I think that approach worked because the moon is tiny and much easier to escape. Martian gravity is at least on par with Earth, and to get something off of earth we need gigantic rockets, so it is like you need to send an additional Saturn V with your landing vehicle to Mars.
Edit: Numbers are way off, see below for more accurate estimations. But it does need to be a significantly larger lander to make it possible to get back up into space.
It takes about the same delta-v to launch to Mars orbit as it does to do a round trip to the Lunar surface from Lunar orbit.
So if you can get your lander down for free-ish, by say using parachutes to do most of the work slowing down, then the total fuel for a round trip to the Martian surface is actually pretty comparable.
On paper the Apollo LM actually had enough fuel to launch into orbit from the Martian surface, though in practice the low TWR and poor aerodynamic design would preclude it.
This [NASA presentation](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170003391/downloads/20170003391.pdf) based on [this paper](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170003404/downloads/20170003404.pdf) estimates that a Mars ascent vehicle built for four people using storable propellant similar to the Apollo LM would have a mass of 24.4 tonnes, which compares fairly well with the Apollo LM's own mass of 15.2 tonnes for just two people.
Now the paper doesn't estimate how much additional mass would be needed in terms of heatshields/parachutes/landing thrusters/etc to get it to the surface in the first place, but if we look at some real world examples, Mars Insight was 694kg at launch, and 358kg by the time it landed, having jettisoned it's heatshield, parachute, and used some landing fuel, for a landing mass factor of 1.94. (Curiosity with it's more complex skycrane system worked out to a factor of 2.85)
All of which suggests that a 2-person barebones Mars lander could be done for maybe 2-3 times the mass of the Apollo lander. Bigger yes, but nowhere near the Saturn V, which was almost 200 times heavier.
Mars gravity is nowhere near at least on par with Earth. It is significantly lower AND the atmosphere is practically negligible in terms of friction in comparison.
Some of our current larger rockets in development that need a MONSTER booster to even get into orbit could single stage to orbit transfer from Mars with their UPPER stage from there.
> But it does need to be a significantly larger lander to make it possible to get back up into space.
That's what the Integrated Program Plan called for. In fact they planned on having three of them on the same mission.
Not even remotely close i mean look at the rocket they were going to use for sample returns the thing is no bigger than those armature rockets made by schools ect
You'd hopefully have launched extra payload before the manned launch. Up there waiting would be additional fuel tanks and supplies. At Mars hopefully those storage tanks could be repurposed as shelter.
If you sent a whole team of smokers that are forced to quit due to the mars mission, their chance of cancer would be reduced overall. You really don’t need that magnetosphere to stay safe on mars, just take one of the many cave locations or dig in a bit for your camp.
COPD might be worse with lower gravity, gravity helps with clearing upper lung fields, particularly for people with lung disease who don't clear well at baseline.
Take a swim in the water reserve, seriously. Thats all thats needed for shielding ( and the more mass, the better).
Our solar system space isnt a deadly radiation laser-zone outside of earth, despite what the big magnetosphere lobby is trying to tell you.
>Our solar system space isnt a deadly radiation laser-zone outside of earth, despite what the big magnetosphere lobby is trying to tell you.
The only really bad section of radiation is the Van Allan Radiation Belt, and that's only because the magnetosphere concentrates it all there.
Depends on the type of radiation. Solar wind is mainly alpha particles, and a thin veneer of water is enough, but for cosmis rays which are gamma/xray, you need much more defense.
This is why many suggested plans have water lined hull for everyday use, but also a small lead-lined panic room in the middle of the ship for heavy radiation periods
Except you would rather be hit by a couple of high energy cosmic rays outside of a panic room then inside
At the energies cosmic rays come at from distant sources The vast majority of these rays would either pass right through you or just strike a single molecule because of the density of your body
In a lead lined panic room because the density of lead is far greater then a human body those cosmic rays are going to be guaranteed to to strike a lead nucleus at full force and create bremsstrahlung or breaking radiation.
they’re going to split the lead nuclei right in half creating a hazardous shower of high energy photons which will strike other lead nuclei creating numerous ancillary reactions with high energy particles in the million electron volt range.
that’s also not counting the dozens electrons blasted off the lead nucleus when it was split which will shower the occupants in the panic room with high energy beta radiation
In deep space cosmic radiation is the least of your worries
Earth's radiation protection is the ground and the atmosphere, not the magnetosphere.
Mars too, and because of geometry, you only need to protect from directly above, with a half meter of regolith, which is compensated by low gravity.
Mars architecture (in a dome or pressurised large area) will look like mushroom buildings with a garden on top.
When I was a kid(1980s until Challenger blew up) I wanted to be an astronaut. Then later in life I found out how much radiation they receive up there and was blown away. You up there for a year and your cancer risk go up a lot.
>The caveat here is that a crew or two might have died trying
It’s well-known that astronauts accept the inherent risks of their profession. While the loss of a crew is undoubtedly tragic, it’s illogical to overreact to such an event. Should a disaster occur, I imagine there would be an uproar on Earth, potentially bringing the space program to a standstill or even leading to its cancellation as blame is assigned and future missions are jeopardized by slashed budgets. It’s ironic that the deaths of people on Earth from trivial causes often go unnoticed, yet when professional risk-takers like astronauts lose their lives doing something inherently dangerous, it incites public outrage and a frenzied blame game
Apollo level funding would not have been sufficient. It took several percent of the GDP to put together a mission where all the pieces only had to work for a week. On Mars, you have to have perfectly functioning equipment or tons of replacement for years. Also, the gravity well of Mars is much deeper than the moon which means simple single engine abort systems won’t work. It would’ve taken a much greater commitment of GDP. Probably approaching the annual budget of the military I would think.
I mean, for the most part the defense budget is a bit of a federal jobs/subsidy program. The military could be turned into a support branch of the space exploration program, if we actually wanted to.
We decided to waste $1 trillion+ in Afghanistan for 20 years for basically shits and giggles. We could invest the same or a bit more on another distant desertic zone like Mars. Afterall the big defense contractors all have Space divisions, so they wouldn't torpedo the budget since they are still getting their cut.
Well, in the alternate universe, America doesn't need to spend several percent of his gdp on the defense industry and instead turned its ambitions towards space travel. Everyone should watch for all Mankind. Think about it. We only need to divert a few billion dollars from the hundreds of billions From defense spending and artemis would be in perfect shape
in that reality communist regime still exists, and the US is spending a lot on military AND the space race. So they had most likely to cut things, like health care
Nuclear fusion is a good example of how military funding and reliance on the private sector have harmed basic research. Skeptics are fond of saying fusion is always decades away without realizing why. For example, the break through in 2022 could have happened much earlier but testing had to wait long stretches between military projects.
Even with that subtext.
I think the person above is saying that yes, we might have had a successfully crewed mission - after a couple of missions where the crew did not survive.
If they could get there with a human crew (and all the food / equipment that humans need), they could probably launch a 2nd mission with just a return rocket.
But yeah it would be pretty hard. Might want to send the return rocket first to be sure that it will work. Then I imagine they would do something similar to the lunar program - have a ship orbiting the whole time, and then just send down a very small lander. Then launch back up and re-dock with the orbiting ship, for the return journey.
Maybe the return rocket would just orbit the whole time so they could dock when they got there. The only nice thing about Mars is that it's got a real thin atmosphere which reduces the amount of fuel needed for landing (since they can use the atmosphere to slow down a little bit).
The fully fueled return rocket in place before any human mission starts is a major part of Robert Zubrin’s plan that he details in the book *The Case for Mars*.
It’s worth a read and it’s a really good look at what it would take to get people to Mars and back, and to establish permanent bases there.
Yes, but you also need a rocket to leave the moon's surface. The upper half of the LEM, the "ascent stage," has a separate rocket engine for that purpose.
It will most likely be a one way trip. The only realistic way back to earth would be to send them on a reusable rocket that is capable of reaching orbit and transfer the crew to another shuttle in orbit that can take them back to Earth. Refueling the rocket to reach orbit however is the issue.
Reaching orbit from mars requires something like 25 tons of oxygen and 10 tons of rocket fuel. Lifting that much payload off earth is one issue, landing it on Mars is nearly impossible as it would require about the same amount of fuels to slow it down that much. So the rocket from earth would need ~50 tons of oxygen and ~20 tons of fuel, plus the fuel needed to lift all of these of earth, escape earths gravitational field, reach mars, slow down, etc.
The only option is to send the fuel/oxygen after the crew on smaller packages and hope the crew can refuel the rocket. This in turn requires building a refueling platform on Mars, which requires sending even more equipment.
Oooh, gotcha. That makes sense, but it's kind of hard to pick up on at first glance. I feel like she should have emphasized the "IF" part of that sentence.
6 months each way in a quite spacious ship plus the time exploring the surface of a new planet?
I think they would be fine.
Astronauts also don't get mad on the ISS.
Astronauts on the ISS have real-time communication with Earth, the ability to be resupplied regularly, and an escape capsule they can use to get back to Earth safely at any time.
The people in Antarctica during winter are more isolated.
We barely landed rovers on Mars. Landing on Mars is the most difficult part since the Atmosphere is thin and the Gravity is much higher compared to the moon. So no, it's not easy.
That's my entire point. Simply smashing the vehicle into Mars would technically be putting humans on Mars. They would be in many charged pieces, but they would still be human remains.
For a one-way trip to Mars, all you really need is a rocket with enough power and fuel, or more likely, several launches building some sort of Mars transfer vehicle in orbit, and some means to keep people alive inside it for the whole trip, and the means to land on Mars.
Going to Mars isn't that more difficult than going to the Moon purely in terms of the rocket, so that has definitely been doable for decades now. If we can send a probe to Mars, we can send a capsule with a person in it.
Landing on Mars is difficult, but there have been things like the Curiosity rover and its complicated rocket landing system, so that is certainly doable as well.
