Dennis Tito To Announce Private Human Mars Mission

[longship]

7. Well, I am not so impressed with biosphere.

It was a good experiment in principle. But they cheated and had to open the environment before they completed their mission. Although one could argue that they learned something from that exercise, one does not have that option on a Mars mission.

A Mars mission is very much beyond what we have ever done before. One of the toughest is even landing on Mars without killing everybody. It's much, much more difficult than landing on the moon.

Two years supply of food for everybody? Figure that one out! Let alone how to launch that much mass to Mars, and bring enough back! And how to shield the astronauts from both cosmic rays and micro meteoroids. That's more mass to launch and bring back.

Just the poop alone presents a big problem when you talk about going to Mars. Of course, they could reprocess it into food like they do urine on the ISS.

And what happens when your six months of Chicken a la King all goes bad. I suppose cannibalism might solve the problem.

Oh! And you also need two years of air to breath, for each and every one of the people going.

It's a very tough job. I don't know how they're gonna do it all that quickly without extraordinary funding.

It took us nearly a decade to get to the moon. Mars is a whole other thing. Even landing on Mars is extremely perilous, much, much more difficult than landing on the moon. If you don't believe me, ask the Russians. Mars has an atmosphere too thin to allow an Apollo like capsule landing, and too dense to allow an easy-peasy airless touchdown like on the moon. Plus, it has twice the gravity of the moon. Again, ask Russia about their record of landing on Mars.

My thinking is that the best project for going to Mars is the other private concern which bills it as a one-way mission, to establish a colony. Every so many years they send a supply ship with more equipment and more settlers. The Mars settlement bootstraps itself. If they want to leave, they'll have to develop a space program of their own, apparently.

It's not exactly ethical, IMHO. But when it was announced last year, many said they would volunteer.

Interesting ethical dilemmas in this enterprise. Eh?