Word: orbitals
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...economy is healthiest, is convinced international endorsement will help his colleagues sell reform at home - but that sounds a bit unrealistic since Chirac and Schröder are hardly in a position to deliver more tough changes. Two powerful forces could keep the Gang of Three from reaching political orbit. First is resentment like that expressed by Portugal's Prime Minister. "If it's about trying to impose their vision on our countries," he says, "that's not a positive thing." A Chirac aide says this danger is well understood. "We want to come up with a proposition for everyone...
...seven-month trip in a confined space can be torturous. The bigger problem is that it can also be lethal because of radiation exposure in deep space, where the absence of Earth's magnetic field leaves astronauts far more exposed to deadly cosmic energy than they are in orbit or on the way to the moon. Some kind of shielding is obviously necessary--anathema to space designers, who like to keep hardware light, but unavoidable all the same. (On the surface of Mars, tanks of water or even dirt berms could serve the same protective purpose.) The best...
...directly from Earth orbit to Mars, and it would probably be simpler and less costly," says Larry Bell, space architect at the University of Houston. "Some of us don't see the necessity of going to the moon first...
Present systems for getting from Earth's surface to low-Earth orbit are so fantastically expensive that merely launching the 1,000 tons or so of spacecraft and equipment a Mars mission would require could be accomplished only by cutting health-care benefits, education spending or other important programs--or by raising taxes. Absent some remarkable discovery, astronauts, geologists and biologists once on Mars could do little more than analyze rocks and feel awestruck beholding the sky of another world. Yet rocks can be analyzed by automated probes without risk to human life, and at a tiny fraction...
Rather than spend hundreds of billions of dollars to hurl tons toward Mars using current technology, why not take a decade--or two decades, or however much time is required--researching new launch systems and advanced propulsion? If new launch systems could put weight into orbit affordably, and if advanced propulsion could speed up that long, slow transit to Mars, then the dream of stepping onto the Red Planet might become reality. Mars will still be there when the technology is ready...