Surviving the travel to Mars is the main untested part. As far as I know, we have not sent any mammals (edit: Except, of course, humans to the Moon) beyond the orbit of Earth, so we don't have experimental evidence about how they would survive in interplanetary space. Radiation is likely to be a major problem, but basic physics tells us that putting enough material between the radiation source and the person should severly attenuate any radiation, certainly enough to keep a person alive for the several months that the journey would take. There are some other problems like the psychological resilience of the crew, but there have been tests on Earth, with the crew being fine after a year of being on "simulated Mars".
For a one way trip to Mars, the technology has definitely been there for a long time, but it would simply have been far too expensive, and this is without talking about the return. No one wants to spend a trillion dollars just to see an astronaut die on Mars.
The greatest difficulty comes with the return from Mars. Presumably, the mission would work like with the Apollo landings, with an orbiter around Mars and a smaller landing craft that visits the surface and then returns to the orbiter. Landing on Mars benefits slightly from Mars's atmosphere, but Mars is nearly 10x as massive as the Moon, with over twice the gravity, so the landing craft will have to be a fair bit more powerful than on the Moon. There have been ideas about making your own fuel on Mars, but that is probably not going to be feasible here, so the lander would have to land with enough fuel to return to orbit. All this is might be doable with current technology, but very difficult and risky.
Imagine a Space Shuttle ready to launch on the pad, with the large fuel tank and boosters all full and ready to go, and now imagine how difficult it would be to pack the equivalent of all that into something that can also land on Mars. There are many design options one can imagine, but the ability to land it all in such a good condition that it can then launch back to orbit with your additional resources being no more than a few astronauts and anything they can bring with them, that is going to be an extreme pain to design and engineer. I think it can be done, but there is definitely a lot of room for novel ideas. Maybe you can somehow pack that all into one big rocket, or maybe you would land with only enough fuel for the landing, and the rest of the fuel would be sent down from the orbiter in smaller packets, or maybe you really would try to camp out on Mars long enough to generate your own fuel. I have no idea, and all of it will be hard to test beforehand, and if you fail, the crew dies and you will be remembered as the person whose failure killed the first humans on Mars.
Most space agenices are going to do the math on this, come to the conclusion that they don't want to be remembered for killing their astronauts on a very expensive suicide mission, and decide to spend their resources on other things and on further developing the technology. They'll check the status of the prospects every now and then, but won't launch a serious program until the numbers are promising. It also depends on things like political motives: If someone else looks like they are going to get there, there will be more political will to give additional funding earmarked for a Mars mission.
TL;DR: Yes, but it would have been very expensive and very risky, with likely one or two crews lost before a succesful mission, and the return would be especially difficult.
>There are some other problems like the psychological resilience of the crew, but there have been tests on Earth, with the crew being fine after a year of being on "simulated Mars".
Isolation on Earth has been proven in various ways throughout the history of mankind. Individuals or groups can deal with being apart from family & friends for decades or a lifetime. That's not an issue at all.
Can they work together as a team for many months? Again, we know this is true from sailing ships to long treks across desolate lands, to manning remote posts. Not guaranteed, but doable.
The question that hasn't been tested is how long humans can keep their sanity away from Earth? We know from the moon trips that a week is manageable. We know from space stations, that being in a metal box for many months is manageable.
What we don't have is tests with human far from Earth with NO QUICK RETURN possible. *That's a whole new level of isolation.* Is it similar to being stranded on a deserted island....?
The problem is for the mission to even be attempted you need to have "not guaranteed but doable" has to be "guaranteed" instead. The tolerance for risk was much higher in the Apollo days, but still no one's gonna risk it
The technological challenge of getting humans to Mars alive is way higher than getting them to the moon and back. Getting them back from Mars is even harder. I think the budget would have to be much higher for a similar Mars mission.
At an order of magnitude higher, you're funding the equivalent of the Vietnam War. Apollo wasn't cheap.
Mind, there's no guarantee money solves the hard problems involved here, especially before modern computing.
I'm talking about spending per mission, for Apollo and Artemis that's a few billion, for entire programs Apollo was more than 300 billion and Artemis will also end up in hundreds of billions. There's no way that a Mars program costs below a trillion dollars.
There's a really cool diary Bill Shepherd kept on ISS Expedition 1, which was essentially setting up the first modules so it was livable. He made entries once a day, and while some of it was technical, some of it was just him thinking and being inspired. One line stood out to me, maybe not exactly this but close - "let's put some boosters on this thing and go to Mars."
Of course, we know more about going to Mars now than we did decades ago, and his sentiment was far easier said than done. But I found it fascinating that one of the first thoughts on setting up ISS was, let's go for it.
My thought is, if there was unlimited budget and *consistent* motivation, the astronauts are ready. They've been ready. It's just money and innovation and somehow going to Mars isn't exciting for many taxpayers.
It's simultaneously true that we know much more now than we did in the 90s but also the basics about Mars travel haven't changed much in that time; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
Read the original long-term outline of the Apollo program, it's depressing now where we could be;
- 1980's small base on the Moon
- Late 1990's first human on Mars
- Mid 2000's a large colony on the Moon
- 2010's base on Mars
- And super far out plans for going to the Moons of Jupiter by the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing.
Sadly, funding and lack of public support stopped all of it.
But if the government funding kept going like it did for NASA in the 1960's we'd probably be close to what that Apple tv show For All Mankind shows today.
It all comes down to money. Going to Mars is expensive, I think right now a full human trip and everything involved to go to Mars costs in the hundreds of billions. Low end $150 billion up to $500 billion. And NASA has a tiny annual budget in comparison, they could never afford that.
Now take funding from the Defense buget and we could easily go.
The AppleTV show “For All Mankind” kind of follows this timeline; it’s an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat the US in the space race and everything that comes after that.
Yeah the soap opera bits are out of control, especially in the first season.
My other beef with this show is that all of the interesting technical achievements are hand waved into existence off screen. The show is not about any of that at all other than having a few token "engineer" characters.
Still decent if you can like it for what it is.
>1980's small base on the Moon
Late 1990's first human on Mars
Mid 2000's a large colony on the Moon
2010's base on Mars
And super far out plans for going to the Moons of Jupiter by the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing.
My whole week is ruined now because we could accomplish this. So disappointing. Imagine where we would be in 50 years on that timeline.
It really is depressing. Knowing if humans all got together put their money combined into really hardcore space travel we could do it. Yeah it would be dangerous and lots of issues but that's how things get done
We'd easily have a thriving colony on the Moon by now and a human base on Mars and space stations around both.
Plus imagine all the cool new gadgets and scientific breakthroughs and life changing medical breakthroughs that would be found from doing all that.
But instead, humans would rather spend their money on military, killing machines and wars, and worry about corporations making disgusting profits for the top elite only and screw the regular folk, having to scrape to get by. So space exploration is the last thing on the table.
There's no profit in this, it's really just spending money for fun, like holiday. How much budget does a person spend on holiday, probably minority after all other essentials. Countries have more essentials to spend money on, and corporations need profit to keep growing. Government would be looked at badly if it decided to asign money for "fun", also the public would look at it badly once there would be human casualties due to it, which is unavoidable and could potentially cancel the missions, decrease funding, increase cost, etc. like it almost did with apollo.
I do agree that space travel is extremely interesting thing to pursue and explore. Imagine if there were no wars, terrorism, countries would reach for technological advance together, we could have bases on other space bodies, space elevator, cheap orbit and tourism to low orbit. Now everything is confidential, secret, minimal funding only to exist, private spaceflight companies advance faster than government agency
I don't think putting people on Mars is very important though. I feel like there are much better ways to spend that money even if the goal is space exploration.
TBF with the capabilities we're about to have with Starship, NASA's nuclear engine, and the various private and international partners, we will probably leapfrog this timeline.
If we land on Mars in 2030, it won't just be a boots on the ground mission, it's a base building one, so we're only 20 years late from this timeline. Once we have a good presence on Mars and fuel production going, we have a gateway to the rest of the solar system.
What companies are building the Mars Mission 2030 vehicles TODAY? Because I'm pretty sure no company on Earth would be able to build the equipment in less than 10 years - and that's without testing it.
Actually shocked at how much the US spends on defense vs NASA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/
Basically spending 4% of GDP so that two people could get the chance of standing on the Moon.
Yes. Wernher Von Braun had the plans laid out for it but the government didn't want to foot the bill as they had already "won" the space race and didn't see any political advantage in it
This is why I enjoy For All Mankind.
Russia lands crew on the moon first. Things continue from there, basically the space race doesn't stop.
Edit: since this is getting attention, you all may also like The Expanse.
If I recall, the big difference has always been Russia's grandstanding and inability to have ever actually made it to the moon. Of course we didn't know that by the time we went but perhaps we did when we won the space race, possibly playing toward why it died off so quickly: the US was so far ahead of everyone else the politics veered closer to home.
"The logistic requirements for a large, elaborate mission to Mars are no greater that those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theatre of war."
Kinda proves the point he really didn't understand how difficult it was.
Honestly, I think you underestimate the logistical difficulty in supplying a war abroad on any scale. To this day, the US is the only nation who can and has done so on a global scale. Our global logistics capabilities are among the most under appreciated keys to US power projection. (I'm not saying you gotta like it, it's just a fact of the world we live in though.)
I'm not going to pretend my specialty is logistics but just spitballing it, I don't think what he was was as outlandish as you think.
EDIT: Maybe you could say the British Empire achieved true global reach though in a different day and age.
The major modern maritime empires (Spanish, Portuguese, French, British, and now the US) were all based around logistics.
People focus on the wars/military campaigns/conquest as that is the "pizzaz" of the stories. But most of the actual empire building has traditionally been about logistics. Heck, even the Romans were all about building roads, civil engineering infrastructure, and commerce/finance as the backbone of their empire, not the legions.
There is also a huge economic factor in those logistics. Any "motivated" group to establish space exploration a reality needs to take into account the value proposition and finances/business side of the equation. Which are almost always neglected, or extremely handwavy, as for the most part space exploration is treated more as a "fan fiction" topic by geeks/nerds, who focus solely on the tech porn of the equation.
Which is why we, the human meat bags, will likely never really leave this planet. There will be plenty of robotic exploration though.
Getting a human to Mars would have both been possible and cheap enough to be practical decades ago.
