Dennis Tito To Announce Private Human Mars Mission

[longship]

16. You are correct, but not complete.

The ISS is still in low Earth orbit. We have no heavy lift booster and only Russia has anything near it in capacity. There is no Saturn V today. It took the better part of a decade to build it in a well-funded era, if you stretch it a bit. The damned thing was fucking 30-some stories tall, almost all of which was dedicated to just getting the fucker out of the Earth's gravity well and launching it to the moon. Blasting off the moon, with no atmosphere and 1/6 Earth's gravity, is easy-peasey compared to getting to Mars, let alone landing and returning.

Mars does not have sufficient atmosphere to allow an Apollo-like landing. It has too much atmosphere, and twice the gravity, to allow a moon-like landing.

Russia has a particularly bad record of attempting a Mars landing. The US record has its failures as well. It isn't like landing on the moon. It's really fucking difficult.

I want people on Mars more than anybody, but we aren't even close to solving the issues to doing such and getting people back alive, let alone leaving them there to deal with things as they are with no rescue other than putative future supply ships.

Mars is a real bitch! I don't think we have the technology to do this by 2018, let alone the next decade. But a Manhattan Project could maybe do it. No hope for that at this time.

Shit! Over half the US thinks the world is less than 10,000 years old! How are you going to sell them on the necessity of space exploration. Fuck! They think Adam and Eve rode vegan velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs.

Not gonna happen without an extreme cultural change. And I am not sure I want such a drastic break. I would prefer something more gentle, and peaceful.