Some interesting food for thought here, let's look at them...
Your ideal volunteer would have to be an "odd man", which means an unmarried individual with no family, and suffering from a non-debilitating fatal disease.
Not necessarily. How about a fit, experienced astronaut who's over 60? Life expectancy in this case would be another 20 years. If we could project a mean survivability of this mission to about 8-10 years, then our volunteer would only lose around 15 years of life, assuming all went well.
The bouncing thing...think about the G-forces that he/she would endure
I suggested the bouncers would be for resupplies, containing crates of food and the like. The Mars colonist would land in something like a Phoenix lander, perhaps scaled up. G-forces on re-entry are indeed an issue, but trials with the MFL and Phoenix lander in Orbiter give me values of only 3g on the smoothest trajectories.The hab would already be there, a collapsible pressure tent. Precision landing is indeed an issue here, as Robert points out. How much precision could we guarantee?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to include an Earth return vehicle then to continuously supply the poor soul until his death? I mean, we are talking cheap here right? Personally, it's not an acceptable solution IMHO in too many ways. I'll stick with the current proposals and wait
Could well be cheaper, but experience tells us that creating a completely new spacecraft costs ten times more than anyone expects. As for waiting... In the 1970s they told us a Mars mission was just 15 years away. As the years go by, it's ALWAYS just 15 years away, as it is today. Tomorrow never comes, and I believe a lot of the proposals for Mars missions are just elaborate and expensive ways of stalling. In 2100 (if the human race is still around and we're allowed to speak about things which aren't scripture study) the projected Mars mission date will be 2115. I won't be there... will you?
Napoleon supposedly said to a general who had elaborated some complicated plan for seizing Viena, involving diversions and counter-marches, "If you want to take Viena, then take Viena!". I think that if we really want to land on Mars, we should go ahead and land on Mars, not in 15 years but as soon as is humanly possible. [This bit is taken from Oliver Morton's book,
Mapping Mars, which is full of qualified candidates as volunteer solo colonists)
A possible problem is that you have to provide adequate radiation shielding for the guy to have a decent chance of reaching Mars in the first place. Thus far, long term missions have been in LEO, and the Apollo missions, which went beyond the magnetosphere, were of short duration. As mission length increases, your chances of being hit by a solar flare before reaching your destination increase.
Now THIS really is a problem. About the only thing that we can do is program the journey in the solar flare minimum period and hope for the best. Unless there is a solar storm, the radiation dose won't be immediately fatal and our colonist will have the 8-10 years of life on Mars. So a good question would be: When do the Hoffman-transfer windows described by Suzy above coincide with solar minimum? I'll look into that one today and get back with the answer.
But you fail to see it: the whole spectacle of the whole idea is the death watch after the guys launches. Millions of goulish people watching and waiting for some weird guy to die alone on a distant planet, having gotten farther away than any human, he is now the subject of a weird social experiment. And after he carks, future explorers get to find out how well the Martian atmosphere mummifies a human corpse. Wouldn't the sight of it be a great welcome to the Red Planet for those follow-on folks?
I don't see it that way. You could see it Shackleton-style as the epic struggle for survival against the odds and a story of life-affirming heroism. It is definitely a social experiment, but no weirder than most on offer. And yes, the sight of our explorer's mummified corpse actually would be inspirational. I predict that whole new religions would be founded on the basis of it. Not that I want new religions, but they would inevitably follow.
Thanks for the link, I would have put it up yesterday if I'd had more time. This is Mr McLane's "Lone Eagle" mission concept that I mentioned above. All I'm trying to do is flesh it out with real technology. Notice the quote from the article:
"McLane’s idea came from his acquaintance with a Russian cosmonaut. “I noticed the cosmonaut seemed to be a slightly different type of person than the American astronaut," McLane said. “Cosmonauts are primarily pilots, and like test pilots, they are very focused on getting the job done. The current American astronauts are picked for things such as their speaking ability and social skills, and most of them have advanced degrees. But the cosmonaut struck me as an adventurous, get-things-done-type person, like our original astronauts back in the 1960’s."
A return to the “get it done" attitude of the 1960’s and a goal of a manned landing within a short time frame, like Apollo, is the only way we’ll get to Mars, McLane believes."
Is it a coincidence that the only person who has responded positively to this idea, Suzy Kosmonavtka, is someone absolutely steeped in Russian Space Program history and culture? This is something also shared with Baxter, whose admiration for the adventurous spirit of the cosmonauts is a clear feature of
Voyage.
In my opinion, the objections based on assumptions about human psychology and sociology are trivial and unrealistic. It's immediately assumed that anyone who risks his life is insane (and we're talking about greatly increased risk here, not suicide, given that we give our colonist a - diminishing but real - chance of indefinite survival with supply drops). Yet just this summer more than 40 people have died on Himalayan expeditions, all of them experienced climbers who knew and assumed the risk. Do we hear cries of "Ban mountain climbing, it's too dangerous!"? Not yet, I'm pleased to say. There exist humans who are quite clearly not insane and yet are prepared to risk high probabilities of death to achieve their aims.
However the technical challenges are realistic problems. I'd put them roughly in order of importance from most risky to least:
1) Radiation, both in transit and on the surface.
2) Bone loss and physical weakening from micro-g environment.
3) High g-loads on reentry.
4) Mechanical failure of one or other unit, especially life support or power.
5) Failure of supply because the drop missed.
6) Failure to rendezvous with the base camp.
I'm working on some Orbiter scenarios to kind of rough-out the mission concepts a little. Needless to say, this high level of risk would be unacceptable to agencies like NASA, ESA or even the Russian Space Agency in its present dependence on Western dollars. When or if this concept gets more detail we should try to sell it to someone with vision and lots of money like Anouseh Ansari or Google. Andy's right that the Chinese would do it, but wrong in suggesting that the "volunteers" would be somehow coerced.
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Sorry to double-post but I found something really great on Suzy's site. After a detailed and well thought-out survey of mission profiles, she says:
"A manned Mars mission could have been launched two or three decades ago, especially if America and Russia had not wasted so much energy and resources on the Cold War. A mission could be launched NOW, with current technologies. There would surely be a few eager volunteers amongst the nearly-200 or so astronauts and cosmonauts who will otherwise wait years for their next spaceflight, especially with the Shuttle fleet reduced and grounded after the Columbia disaster, then only launching occasionally. The mission certainly would not be risk-free; there’s a likely chance someone might perish. There are also the long-term effects of radiation exposure to consider; the robotic Mars Odyssey spacecraft measured the radiation it encountered, which was nearly twice the amount those in low-Earth orbit experience. (The interplanetary spacecraft would obviously need a “storm shelter” to protect against solar storms, also.) I doubt that the more adventurous types would be put off by the risk, though! (If anyone’s looking for volunteers, I’ll go!)
The governments of the countries involved do not seem interested in going to Mars; most politicians have no interest in spaceflight and are too busy bickering, backstabbing and taking bribes, anyhow. They are entirely lacking in any imagination or vision. The general public seems mainly indifferent to the space program (it is admittedly remote and irrelevant to many people’s lives), though there are plenty of enthusiasts and dreamers on the Internet. (And when it comes to space travel, dreaming is about all that most people will ever get to do.)
What would be the point of going to Mars, anyway? I guess, if nothing else, it’s somewhere else to go and something to do. And it is surely a better use of taxpayers’ money than spending billions of dollars on more effective ways to kill people."
Now THAT's what I call straight talking. I wish I'd said that. And I'd go too, if my wife gave me permission.
