Re: Why NASA should focus on the Moon, not Mars - Henry Spencer

On Nov 27, 3:38 pm, Brian Thorn <bthor...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:14:07 -0800 (PST), Totorkon

<aertr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If international contributions are included, the pricetag of the
completed iss will exceed $100B.

You just can't let that go, can you? :-) Between Shuttle and Station,
the US cost of the program is $60-75 billion. You think
budget-challenged  ESA, Japan, and Russia have spent $25-40 billion on
ISS? Have you seen their annual budgets?

In a nutshell, your numbers are hogwash. If you can't even get a
realistic estimate of the cost of ISS (which is largely already paid
for and a matter of public record), why should anyone take your
"prophet of doom" numbers for a Mars mission seriously?

If the total cost of the shuttle program is divided by the number of
flights, the cost per is $1.3B. The 35 flights, past and projected,
to the iss would amount to $45B.
A $25B contribution by russia and esa seems low given that after 2010
iss will be totally dependent on them. Also the lower cost of soyuz
relative to an equivalent american launcher should be factored in.

That $T for mars has been thrown
around, albeit by critics.  Zubrin's estimate is a quarter of the
apollo program cost, which does seem overly optimistic.

I agree. But if he comes in twice as expensive as he thinks, that's
still less than $100 billion. Yet critics instantly, without even
thinking about it, scream "IT WILL COST US A TRILLION DOLLARS!"

While I think $100B is low, that's still more than 200 mers.

The mer rovers in their prime could generate almost a kWhr/day, even
with the high incident angle of the sunlight.  Careful design of solar
'wings' could quadruple that.  At an average 1mph for ten hours a day,
circumnavigation of the planet would take less than four years, a
rover lifespan that has already been exceeded.

Yet in the real world, they've only traveled a few miles in five
years. So if we quadruple their capability, we get about 12 miles
distance in five years. Which also happens to be about what NASA is
aiming for out of MSL.

The combined total is about 12 miles so that would be 48 miles and
they were designed for science not distance. The lunar rover with
astronauts had a mass of almost 700 kg and was able to get more than 5
miles per kWhr. Even on mars, double that on 3 or 4 kWhrs/day is a
safe estimate.

Again, you want us to ignore real world experience and take it on
faith that your R2-D2 class Wonder Rover is going to be able to drive
all the way around the moon in a year?

Sorry, no.

The more information the public has about mars, the  more excitement
that can be generated, the greater the support for a second planet
with people.

Except that every time anyone brings up the idea of sending people,
critics like you say "don't waste our money, the robots can do it
instead right now, and even if they can't, just wait five years when
robots will be serving us tea!" Then five years come and go and robots
have yet to come at all close to this level of capability. So we say,
"let's just send people" and critics say "in five years we won't need
to, the robots will be able to do it!". There appears to be no end in
sight to this nonsense, based on enormously overstated robot
capabilities and obviously unresearched cost figures you're using to
shout down Manned Mars.

Brian

You ignored my points about technology transfer, smaller competive
launchers, ion drive and a learning curve.

More to the point, this thread was started with a link to Henry's
article, including:

"The obsession with mars was a bad idea then and is a bad idea now".
.

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