Mars now? Why?

-




It was an amazing achievement but Mars is probably a bridge too far.

We should extend out into space, but with small steps. The ISS, a permanent moon base, asteroid mining. Each building more infrastructure, more habitable spaces to go.

Hundreds of years ago many sailors died on a world with a breathable atmosphere, mostly liveable temperatures, water - not always fresh. It took centuries for systems to evolve that improved navigation & propulsion enough that most sea voyages did not result in the deaths of the voyagers. And that was of course on our home planet.

One NASA engineer was quoted as saying there were still 57 total loss mission-failure scenarios they did not know how to solve a couple of years ago.

Mars contains nothing of special appeal apart from the explorer thrill of standing on another world. It's a very cold, hostile place with no breathable atmosphere and no accessible resources to sustain a long landing and return. The nine-month each way journey gives no prospect of emergency return. A serious medical issue is unlikely to be resolvable unless there's a surgeon in the crew. Solar flares, catastrophic life support system failure, you name it, there's no way it makes sense any time soon.

Once solar-orbit stations are available a few days from Mars... it will be a different risk assessment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Instead of pushing the country over a cliff?

-
OK, this is pretty out-there, but I have to say it, sorry! Invoking Article 50 is not the brave thing to do. A truly brave leader might stand up and say: "Mistakes have been made. Referendums are great tools of direct democracy, but most countries have a written, considered constitution and do not base decisions that will affect the future of everyone alive today for the rest of their lives on the electoral flip of a coin as my predecessor did. Lies have been told, on both sides, but there is even evidence that another country was involved in engineering the result. A country whose leader believes that a weakened Europe and UK is in his best interests. This is very difficult, but I have decided that on balance I cannot proceed with the Article 50 declaration. I will instead schedule the dissolution of Parliament for a general election and a further referendum on the European question. The voters of the UK must have a further say on whether they wish to go ahead with such a momento...
Read more

Scotrail "smart" cards?

-
Image
A few years after London made its Oyster smart card unnecessary by integrating contactless bank cards for Tube and bus journeys, Scotrail has finally enabled Flexipasses on their own proprietary smart cards. My home station is a ticketless station. I feel there are a couple of aspects of the scheme for smartcards that have not been user-tested from the point of view of users of small rural commuter stations. Of which there are many on the Glasgow-Edinburgh lines and many more throughout Scotland. I'd like to always arrive with plenty of time for my train in the morning, but sometimes the train is even early. At Kirknewton, Scotrail have placed the Edinburgh-bound smartcard reader by the main car-park entrance, halfway along the platform, about 50m from the entrance nearest the road where late arriving passengers - some detained by the level crossing - scramble for the train. Maybe Scotrail's business analysts imagine that everyone always arrives for a train with 90 second...
Read more

So wind is the answer?

-
UK generation Look at any day, week or month. See the red line? That's gas turbines.  Burning gas is better than coal for soot, but carbon is carbon. Methane plus oxygen generates heat plus carbon dioxide. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-natural-gas The blue line, that's wind. There's about 14GW of total capacity in the UK at the moment. That's about half the UK's average demand.  https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Except on Tuesday, when it was almost zero. So it is on any hour, day, week or month you look at.  Electricity demand varies a bit, but the red line is almost a mirror image of the blue. That's because electricity can't be stored in any great quantity. The pumped storage and batteries on the grid at the moment are used only for smoothing, not covering major gaps in the wind.  Every time the wind turbines stop, the gas turbines start In a BBC News report yesterday, the 9th of June 2020, a screen showed a picture of coal gen...
Read more