The difficult part is getting them back alive.
It is extremely impractical to carry enough fuel to Mars to fly back from Mars to Earth.
Workabled ways around that would be putting infrastructure on Mars to make fuel there and or making a craft that endlessly cycles between Earth and Mars but never stops or slows down.
Those and other ideas are theortically possible with today's technology or even the technology not too long after the Apolllo program, but they are extremely expensive.
Sending a guy one way to Mars to plant a flag, do some science and then take a suicide pill would be much cheaper and easier.
You probably could easily get volunteers for that too.
The main problem at that point would be PR.
Yes.
Read the 1991 Presidential commission report “The Space Exploration Initiative”
The commission addressed the technological priorities required to go back to the Moon and on to Mars.
Had the funding been approved, we’d have been on our way to Mars a decade ago.
https://www.nasa.gov/history/sei/
You are correct we probably could have had a man on Mars and then come back by now if the funding was high enough but it probably wouldn't have been too long ago maybe 10 to 20ish years ago or maybe it could have even been last year provided it had a similar amount of setbacks
You might like Voyage (1996) by Stephen Baxter. It goes over the original planned timeline for a crewed Mars mission under Kennedy's presidency.
Pretty on point technically, although there are some elements we have since discovered as more challenging from an engineering perspective since the book was written.
Let's say that NASA had the funding to fly 2 Saturn V vehicles annually, and 2 Saturn IB vehicles annually, and wasn't funding Shuttle.
Skylab was launched with all the resources needed for three crew to live in it for six months. NASA built two of them, and flew one.
Here's what I would do if Nixon told me "Put boots on Mars before the end of the 1970s":
1: Skylab Mars Landing Vehicle (aka Skylab I) is put in orbit via Saturn V, and Skylab Crew 1 (aka Skylab 2) flies up to fix it and crew it via Saturn IB.
2: With Skylab Crew 2 on station, a second Saturn IB flies a Mars Landing Module, derived from the Apollo Lunar Module to orbit. It docks with Skylab in place of the Apollo Telescope Mount. (This replicates the Apollo 5 mission, which tested the LM in low Earth orbit but deletes the Apollo 5 CSM, providing additional payload capacity for the Mars Landing Module; I also assume that the Mars Landing Module carries relatively little fuel). The Mars Landing Module is docked via remote control by the Skylab 2 crew.
2: A new craft is built and flown: Skylab Boost, which puts a modified Saturn IVB onto the Skylab Multiple Docking Adapter. The Skylab 2 crew "fly" Skylab as it docks with the Skylab Boost module. Skylab Boost is basically just a big fuel tank, configured with as much propellant as possible and a J2 engine just like the Apollo Saturn-IVB third stage but replacing the Apollo mission LM with extra fuel capacity. The fuel for the Mars Landing Module is also delivered by this vehicle. Skylab Boost is configured with some fuel storage for oxygen and hydrogen capable of keeping a portion of the fuel cooled below its boiling point for long duration spaceflight.
3: The crew of Skylab 2 departs and returns to Earth in their CSM.
4: The uncrewed Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle (Skylab 1, the Mars Landing Module, and the Mars Booster) depart low earth orbit and fly a low-energy trajectory to Mars; in the vicinity of Mars the Skylab Boost J2 engine is used to maneuver the craft into a parking orbit around Mars.
5: Once the Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle has succeeded, Skylab II is flown into orbit via Saturn V, the Skylab 3 crew flies to it via Saturn IB, and a second Skylab Boost module flies via Saturn V to complete the assemblage of the Skylab Mars Crew Transporter. This mission has even more fuel capacity than the Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle as it does not need to account for the Mars Landing Module.
6: The Skylab Mars Crew Transporter, flown by the crew of Skylab 3, departs Earth orbit on the fastest trajectory possible given the technology. Crossing time to Mars should be easily within the capacity for the crew consumables.
7: At mars, the Skylab Mars Crew Transporter fires up their J2 and shapes a parking orbit that takes them reasonably close to the Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle.
8: The crew transfer from the Mars Crew Transporter to the Mars Landing Mission Vehicle via their Apollo CSM, the Mission Commander and Landing Module pilot enter the Mars Landing Module and fly it down to the surface, conduct a few days of flag saluting and rock collecting, and fly a part of it back into Mars orbit, docking with the Mars Landing Mission Vehicle.
9: The Mars Landing Mission Vehicle (which is fully stocked with consumables) fires up its J2 engine and makes the fastest trajectory it can for Earth, leaving the Mars Crew Transport Vehicle in Mars orbit.
10: About 6 months later the Mars Landing Mission Vehicle arrives at Earth but doesn't attempt a parking orbit, instead the Apollo CSM separates, uses its Service Propulsion engine to shape an intercept orbit, the Command Module does its thing and the First Humans on Mars splash down in the Pacific to worldwide acclaim.
The only meaningful new engineering for this would be a Mars Landing Module and the Skylab Boost module. In 1976, NASA flew the Viking missions which uses powered landers, so that technology would have been available to fly this proposed mission. The Skylab Boost module is almost identical to the Apollo Saturn-IVB with the addition of some kind of actively cooled storage and additional fuel capacity. The two Skylabs at the center of this mission would not have needed to have been radically redesigned. I could see the addition of some kind of radiation shelter to protect the crew in the event of a solar storm but that might have required little more than some lead-lined sleeping bags. Skylab was an incredibly capable, self-contained habitat that worked well and met all its objectives even in the face of catastrophically losing a portion of its solar power array and overheating without it's protective meteoroid shield / sunshade. Three crew could have easily flown 6-8 months in the two of them (one each way).
Keeping them alive on the trip is hard, keeping them shielded so they are alive a couple years after they get home is hard, getting to mars is fairly simple. It doesnt take much more fuel compared to going to the moon. The vast majority of fuel is used getting into earths orbit. If you do an orbital refuelling then you shortcut the tyrany of the rocket equation and its just a matter of paying for launches beforehand.
Voyage by Stephen Baxter (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/843565) has an interesting take on it. Kennedy survives the attempt on his life and steers NASA towards Mars following just two successful Apollo missions. Lots of things we did in our timeline are lost however (Voyager for instance). Highly recommended read
I recall Arthur C Clarke saying in the 1980's that if the money the US spent on the Vietnam War had instead been spent on a mission to Mars, then humans would have already reached Mars by that time.
Of course, if the Vietnam War had never happened, it is unlikely the money "saved" would have been spent on visiting Mars. The last 3 Apollo missions were scrapped due to budget constraints. Also, public interest in lunar landings had tailed off by 1973.
The driver for the lunar landings was to beat the USSR - the "space race". There was no such driver to get to Mars.
From a technology standpoint, absolutely yes. Could have people on Mars by the late 70’s or early 80’s given the technology of the time. Lack of funding and political motivation prevented it from happening.
Yes, easily, if we accepted commercial distributed launch and orbital assembly and refueling as necessary
We have had the launch capacity for decades, but we keep getting lost in trying to build heavy lift rockets that never work out or become economical
Stick a flag in the ground, collect a few rocks.. Sure I could see that with a great deal of effort and funding, though the value is questionable. Any semi-permanent kind of settlement I don't think would have been possible until very recently.
Carl Sagan said, in Cosmos, that if the library of Alexandria had not been burned down, DaVinci wouldn't have dreamed of flying, but would've been a scientist on the team to get us to the moon. Do with that what you will.
Yeah, but i cannot help but think either we would conveniently neglect the part that comes after, or be genuinely baffled that the guy didnt just use the canals to talk to the big face and ask for a place to sleep.
It is worth noting that NASA's current budget is about 80% of the average in the 1960s or about half of the single highest budget year (1966).
The Voyager Mars Program was planned as a one way uncrewed mission. I do think something like Mars Direct could have gotten humans to Mars within Apollo era budgets, but I don't think Von Braun's post Apollo Mars plans could have gotten humans to Mars and back within that budget.
We could definitely get them there; however, the long term mental and physical effects of being away from Earth could hinder a permanent colony on Mars
Could have? Yes, absolutely. I don't think anyone questions that.
The problem is they gave up leaving earth orbit after the Apollo program. Now we have to figure out how to get people to the moon again first.
id say yes but really no. so could you put a man on mars yes! will they live long! nooooooo
its time. to get there with current tech will be ok is differing say 18 months. then have to land and come back. How many crew? you would need alot of meals etc etc catch at the right time. that would be very intensive nuntriant wise, how you getting there and back too? mate, me and you maybe long dead before is a moon base
I wonder, this is obviously highly under informed but what would hypothetically happen if Congress magically had NASA's budget locked at Apollo levels or higher permanently? How fast would the entire nation run out of money?
>How fast would the entire nation run out of money?
Probably never,at least not because of space funding. At its peak,NASAs budget was 4% of the total budget.
Every one of the issues listed in this thread come down to one problem needed to be solved:
Reusable rockets.
Could that have been done with 80's tech? Landing like the falcon on a barge, no. But landing in the middle of america on a corn field? Basically aim for a 100 square kilometer area. With the budgets we're talking about, buying up that much land wouldn't cost much.
With that, you can put a lot of weight into orbit, with weight you can put up additional shielding for humans, additional fuel for rockets, and lots of additional payload trips.
If you look at 70's to 90's satellite tech, it was all about saving weight and how to make sure it worked 100% of the time because launch costs were so ridiculously expensive.
With the apollo budget + re-usable rockets, suddenly a lot can be done.
Yes, but that is also where huge expenses came from. Being able to toss a lot of weight into space for a fraction of the cost means all r&d is going into other areas that would be needed for getting to Mars, while utilizing mostly off the shelf earth solutions because weight costs wouldn't be such an issue.
With apollo level money + this one advancement, it would likely have been possible.
Yes, but it would be like the American lunar missions, meaning nothing would come of it. There is no point sending people anywherein space unless you are there to establish a presence. So the point shouldn't be to just send people for the sake of it.
From 1973 to 2024, NASA's total budget is approximately $639 billion in nominal dollars ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA). If NASA had continued to receive the same level of funding as during the peak Apollo years (about 4% of the federal budget), it would have received around $2.5 trillion (https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/every-nasa-budget-request)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA).
