Back in grad school, one of the mandatory sessions for EE grad students was a presentation by a NASA scientist, who was pushing for a manned flight to Mars before the year 2000 to take advantage of close proximity between the two planets that wouldn't exist for quite a while thereafter.
Fast forward 15 years, and NASA figures out that (oops!) the radiation encountered during such a flight would likely kill any astronauts unlucky enough to start it. That's my objection to NASA in a nutshell; lots of blue sky, but when it comes down to figuring out the likely problems, they're just as incompetent as any other government agency.
(possible fix for the problem; build any spacecraft around a magnet to produce a field like the Earth's--but that would end up making it a LOT heavier. Ooops)
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3 comments:
Funny -- I've just been re-listening to C.S. Lewis' "Out of the Silent Planet." Yet another reason for the inmates of Thulcandra not to mess around in Deep Heaven.
Heavier is not necessarily an issue. If the craft is built in stages at the ISS or similar station. it can be as massive as necessary.
Yes, you theoretically COULD use arbitrarily high numbers of launches to get all that material into space, but ya know...there is this little special interest group called "taxpayers" that might object to spending $100 billion to put some clown on Mars.
And I'm still not persuaded that NASA knows about all the ways that they could get a few more astronauts killed well enough to assume that even this would be enough.
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