Tag: space exploration

Tom’s World – 11FEB2026 – Red Planet Blues

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TomD

Getting to and from Mars is easy as long as you have Delta V. You need a velocity of approx. 7 mile/second to break earth orbit and around 20m/s to get to mars and more to match mars orbit. And that’s minimum energy, you’d probably want to double that at minimum to get the total ET down to something humans could handle.

I’ll leave it up to you to calculate the total energy requirement in joules or whatever to accelerate that much mass and fuel to a total Delta V of around 50-60 miles/second and how to do that with chemical reactions.

We got Voyager out of the solar system and up to 25-30 miles/second total energy but that’s when you have years to hop from planet to planet sling shotting around each to gain velocity.

Practical Mars will have to wait on fission at minimum or fusion and you still need reaction mass.

The moon is cool.

Back in the Apollo days of the early 70’s, I met a couple of students from U of Wisconsin on sabbatical traveling around the country and working odd jobs for cash. They were only here (Atlanta) for a couple of months before moving on and we got along save several heated debates on the Apollo program. It was their position that Apollo and all similar projects be immediately defunded until human perfection was achieved, though they didn’t state it in such stark terms, the implication was such had they the desire and ability to extrapolate. Even at the time I knew that was absurd and the purest fairyland fantasy because that condition would never be met and the net effect would be to condemn the planet to the darkness. It was my 1st exposure to hard-hard idealistic leftism. I had already left the Marine Corps but that train of thought and logic not common there then or now, I suspect.

Reprieve, Reprieve.  Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight, Mr. Snedrig

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As I have whined interminably about, I am in the midst of a long, boring and exhausting project from which death would be a welcome release.  But today I unexpectedly discovered that I have a two-day respite from this miserable existence.  I have Friday and Saturday off.  And just like that my heart is full of joy.  I can sleep in tomorrow morning, maybe as late as 6:30 a.m.!  “I’m as light as a feather! I’m as happy as an angel! I’m as merry as a schoolboy! I’m as giddy as a drunken man!”

Seriously, when some onerous burden is unexpectedly lifted off your shoulders, even if only for a little while, it changes your attitude.  Because now the thing that you had seen as impossibly hard has been cut into a smaller piece.  It can never now be what it was.  It is diminished.  Even if the diminution is minor, the psychological effect is great.

I will spend tomorrow weighing some decisions that I need to make.  I have a lot of factors and unknowns that need to be considered and somehow weighed against each other.  I have to perform the hardest of all tasks; think intelligently.

But all that is okay.  This two day carve out of time is a perfect interval to look carefully at the problem and make some kind of decision.  Maybe it won’t be definitive but at the very least I’ll be able to define the time parameters needed to answer all the questions.  And to me that is an important milestone in any project.

I was watching a YouTube video from someone who argued that human colonization of other planets was highly improbably and interstellar colonization was completely impossible.  For interplanetary human travel he pointed to the health problems associated with extended time in freefall and the damage to human health from radiation that permeates the environment beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.  In addition to these problems, for the case of interstellar travel, he pointed to the issues that a twenty-thousand-year multi-generational space ship would create for the humans within.  First off, he reiterated that all health issues would be magnified by several orders of magnitude over such an enormous length of time.  But he also stressed that a flight of that duration would see a genetic selection among the crew for individuals with anti-social or even psychopathic tendencies.  He predicted that well before arrival, the crew would have sunk into barbarism and cannibalism.  Now that’s a scenario I can stand behind!

Anyway, it was very interesting, if a little bit depressing.  One thing I learned is that mammals brought onto the International Space Station to test the effects of microgravity on reproduction had a 100% rate of birth defects due to developmental anomalies caused by the lack of gravity.  Well, all this negativity sure puts a damper on a lot of my favorite science fiction stories from the golden age of science fiction.  Where does that leave “Red Planet,” “Farmer in the Sky” and “The Rolling Stones?”  Well, maybe we can find a workaround.

Now, Wouldn’t That Be Something

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When I was a kid interstellar exploration was something that people talked about as if it were only a matter of time before we figured it out.  Fifty years later and I think we’re all a lot older and wiser.  Even completely automated space craft reaching the nearest stars has begun to look like an improbability anytime within the next millennium.  The scope of the resources needed to get something from here to even Proxima Centauri is staggering.  Of course, I’m talking about a total project time that only totals into decades of time.  If we’re interested in a 40,000-year round-trip, we could start working on it right now.  But something like that is so laughably useless that I’d be embarrassed to even admit considering it as one of the options.  To make the trip in a time frame that makes it useful the ship would have to accelerate to and decelerate from some considerable fraction of the speed of light.  Let’s postulate 30% as the fraction.  With that capability the trip would take something like twenty-five years round-trip.  Sure, that’s a long time but our civilization should have a long enough attention span to follow up on the project and mine the results when the probe returns (if it returns).  But the scope of such a project is too titanic for our current technological stage.  It’s too grand.

Let’s look at more manageable projects.  What’s doable?

I don’t have much enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s manned trip to Mars.  Four or five years in space is a lot of radiation for astronauts to absorb.  I don’t see the sense in it.  I prefer the robot exploration thing we’ve been doing with the Voyager and later probes.  The recent flyby of Pluto was very impressive.  But I think much more ambitious unmanned exploration of the solar system is warranted.

I think the best bang for the buck is finding out if Europa has life in its ocean.  I can imagine a series of visits.  The first should be an orbiter that sends down a probe to take reading.  Once the presence of water oceans has been confirmed a lander can be sent to try and find life.

I realize this is a large order to fill.  I don’t know exactly how thick the ice crust is over the ocean.  It may be many miles.  If that is the case a very creative solution may be needed.  Possibly a nuclear powered “drill” might be an option.  Of course, if all else fails we could set off a nuke.  Then again if there really are “Europans” we might start an interplanetary war.  So maybe some thought will have to be expended thinking about the best way to search for life there.  But I see a series of missions to attempt to answer this question as one of the most meaningful and exciting challenges that currently exist for mankind.

Of course, I’ve been talking of the cuff.  Doing a quick AI search I see that the exact thickness of the ice is estimated to be between 5 and 20 miles thick.  NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, launching in October 2024 and arriving at Jupiter around 2030, will use radar to penetrate the ice and measure its depth more precisely.  So, chances are I’ll be old and broken down before much of anything is known about this ocean.

But I still find the prospect exciting.  Imagine if some kind of multicellular life exists in that ocean.  I hesitate to even imagine intelligent life there but it’s not impossible.  We might find that wherever there’s liquid water and organic molecules life tends to develop from spores that float around in outer space.  Now wouldn’t that be something?