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hubie writes:
"U.S. House of Representatives's Science, Space and Technology Committee had a meeting to discuss whether NASA should help out the Mars Foundation. The Mars Foundation scrapped their earlier plans to send two humans to Mars, and revised it to do a two-person fly-by. However, they want NASA help. They want a design modification to the Orion spacecraft and they want use of the Space Launch System. If this goes anywhere, it will be interesting how it is proposed that funding get allocated."
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Mars Foundation Solicits Congressional Help
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Informative) by geb on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:59AM
Somebody seems to have become confused, and failed to look up Inspiration Mars on wikipedia, through losing the "inspiration" bit of the name.
The Inspiration Mars 2018 mission plan was not a landing, it was to be a free return trip very much like the one proposed, except that they vastly underestimated the difficulty.
The original plan was to have a 100% privately funded Mars mission, by cramming two people into a tiny tin can, reducing weight everywhere possible, and hoping the crew would still be sane and healthy by the time they got back. They eventually realised that it wasn't possible to fit everything they needed onto one launch booster, or even two, and the costs started rising to an order of magnitude above what they originally had hoped for.
It's at that point that they realised that the SLS was the only launch booster that could do the job, and that the US government via NASA was the only organisation who could pay for it.
The 2018 mission was to be a simple Earth -> Mars -> Earth free return trip. Since they were going to miss that anyway through lack of money or any available hardware, they moved on to a more exciting combined mission, Earth -> Venus -> Mars -> Earth multiple flyby. It's very similar to a mission proposed under the Apollo Applications Program, just before Apollo had its funding cut.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AsteroidMining on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:34AM
I have to say that I am unsympathetic. After everyone and their brother told them their mission plan was unrealistic and their cost estimates way too low they have found... that their mission plan was unrealistic and their cost estimates were way too low. Now they want to get NASA to execute one of ideas of von Braun and the NASA Advanced Concepts Office (still around, by the way, and now headed by Les Johnson), but to do it for them, not that they are going to pay for it.
The number of things wrong here is more than I care to list, but here is one that sticks out - do they seriously think that NASA should pay for a ground-breaking spaceflight and then use non-NASA astronauts, who are (to be blunt) not going to be well-trained? Do they have any idea how the NASA astronaut corps would react to this if it actually reached some level of serious possibility?
I predict the Mars Foundation will devolve into a "support space exploration" advocacy group, which is find. At least they got some good press.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:52PM
"not going to be well-trained?"
For political reasons the original astronaut corps, despite being spam in a can, had to be jet fighter test pilots.
For this mission, frankly you need something like two mellow buddhist monks, or maybe ex-submarine service bros who can chill. Or maybe two monks who can treat it like a long silent retreat. Or maybe two theoretical scientist academics who can read papers and screw around with theories the whole time (but they better be from different disciplines or they're going to fight). Maybe two old school RPG DnD / Pathfinder fanatics who can play out a couple long adventures, although how you roll a D20 in space is a mystery to me. Its going to be a very long and boring mission. Tom Cruise from Top Gun need not apply.
The odds of death are actually pretty good, and there's not much for them to do, so some totally mellow religious monk types on a very long retreat might be the best choice. Celibate means no grieving family, generally in the west they have decent liberal arts educations so they'll have things to think and talk about. No worries about mortality. Could be a good gig.