How to Get to Mars

[omni550]

A friend just sent me this video about the Mars mission:

How to Get to Mars. Very Cool! HD - YouTube

 

[frayne]

An engineering marvel !

 

[Free To Canoe]

Very cool indeed!

 

[73ss454]

Amazing!

 

[Moscyn]

Thanks for sharing this! Really great!

 

[Lazarus]

This is not the most recent lander animation.

This is.

Curiosity Mars Landing 2012 - YouTube

 

[Chuckanut]

I admire the creative people who can come up with such ideas and then make them work. As I recall, two rovers were landed on Mars using the bouncing balloon method.

The current rover, Curiosity, is too big to be bounced around, so they found another creative way to land it. And, once again, made it work!

 

[Lazarus]

Both methods are engineering marvels.

But we could have had manned landings in the 80's if we had had the will.
Now the U.S. has no manned spaceflight capability at all.

 

[Jay_Gatsby]

Both methods are engineering marvels.

But we could have had manned landings in the 80's if we had had the will.
Now the U.S. has no manned spaceflight capability at all.

Maybe. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket will carry a manned DragonRider capsule by mid-2015, with the first manned mission to the ISS by December 2015.

Dragon (spacecraft) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At a NASA news conference on 18 May 2012, SpaceX confirmed again that their target launch price for crewed Dragon flights is $140,000,000, or $20,000,000 per seat if the maximum crew of 7 is aboard. This contrasts with the current Soyuz launch cost of $63,000,000 per seat.

 

[kyounge1956]

Both methods are engineering marvels.

But we could have had manned landings in the 80's if we had had the will.
Now the U.S. has no manned spaceflight capability at all.

I recently listened to Packing for Mars on audiobook. It's about the various difficulties of maintaining human life in space, even for brief periods, never mind the (IIRC) more than a year in each direction required for travel between Earth and Mars. It's hard for me to imagine any way to test people in advance to determine whether crew candidates (individually and as a group) are able to tolerate the conditions of a flight to Mars and back without going nuts or killing each other, or both. It might be more feasible to develop remote control of landers and virtual reality equipment to a degree that would enable people to "walk" on Mars and interact with the Martian surface without actually having to go there physically.

 

[clifp]

I recently listened to Packing for Mars on audiobook. It's about the various difficulties of maintaining human life in space, even for brief periods, never mind the (IIRC) more than a year in each direction required for travel between Earth and Mars. It's hard for me to imagine any way to test people in advance to determine whether crew candidates (individually and as a group) are able to tolerate the conditions of a flight to Mars and back without going nuts or killing each other, or both. It might be more feasible to develop remote control of landers and virtual reality equipment to a degree that would enable people to "walk" on Mars and interact with the Martian surface without actually having to go there physically.

I wonder why this particular video is making the runs, my sister, a non techy, just sent me a link to the video. It is is a cool video but it is about the Spirit which landed in 2004 and stopped working in 2011. It is twin Opportunity is still working.

The most recent Mars Lander Curiosity and an even more spectacular land sequence which also worked without a hitch.

Packing for Mars was neat quirky book that I doubt I would have picked up except for it was cheap on the Kindle.