Thursday, September 13, 2012

NASA & the MArs MAVEN or the Lunar Outpost

Mars Maven – NASA Dec 2013 mission

NASA has Mars on the brain! Planned for December of 2013, NASA plans to send the “Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission (MAVEN)” which is a mission of a single mind, understanding the role atmospheric gas to space and the changing Martian climate that brought it from a fruitful planet to the Red Planet we all know and love today.

Why is this important? Well; if we want to spend any time out there than we need to know what if anything to beware of; or perhaps we want to seed it-just reverse whatever was done to it and make it verdant again, there a millions of possibilities but we need to know why it happened before we can know why we needed to know!

NASA & a manned lunar outpost!

NASA official Lori Garver spoke of one of the coolest things I have heard yet because it speaks of future plans as well as; have you read the second odyssey series by Arthur C Clarke & Steven Baxter – the book entitled Sunstorm? They have an outpost on the moon and the beginnings of one on Mars. So this is a credible first step and I find that both exciting and smart. We should start the living in space thing when we are within a reasonable distance for emergency retrieval or some other unexpected action.

The schedule, says Garver, is 2017 and you might think that is far away from now, but we have a lot to do! We have a 1.5 billion dollar face lift to modernize the Kennedy Center and then there’s the rocket launch system – the SLS, a more powerful system that just happens to be our first real rocket since Apollo. Then we have to be ready for the collection of water, oxygen, silicon etc from the moon site. The best circumstances would be ones where we could be 100% self-sufficient, but we will probably have to settle for 90% (+/-)

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