Comments

  1. John Morales says

    I was told halfway through last year the bubble had burst.

    And yes, larpar. There’s a rather nice one of the Hitch, too.

    (Neither makes bones about it)

  2. StevoR says

    Hence the Zubrin Mars Direct plan for making rocket fuel back on Mars to then be used for the return journey :

    The first flight of the Ares rocket (not to be confused with the similarly named rocket of the now defunct Constellation program) would take an uncrewed Earth Return Vehicle to Mars after a 6-month cruise phase, with a supply of hydrogen, a chemical plant and a small nuclear reactor. Once there, a series of chemical reactions (the Sabatier reaction coupled with electrolysis) would be used to combine a small amount of hydrogen (8 tons) carried by the Earth Return Vehicle with the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere to create up to 112 tonnes of methane and oxygen. This relatively simple chemical-engineering procedure was used regularly in the 19th and 20th centuries,[8] and would ensure that only 7% of the return propellant would need to be carried to the surface of Mars.

    96 tonnes of methane and oxygen would be needed to send the Earth Return Vehicle on a trajectory back home at the conclusion of the surface stay; the rest would be available for Mars rovers. The process of generating fuel is expected to require approximately ten months to complete.

    Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct

    Among various other plans that obvs consider this issue and address it. It’s not something that hasn’t already occurred to those intrested in planning such missions and then been addressed by them.

    I recall Zubrin’s plan as quoted being discussed decades ago.

    Dreadful and deceptive AI slop clip too.

  3. erik333 says

    What is the going rate for predicting spaceX won,t get anyone (alive) to Mars before 2050 on Polymarket anyway? Ofc they could buy a rocket design off somebody else, that might work.

  4. says

    Yeah, it’s an obvious AI head reciting a pre-written script — the way it pronounced abbreviated units (m/s etc) was a giveaway. But I’d be interested in seeing a rebuttal of the actual facts in the script.

    I’ll believe in automated harvesting of fuel on Mars when we can point to a 160 acre field and tell a machine to grow a soybean crop, tend to it, and let me know in a few months when they’ve filled a boxcar with processed beans. That’s got to be easier than gathering hydrazine or oxygen over the distance from Earth to Mars.

  5. StevoR says

    @PZ Myers : Were you this skeptical of the Apollo Moon landing program when that was happening?

    Woud you have been this pessimistic of people’s ability to fly in heavier than air craft back in the day? (1901~ish.)

    Humanity finds a way.

    With science, engineering. Imagination. Brilliance. Which people do show and come up with..

  6. Owlmirror says

    Video is gone now.

    Video unavailable
    This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.

  7. Owlmirror says

    Or . . . maybe not. I just found another one:
    why we can’t reach Mars | Richard Feynman
    Completely different use of face and voice, and some guy in the background who isn’t Feynman doing equations on a blackboard.

    And . . . wow, a lot more videos as well.

    It looks like making anti-Mars videos using Richard Feynman’s body is, like, a whole thing now?

    The voice in this once sounds ever so slightly English RP pronunciation. The other voice wasn’t really Feynman either, but it sounded closer than this one.

  8. robro says

    StevoR @ #9 — I wasn’t skeptical about the Apollo goal but then I was a teen and the world was full of possibilities. Now I’m old and not sure we can even get back to the Moon. Part of my skepticism is about the political climate now versus then. Apollo was sold as the great human desire to explore new worlds, but it was driven by fear and competition with the USSR. That’s not the case now so a good deal of the financial motivation is gone. And, as I’m sure you realize, Mars is a much tougher problem than the Moon for humans. Will we ever get to Mars? Maybe, even probably, but not in my lifetime.

    Owlmirror @ #12 — I can’t see the one PZ posted, but I’ve seen the one you posted before. It looks like AI to me…the mouth isn’t quite in sync and in fact seems like a loop. The audio may be Feynman…that’s more difficult to say. There are a bunch of these kind of AI generated talking heads. I’ve seen some with the “Founding Fathers” like Franklin. Clearly that’s all AI generated.

    Oh, and welcome back to Pharyngula. Hope you’re feeling better, PZ.

  9. Kagehi says

    Do I think someone will eventually go back to the moon? Yes, same with Mars. Will it be Elon? Not even if he survives being arrested for conspiracy with Miller, Trump, et al. Will it be done with todays technology, without some sort of major breakthrough(s), not likely Mars. Maybe the moon, but then it wasn’t implausible to have a base there given the technology we already had back when we still did go there. Its like arguing that going back to ancient times and watching people argue about it being impossible to sail across the Mediterranean, and how you would run out of everything needed to get there, therefor, the big, seemingly endless, oceans would be suicide, even if someone had evidence of there being something “to” get to out there.

    Now, what exactly those breakthroughs would actually need to be… we can guess at a few, like making sure you don’t run out of food and water, or fuel, and those are big ones, but its unclear a) what would solve those, or b) what others we might not be considering.

    Ironically, some rich nut like Muskrat may be the only “viable” way, as mentioned, due to the politics of it, to actually make it happen. Which is sad, but also not insurmountable, because I could see probes turning up, say, vast amounts of some minerals, or development of a technology that might make mining asteroids plausible, etc., actually offering an incentive once more for governments to go, “Hmm.. We could use that. Someone work out how to get there!!” But, equally sadly, this might be the only thing, outside of either a collective a slightly nuts people, or one really rich nut, doing it themselves.

Leave a Reply