Mars Before Moon?
Why is everyone working themselves into a tizz about Mars? We haven’t even established a base on the Moon yet. I’m assuming we are talking about sending exploratory spacecraft to Mars with the distant vision of establishing a human presence on Mars AFTER we establish a Moon-base?
My analogy - centuries ago the Europeans were expanding their trade and military empires’ by sailing further and further away from home. The process was to establish a ‘foothold’ port/base, then strengthen that, and then set off from there to go further out and establish another port/base and so on. That’s how the British could establish and run Australia (for example) from the other side of the world; they had a chain sequence of replenishment and communication port/bases to set off from – one logical, sensible step at a time.
So let’s get a Moon-base happening first, much like the International Space Station (ISS) now; conduct experiments; develop research; observe Mars and the rest of the cosmos from the Moon; launch exploratory spacecraft to Mars from the Moon’s surface; build the Moon-base up with its own community of scientists and space engineers, much like the Antarctic bases and International Space Station (ISS).
But isn’t there water on Mars? I don’t really think that ‘water on Mars’ is a valid excuse to go to Mars first before taking the natural step of establishing a Moon-base. I mean, according to NASA, we’ve transported astronauts there 6 times before, over 40 years ago – so it’s a no-brainer. It takes almost a year to get to Mars, whereas (according to NASA) it only 3 days to get to the Moon. Mars has a lot of flood and river channels suggesting that a long time ago liquid water flowed on Mars during a time when Mars was a warm and wet planet with a thicker atmosphere. There is recent evidence that there may also be liquid water at or near the surface on Mars in some places, but this has yet to be proven.
Water on the Moon? The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places; not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth." The results from the Chandrayaan mission are also "offering a wide array of watery signals."
There is one thing that space-enthusiasts don’t talk about which is a major ‘barrier’ to manned space flight – in a word RADIATION. Astronauts, scientists and space engineers would never survive the radiation exposure from earth’s Van Allen radiation belts and then, once they are past that, the intense radiation from the sun – the radiation levels are way too high and they can penetrate every know substance known to humans.
Radiation from space takes the form of subatomic particles from the sun. These high-speed particles tear through DNA molecules, splitting them or damaging the instructions they have encoded for cell reproduction. The damaged DNA can lead to cancers or other diseases. Radiation exposure would be extreme and chronic microwaving current space travellers and pioneers.
So logically, all the money NASA and the rest of the space / scientific world intend to spend on proposed missions to the Moon or Mars, should be put into developing a system, alloy or synthetic material (similar to Demron) that can effectively shield high-Rad radiation from the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts and subatomic particles from the sun. Once this has been achieved, then genuine, credible manned space flight will be possible, but probably not in our lifetime. We can always go to the movies…
Biting the hand that feeds IT
