Note that a crew escape system, what the article treats as an absolute minimum for a manned vehicle, doesn't exist on the space shuttle for budgetary reasons. The space shuttle has many, many abort modes[1], but absolutely nothing can be done while the solid boosters are firing, since you can't shut them off or detach them from the stack.
Maciej Cegłowski (pinboard.in) complains at length about this in an essay[2] about the space shuttle.
Many human Mars mission architectures use an Earth return vehicle that is separate from the outbound vessel. The requirements are very different, and there's an overwhelming advantage to placing an Earth return vehicle on the surface ahead of time to produce the methane fuel for its return flight in situ ahead of time, so a vessel that can get astronauts out to Mars without being able to return them is still an important contribution.
On a poignant side note, the article notes that the only feature Dragon now lacks to become qualified for carrying humans is a launch abort system; the original Space Shuttle was designed without a launch abort system.
It's nice that it has this capability, but it's still not an ideal Mars lander, and I think the economics work out that it's cheaper to design a new ship than to send a non-ideal ship all the way to Mars.
For instance, the Dragon's heat shield is (I assume) far heavier than it needs to be for a Mars entry. A purpose-built Mars lander could be made significantly lighter than a purpose-built Earth lander, and sending unneccessary weight to Mars winds up expensive.
Besides, there's going to be a lot of custom hardware needed for a manned Mars mission anyway. At a minimum you'll need a large "Command Module" for the astronauts to travel in (sitting in a Dragon ain't gonna cut it for a one-year voyage) and a custom-built Mars takeoff craft.
I went and carefully read the statement. It says the capsule can carry crew, and that the capsule can land on Mars. It did not say that the capsule can carry crew to Mars, which is a wildly different thing. I think the Register added that accidentally.
I don't think that's possible, because solving the equations to carry enough supplies to get the crew to Mars alive while still being able to stop when you get there almost certainly has no solution with any capsule primarily designed to get to Earth orbit. On the other hand, merely getting hardware to Mars if you don't care how long it takes can be relatively low energy [1], which would also be an orbit not requiring a lot of propellant to enter Mars orbit.
The discussion of not yet having a return vehicle for a trip to Mars reminds me of a Reddit AMA with a Russian engineer through his grandson. There he claims his Grandfather worked on a plan to send an astronaut to Mars orbit then return, but there was a second and favored plan with which the astronaut would land on the surface, walk around, then die.
The other benefit to a settlement plan, is that you could send the habitat and tools ahead of time, to be assembled by robots. Which implies multiple missions, which lowers per-mission weight requirements, and allows for habitat tests prior to having human life (and larger, more temperamental resources) on the line and for fixes to be bundled in subsequent missions.
I think if we are technologically capable of it, it's a much better plan than return. A kind of 6 months on the surface, return ASAP mission would probably go down like Apollo in that those funding it would be like well that's done now and building on that one mission could take decades again.
Why do people assume that the people we send to Mars need to come back? Could we not send large supply stores first and then send people on a one way trip? I would guess people would sign up even knowing that the trip to Mars is one way.
As always, landing is the easy part. Escaping the gravity well is not. (Looks like they plan to make it a one way trip, setup a colony, then mfg fuel before the return trip.)
Nanotechnology is hype. It already exists... it's called biology. It is possible to get a fair idea of its limitations from studying biology, since nature has been exploring it for about five billion years.
It's not "nano," but it is workable and working. The goal is to build a set of reprap variants that collectively can self-manufacture. Once that is done you have a human-scale, workable, practical universal assembler. It is not as sexy as a nano-universal-assembler, but unlike nano-hype it is actually happening.
Of course, I'm sure we will make extensive use of nanotech in colonizing Mars as well: algae, soybeans, etc.
I agree that biology is nanotechnology. But I disagree that nanotech is limited by what nature has done already on Earth. Nature cannot possibly have explored the entire search space and found the global optimum, even in these five billion years.
Theoretically true... maybe I'm being too harsh. I just really dislike fantasy hype being sold as just-around-the-corner tech by the likes of Drexler and Kurzweil, so I enjoy bashing it upside the head every now and then.
As far as I can see, there is absolutely nothing on the tech horizon that looks like Drexler-esque nanotech. Everything I am aware of is either biology, bio-derived, or is simply an advance in materials science rebadged as nanotech for hype purposes. (e.g. nanomaterials, which are just better materials with "nano" stuck on them because they incorporate microscopic structural motifs... which is of course something materials research was doing before the nano-hype craze came along.)
That's true. Kurzweil and friends overestimate the speed in which science advances. We don't even nearly understand our own biology yet, as we're still learning a lot from nature.
Kurzweil's "We can upload ourselves in 30 years" is basic hubris. Our brains turn out to be more complicated than we thought every time scanning tech advances.
But once we fully grasp how our own bio-"machinery" works, we may be able to develop something that can survive on Mars. That is probably a long haul from now (>200 years).
This is getting off-topic but... I don't think it's just underestimating the rate. The problem is that they're just way off, and their hype has a defocusing effect. I don't think it's harmless.
