and associated merch! Even if their Mars One series ended up being a mega-success, they'd pull in, what - millions? That's a far cry from the billions any developed nations with a serious manned space program requires.
If anything, I think the actual avenue to sending people to Mars is in developing more tangible collaborative projects between the corporate and federal spheres. SpaceX feels like a step in the right direction.
Well, part of what your saying is touchy. There have been statements for a long time that we have the tech to not only reach Mars but begin terraforming (a very slow process) which seemed to have been backed up pretty reliably. The big issue of course being politicians wanting to be re-elected so wanting to fund things fighting symptoms of problems now that have a tangible result even if no long term value, compared to everyone putting the long term first, getting on the same page, and pushing for space travel because despite no short term returns it's the solution to pretty much every long term problem humanity faces. I seem to remember back when I was in the 1980s hearing it claimed that we were going to launch a mars mission "any day now" and how a lot of the technology we were using came from the space program as a by product of planning for a mars mission. As a general rule I see no real reason why we can't land a first mission on mars for that reason, the big question is always going to be whether it survives or not, odds are we should expect the first few missions of this sort to fail as we gather more data.
When it comes to funding the idea here seems to be that they are doing the PR in a style that appeals to the current everyman. The plan seems to be to make just enough money to do some basic construction, and as they do more they hope to cover it heavily and convince more people to donate as they see increasingly tangible results. As they get closer their broadcast rights and merchandising could be worth increasingly more. Indeed if the launch was happening tomorrow I could easily see them pulling down a few billion in PPV and advertisements to a literally global audience.
The plan isn't a bad one, and truthfully I'm willing to grant the tech is out there. The big question I always have is that if they do get this starting 6 billion dollar budget they are lining up investors for, exactly where will they begin construction? Right now for example getting a craft into space and sending it towards Mars is easy, and with our current computers and information from satellites I expect it won't even be hard to stay on course. I mean we've been sending people into space and through orbit for a while. The big question I keep wondering is who is actually willing to sell them, and then let them store enough rocket fuel to build, test, and launch, something that size. It's possible of course but whose back yard is this happening in supposedly, and have they gotten permission given the security concerns this raises. I'm also guessing that if they plan to launch and build a shelter capable of lasting decades they plan to use nuclear power, so of course one has to ask who is giving them permission to build and run a private nuclear reactor, and probably several, right next to that giant missil.. err space ship.
At the end of the day what this project entails is making a ship carrying a module probably around the size of a "Trident" class submarine with multiple nuclear reactors powering it which is both the command module of the ship and the module that will land and be the "colony". Unlike a space shuttle the ship only has to launch once, and then land once, and in performing the landing the only part that needs to survive is the module since it's a one way trip. None of this really goes beyond what we've already done, it's just an extension of projects we've seen before. We know we can launch stuff into space, we know we can send something we've launched to mars, and we know we can land things there albeit we've only done it with a small robot to my knowledge. It's simply a matter of scale. Built correctly you could probably have a small group of humans in that "Trident" with a hydroponics module, and other renewable food sources like say rabbits which breed rapidly. It could also be armored well enough to survive 50-60 years. If the plan was also to begin terraforming hypothetically we'd probably need another separate module the size of the command module, which would of course double the project, and to my knowledge I've heard very little about doing anything of note once we put people there, the point being to land people specifically for inspirational purposes.
For the price of six billion I cannot see them doing all of this just considering what a Trident can cost to make, and we're talking something far more ambitious than even that. That said they could probably make a good start on it, once they started building their module, then they might say be able to get governments to donate nuclear reactors, and of course given them areas to launch from, in return for such assistance though I'm sure the government would of course want to have it's own people involved, and probably in charge of the mission itself, and presumably then start helping with funding, as well as whatever people provide as it comes closer and closer to fruition.
It's highly optimistic, but I can see it happening, even if I certainly wouldn't want to bet in favor of it. The only real scam I see in this so far is that I do not see how they can promise people spots in this mission, when at the end of the day your going to need some pretty high standards. I can see a lot of people volunteering for this to be honest, but at the end of the day your going to need tons of engineers and people like that, not a bunch of pie in the sky dreamers, and theoretical physicists when to my knowledge it's uncertain there are any definite plans to do research, that would make sense, but would require increasing the mission parameters for labs, and of course a module that would allow people to enter and leave, as well as suits allowing people to survive on mars rapidly increases the complexity of the plan beyond the already ambitious "land a giant armored module full of people intact enough for them to live out the rest of their lives, even if not in any degree of comfort".
