Re: Space Policy: Why Mars should be our top priority.



Derek Lyons wrote:
Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Anyway, it would be a really fun thread to figure out what NASA could and couldn't do in regards to a Mars flight using 1970 technology, and throwing the amount of money and ASAP political will at the problem that Apollo had.

Using 1970 technology, I'd say the odds are you have a dead crew. Too
many known unknowns, let alone unknown uknowns.

You'd obviously have to do years worth of orbital tests to check out the systems to be used on the actual flight, but it wasn't impossible to do by any means with the existing technology - just huge and inefficient in regards to Saturn V launches needed to accomplish it, even with NERVA nuclear engines to send it on its way.
If you were going to brute-force it, you would probably end up using a very small crew (2-6?) and zero food and water recycling.
CO2 scrubbing might be availble in something better than the lithium hydroxide scrubbers used on Apollo, but again - do you want to get fancy and possibly unreliable, or keep it safe and simple despite the weight?

I'm not certain that brute force would even be an option - not without
starting to buy Saturn V's by the case.

That's probably be exactly how it would end up. Ten or twenty Saturn V's to assemble it in LEO; but those launches would probably have cost less than a Shuttle launch on average, and we've done over a hundred of those.

Every time you remove even one crew member, you save a tremendous amount of weigh required to keep them alive on the trip to Mars and back.

You also increase the workload of the remaining crew members
proportionally.

Flags and footsteps... minimal crew gets there and does some basic exploration while waiting for things to line up right for a Hohmann transfer orbit back to Earth.

Pat
.

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