MarsBlog.net

GREEN MARS? Carole Stoker is set to present findings from a review of Mars Pathfinder photographic data, which suggest that chlorophyll may exist on Mars.

This should be interesting.

SPACEFARING WEB 2.5: John Carter McKnight has a new Spacefaring Web essay up, this one asking what are the Big Questions of the day and what is the role of space exploration and settlement in answering them:

We highlight the answers we have, and advance the urgency of the right questions, by creating and supporting those projects which address them and scrapping or minimizing those that don’t. This would favor Mars over Pluto, SETI over ISS, space tourism over space solar power, terraforming and ISRU experiments over geomorphologic data gathering. This does mean provoking controversy. But bear in mind that NASA has largely chosen its mission with an eye to avoiding controversy. In this mission it has succeeded: in the popular mind there is an equivalency between NASA, space, and trivial or outdated answers to unasked questions – with the exception of those programs that resonate, as mentioned above. If we wish more support, more interest, more participation, it is precisely this safely bland marginality that we must end. By moving to the center of the controversies of the age we will draw both opposition and support, but once again space will matter.

LINK TROUBLES: Okay, let’s try this again — the Congressional Record page with Congressman Cooksey’s speech.

This story boggles the mind.

An international team of scientists is given $350,000 and two years to develop a Mars mission, and this is what they come up with? Whether or not one considers the “Mars Direct” architecture to be the “right” way to get to Mars, it really is the architecture to beat. So, how does this architecture stack up against Mars Direct and/or its various cousins?

Well, first off, one immediately notices that the mission stay-time on the Martian surface is only 34 days. 34 days? Haven’t we heard that number before? Oh, yes, we have — in the notorious “90 Day Report”.

And then, as in that earlier document, one finds that the designed mission “requires” certain exotic and as-yet undeveloped elements, such as a new launcher, nuclear propulsion, etc.:

Aldrin said the earlier U.S. Department of State-funded Project 1172 scripted a human Mars trek. The two-year long study cost $350,000, creating a credible scenario that had a crew staying on the red planet for 34 days. Aspects of that assessment involved use of a new launcher, ultra-thin solar arrays, as well as nuclear propulsion and power hardware to help pull off a Mars sojourn. An estimated cost for the stopover on Mars was roughly $20 billion to $22 billion.

But not to worry — a follow-on study promises to tackle the infrastructure required for such a mission. Wanna bet they propose a massive new space station and/or a base on the Moon as “required infrastructure” for the first manned Mars missions?

You’d think that somewhere in those two years of research they would have stumbled across Mars Direct, et al, and perhaps proposed some improvements on the idea. All right, yes, so I understand the diplomatic and national security justifications behind employing ex-Soviet scientist in make-work to keep them from going “rogue”. All the same, that money would have been better spent by giving it to the Mars Society to use in developing the knowledge base.

I’ll be off to see this on Thursday.

I’ll bring back pictures.