NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say

Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by Retric on Monday November 23, 2015 @01:03PM (#10616030)

Sending 1 human to mars requires on the order of 20+ tons of equipment at a minimum, plus consumables. That's a lot of robots, so even if a human was 100 times better than the opportunity rover, sending rovers would still be a better bet. Worse there is a large risk they die before doing anything.

If anything Mars is a great opportunity for automation. It has no environment to destroy and with the right design it could end up exporting a constant stream of goods to humanity with zero environmental cost. Nuclear waste for example is a non issue. We could even try things like a space elevator on mars without risk of harming people on earth.

PS: For comparison the lunar lander weighed ~36,200 pounds and needed a lot less thrust to get into lunar orbit.

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by anigbrowl on Monday November 23, 2015 @02:27PM (#10616661)

What goods would you expect to retrieve from Mars? Or do you mean that it would be a great place to locate industry that would create unacceptably high pollution on earth?

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by Retric on Monday November 23, 2015 @02:49PM (#10616821)

In theory, you send one von Neumann machine and in a few years it has a planets worth of manufacturing to send you anything you want. Sure, shipping would be energy intensive, and you only get ~59% as much solar energy to work with. However, the equivalent of a 2 million meter x 2 million meter solar farm could produce a lot of energy.

Assuming space elevators, you could replace the vast majority of earth manufacturing. Though, with a long lag time before arrival.

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