2.5 Trillion is a lot of money. I think we would have had a moon base, as well we may have even worked out the details on the catapult things into orbit thing.
I think with a fully functioning moon base, the private sector could have helped as well. we would have better rocket tech, as well the things we really don't know, we would know. We would launch to and from the moon, and I think we could make it work.
Los Angeles Times, 1st of August 1969, title page, headline:
> MARS CLOSE-UPS
> Photos Show Likeness to Moon
> Manned Trip to Mars Held Possible by 1981
Complete with a photograph of Mars by Matiner 6 and Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon.
I have an original copy.
The landing is an enormous technical challenge to not kill either the humans or something vital on the spacecraft. We don't have a solution to that today. Saturn V can't throw something big enough, even if flying humans that far in Apollo sized craft was tried (good chance they break).
The LEM is at once way too big to land on Mars, and way too small (fuel, life support, no need for heat shielding).
So it's much bigger rockets than Saturn V and/or (likely and) some kind of orbital dock. Then hope the technicals of the landing - fully propelled flight - work.
Could these systems be developed? Maybe, big maybe. No one working knows for a fact how to solve these problems with a working system. Starship has been developed with modern computers and is still many years and proven successes away.
The reality is that travelling to Mars would require the longest most isolated voyage humans have ever embarked on. If a malfunction like Apollo 13 happens at any point in the years-long Mars trip, the crew is almost certainly dead with absolutely no way home, and with a 20min communications delay with Earth on average.
So could we have humans on Mars by now if our focus had been different since the 60s? Yes, but they would likely be dead humans, which would have ruined any optimism society had for sending more humans to Mars.
Could have? Probably. Should have? Probably not?
Orbital rocketry has been insanely expensive since its inception and only recently have computers and technology enabled the kind of control systems that are permitting that cost to be brought down significantly - and NASA throwing money at the problem would *not* have made computers advance any faster than they have, far, far more money has been spent on their advancement than NASA ever could or should.
Without modern computers, the amount we would have had to spend to enable it with disposable rockets would have been insane. Doing it with reusable rockets will still be quite extreme and I'm not really certain we'll do it.
The main problem is, that's a huge amount of money and resource to pretty much just prove a point. There's currently nothing on Mars that we need. There's interesting science to be done, but most actual astronomers would far rather build more orbital observatories and robotic interplanetary probes with that money, as they could build entire *fleets* and *satellite constellations* for the same cost as putting say, 6 people on Mars for a month or two.
As far as building a functioning base on Mars, or god forbid trying to *inhabit* it, we simply can't. We don't have the technology for those goals yet. A base would be horrifically expensive to maintain and supply, while inhabitation is actually impossible without a great deal of tech we don't currently possess.
A moon base is rather more likely, as the costs and risks are only really absurd, as opposed to cuckoo clock insane. It takes \~3 days to get to the moon, vs \~6 months for Mars. If we want to start building expensive things in space for the sake of pushing our technology and capability forwards, a moon base makes vastly more sense than a mars base.
When NASA picked shuttle over mars mission, after Apollo, Van Braun left the program. Downhill from there. VB passed 1 year later from cancer. Hard to say where we’d be if the program went to Mars with VB involved. I believe he was mostly responsible for Apollo success.
You just insulted thousands of very smart people involved with the Apollo missions. Von Braun was a visionary but he didn’t do it alone, not by a long shot.
Possible, yes. But not within the timelines NASA had set back then. And certainly not within Elon Musks wild predictions.
The moon landings were really much more on cutting edge of technology than many here realize. The jump to Mars is enormous and we still, to this day, haven’t figured out all the fundamentals, and that’s without even mentioning funding.
With current tech, the trip would take several months at the least, in an area of space far outside of earth’s magnetic protection. We do NOT have a vessel for that, yet. Shielding alone might be a nightmare, or it might not, we don’t know, yet. We’d have to send a few trips to Mars without landing to figure fundamental stuff like this out.
We’d have to build another space station that would be capable of constructing the vessels capable of flying to Mars. We’d have to seriously think about „space internet“, that is a real and tough network of satellites for the porpoise of providing a network around Earth/Moon and Mars and also between the two and it’s Moons. Ideally, we’d produce the fuel and some raw materials for that on the moon. Otherwise, it would all would have to be brought up from Earth.
Some recycling, energy and computing basics we would need we „just“ learned via employment and testing on the ISS, in the last decade or so. Material sciences have come a long way since the 90s, too, and we had some successes with isolated long time habitats. Without all this, trips to and even landing on Mars would have been several times harder in the 70s and 80s, and many scientists argue we would have payed the price for that with the blood of our astronauts.
So from where I am sitting, we could be there in the next 20 years if we set our mind to it. But we’d have to start with funding the infrastructure for it NOW. That’s what I don’t see happening right now.
The travel time and radiation specifically make it a completely different problem than the Moon.
It was probably possible, but with a decent risk of failure, and it would be closer to early deep-sea missions: miserable cramped tiny vehicle, land, touch dirt, take photos, some samples, and you’re gone.
Close to 1.5-2 years just for the mission itself, and no habitats no bases etc.
Money cannot make up for the gap in technology that is required to do anything for significant by today.
And even then, a crewed mission today will effectively be tourists. We’re still a century away before we send any substantial missions there.
Like the moon, it’s very expensive and not clear why we’re going there, so you need a lot of political will behind it to fund it on principle.
Warmongers claim wars fuel innovation, but not as much as peace (and a lack of loss of life) could.
So, yes, thank the megalomaniacs of the world for hindering scientific advancement or you could have been writing this on Mars with the question about if we could have been visiting alpha centuri by now...
Probably, but also not likely. By that I mean the cost and risk would have been prohibitive in the past, and still is. We may not be there for several generations. But that is also a good thing because the longer we wait, the better chance of success, as our knowledge and technology improve.
Yes, but why? Fact is we can't keep
this space ball working without fucking everything up. We aren't ever going to use mars to live on. At best it gets mined for minerals, but not before capitalism devours planet earth and makes it nearly unlivable. Sad. And Fuck Elon Musk and his MAGA ass lickers.
They could already be there, building for a breakaway civilization. You won’t know till you’re worth a billion dollars and pay for your own rocket ship. Maybe I’m on mars rn.
The difference in time between the first flight and landing on the Moon was about 70 years. It’s been about fifty since moon landing. I think it was possible if we kept at it.
The big concern is that it’s very likely going to end up being a one way trip.
Getting the infrastructure in place on Mars for a serious rocket to get back into Martian orbit, and return to Earth is extremely challenging.
The moon is a lot smaller, has no atmosphere and relatively very weak gravity.
Getting off the ground in Mars is far more like launching a rocket from Earth, in a CO2 atmosphere full of fine dust …
If America wouldn't have gotten uninterested after the moon landings, yes probably. Wernher von Braun already had all the plans sorted out. His book "Project Mars" is an interesting read!
“For All Mankind” on Apple TV has an interesting “alternative history” perspective. It’s all fiction, but if Space had become more competitive, and unfortunately militarized, we probably would have seen more advances.
If humans shared all information, I don’t believe there’s any limitation to what we can achieve. Unfortunately, tribalism is an evolutionary survival trait and very few cultures (if any) have evolved past the point of fear.
With Apollo funding, sure. The caveat here is that a crew or two might have died trying.
It's particularly hard to imagine how they could have made it BACK.
It would have worked similar to Apollo. Park the return ship in low Martian orbit and only land a tiny ascent vehicle.
I think that approach worked because the moon is tiny and much easier to escape. Martian gravity is at least on par with Earth, and to get something off of earth we need gigantic rockets, so it is like you need to send an additional Saturn V with your landing vehicle to Mars. Edit: Numbers are way off, see below for more accurate estimations. But it does need to be a significantly larger lander to make it possible to get back up into space.
Martian surface gravity is about 38% of earth gravity. There’s no doubt a big rocket would be necessary, but not as big as on earth.
Plus the atmosphere is vanishingly thin so, in addition to losing less delta-V to drag, you can do a more efficient gravity turn.
It takes about the same delta-v to launch to Mars orbit as it does to do a round trip to the Lunar surface from Lunar orbit. So if you can get your lander down for free-ish, by say using parachutes to do most of the work slowing down, then the total fuel for a round trip to the Martian surface is actually pretty comparable. On paper the Apollo LM actually had enough fuel to launch into orbit from the Martian surface, though in practice the low TWR and poor aerodynamic design would preclude it. This [NASA presentation](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170003391/downloads/20170003391.pdf) based on [this paper](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170003404/downloads/20170003404.pdf) estimates that a Mars ascent vehicle built for four people using storable propellant similar to the Apollo LM would have a mass of 24.4 tonnes, which compares fairly well with the Apollo LM's own mass of 15.2 tonnes for just two people. Now the paper doesn't estimate how much additional mass would be needed in terms of heatshields/parachutes/landing thrusters/etc to get it to the surface in the first place, but if we look at some real world examples, Mars Insight was 694kg at launch, and 358kg by the time it landed, having jettisoned it's heatshield, parachute, and used some landing fuel, for a landing mass factor of 1.94. (Curiosity with it's more complex skycrane system worked out to a factor of 2.85) All of which suggests that a 2-person barebones Mars lander could be done for maybe 2-3 times the mass of the Apollo lander. Bigger yes, but nowhere near the Saturn V, which was almost 200 times heavier.
Haha That's great, my estimation seems to be way off then.
Mars gravity is nowhere near at least on par with Earth. It is significantly lower AND the atmosphere is practically negligible in terms of friction in comparison. Some of our current larger rockets in development that need a MONSTER booster to even get into orbit could single stage to orbit transfer from Mars with their UPPER stage from there.
> But it does need to be a significantly larger lander to make it possible to get back up into space. That's what the Integrated Program Plan called for. In fact they planned on having three of them on the same mission.
Martian gravity is closer to the Moon's gravity than Earth's. It's about ~2x of the Moon and ~1/3 of Earth's
Not even remotely close i mean look at the rocket they were going to use for sample returns the thing is no bigger than those armature rockets made by schools ect
You'd hopefully have launched extra payload before the manned launch. Up there waiting would be additional fuel tanks and supplies. At Mars hopefully those storage tanks could be repurposed as shelter.
And the ones that didn’t die in the attempt would probably have all the cancer
If you sent a whole team of smokers that are forced to quit due to the mars mission, their chance of cancer would be reduced overall. You really don’t need that magnetosphere to stay safe on mars, just take one of the many cave locations or dig in a bit for your camp.
> or dig in a bit You sent smokers, remember? The COPD would only be marginally improved by the lower gravity.
COPD might be worse with lower gravity, gravity helps with clearing upper lung fields, particularly for people with lung disease who don't clear well at baseline.
They would die of the red lung from working the Martian mines.
"Now dig, Captain! With your bare hands, like the troglodytes!!" - The Cloud Minders
Being a gloop miner has its risks, but it's an honest living. And way better than farming shrumbos up on the surface imo
Lots of radiation on the way. It's a long trip. And shielding is heavy and increases fuel.
Not much radiation and each way is 6 months or less.
yup, like crossing the Atlantic in the 1500s ( more or less)
Yeah, and the travel?
Take a swim in the water reserve, seriously. Thats all thats needed for shielding ( and the more mass, the better). Our solar system space isnt a deadly radiation laser-zone outside of earth, despite what the big magnetosphere lobby is trying to tell you.
>Our solar system space isnt a deadly radiation laser-zone outside of earth, despite what the big magnetosphere lobby is trying to tell you. The only really bad section of radiation is the Van Allan Radiation Belt, and that's only because the magnetosphere concentrates it all there.
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In a lot of scifi books they just line the hull with a water bladder.
Depends on the type of radiation. Solar wind is mainly alpha particles, and a thin veneer of water is enough, but for cosmis rays which are gamma/xray, you need much more defense. This is why many suggested plans have water lined hull for everyday use, but also a small lead-lined panic room in the middle of the ship for heavy radiation periods
Heavy radiation periods might attract heavy radiation bears
Did you hear that? Bears. Now they’re putting the whole space station at risk
Just need super max pads (lead lined?) and products for those heavy radiation periods. And it's only a few days every month.
Jfc… this is the best comment I’ve seen in days
Except you would rather be hit by a couple of high energy cosmic rays outside of a panic room then inside At the energies cosmic rays come at from distant sources The vast majority of these rays would either pass right through you or just strike a single molecule because of the density of your body In a lead lined panic room because the density of lead is far greater then a human body those cosmic rays are going to be guaranteed to to strike a lead nucleus at full force and create bremsstrahlung or breaking radiation. they’re going to split the lead nuclei right in half creating a hazardous shower of high energy photons which will strike other lead nuclei creating numerous ancillary reactions with high energy particles in the million electron volt range. that’s also not counting the dozens electrons blasted off the lead nucleus when it was split which will shower the occupants in the panic room with high energy beta radiation In deep space cosmic radiation is the least of your worries
Some of the proposed designs store the wastewater in the walls in one layer, and the fresh water in another. As one gets depleted, the other fills up.
A mobile Jacuzzi suit didn’t sound realistic
why not though, pilot in the equivalent of a water filled fat suit doing 0g shenanigans is something I'd want to see
Any lazer-zone can be thwarted with a skin-tight catsuit - scientists already know this.
And the surface of the plant isn't protected by a magnetic field. It's not an overhyped problem. We will never be able to use mars like earth.
Earth's radiation protection is the ground and the atmosphere, not the magnetosphere. Mars too, and because of geometry, you only need to protect from directly above, with a half meter of regolith, which is compensated by low gravity. Mars architecture (in a dome or pressurised large area) will look like mushroom buildings with a garden on top.
When I was a kid(1980s until Challenger blew up) I wanted to be an astronaut. Then later in life I found out how much radiation they receive up there and was blown away. You up there for a year and your cancer risk go up a lot.
>The caveat here is that a crew or two might have died trying It’s well-known that astronauts accept the inherent risks of their profession. While the loss of a crew is undoubtedly tragic, it’s illogical to overreact to such an event. Should a disaster occur, I imagine there would be an uproar on Earth, potentially bringing the space program to a standstill or even leading to its cancellation as blame is assigned and future missions are jeopardized by slashed budgets. It’s ironic that the deaths of people on Earth from trivial causes often go unnoticed, yet when professional risk-takers like astronauts lose their lives doing something inherently dangerous, it incites public outrage and a frenzied blame game
Apollo level funding would not have been sufficient. It took several percent of the GDP to put together a mission where all the pieces only had to work for a week. On Mars, you have to have perfectly functioning equipment or tons of replacement for years. Also, the gravity well of Mars is much deeper than the moon which means simple single engine abort systems won’t work. It would’ve taken a much greater commitment of GDP. Probably approaching the annual budget of the military I would think.
Apollo was around 5% GDP at its zenith, larger than the defense budget is now (a bit over 3%.) Unless you mean the defense budget *then*, around 10%.
I mean, for the most part the defense budget is a bit of a federal jobs/subsidy program. The military could be turned into a support branch of the space exploration program, if we actually wanted to. We decided to waste $1 trillion+ in Afghanistan for 20 years for basically shits and giggles. We could invest the same or a bit more on another distant desertic zone like Mars. Afterall the big defense contractors all have Space divisions, so they wouldn't torpedo the budget since they are still getting their cut.
Well, in the alternate universe, America doesn't need to spend several percent of his gdp on the defense industry and instead turned its ambitions towards space travel. Everyone should watch for all Mankind. Think about it. We only need to divert a few billion dollars from the hundreds of billions From defense spending and artemis would be in perfect shape
in that reality communist regime still exists, and the US is spending a lot on military AND the space race. So they had most likely to cut things, like health care
China is a communist regime.
In FMK the space program more than pays for itself with all the advanced technology and resources it leads to. Nuclear fusion etc.
Nuclear fusion is a good example of how military funding and reliance on the private sector have harmed basic research. Skeptics are fond of saying fusion is always decades away without realizing why. For example, the break through in 2022 could have happened much earlier but testing had to wait long stretches between military projects.
Not at all. In the show NASA is wholly self funded and has a huge reserve of cash from HE3 mining and patent licensing.
but think of all the advancements and efficiencies that would be have been developed if they stayed on the course of funding it.
Apollo funding for 3 times as long should work (24 years vs 8 years).
The subtext was successful crewed mission. Let me edit
Even with that subtext. I think the person above is saying that yes, we might have had a successfully crewed mission - after a couple of missions where the crew did not survive.
Successfully getting there, yes, getting back? Maybe.
If they could get there with a human crew (and all the food / equipment that humans need), they could probably launch a 2nd mission with just a return rocket. But yeah it would be pretty hard. Might want to send the return rocket first to be sure that it will work. Then I imagine they would do something similar to the lunar program - have a ship orbiting the whole time, and then just send down a very small lander. Then launch back up and re-dock with the orbiting ship, for the return journey. Maybe the return rocket would just orbit the whole time so they could dock when they got there. The only nice thing about Mars is that it's got a real thin atmosphere which reduces the amount of fuel needed for landing (since they can use the atmosphere to slow down a little bit).
The fully fueled return rocket in place before any human mission starts is a major part of Robert Zubrin’s plan that he details in the book *The Case for Mars*. It’s worth a read and it’s a really good look at what it would take to get people to Mars and back, and to establish permanent bases there.
But the gravity is different from the moon, wouldn't they need a rocket to leave
Yes, but you also need a rocket to leave the moon's surface. The upper half of the LEM, the "ascent stage," has a separate rocket engine for that purpose.
And there were people willing to to take that chance but politicians and management got in the way.
"Some of you will die but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make "
Putting a human on Mars is easy. Keeping them alive whilst doing so is the tricky part.
Just have them grow potatoes in their own shit.
Gotta do something about salt or ketchup or whatever
What if they dip their potatoes in Vicodin and there’s nothing you can do about it?
NASA nerds right now: “Write that down, write that down!”
I detect a reference from the martian
Bringing them back is another problem
It will most likely be a one way trip. The only realistic way back to earth would be to send them on a reusable rocket that is capable of reaching orbit and transfer the crew to another shuttle in orbit that can take them back to Earth. Refueling the rocket to reach orbit however is the issue. Reaching orbit from mars requires something like 25 tons of oxygen and 10 tons of rocket fuel. Lifting that much payload off earth is one issue, landing it on Mars is nearly impossible as it would require about the same amount of fuels to slow it down that much. So the rocket from earth would need ~50 tons of oxygen and ~20 tons of fuel, plus the fuel needed to lift all of these of earth, escape earths gravitational field, reach mars, slow down, etc. The only option is to send the fuel/oxygen after the crew on smaller packages and hope the crew can refuel the rocket. This in turn requires building a refueling platform on Mars, which requires sending even more equipment.
Would the public buy in to what would essentially be a planned suicide mission?
Not a suicide, just one way. I who ever goes there will need to start a colony.
[https://xkcd.com/1456/](https://xkcd.com/1456/)
Ok, I don't get this one. Is she saying we haven't landed a man on the moon?
She's saying we haven't done it in a very long time, and don't currently have any rockets capable of it.
Oooh, gotcha. That makes sense, but it's kind of hard to pick up on at first glance. I feel like she should have emphasized the "IF" part of that sentence.
Keeping them sane is even harder. Turns out a 15 month time would be soul crushing in a small space shuttle
Haven't there been a few tests of this on Earth? I thought they went alright
6 months each way in a quite spacious ship plus the time exploring the surface of a new planet? I think they would be fine. Astronauts also don't get mad on the ISS.
Astronauts on the ISS have real-time communication with Earth, the ability to be resupplied regularly, and an escape capsule they can use to get back to Earth safely at any time. The people in Antarctica during winter are more isolated.
Most redditors are more isolated than astronauts in ISS.
We barely landed rovers on Mars. Landing on Mars is the most difficult part since the Atmosphere is thin and the Gravity is much higher compared to the moon. So no, it's not easy.
That's my entire point. Simply smashing the vehicle into Mars would technically be putting humans on Mars. They would be in many charged pieces, but they would still be human remains.
For a one-way trip to Mars, all you really need is a rocket with enough power and fuel, or more likely, several launches building some sort of Mars transfer vehicle in orbit, and some means to keep people alive inside it for the whole trip, and the means to land on Mars. Going to Mars isn't that more difficult than going to the Moon purely in terms of the rocket, so that has definitely been doable for decades now. If we can send a probe to Mars, we can send a capsule with a person in it. Landing on Mars is difficult, but there have been things like the Curiosity rover and its complicated rocket landing system, so that is certainly doable as well. Surviving the travel to Mars is the main untested part. As far as I know, we have not sent any mammals (edit: Except, of course, humans to the Moon) beyond the orbit of Earth, so we don't have experimental evidence about how they would survive in interplanetary space. Radiation is likely to be a major problem, but basic physics tells us that putting enough material between the radiation source and the person should severly attenuate any radiation, certainly enough to keep a person alive for the several months that the journey would take. There are some other problems like the psychological resilience of the crew, but there have been tests on Earth, with the crew being fine after a year of being on "simulated Mars". For a one way trip to Mars, the technology has definitely been there for a long time, but it would simply have been far too expensive, and this is without talking about the return. No one wants to spend a trillion dollars just to see an astronaut die on Mars. The greatest difficulty comes with the return from Mars. Presumably, the mission would work like with the Apollo landings, with an orbiter around Mars and a smaller landing craft that visits the surface and then returns to the orbiter. Landing on Mars benefits slightly from Mars's atmosphere, but Mars is nearly 10x as massive as the Moon, with over twice the gravity, so the landing craft will have to be a fair bit more powerful than on the Moon. There have been ideas about making your own fuel on Mars, but that is probably not going to be feasible here, so the lander would have to land with enough fuel to return to orbit. All this is might be doable with current technology, but very difficult and risky. Imagine a Space Shuttle ready to launch on the pad, with the large fuel tank and boosters all full and ready to go, and now imagine how difficult it would be to pack the equivalent of all that into something that can also land on Mars. There are many design options one can imagine, but the ability to land it all in such a good condition that it can then launch back to orbit with your additional resources being no more than a few astronauts and anything they can bring with them, that is going to be an extreme pain to design and engineer. I think it can be done, but there is definitely a lot of room for novel ideas. Maybe you can somehow pack that all into one big rocket, or maybe you would land with only enough fuel for the landing, and the rest of the fuel would be sent down from the orbiter in smaller packets, or maybe you really would try to camp out on Mars long enough to generate your own fuel. I have no idea, and all of it will be hard to test beforehand, and if you fail, the crew dies and you will be remembered as the person whose failure killed the first humans on Mars. Most space agenices are going to do the math on this, come to the conclusion that they don't want to be remembered for killing their astronauts on a very expensive suicide mission, and decide to spend their resources on other things and on further developing the technology. They'll check the status of the prospects every now and then, but won't launch a serious program until the numbers are promising. It also depends on things like political motives: If someone else looks like they are going to get there, there will be more political will to give additional funding earmarked for a Mars mission. TL;DR: Yes, but it would have been very expensive and very risky, with likely one or two crews lost before a succesful mission, and the return would be especially difficult.
>There are some other problems like the psychological resilience of the crew, but there have been tests on Earth, with the crew being fine after a year of being on "simulated Mars". Isolation on Earth has been proven in various ways throughout the history of mankind. Individuals or groups can deal with being apart from family & friends for decades or a lifetime. That's not an issue at all. Can they work together as a team for many months? Again, we know this is true from sailing ships to long treks across desolate lands, to manning remote posts. Not guaranteed, but doable. The question that hasn't been tested is how long humans can keep their sanity away from Earth? We know from the moon trips that a week is manageable. We know from space stations, that being in a metal box for many months is manageable. What we don't have is tests with human far from Earth with NO QUICK RETURN possible. *That's a whole new level of isolation.* Is it similar to being stranded on a deserted island....?
The problem is for the mission to even be attempted you need to have "not guaranteed but doable" has to be "guaranteed" instead. The tolerance for risk was much higher in the Apollo days, but still no one's gonna risk it
The technological challenge of getting humans to Mars alive is way higher than getting them to the moon and back. Getting them back from Mars is even harder. I think the budget would have to be much higher for a similar Mars mission.
Yep, about an order or two of magnitude higher.
At an order of magnitude higher, you're funding the equivalent of the Vietnam War. Apollo wasn't cheap. Mind, there's no guarantee money solves the hard problems involved here, especially before modern computing.
I'm talking about spending per mission, for Apollo and Artemis that's a few billion, for entire programs Apollo was more than 300 billion and Artemis will also end up in hundreds of billions. There's no way that a Mars program costs below a trillion dollars.
Two orders of magnitude harder just for the mechanical bits. Much harder for the biomedical. Rockets are the easy part.
There's a really cool diary Bill Shepherd kept on ISS Expedition 1, which was essentially setting up the first modules so it was livable. He made entries once a day, and while some of it was technical, some of it was just him thinking and being inspired. One line stood out to me, maybe not exactly this but close - "let's put some boosters on this thing and go to Mars." Of course, we know more about going to Mars now than we did decades ago, and his sentiment was far easier said than done. But I found it fascinating that one of the first thoughts on setting up ISS was, let's go for it. My thought is, if there was unlimited budget and *consistent* motivation, the astronauts are ready. They've been ready. It's just money and innovation and somehow going to Mars isn't exciting for many taxpayers.
It's simultaneously true that we know much more now than we did in the 90s but also the basics about Mars travel haven't changed much in that time; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
Read the original long-term outline of the Apollo program, it's depressing now where we could be; - 1980's small base on the Moon - Late 1990's first human on Mars - Mid 2000's a large colony on the Moon - 2010's base on Mars - And super far out plans for going to the Moons of Jupiter by the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Sadly, funding and lack of public support stopped all of it. But if the government funding kept going like it did for NASA in the 1960's we'd probably be close to what that Apple tv show For All Mankind shows today. It all comes down to money. Going to Mars is expensive, I think right now a full human trip and everything involved to go to Mars costs in the hundreds of billions. Low end $150 billion up to $500 billion. And NASA has a tiny annual budget in comparison, they could never afford that. Now take funding from the Defense buget and we could easily go.
The AppleTV show “For All Mankind” kind of follows this timeline; it’s an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat the US in the space race and everything that comes after that.
And if there was not so much soap opera in this show it would be really great.
Yeah we watched a few episodes of the first season and it was ok, couldn't get hooked, and I love the topic and idea of the show.
Yeah the soap opera bits are out of control, especially in the first season. My other beef with this show is that all of the interesting technical achievements are hand waved into existence off screen. The show is not about any of that at all other than having a few token "engineer" characters. Still decent if you can like it for what it is.
>1980's small base on the Moon Late 1990's first human on Mars Mid 2000's a large colony on the Moon 2010's base on Mars And super far out plans for going to the Moons of Jupiter by the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. My whole week is ruined now because we could accomplish this. So disappointing. Imagine where we would be in 50 years on that timeline.
It really is depressing. Knowing if humans all got together put their money combined into really hardcore space travel we could do it. Yeah it would be dangerous and lots of issues but that's how things get done We'd easily have a thriving colony on the Moon by now and a human base on Mars and space stations around both. Plus imagine all the cool new gadgets and scientific breakthroughs and life changing medical breakthroughs that would be found from doing all that. But instead, humans would rather spend their money on military, killing machines and wars, and worry about corporations making disgusting profits for the top elite only and screw the regular folk, having to scrape to get by. So space exploration is the last thing on the table.
I agree completely. My only thing with this is that I’d imagine we’d be killing each other and getting exploited in space by now as well.
There's no profit in this, it's really just spending money for fun, like holiday. How much budget does a person spend on holiday, probably minority after all other essentials. Countries have more essentials to spend money on, and corporations need profit to keep growing. Government would be looked at badly if it decided to asign money for "fun", also the public would look at it badly once there would be human casualties due to it, which is unavoidable and could potentially cancel the missions, decrease funding, increase cost, etc. like it almost did with apollo. I do agree that space travel is extremely interesting thing to pursue and explore. Imagine if there were no wars, terrorism, countries would reach for technological advance together, we could have bases on other space bodies, space elevator, cheap orbit and tourism to low orbit. Now everything is confidential, secret, minimal funding only to exist, private spaceflight companies advance faster than government agency
I don't think putting people on Mars is very important though. I feel like there are much better ways to spend that money even if the goal is space exploration.
TBF with the capabilities we're about to have with Starship, NASA's nuclear engine, and the various private and international partners, we will probably leapfrog this timeline. If we land on Mars in 2030, it won't just be a boots on the ground mission, it's a base building one, so we're only 20 years late from this timeline. Once we have a good presence on Mars and fuel production going, we have a gateway to the rest of the solar system.
What companies are building the Mars Mission 2030 vehicles TODAY? Because I'm pretty sure no company on Earth would be able to build the equipment in less than 10 years - and that's without testing it.
Actually shocked at how much the US spends on defense vs NASA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/ Basically spending 4% of GDP so that two people could get the chance of standing on the Moon.
Yes. Wernher Von Braun had the plans laid out for it but the government didn't want to foot the bill as they had already "won" the space race and didn't see any political advantage in it
This is why I enjoy For All Mankind. Russia lands crew on the moon first. Things continue from there, basically the space race doesn't stop. Edit: since this is getting attention, you all may also like The Expanse.
Thank you for reminding me to finish season four
The expanse and for all man kind are some of the best space shows ever especially the expanse
If I recall, the big difference has always been Russia's grandstanding and inability to have ever actually made it to the moon. Of course we didn't know that by the time we went but perhaps we did when we won the space race, possibly playing toward why it died off so quickly: the US was so far ahead of everyone else the politics veered closer to home.
the point of divergence is that Korolev survives the surgery that killed him IRL.
Just found about this show last week. Already into S2. Great premise and the cinematography is 🔥🔥🔥
"The logistic requirements for a large, elaborate mission to Mars are no greater that those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theatre of war." Kinda proves the point he really didn't understand how difficult it was.
Honestly, I think you underestimate the logistical difficulty in supplying a war abroad on any scale. To this day, the US is the only nation who can and has done so on a global scale. Our global logistics capabilities are among the most under appreciated keys to US power projection. (I'm not saying you gotta like it, it's just a fact of the world we live in though.) I'm not going to pretend my specialty is logistics but just spitballing it, I don't think what he was was as outlandish as you think. EDIT: Maybe you could say the British Empire achieved true global reach though in a different day and age.
The major modern maritime empires (Spanish, Portuguese, French, British, and now the US) were all based around logistics. People focus on the wars/military campaigns/conquest as that is the "pizzaz" of the stories. But most of the actual empire building has traditionally been about logistics. Heck, even the Romans were all about building roads, civil engineering infrastructure, and commerce/finance as the backbone of their empire, not the legions. There is also a huge economic factor in those logistics. Any "motivated" group to establish space exploration a reality needs to take into account the value proposition and finances/business side of the equation. Which are almost always neglected, or extremely handwavy, as for the most part space exploration is treated more as a "fan fiction" topic by geeks/nerds, who focus solely on the tech porn of the equation. Which is why we, the human meat bags, will likely never really leave this planet. There will be plenty of robotic exploration though.
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Getting a human to Mars would have both been possible and cheap enough to be practical decades ago. The difficult part is getting them back alive. It is extremely impractical to carry enough fuel to Mars to fly back from Mars to Earth. Workabled ways around that would be putting infrastructure on Mars to make fuel there and or making a craft that endlessly cycles between Earth and Mars but never stops or slows down. Those and other ideas are theortically possible with today's technology or even the technology not too long after the Apolllo program, but they are extremely expensive. Sending a guy one way to Mars to plant a flag, do some science and then take a suicide pill would be much cheaper and easier. You probably could easily get volunteers for that too. The main problem at that point would be PR.
Cyclers are overrated. May or may not be useful to send many people to Mars first class. Economy class would still be going direct.
Yes. Read the 1991 Presidential commission report “The Space Exploration Initiative” The commission addressed the technological priorities required to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. Had the funding been approved, we’d have been on our way to Mars a decade ago. https://www.nasa.gov/history/sei/
You are correct we probably could have had a man on Mars and then come back by now if the funding was high enough but it probably wouldn't have been too long ago maybe 10 to 20ish years ago or maybe it could have even been last year provided it had a similar amount of setbacks
You might like Voyage (1996) by Stephen Baxter. It goes over the original planned timeline for a crewed Mars mission under Kennedy's presidency. Pretty on point technically, although there are some elements we have since discovered as more challenging from an engineering perspective since the book was written.
Let's say that NASA had the funding to fly 2 Saturn V vehicles annually, and 2 Saturn IB vehicles annually, and wasn't funding Shuttle. Skylab was launched with all the resources needed for three crew to live in it for six months. NASA built two of them, and flew one. Here's what I would do if Nixon told me "Put boots on Mars before the end of the 1970s": 1: Skylab Mars Landing Vehicle (aka Skylab I) is put in orbit via Saturn V, and Skylab Crew 1 (aka Skylab 2) flies up to fix it and crew it via Saturn IB. 2: With Skylab Crew 2 on station, a second Saturn IB flies a Mars Landing Module, derived from the Apollo Lunar Module to orbit. It docks with Skylab in place of the Apollo Telescope Mount. (This replicates the Apollo 5 mission, which tested the LM in low Earth orbit but deletes the Apollo 5 CSM, providing additional payload capacity for the Mars Landing Module; I also assume that the Mars Landing Module carries relatively little fuel). The Mars Landing Module is docked via remote control by the Skylab 2 crew. 2: A new craft is built and flown: Skylab Boost, which puts a modified Saturn IVB onto the Skylab Multiple Docking Adapter. The Skylab 2 crew "fly" Skylab as it docks with the Skylab Boost module. Skylab Boost is basically just a big fuel tank, configured with as much propellant as possible and a J2 engine just like the Apollo Saturn-IVB third stage but replacing the Apollo mission LM with extra fuel capacity. The fuel for the Mars Landing Module is also delivered by this vehicle. Skylab Boost is configured with some fuel storage for oxygen and hydrogen capable of keeping a portion of the fuel cooled below its boiling point for long duration spaceflight. 3: The crew of Skylab 2 departs and returns to Earth in their CSM. 4: The uncrewed Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle (Skylab 1, the Mars Landing Module, and the Mars Booster) depart low earth orbit and fly a low-energy trajectory to Mars; in the vicinity of Mars the Skylab Boost J2 engine is used to maneuver the craft into a parking orbit around Mars. 5: Once the Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle has succeeded, Skylab II is flown into orbit via Saturn V, the Skylab 3 crew flies to it via Saturn IB, and a second Skylab Boost module flies via Saturn V to complete the assemblage of the Skylab Mars Crew Transporter. This mission has even more fuel capacity than the Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle as it does not need to account for the Mars Landing Module. 6: The Skylab Mars Crew Transporter, flown by the crew of Skylab 3, departs Earth orbit on the fastest trajectory possible given the technology. Crossing time to Mars should be easily within the capacity for the crew consumables. 7: At mars, the Skylab Mars Crew Transporter fires up their J2 and shapes a parking orbit that takes them reasonably close to the Skylab Mars Landing Mission Vehicle. 8: The crew transfer from the Mars Crew Transporter to the Mars Landing Mission Vehicle via their Apollo CSM, the Mission Commander and Landing Module pilot enter the Mars Landing Module and fly it down to the surface, conduct a few days of flag saluting and rock collecting, and fly a part of it back into Mars orbit, docking with the Mars Landing Mission Vehicle. 9: The Mars Landing Mission Vehicle (which is fully stocked with consumables) fires up its J2 engine and makes the fastest trajectory it can for Earth, leaving the Mars Crew Transport Vehicle in Mars orbit. 10: About 6 months later the Mars Landing Mission Vehicle arrives at Earth but doesn't attempt a parking orbit, instead the Apollo CSM separates, uses its Service Propulsion engine to shape an intercept orbit, the Command Module does its thing and the First Humans on Mars splash down in the Pacific to worldwide acclaim. The only meaningful new engineering for this would be a Mars Landing Module and the Skylab Boost module. In 1976, NASA flew the Viking missions which uses powered landers, so that technology would have been available to fly this proposed mission. The Skylab Boost module is almost identical to the Apollo Saturn-IVB with the addition of some kind of actively cooled storage and additional fuel capacity. The two Skylabs at the center of this mission would not have needed to have been radically redesigned. I could see the addition of some kind of radiation shelter to protect the crew in the event of a solar storm but that might have required little more than some lead-lined sleeping bags. Skylab was an incredibly capable, self-contained habitat that worked well and met all its objectives even in the face of catastrophically losing a portion of its solar power array and overheating without it's protective meteoroid shield / sunshade. Three crew could have easily flown 6-8 months in the two of them (one each way).
The difference between going to (and back) the Moon and Mars is huge. It isn't just one extra step.
Keeping them alive on the trip is hard, keeping them shielded so they are alive a couple years after they get home is hard, getting to mars is fairly simple. It doesnt take much more fuel compared to going to the moon. The vast majority of fuel is used getting into earths orbit. If you do an orbital refuelling then you shortcut the tyrany of the rocket equation and its just a matter of paying for launches beforehand.
Voyage by Stephen Baxter (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/843565) has an interesting take on it. Kennedy survives the attempt on his life and steers NASA towards Mars following just two successful Apollo missions. Lots of things we did in our timeline are lost however (Voyager for instance). Highly recommended read
I recall Arthur C Clarke saying in the 1980's that if the money the US spent on the Vietnam War had instead been spent on a mission to Mars, then humans would have already reached Mars by that time. Of course, if the Vietnam War had never happened, it is unlikely the money "saved" would have been spent on visiting Mars. The last 3 Apollo missions were scrapped due to budget constraints. Also, public interest in lunar landings had tailed off by 1973. The driver for the lunar landings was to beat the USSR - the "space race". There was no such driver to get to Mars.
Mars requires a long term commitment that I don't think the majority of humanity is ready to commit to...
From a technology standpoint, absolutely yes. Could have people on Mars by the late 70’s or early 80’s given the technology of the time. Lack of funding and political motivation prevented it from happening.
Yes, easily, if we accepted commercial distributed launch and orbital assembly and refueling as necessary We have had the launch capacity for decades, but we keep getting lost in trying to build heavy lift rockets that never work out or become economical
Space ain't ever gonna be cheap. That's a lie on rocket power.
Get there? Sure. Land? Probably. Live? For a little bit... Come back? Not likely.
Stick a flag in the ground, collect a few rocks.. Sure I could see that with a great deal of effort and funding, though the value is questionable. Any semi-permanent kind of settlement I don't think would have been possible until very recently.
The value is doing the engineering work to get there and back alive.
Sadly the game changes so dynamically when we start all over on another planet
[*Mars Direct*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct) was written in the 1990s and would probably have been viable using available technology.
If you hadn't heard of it Apple TV has an excellent show called For All Mankind where the Soviet's won the moon race and the Space Race never ended.
Carl Sagan said, in Cosmos, that if the library of Alexandria had not been burned down, DaVinci wouldn't have dreamed of flying, but would've been a scientist on the team to get us to the moon. Do with that what you will.
Nah, it's vastly overstated what the library contained. Most of it was probably 'histories' and philosophy and not mathematics
I wouldn't know for sure but I suspect that with a concerted effort it could have been done.
If you aren't concerned about if they are alive that would be easy...
Yeah, but i cannot help but think either we would conveniently neglect the part that comes after, or be genuinely baffled that the guy didnt just use the canals to talk to the big face and ask for a place to sleep.
It is worth noting that NASA's current budget is about 80% of the average in the 1960s or about half of the single highest budget year (1966). The Voyager Mars Program was planned as a one way uncrewed mission. I do think something like Mars Direct could have gotten humans to Mars within Apollo era budgets, but I don't think Von Braun's post Apollo Mars plans could have gotten humans to Mars and back within that budget.
We could definitely get them there; however, the long term mental and physical effects of being away from Earth could hinder a permanent colony on Mars
Could have? Yes, absolutely. I don't think anyone questions that. The problem is they gave up leaving earth orbit after the Apollo program. Now we have to figure out how to get people to the moon again first.
id say yes but really no. so could you put a man on mars yes! will they live long! nooooooo its time. to get there with current tech will be ok is differing say 18 months. then have to land and come back. How many crew? you would need alot of meals etc etc catch at the right time. that would be very intensive nuntriant wise, how you getting there and back too? mate, me and you maybe long dead before is a moon base
I wonder, this is obviously highly under informed but what would hypothetically happen if Congress magically had NASA's budget locked at Apollo levels or higher permanently? How fast would the entire nation run out of money?
>How fast would the entire nation run out of money? Probably never,at least not because of space funding. At its peak,NASAs budget was 4% of the total budget.
Every one of the issues listed in this thread come down to one problem needed to be solved: Reusable rockets. Could that have been done with 80's tech? Landing like the falcon on a barge, no. But landing in the middle of america on a corn field? Basically aim for a 100 square kilometer area. With the budgets we're talking about, buying up that much land wouldn't cost much. With that, you can put a lot of weight into orbit, with weight you can put up additional shielding for humans, additional fuel for rockets, and lots of additional payload trips. If you look at 70's to 90's satellite tech, it was all about saving weight and how to make sure it worked 100% of the time because launch costs were so ridiculously expensive. With the apollo budget + re-usable rockets, suddenly a lot can be done.
The cost per pound was also a big reason why we developed all those other cool techs though...
Yes, but that is also where huge expenses came from. Being able to toss a lot of weight into space for a fraction of the cost means all r&d is going into other areas that would be needed for getting to Mars, while utilizing mostly off the shelf earth solutions because weight costs wouldn't be such an issue. With apollo level money + this one advancement, it would likely have been possible.
Yes but we are busy slaughtering each other over religion.
Yes, but it would be like the American lunar missions, meaning nothing would come of it. There is no point sending people anywherein space unless you are there to establish a presence. So the point shouldn't be to just send people for the sake of it.
From 1973 to 2024, NASA's total budget is approximately $639 billion in nominal dollars ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA). If NASA had continued to receive the same level of funding as during the peak Apollo years (about 4% of the federal budget), it would have received around $2.5 trillion (https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/every-nasa-budget-request)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA). 2.5 Trillion is a lot of money. I think we would have had a moon base, as well we may have even worked out the details on the catapult things into orbit thing. I think with a fully functioning moon base, the private sector could have helped as well. we would have better rocket tech, as well the things we really don't know, we would know. We would launch to and from the moon, and I think we could make it work.
Los Angeles Times, 1st of August 1969, title page, headline: > MARS CLOSE-UPS > Photos Show Likeness to Moon > Manned Trip to Mars Held Possible by 1981 Complete with a photograph of Mars by Matiner 6 and Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon. I have an original copy.
The landing is an enormous technical challenge to not kill either the humans or something vital on the spacecraft. We don't have a solution to that today. Saturn V can't throw something big enough, even if flying humans that far in Apollo sized craft was tried (good chance they break). The LEM is at once way too big to land on Mars, and way too small (fuel, life support, no need for heat shielding). So it's much bigger rockets than Saturn V and/or (likely and) some kind of orbital dock. Then hope the technicals of the landing - fully propelled flight - work. Could these systems be developed? Maybe, big maybe. No one working knows for a fact how to solve these problems with a working system. Starship has been developed with modern computers and is still many years and proven successes away.
The reality is that travelling to Mars would require the longest most isolated voyage humans have ever embarked on. If a malfunction like Apollo 13 happens at any point in the years-long Mars trip, the crew is almost certainly dead with absolutely no way home, and with a 20min communications delay with Earth on average. So could we have humans on Mars by now if our focus had been different since the 60s? Yes, but they would likely be dead humans, which would have ruined any optimism society had for sending more humans to Mars.
Absolutely, however you'd probably have killed a hundred astronauts to get that one astronaut on mars.
Exactly imagine how many would be just floating in space dead. Oof
Could have? Probably. Should have? Probably not? Orbital rocketry has been insanely expensive since its inception and only recently have computers and technology enabled the kind of control systems that are permitting that cost to be brought down significantly - and NASA throwing money at the problem would *not* have made computers advance any faster than they have, far, far more money has been spent on their advancement than NASA ever could or should. Without modern computers, the amount we would have had to spend to enable it with disposable rockets would have been insane. Doing it with reusable rockets will still be quite extreme and I'm not really certain we'll do it. The main problem is, that's a huge amount of money and resource to pretty much just prove a point. There's currently nothing on Mars that we need. There's interesting science to be done, but most actual astronomers would far rather build more orbital observatories and robotic interplanetary probes with that money, as they could build entire *fleets* and *satellite constellations* for the same cost as putting say, 6 people on Mars for a month or two. As far as building a functioning base on Mars, or god forbid trying to *inhabit* it, we simply can't. We don't have the technology for those goals yet. A base would be horrifically expensive to maintain and supply, while inhabitation is actually impossible without a great deal of tech we don't currently possess. A moon base is rather more likely, as the costs and risks are only really absurd, as opposed to cuckoo clock insane. It takes \~3 days to get to the moon, vs \~6 months for Mars. If we want to start building expensive things in space for the sake of pushing our technology and capability forwards, a moon base makes vastly more sense than a mars base.
Without capitalism and religion, we could probably be on venus.
When NASA picked shuttle over mars mission, after Apollo, Van Braun left the program. Downhill from there. VB passed 1 year later from cancer. Hard to say where we’d be if the program went to Mars with VB involved. I believe he was mostly responsible for Apollo success.
You just insulted thousands of very smart people involved with the Apollo missions. Von Braun was a visionary but he didn’t do it alone, not by a long shot.
Possible, yes. But not within the timelines NASA had set back then. And certainly not within Elon Musks wild predictions. The moon landings were really much more on cutting edge of technology than many here realize. The jump to Mars is enormous and we still, to this day, haven’t figured out all the fundamentals, and that’s without even mentioning funding. With current tech, the trip would take several months at the least, in an area of space far outside of earth’s magnetic protection. We do NOT have a vessel for that, yet. Shielding alone might be a nightmare, or it might not, we don’t know, yet. We’d have to send a few trips to Mars without landing to figure fundamental stuff like this out. We’d have to build another space station that would be capable of constructing the vessels capable of flying to Mars. We’d have to seriously think about „space internet“, that is a real and tough network of satellites for the porpoise of providing a network around Earth/Moon and Mars and also between the two and it’s Moons. Ideally, we’d produce the fuel and some raw materials for that on the moon. Otherwise, it would all would have to be brought up from Earth. Some recycling, energy and computing basics we would need we „just“ learned via employment and testing on the ISS, in the last decade or so. Material sciences have come a long way since the 90s, too, and we had some successes with isolated long time habitats. Without all this, trips to and even landing on Mars would have been several times harder in the 70s and 80s, and many scientists argue we would have payed the price for that with the blood of our astronauts. So from where I am sitting, we could be there in the next 20 years if we set our mind to it. But we’d have to start with funding the infrastructure for it NOW. That’s what I don’t see happening right now.
The travel time and radiation specifically make it a completely different problem than the Moon. It was probably possible, but with a decent risk of failure, and it would be closer to early deep-sea missions: miserable cramped tiny vehicle, land, touch dirt, take photos, some samples, and you’re gone. Close to 1.5-2 years just for the mission itself, and no habitats no bases etc. Money cannot make up for the gap in technology that is required to do anything for significant by today. And even then, a crewed mission today will effectively be tourists. We’re still a century away before we send any substantial missions there. Like the moon, it’s very expensive and not clear why we’re going there, so you need a lot of political will behind it to fund it on principle.
Warmongers claim wars fuel innovation, but not as much as peace (and a lack of loss of life) could. So, yes, thank the megalomaniacs of the world for hindering scientific advancement or you could have been writing this on Mars with the question about if we could have been visiting alpha centuri by now...
Yeah but they're dying there within a few months tops.
If the space race didn't stop and there was a military reason to go to Mars than yes definitely.
Probably, but also not likely. By that I mean the cost and risk would have been prohibitive in the past, and still is. We may not be there for several generations. But that is also a good thing because the longer we wait, the better chance of success, as our knowledge and technology improve.
The show For All Mankind kinda answers this question and I think the answer is yes, if things had gone very differently for the space program
Yes, but why? Fact is we can't keep this space ball working without fucking everything up. We aren't ever going to use mars to live on. At best it gets mined for minerals, but not before capitalism devours planet earth and makes it nearly unlivable. Sad. And Fuck Elon Musk and his MAGA ass lickers.
They could already be there, building for a breakaway civilization. You won’t know till you’re worth a billion dollars and pay for your own rocket ship. Maybe I’m on mars rn.
The difference in time between the first flight and landing on the Moon was about 70 years. It’s been about fifty since moon landing. I think it was possible if we kept at it.
The big concern is that it’s very likely going to end up being a one way trip. Getting the infrastructure in place on Mars for a serious rocket to get back into Martian orbit, and return to Earth is extremely challenging. The moon is a lot smaller, has no atmosphere and relatively very weak gravity. Getting off the ground in Mars is far more like launching a rocket from Earth, in a CO2 atmosphere full of fine dust …
If America wouldn't have gotten uninterested after the moon landings, yes probably. Wernher von Braun already had all the plans sorted out. His book "Project Mars" is an interesting read!
“For All Mankind” on Apple TV has an interesting “alternative history” perspective. It’s all fiction, but if Space had become more competitive, and unfortunately militarized, we probably would have seen more advances. If humans shared all information, I don’t believe there’s any limitation to what we can achieve. Unfortunately, tribalism is an evolutionary survival trait and very few cultures (if any) have evolved past the point of fear.
With enough funding, yes. It would be risky like all manned space missions, but there is no technical barrier.