If you look into where real innovation happens, it always happens where people are engaged with the world. It happens where people are trying to solve real rubber-meets-the-road problems.
You don't get innovation by speculating in a vacuum and then throwing around ivory-tower abstractions.
Take the old Bell Labs for instance... it was so phenomenally innovative because they had a good supply of hard real-world problems coming from the telecom buildout. Problems are just as valuable as solutions... maybe more valuable. Problems are the fuel of engineering. The closer you get to the expanding wave-front of real applied technology, the meatier the problems become.
If Drexler-esque nanotech ever starts to happen, it won't be because of hand-wavy speculation about consciousness uploading. It will be because someone somewhere has a hard problem that demands a nanotech solution. As an example I can think of one currently very relevant candidate: cleaning up nuclear contamination. (Of course, bio-remediation coupled with genetic engineering or selective breeding might work there too...)
There seems to be an epidemic of defocus in engineering right now. I keep seeing press releases from certain well-respected universities like "Scientists develop method of using viral particles to harness (tiny amounts of) energy from the vibrations of bull testicles on Wednesdays." A lot of people seem to have no intuition for practicality.
... which brings us back to the topic at hand in a meandering way ...
This is one of the reasons I love the space program. It's an endeavor that supplies us with an ample supply of hard real problems.
Historically, betting against Kurzweil hasn't been that good of a bet. He actually predicted the victory of a computer over the top human player as happening a year and a half later than it did. And yet in the 80s, when he made the prediction, it was largely rejected as a fantasy. People thought it wouldn't happen until decades later, if at all.
Similarly, his support of and predictions related to the human genome project at its beginning drew a great deal of skepticism. Once again, he was right. Ditto for wearable computing (i.e. iPod touch).
Kurzweil hasn't been right about everything, of course, but I think we'd be hard pressed to find another futurist with as good of a success rate with pubic predictions.
Consciousness uploading is to the iPod as interstellar starships are to commuter aircraft.
Actually, it might be worse than that. Right now I think we have better ideas about how to build an interstellar starship (Orion nuclear pulse propulsion, light sails, etc.) than we do about how to upload human consciousness to a computer.
I'd like to just send vials of our hardiest cold-weather organisms to smash against Mars and see if anything manages to survive. (Some folks would probably object to this until we manage to confirm that Mars doesn't have any life of its own.)
Nice strawman. We don't need nanotech to build substantial infrastructure on Mars. We have the technology to do that today, we had it decades ago. This is not a far future problem, it's merely a problem of getting the funding to get it going.
Not quite. The missing tech is, I think, in the area of manufacturing. The settlers would have to unpack and boot up a complete industrial infrastructure since the nearest Radio Shack or Home Depot is 300,000,000 miles away.
But we're moving in that direction with 3d printing and rapid fabrication technology...
A martian colony need not have an Earth-equivalent industrial base immediately. Imagining that it should is merely self-limiting.
At one level a martian colony needs only enough of an industrial base to survive given continued trade with Earth. Longer term it likely needs enough of an industrial base to be self-sufficient indefinitely. However, this level of technology and industry could be considerably far behind the state of the art on Earth or very much lacking in a great many categories. It's not necessary to replicate a 21st century Earth on Mars in order for a colony to be feasible.
It would be interesting to pre-ship a bunch of supplies to mars.
Start the process like this:
Figure out a plan to build a base and sustain life.
Build the systems and devices to executre that plan
Start sending this equipment to mars.
Train your team. Cycle through plan.
Eventually you send your team(s) and they start using equipment.
Bonus if the equipment you send is autonomous and can start building before your team arrives.
A multi-phased trip seems reasonable, where you land the production units, and some robotics to deal with the unknowns.
Then before the manned trip even happens you know that there is viable base already operating. If something happens between the manned launch, and their landing, their spaceship could be setup to handle a shot around mars for a return trip as an emergency measure.
Still making a ship capable of holding 6 years of supplies isn't very attractive.
I agree, you're going to want a base on Mars before you land there. No point going all the way there just to spend three days there (like the Moon) so significant living quarters are a great idea. To my way of thinking the best way to build is using the local materials -- either digging underground or building out of rocks. If you were clever, and if you could find a decent source of water, you could probably build a pretty good structure by using dirt and ice. This, of course, requires a lot of fancy robots.
As far as the ship goes, you're definitely going to need a "mothership" capable of entering and leaving Mars orbit (so, a crapload of fuel onboard or else a new engine technology) as well as a lander, so abort capability shouldn't be that big an issue.
The more I think about it, the more difficult a Mars mission seems, and the more sensible it seems to keep on sending robots until we're really ready for a permanent Mars colony (i.e. the point at which it actually makes economic sense).
I suggest you read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and think about why any Earth-bound government would hate the idea of allowing space based travel or settlement by any agency not under their direct control.
Maciej Cegłowski (pinboard.in) complains at length about this in an essay[2] about the space shuttle.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes
[2]: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm