Boots on the ground. On Mars.

[Napkiraly]

Getting there and getting back is a lot harder than just getting there.

Previous missions (eg Pathfinder and Explorer) have landed payloads much heavier than a person (274 kg and 185 kg), gently enough for a living human to survive. However, they took six months to get there. For a live human cargo that would mean quite a lot of life support, but maybe that's OK. The earlier missions also delivered another 600 kg to Mars orbit: the life support that needs to go to Mars surface is a lot less, 600 kg is probably enough for the life support to Mars orbit. Then the passenger goes down in an Explorer-type lander with just a space suit and a camera, short range transmitter to communicate with the orbiter, and a silly little flag to plant. They prance around until they run out of oxygen, then die. If you think no-one will volunteer for that you're crazy.

But even easier than that is getting a human body to Mars and landing it hard. Long before anyone walks on Mars, someone could be buried there.

Good thing they're saying the chances of you ever coming back are essentially nil.

Anyways OP, nothing will come of this.

[AiliailiA]

Getting there and getting back is a lot harder than just getting there.

Previous missions (eg Pathfinder and Explorer) have landed payloads much heavier than a person (274 kg and 185 kg), gently enough for a living human to survive. However, they took six months to get there. For a live human cargo that would mean quite a lot of life support, but maybe that's OK. The earlier missions also delivered another 600 kg to Mars orbit: the life support that needs to go to Mars surface is a lot less, 600 kg is probably enough for the life support to Mars orbit. Then the passenger goes down in an Explorer-type lander with just a space suit and a camera, short range transmitter to communicate with the orbiter, and a silly little flag to plant. They prance around until they run out of oxygen, then die. If you think no-one will volunteer for that you're crazy.

But even easier than that is getting a human body to Mars and landing it hard. Long before anyone walks on Mars, someone could be buried there.

Good thing they're saying the chances of you ever coming back are essentially nil.

Taking the whole history of Mars missions into account, your chances of landing are only 50/50.

Doesn't that make sending a corpse an even better idea? If it doesn't make it, you're buried in space and that's pretty cool too.

It is the red planet *nods*

I suppose that explains why there isn't any food.

Who needs food when you have rockets?

[Hollorous]

What is it with people using that Soviet flag and being completely mental for Mars. Is it just one incredibly...focused person incessantly posting the same thing?

Anyway, as per the thread a few months ago: funding this through a big brother program will only lead to the need for our colonists to do increasingly crazy stuff to maintain the viewers and thus stay alive. It is terrifyingly dystopian and a great sci-fi plot if only people weren't taking it seriously.

It is the red planet *nods*

Ever see "Iron Sky"? Perhaps there's Soviets on Mars, biding their time since 1991, ready to pounce on the world and crush capitalism once and for all.

The existence of the Mars SSR has obviously been a well-guarded space secret. Clearly, the space race gap has substantially grown.

And they say that Brezhnev did nothing.

[Napkiraly]

Good thing they're saying the chances of you ever coming back are essentially nil.

Taking the whole history of Mars missions into account, your chances of landing are only 50/50.

Doesn't that make sending a corpse an even better idea? If it doesn't make it, you're buried in space and that's pretty cool too.

Might as well go out with a bang-or a silent spacing.

[Saruhan]

What is it with people using that Soviet flag and being completely mental for Mars. Is it just one incredibly...focused person incessantly posting the same thing?

Anyway, as per the thread a few months ago: funding this through a big brother program will only lead to the need for our colonists to do increasingly crazy stuff to maintain the viewers and thus stay alive. It is terrifyingly dystopian and a great sci-fi plot if only people weren't taking it seriously.

Red's going crazy over the red planet, I like it

[AiliailiA]

Taking the whole history of Mars missions into account, your chances of landing are only 50/50.

Doesn't that make sending a corpse an even better idea? If it doesn't make it, you're buried in space and that's pretty cool too.

Might as well go out with a bang-or a silent spacing.

Sounds like a business plan to me.

Wikipedia tells me that launch costs to Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit are $12,000 per kilo for the Falcon 9 (SpaceX) and $14,000 per kilo for the Proton-M (the Russian workhorse most used). GTO is the highly eliptical orbit that geosynchronous satellites are launched with, requiring only a small amount of additional delta-V to circularize their orbit near apogee. It costs more to put a satellite into geostationary orbit because launches are never from exactly at the equator, but we don't need that.

