[meteorite-list] Wanna go to Mars? Wanna come back?

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue May 9 01:03:23 2006
Message-ID: <vh806292fcp19fboe36l6ebj3afdoa9bib_at_4ax.com>

Maybe we could sponser people to send on this mission. I'll chip in 10 bucks to
send Tom Cruise.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3217961/

May 8, 2006 | 8:30 p.m. ET
Risking it all on Mars: Would you chip in a million dollars to have someone go
on a one-way trip to Mars? How about $100,000, or $10,000? It may sound like the
ultimate revenge, but X Prize founder Peter Diamandis is floating the idea as a
privately funded way to start settling the Red Planet.

The plan, which Diamandis outlined this weekend during the International Space
Development Conference, assumes that 100,100 contributors would drink the Red
Planet Kool-Aid. It also assumes that all the medical, technical and logistical
challenges involved in setting up a permanent Mars base can be solved for about
$8 billion ? far less than NASA's projected price tag.

But some folks are already to go, including SpaceShot founder Sam Dinkin, who is
offering to run the lottery that would select the Mars trainees. "I am in for
$100,000," Dinkin writes in Transterrestrial Musings.

The idea of one-way Martian settlement missions, with no provision made for
returning to Earth, has been seriously kicked around for a couple of years, with
Australian scientist-philosopher Paul Davies among the high-profile proponents.
Davies and others say that making the trip one-way would make the journey
affordable ? and that plenty of people would be willing to take the ultimate
risk to push the frontier forward.

Diamandis' plan, which he calls the "Mars Citizenship Program," adds a
private-sector, volunteer twist to the funding arrangements. "I do believe that
there is no government in the world that will send a person on a one-way
mission," he said. "They will never take the risk."

He envisions kicking off the recruitment effort with an endorsement from "a very
wealthy individual, or a hypercredible movie star or someone of global
notoriety." This is in line with Diamandis' theory that even a seemingly wacky
idea have a better chance of getting off the ground if a phalanx of credible
authorities stands behind it.

"If you announce it the right way above the line of supercredibility, it will
succeed," he said. "When we announced the X Prize, we had the NASA administrator
there, the head of the FAA, 20 astronauts, Burt Rutan, Erik Lindbergh. People
never asked me, 'Do you have the money?' 'Are any teams out there?' They
believed that mission, and we made it real."

His formula for raising the money this time calls for getting would-be Mars
settlers to contribute to the cause, according to this schedule:

$10,000 each from 90,000 people.
$100,000 each from 10,000 people.
$1 million each from 100 people.
That's $2 billion to start out with, and Diamandis projects that smart
investments could bring the war chest to $8 billion in the course of a decade.
During that time, the project's managers would undertake a series of preparatory
missions. "They start sending to Mars a nuclear reactor, habitats,
remote-controlled rovers, food supplies," he said.

A lottery would pick 101 candidates out of the 100,100 supporters for medical
screening and training. A succession of six-member crews would then be selected
from the pool for the one-way missions. Each crew would be brought up to a space
station for the transfer trip to Mars. As the transfer vehicle whizzes by the
Red Planet, "you hop out in your capsule, and you just send the people down to
the surface" ? where the robotically built habitats would hopefully be waiting.

The Mars settlers would have "100,000 people rooting for them" back on Earth,
sending what's needed to sustain the new colony.

There are plenty of gaps to be filled in here: When orbital push came to shove,
would that many people really give that much money to sever physical ties with
their home planet? Whom would they trust with the money, and is the technology
really doable? Could the project survive those first citizen casualties?
Wouldn't it be better to wait for the professionals to go in there first?

If you're waiting for the NASA mission, you're going to have to wait a long,
long time. At one time, the space agency said it could conceivably send humans
to Mars by 2025 or 2030. But Dan McCleese, chief scientist for the Mars
Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said those dates are no
longer workable, due to budgetary considerations.

"This date of 2030 is slipping very rapidly," he said over the weekend in Los
Angeles.

McCleese told me that NASA has discussed staging one-way human missions ? but
that the challenges would be unprecedented.

"The first time you go is permanent," he noted. "The first time I land, I have
to have all the infrastructure to stay there forever. That's an entirely new
thing for a space mission."

All this begs the question: Would you go? Feel free to register your vote in an
unscientific poll, and send along your comments on the Mars Citizenship Program
or other settlement schemes. I'll pass along a selection of the feedback later
in the week.
Received on Tue 09 May 2006 01:05:22 AM PDT