In the past, space exploration programs have adopted two main strategies in supplying mission crews with resources: a carry-along approach, where all vehicles and resources travel with the crew at all times – as on the Apollo missions to the moon – and a “resupply strategy”, in which resources are replenished regularly, such as by spaceflights to the worldwide Space Station.
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The red planet has been all over the news lately, the scientific community has been very excited about this topic.
To see whether fuel resources and infrastructure in space would benefit manned missions to Mars, Takuto Ishimatsu, who conducted the work as part of his PhD thesis and is now a postdoc at MIT, developed a network flow model to explore various routes to Mars-ranging from a direct carry-along flight to a series of refuelling pit stops along the way.
Any life form we find outside our planet is indeed pretty exciting news, and now we know that Mars has all of the ingredients needed to have such life forms.
There is also private investment in the race to Mars.
In fact, the prospect of humans pioneering on Mars is gradually becoming more and more of a reality – and in a few ways may be a necessity, a top-ranking NASA scientist told CNBC recently. “The appeal has been that as we explore, the next frontier beyond our atmosphere is Mars”. But a resource network in space would enable humans to make the journey repeatedly in a sustainable way. “The last one was the end of the dinosaurs”, Greene said, referencing the event that scientists surmise brought about the extinction of dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. And the plan isn’t just to visit the planet and come home. When all you’ve got is a hammer everything looks like a nail, and when all you’ve got is a shitload of cash and a deep fetish for science fiction, everything looks like a problem easily fixed by colonising Mars. British astronomers have been even more stark in speaking of the likelihood that a space rock of large enough size could create pandemonium around the world.
“However, while the United States has been getting close-up inspections of nearly all planets in the solar system, China’s Mars probe, Yinghuo 1, lost contact before leaving the Earth orbit”, the editorial said.
However, “it’s not a matter of if, but when”.
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The panoply of risks makes it important to seek out viable alternatives to ensure humanity’s survival. My personal prediction is that the whole project will go belly-up during the next tech bubble burst, and we’ll be forced to explain to our kids why we wasted so much money on space research instead of using it to tar and feather every high-level fossil fuel executive.
