Seriousely Folks (Score 1)

There are two general trains of thought I've noticed in this thread that I want to respond to. You'll have to forgive me if this has been gone over before, but I set my threshold pretty high.

Robots can do it better and cheaper than people

Let's do a simple thought experiment. If you dropped a thousand Spirit-type rovers into the South Dakota badlands, you might have found a fossil or two at the conclusion of the mission. On the other hand, you may not find anything. However, if you send a trained human geologist with a rock hammer out, he'll come back in a few hours with a wheelbarrow full of fossils. Only the presence of humans will be able to uncover the subtle signs of past life on Mars, if it once existed. This is a question we cannot afford to ignore. Its implications are too fundamental to the basic questions that puzzle the thinkers of our era.

True, each robotic mission costs less than a manned mission would, but you are certainely not going to get anywhere near the same kind of scientific returns. Robot missions are cheap and don't put people at risk, but they aren't by any means giving you the same value for your dollar as manned missions could.

We don't have the technology/money to put people on Mars and bring them back.

This is patently false.

In 1990 two then little known engineers named Ed Baker and Bob Zubrin introduced a new Mars misssion architecure called Mars Direct. Mars Direct used sound engineering, no-nonsense thinking, and some novel ideas to bring the estimated cost of a manned mars program down from NASA's existing estimate of $450 billion to only $20 billion, with a unit cost of $2-$3 billion per mission, round trip. Zubrin and Baker's cost estimates have been varified by NASA and Lockheed Martin costing experts, but Zubrin himself claims that a private company could accomplish the same mission for only $4-$6 billion in development and $1.5-$2 billion per mission.

$20 billion spread over a 10 year development program is only $2 billion annually, or around 15% of NASA's current budget of $15 billion.

The lynchpin of the Mars Direct concept was a technology called In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) or as Zubrin puts it "living off the land". This is actually a lot more modest than it sounds. All it means is that instead of carrying oxygen, water, or rocket fuel for the mars surface stay and return trip phases of the mission, only a small amount of hydrogen feedstock is brought from earth. Once there, the hydrogen is is processed by a series of chemical reactions into water, oxygen(for breathing and propellent) and methane(rocket fuel). The only martian resource needed is carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide is 95% of the martian atmosphere, it is readily available. This relience on martian resources is therfore not nearly as risky as it firsts sounds, and still enables huge mission mass savings.

At the time of its introduction, Mars Direct relied on no unproven technology except for the ISRU equipment. Everything else, propulsion, power, materials, life suppert, etc... was all based on proven, time-tested technology.

However, in the intervening decade, Lockheed Martin has designed, built and tested working prototypes of all the chemical gear necessary for a Mars Direct-type mission. Zubrin himself has developed several succeeding generations of the technology at his own company, Pioneer Astronautics.

In addition to low cost and simplicity, Mars Direct offers a number of other advantages over competing architectures. It incorporates a spinning tether system, like a bolo, to provide artificial gravity to the crew, avoiding the negative effects of prolonged exposure to microgravity. Mars Direct requires no on-orbit assembly. Everything is built on earth, where our industrial infrastructure coincidentally already happens to exist. On Earth, everything can be built and tested in the presence of trained specialists, not by glorified pilots. On Earth, effective quality control can be maintained.

The folly of on-orbit assembly can be observed simply by taking a look at the ISS. It is now 8 years behind schedule and counteless billions over-budget. Most recently, one of the modules sprung a leak and had to be sealed off.

Mars Direct, in contrast, requires only two heavy lift launches for each mission. No orbital assembly is required, in fact, Mars Direct includes no mission critical orbital meetups at all. Mars Direct requires only one Mars Surface rendezvous, which is much easier to accomplish than an orbital docking. This surface rendezvous only requires that the two craft land within 500 miles of each other for the mission to succeed. In addition, provisions exist within the plan to rescue a crew should rendezvous fail completely.

Mars Direct mission hardware can also be used, with minor modifications, to explore the moon and near earth asteroids. Mars Direct hab modules can even be used as the fundamental building blocks of the first Mars and Lunar bases.

For more information, I highly recommend The Case For Mars, by Robert Zubrin, a thoroughly informative book.

Even NASA was so impressed with Zubrin's plan that they adopted a modified(bloated) version called Mars Semi-Direct, which they still estimated to cost only $55 billion for development and less than $4 billion per mission as their baseline Mars reference mission.

This was way back in the early 90s, and the technology has only improved since then. We can do Mars, we can do it now, and we can do it for a small fraction of NASA's existing budget.