Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

SPACE.com -- New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days

Now thats what Im talkin about.

Sure it has enough thrust to get you to Mars with the quickness BUT the G forces caused by the braking thrust when approaching Mars would suck.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Awesome sauce. Now they just need to pack 40 days worth of food into it, shouldn't be too hard if we limit them to one twinky and 2 bottles of water a week.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

I've read about VASMIR before.

Maybe they can get this plan going quicker if they can cut the power requirements down. It would ramp up trip time, but also feasibility.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

its better then packing (what was it, 6 months it said?) of food.

But this is a break through. at this rate we'll be able to make the jump to light speed.

Though I'm not good with the physics, how would you stop a ship going that fast?

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Turn it around mid-course and fire the engines.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

So power is that problem here? It's a really cool thing, but it doesn't seem like we'll have it anytime soon because of the power problem.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Obama will never approve.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Here's a good animation of what a trip to Mars might look like using a spacecraft powered by 3 VASMIR engines.



EDIT 2: I think some chemical rockets should be added to this design in order to allow the spacecraft to make some movements that require short but strong bursts of thrusts, but you only put enough fuel for it on the spacecraft to make it useful for weight issues of course.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

LOL !
With hydrolic disc brakes obviously !

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

The article says that the power source is the choke point. None exists powerful enough to meet the needs of the ship. Hopefully that will continue to improve.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Nah they just need the new bunny batteries, duracell !
27000 AA batteries, no problamo, mars in 30 days !

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Sounds fascinating...but it won't happen from this country anytime soon, we can't even keep the lights on or fix pot holes in our cities, let alone get a space vehicle to Mars.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

She dont look like much, but she's got it where it counts.

I hope to see mankind land on Mars before I die.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

So how were things in this country when we went to the moon? Pretty much the same, but there's less racism now and more rights for women, and insanely powerful computers. The technology is here, we at the least can get things there. If one was to launch a bunch of pre-fabbed buildings down to the surface, I suppose that could help set up a sustainable(ish) base for further exploration or at the very least give a place to recover/reload/refuel the rockets.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

This technology would probably be used to send probes quickly at first wouldn't it?

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Maybe even a monkey or a dog too.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Hopfully in our life time we would have space stations in mars like in doom 3.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Trip to Mars. Pfft. If it's inhabitable, who gives a fuck? My dreams of teleporting off this shit planet have been dashed once again. :help:

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

I think Mars may be closer, in technological terms than one might think. Rather than changing the planet to fit the human it seems much easier to change the human to fit the planet. Maybe even inevitable.

Have you seen the wearable robots they're playing with in Japan? And then you look at the Mind Machine Interfaces we've been doing that can take the image from a camera and feed it into the brain, the things that let monkeys control robotic arms just by thinking about it and letting the machine learn which bits of the brain light up when it's thinking about certain things.

It is my belief and hope that we're moving towards an integration of man and machine.

Going into space for any great length of time almost necessitates we shed the majority of our organic bodies. Maintaining a brain is much more efficient than an entire body. Machines don't atrophy the same way either. It would make colonising nearby planets much more practical.

And as for deep space, there is some chance that we will eventually be able to re-write our own genetic code so that our brains don't decay with age. Couple that with mind machine interfaces and we could be starships; with inputs directly to our senses we could dream away the voids between the stars.

What dreams would such creatures have; would it be a harder or more loving eye that cast itself across the first sunrise on those new worlds?

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

I'm wondering if some kind of bio-engineering would be better. For some reason I just can't see myself trusting a machine to keep me alive 24/7. Genetically modify human beings to be simply all around stronger and less fragile and it would be easier to send them flying around all over the galaxy. You'd still have to deal with the problems of supplying air, water, and food of course but I imagine people would be more comfortable with genetic modification then plopping brains into a robot.

I mean personally I like my fleshy self. Unless the robot will be capable of perfectly mimicking the human body(albeit, with added bonuses), I'm not interested. I want to have all of my senses intact, want to be able to feel pain even. It's all a part of being human to me.

You could also just make warp, that would solve long distance travel problems. =p

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

There are a lot of people who wouldn't agree to this on principle. There are also a lot of ethics concerns around bioengineering of humans, including with discrimination. Whites used to discriminate against blacks just because they looked different. And modern bioengineering, with some applied thought, time, and money, can achieve a lot more than just making people look different.

Do you read Alistair Reynolds? Because I remember that's one of the things he toys with frequently in his novels and short stories.

I can imagine ion thrusters being used a lot in long distance travel.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Let Toyota design it... we'll be there in less then 40 days. Of course we will arrive at Jupiter before the fuel runs out.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Oh hell no. I dont want to be a damn machine. Humans need to stay humans, not become cybernetic organisms.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

That level of genetic modification is never going to help you or me. You want to re-write someone you do it when they're all of a few cells high. But then you’ve got a lot of moral and legal problems, whose going to own these modified humans’ genomes? Aren't there human rights issues in tailoring a child specifically so that it can do a job when it gets older?

The advantages of bionics is they're entirely voluntary, potentially applicable to us in some form or another - this woman for instance already has a robotic arm; (kinda cool, though not anywhere near what I'm talking about of course) - and you can program computers to perform certain tasks much more precisely than an organic circuit. I don’t think we’ll be looking at really good mind machine interfaces in our lifetimes but then again people said we’d never see computers in the home.

I think that they will be, certainly at first, things you do bit by bit. I don’t imagine too many people just ditching their organic bodies entirely. But as you get older and your body starts to break down... I imagine that’s where most of the technology is going to come from.

In a sense beyond having certain a combination of biological capabilities I was never good at being human anyway. There are bits and pieces of my fleshy self I like of course. Touch, taste, sound, sight - never had much of a sense of smell but the few smells I do get are nice I suppose. Can't say I particularly like pain but if you didn't have it....

Hopefully you should be able to wire those in at some point though. Be devilishly complex but at the same time

There are bits of my fleshy self I could definitely do without. Having to eat, needing to sleep.... =p


I don't. But next time I buy some books I might seek him out. :)

You don't have to become one but I don't see why humans need to stay humans.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

True, though I wouldn't doubt that putting our brains into robots or spaceships is also going to cause a big moral dilemma for a bunch of people.

So long as the full battery of senses could be wired into an android body then yeah, I'd be fine with it. I just don't see that happening within my lifetime. We're moving fast with this stuff but I don't think it will get to the point where our replacement limbs are better then our current limbs before I die (unless they make that pill that makes people live forever). Eventually yeah, but I don't know how soon.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

I'll stay non-machine, thank you. I dont have a problem controlling machines, but when the machine becomes a part of you, thats the line.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Are you 100% certain? If you lose a hand, do you want to be able to still engage in things that'd require both hands? I can see why having some sort of computer or AI might be worrisome, but machines by themselves seem like a solution to human biological problems.

Re: Trip to Mars in 40 days
 

Would I want it? Probably, but I wouldnt want to become half machine. I am human, not a cyborg. I am ok with machine enhancements, but not with integration.