[FPSPACE] And Griffin's true reasons for sizing the Ares 5

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

Bret Drake and NASA seem to live in cloud-cuckoo land judging from the
article you point to.
 
For one thing their plan is too ambitious, aiming as it is for an actual
landing on Mars. At
best the astronauts would be stuck there for the rest of their lives.
 
In my view their mission should be to visit Phobos and Deimos, and possibly
to set up
a permanent presence there. Lunar experience would come in handy.
 
At the same time the Drake plan is also not ambitious enough. There is no
way it would
be defensible to despatch a single craft on such a long journey. At a
minimum there would
have to be two craft, possibly three. There would have to be a provision for
one of the craft
to be abandoned, and its crew to transfer to the other(s) - within the frame
of a successful
mission overall.
 
Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley envisaged two craft with a total of 12 crew
back in 1956
in The Exploration of Mars. Why has Drake abandoned that concept and now
insists on
putting all NASA's eggs in one basket? Experience from the ISS shows that
things break
down much sooner than anticipated. Keeping your spacecraft in good working
order for the
duration of a voyage along a Hohmann orbit to Mars is a tall order in
itself.
 
A mature vision does not call for a visit to Mars, but on the conquest of
Mars. The defeat
of imperial Japan in 1945 was not carried out by sending one plane from the
United States
across the Pacific Ocean carrying a single doomsday bomb. Rather it was
achieved 
through a lengthy island-hopping exercise, which finally allowed the Enola
Gay and
Bockscar missions to take advantage of Tinian, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, etc.
 
Likewise Mars is not conquered by launching a suicidal expedition from the
Cape, but
through the establishment of permanent outposts on the Martian moonlets
first.    
 
--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagelse, Denmark
 
  

-----Original Message-----
From: E.P. Grondine [mailto:epgrondine at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 4:50 PM
To: fpspace at friends-partners.org
Subject: [FPSPACE] And Griffin's true reasons for sizing the Ares 5


Griffin's reason for the choice the Ares 1/Ares 5 architecture may be seen
here:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090722-tw-mars-mission.html

Of course, the Ares 1, while it has the support of Thiokol, doesn't work;
further a more efficient path of launcher development is Jupiter/Direct.

E.P. 

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