To bury people "in space" we only need to ensure they never ever come back to Earth. Lunar orbit would do (another 4.8 delta-v on top of GTO) since if it screws up the body will be buried on the Moon and they can't complain about that: it's in space and no-one has ever been buried there before. Anywhere but Earth, right?

Solar escape velocity is almost four times Earth escape velocity. That's for billionaires. Billionaires are fussy, and also you have to consider that they didn't get that rich by being generous, we could get screwed by their lawyers using some obscure clause of their will and not even be able to bury my dog Laika in any kind of space. No, we should be looking to market this to millionaires. Some of them are decent folk, at least when they're dead.

So let's assume their corpse weights 70 kg (that's about what I weigh) and if not we can slip the undertaker a few thousand to put some bean bag foam in place of perishable organs. 70 x $12,000 is $840,000. Under a million bucks!

That's only to GTO of course. I'm not a rocket scientist, and I must say that the decision of the American manufacturers of Delta rockets to switch to from Arabic to Roman numerals for their boosters was a total dog act. You search for "delta-v" on Google and you get a whole lot of advertising for their rockets. Google does not serve well, though I've had some help from a site called Encylopedia Astronautica.

Maybe there are rocket scientists here on General who know about final stages and can sharpen this up, but my best shot is that we'll need about four times the payload (weight of the corpse) to make sure the corpse stays out in space. Making it about $4 million bucks (American bucks, aka little bucks) for the first commercial space burial.

Tell me that's not a business plan.

[Divair]

Old news. I also have serious doubts about their ability to do this. For one thing a lot of the suppliers they list haven't actually committed to supplying them with anything. And that's just one of many problems they have. They have jackshit plans in place for dealing with cosmic radiation, they lack designs for almost everything, much less the ability to build anything.Nothing I've read about them mentions two of the bigger difficulties of sending humans to mars, Cosmic Rays, and Bone Loss. The list goes on and on. This is just another overly ambitious space start-up that will never see any measurable progress.

/Thread.

[Nazis in Space]

Real men sail to Mars on board of their open-deck space caravels, have lots of sex with the native, green-skinned martians, and bring a whole fuckload of new and exciting stds back home to earth.

[Lazssia]

Real men sail to Mars on board of their open-deck space caravels, have lots of sex with the native, green-skinned martians, and bring a whole fuckload of new and exciting stds back home to earth.

Through our sensual superiority, we will conquer the natives, and bring about the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire. *nods*

[Hatsunia]

I don't think "'Jersey Shore' meets NASA meets 'American Idol'" is at all, a sound idea.

You search for "delta-v" on Google and you get a whole lot of advertising for their rockets.

No you don't, you get delta-v defined as "change in velocity" and other stuff not related to rockets. They only made it up to Delta IV.

[AiliailiA]

You search for "delta-v" on Google and you get a whole lot of advertising for their rockets.

No you don't, you get delta-v defined as "change in velocity" and other stuff not related to rockets. They only made it up to Delta IV.

From that masterpiece of comedy, you picked that to spin your own joke off?

... wait ... you weren't joking? You're arguing with me?

Well OK. Tell me what the ratio of rocket mass to payload is, to get payload from GTO to earth escape. Or get the fuck out of my business plan

[Call to power]

I don't think "'Jersey Shore' meets NASA meets 'American Idol'" is at all, a sound idea.

Lets not be too hasty, maybe ejecting quack authors from our planet is the way forward.

[Umbra Ac Silentium]

:C I want to go to Mars

[New Rogernomics]

Well it is an expensive way to give Martians a free pair of boots.

[Phocidaea]

Imma call hoax and/or over-optimism.

Also, 2023 is more than 110 years after the discovery of airplane flight, and even further past the discovery of flight in general (balloons, gliders, etc.)

[Hatsunia]

No you don't, you get delta-v defined as "change in velocity" and other stuff not related to rockets. They only made it up to Delta IV.

From that masterpiece of comedy, you picked that to spin your own joke off?

Sorry, my joke detector doesn't always work.

... wait ... you weren't joking? You're arguing with me?

Well OK. Tell me what the ratio of rocket mass to payload is, to get payload from GTO to earth escape. Or get the fuck out of my business plan

From here, the delta-v for GTO to Earth escape (C3=0) is 0.7 km/s (700 m/s). Although solid-fueled stages aren't as efficient as Lox/RP-1 and Lox/LH2, they are cheaper and good for small payloads such as a 70-kilogram corpse, while the more expensive but more efficient fuels are for payloads that weigh from several hundred kilograms to several metric tons. Every stage, by itself, has different ratios between the gross mass and the empty mass, but they may vary from stage to stage. One of these stages is the Payload Assist Module - D, an upper stage with a gross:empty mass ratio of about 9.2 and a specific impulse of 292 seconds. We will be basing our hypothetical upper stage on this. According to this delta-v calculator, you only need a stage that has a loaded mass of 22.54 kg and an empty mass of 2.45 kg for GTO to Earth escape.

Full mass: 70 + 22.54 = 92.54 kg
Dry mass: 70 + 2.45 = 72.45 kg
I_sp: 292 s

delta-v = 700.84 m/s

ratio between stage mass and payload: about 0.3 (22.54/70)
ratio between (stage + payload) mass and payload: about 1.3 (92.54/70)

But for a LEO to Earth escape trajectory, a delta-v of 3200 m/s, you need a stage that has a loaded mass of 215.74 kg and an empty mass of 23.45 kg for LEO to Earth escape.

Full mass: 70 + 215.74 = 285.74 kg
Dry mass: 70 + 23.45 = 93.45 kg
I_sp: 292 s

delta-v = 3200.45 m/s

ratio between stage mass and payload: about 3.1 (215.74/70)
ratio between (stage + payload) mass and payload: about 4.1 (285.74/70)

(used to be Star-48, but then I realized that that was an engine, not a stage)

[Ralkovia]

http://mars-one.com/en/

HOLY. FUCK. MARS COLONY.

Apparently, everything they need they have a supplier for, and they are taking applications from anyone. About 110 years after the discovery of flight, we will have a mars colony.

I question the legitimacy of this program, not because a Mars Colony seems infeasible, other than the novelty of "SPEHSS" but the fact that I don't have to be a mega math nerd. It's cool shit and all, but I rather not my team comprise of an accountant, a fry cook, and a garbageman.

[Faith Hope Charity]

I know its off topic, call it a pet peeve, but i find the term "boots on the ground" offensive.. it dehumanizes the situation, whether it has to do with the military (usually the case), or with astronauts, etc. People shouldn't be referred to solely by their footwear.

just saying, not looking to start a fight, etc...

[The Corparation]

I know its off topic, call it a pet peeve, but i find the term "boots on the ground" offensive.. it dehumanizes the situation, whether it has to do with the military (usually the case), or with astronauts, etc. People shouldn't be referred to solely by their footwear.

just saying, not looking to start a fight, etc...

I agree, and it also overlooks the fact that the soldiers may not be wearing boots and may have alternate forms of footwear.

[AiliailiA]

I know its off topic, call it a pet peeve, but i find the term "boots on the ground" offensive.. it dehumanizes the situation, whether it has to do with the military (usually the case), or with astronauts, etc. People shouldn't be referred to solely by their footwear.

just saying, not looking to start a fight, etc...

I agree, and it also overlooks the fact that the soldiers may not be wearing boots and may have alternate forms of footwear.

Hoverclogs. They haven't been invented yet.

[Xathranaar]

As long as they're not doing research into teleportation. That never ends well.

[Shnercropolis]

what the jeebus is this falsehood?

[Cameroi]

eventually someone will, and before they do, a lot of con'ster's will scam doing so.

[The Corparation]

what the jeebus is this falsehood?

A bunch of people who think that just because people are building rockets and space suits, that because they want to go to Mars, they'll magically get some of those rockets and space suits.They also seem to think that having it a reality show will pay for it and are completely oblivious to the fact that having a bunch of calm reasonable people that get along isn't going to be that interesting a reality show, and a crew of astronauts that acts like the cast of the Jersey Shore which would get ratings would probably end up killing themselves through stupidity or petty rivalry.

[Hatsunia]

It will still be cool to see the actual (non-reality show) manned Mars expedition, or the return to the Moon, when that time comes.