szabonj@ibmpa.UUCP (Nick Szabo) (12/16/89)
In article <5589@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> gtz@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Eric C. Garrison) writes: >All this talk about which is better, manned or unmanned, is getting worn. >Let's try a new game. Let's suppose that we were designing a mission to Mars. Why Mars? There are several hundred thousands asteroids, a billion comets, dozens of moons, that have not been explored at all, and several planets that have not been explored as well as Mars. Thousands of the asteroids are much closer in energy than Mars, closer even than the surface of the Moon. So why Mars? Because it's the fad? Nail him, Henry! :-) >The object is to design a Mars landing/sample return mission, with minimum cost >and maximum results. There is a soft limit on the Budget at $200 billion, and >a hard limit at $400 billion. Where are you going to get this kind of money? It is nearly an order of magnitude more than we spent on Apollo, back in the days when space really did equate to national prestige. A more realistic budget would be an average of $2 billion for each planetary system and the Moon, plus another $10 billion for the asteroids and comets. There is quite a bit we could do with this budget, among them: (1) long-term observation of the volcanoes on Io and Triton (2) a resource survey of the asteroids and comets, based on ground telescopes, meteor samples, on-site flybies, and on-site sampling, including core drilling. (3) a resource survey of the Moon and Mars, based on meteor and on-site sampling, and thorough geochemical mapping from polar orbit. (4) complete mappings of all the planets and larger moons in the solar system. BTW, put this under your "manned" category. Manned from Earth. The scope of this project is several orders of magnitude wider than just Mars, with a cost at least an order of magnitude less. We can start building this stuff today, instead of fantasizing ("planning") for the next 30 years. The technology produced by this project will be scaled on a human scale, ie directly applicable to medicine, manufacturing, mining, and commercial space enterprise, rather than being gigantic dead ends like Saturn/Apollo. Thus the spinoffs, too, will be much greater than from a manned mission. I posted the details of this scenario a few months ago. I can repost them if you like, but technology changes and I will have to update them. As should be. NASA hasn't updated its plans since the 60's. "Manned landing on Mars: 1980" From a NASA planning document, 1970 **** These opinions are not related to Big Blue's ******** -- --------------------------- Nick Szabo szabonj@ibmpa.tcspa.ibm.com uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj