That will be quite a task for anyone to recover those rovers. Going to Mars and landing is one thing. Taking off from Mars is another. Mars has no airfields or launch pads to take off from. The escape velocity is around 11,000 MPH. So everything would have to be built from the ground up. This would take months if not years. That means the people who land their will have to stay there quite awhile until there are means to take off and rendezvous with the orbiter above and then back to Earth. As it stands a round trip with out landing is about 1.9-2.1 years. It is estimated it would take about 5 million lbs of food, medicines and other needed items to make such a trip for 4-5 men. You need to get this into orbit along with the space craft, lander and assemble this in space before the trip is even made. This would be about 25-40 trips by a Space Shuttle to get all this into place. So the people that land might have to add a year or more before return. As far as costs go I would hate to guess what it might be. Maybe 500 billion or more. There are folks that think we can just go up and take off for interstellar space and make trip to another Solar System. Think about that for a moment. 22 light years is like 2.5 million trips to Mars. Never mind the fact it would take from 20 thousand to 80 thousand years just to get there. I don't think a space craft of that size (probably a million tons or so) could travel at anywhere near light speed because of it's mass. So for the time being we are quite stuck to our own Solar System. Man will get to Mars but not for quite a long time. That's Humans don't kill one another off and destroy our Earth before then. Maybe in our life time a round trip to Mars and back might be in the cards. Lets hope.

not 100% accurate alan...

the closest star is only 4ly away so at even half the speed of light that's only 8 years... plus time changes with high velocity so your looking at half that at half the speed of light so the passengers would need 4y right? :/

assuming your using a advanced plasma based engine powered by a fusion reactor your return would also be just over 4y and such engine would potentially be 20y-40y away the reactor is about 10y although a fission is currently available.

for a trip like that you would grow your own food and use centripetal force for gravity... if it had funding the hull could be built in under 10y

i thank with current techs they projected a 85y voyage reduced from 81000 in just a few years.

sorry lol checked my facts fastest engine is 7.1% ls so that's only ~47y with current tech to get there

At this time speeds of only 54,000 miles an hour have been attained. What do you think the power would be to push such a space craft at half the speed of light. It is not available or attainable on our Earth. There is not enough fuel or any type of power we know of to push a million tons at such a speed. Never mind the fact of where you are going and why. No one is going to make such a trip without knowing what is there. There are dozens of other reasons why this is not feasible.

1. Distances. 5 light years to 20 light years. You are talking about thousands of years even traveling at lets say 186,000 miles per hour (that is 1/3600th of the speed of light) which takes you 3600 x number of light year the object is from Earth. Now if you include greater then 20 to 1000 light years away. Now you are talking to the millions of years of travel time. How many life times is that? More then Mankind has had from the beginning. Even at a million miles per hour you would divide the total by 5.

2. Speed. Some will say hey we can travel faster then that. OH? Object of great mass can not even approach the speed of light. Not enough power on this Earth to have an object this size to travel all this time at this speed, period.

3. Space travel by man. Know one even knows how man can cope in a long space voyage, never mind the fact live for thousands of years with out any problems.

4. What is There! Would anyone travel to someplace without knowing what is really there before you get there. Never mind the fact it takes a million years to get there.

5. Communication with space craft traveling at light speed. Lets just say you could travel at the speed of light. You can never communicate with anyone because all signals sent to you after you left would never reach you until you arrived at your destination. They would always be behind you. Everyone on Earth would be dead 10 times over which were alive when you left. True fact though you would not age at a normal rate at this speed. I really do not think the craft or the human inside this craft could stand the stress of light speed travel.

It is nice to dream but for the time being we are stuck to our Solar System until Man can figure out a way of Greater then Light Speed Travel and can cope with the all the problems of a long, long, long long space voyage.

Alan is pretty right on actually.

Consider this:

If you can shrink the Sun to the size of a grain of salt. Earth would be the size of a water molecule orbiting only 1 inch away. The nearest star would be 5 miles away. The far side of our galaxy would be twice the distance of the Moon.

This is why SPACE is called SPACE. . . . There is a hell of a lot of it. . . . It's pretty roomy out there.

c1c2c3c4c,

You are dead wrong at so many levels. First of all, to have any significant time dilation, you will have to travel at least 90% the speed of light to get 50% dilation. You make the mistake that there is a 1 to 1 correlation.

Second, the mass of the ship at our current technologies are simply not up to the task. We do not have a working engine that can get us to even 1% the speed of light. Everything we have in the think tanks is just theories.

"Just grow our food". We cant even grow wheat in space. Let alone carrots, fish or anything else we need. To give you an idea how deficient our technology is: NASA and the food industry STILL has NOT figured out a way to feed the astronauts adequately on a round trip to Mars, even if we can grow entire crops. Our technology can't figure out a way to store food longer than 36 months. Sure we can store dry foods for 10 years, but you can't live a five year mission on that. They will die of protine poisoning.

Power. Solar cells will work no farther than Jupiter. To date, nobody has been able to figure out how to build a nuclear power-plant in space, even if it was even legal to do, which by international treaties. Even if we did, a nuclear power-plant to go to the nearest star would have to be 50 times bigger than the entire facility at Three Mile Island.

Sorry, but you give the state of our technology FAR too much credit.

Lol. I never thought of it that way. Thanks though. How far would the way station be between our solar system and one 50 light years be? 25 light years would be the half way point. That is only 4.5 into 25 x 5 or only 27.777 miles away. Lets get started right away. Lmao!

In the meantime...we haven't been back to the MOON in over 35 years. Go figure.

I still think the moon is the place to start. Sure, it will take a while to be able to make spacecraft on the moon or in lunar orbit but once you can do that, space really opens up. and besides, if China gets the good solar exposure spots first, it may no longer be practical for us to build a base at all.

What about the Theory of Relativity?

Space-wise, we're at the end of our rope. Colonizing the solar system just isn't feasible with our current technological level- soup cans sitting on hundreds of tons of explosives are not going to get us anywhere, literally or figuratively.

We need a scientific breakthrough. Transportation by rocket is too expensive and too slow, and this is our biggest obstacle (even the speed of light is much too slow for interstellar travel). All the other problems with living extraterrestrially are minor in the face of the simple problem of "getting there." Unless we reach a point technologically where we can ignore mass and distance, we will be stuck on this little blue marble until the Sun burns it up.

That is not to say that we should give up outer space. We can learn many things that can be put to use now, such as how to feed astronauts reliably or shield humans from radiation. An aside- radiation is a *huge* problem. Besides mutations and cancer, it can result in sterility. This means it would be impossible for us to develop true, self-sustaining extraterrestrial colonies unless we figure out a way to protect our little gametes.

All in all, we should focus on developing practical means to support space colonies before we start talking about where we're going to put our Moon base. And hope that the theoreticians can cook up something snazzy on the chalkboard.

I hate to burst your bubble. The first Commodore 64 was not built until 1982. I know there is nothing I can say or anyone else that will disperse your non-landing on the moon theory. To each his own I guess.

WOW, me not having the scientific knowledge that you guys have is crazy. Im way behind. The things you talked about I of course have no idea. But it is interesting to read what you wrote. Its too bad we cant see space travel like that in our lifetime. The universe is so interesting. Everybody wants to know the secrets of the universe. But they say the only way you will know is when you die.

That's my point Allan. I tried a Commodore 64 around high school time in 1983. The school did not own it, one of the students did and a huge piece of crap it was! So, go back to the mid 60's when they were gearing it all up at NASA for the 'successful' 1969 landing and its almost 20 years prior to the CD64 joke.

Forget the computer part of it, we can do amazing things in that way now. I have studied Astrophysics since the early 90's and it has become very apparent that getting human beings through that alive and well would have been very unlikely indeed. I agree with what Nixon did ( and FOUR times makes the story a lot bolder and more final ). Leaving the protection of the magnetic field we have ( resulting from the churning molten core ) for any period of time will be the greatest challenge, just as it was in the 1960's.

Has anyone considered teleportation?? Just a thought...from what I hear its even faster than the speed of light!

Why is no one talking about the ION engine? You know, going HALF the Speed O' Light? We ALREADY have this technology. At present, due to fuel mass and acceleration times, we've only gone ten times the speed of conventional chemical thrust. But, we KNOW we can get to a significant percentage of the SOL.

Half the speed of light? Ten ttimes the speed of conventional chemical rockets? Hold your horses a bit there! While the ION and VASIMR technologies are promising, they are NOT the miracles you make them out to be.

Specifically, despite their higher propellant speed, these engines lack the reaction mass of traditional chemical rockets. Remember Newtons laws, sure you're throwing your propellant out at half the speed of light, but you're only discharging a few grammes! Conventional rockets on the other hand only launch a few tons of gas out at super sonic speeds.

Think for a moment about which would be more effective in escaping a gravity well? Though there is no denying that the higher specific impulse of these electric drives would be useful in interplanetary thrusting, they are nowhere near enough to replace chemical rockets in escaping ANY gravity well.

The highest speed we have attained was by the Helios probes. Top speed was 157,078mph. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_probe

Proxima Centauri (closest star to us) is 4.2 light years away, or 24,635,923,200,000 miles. So even at the impractical to achieve speed of the helios probes, it would take 17,903.9 years to reach it, and slightly longer still to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest star system.

Ion engines are very promising, but are really just a novelty until we start putting more power into them. Whether or not they'll make interstellar travel a reality, they'll certainly make the exploration of our own solar system a much more attractive prospect, and that's a huge deal in and of itself. Now all we have to do is stop spending all our money and effort trying to blow each other up and make it happen.

Haha... I think that barreling into the suns gravity well may have been a large factor of the crafts high speed, not the engines. :)

I agree that the electric engines are interesting for long duration flights due to their high specific impulse. And despite what was said (or rather claimed) above, it is entirely feasible to build a nuclear reactor in space. Look at Voyager! It's powered by a small thermo-electric reactor!

From The BBC 2/6/2012; How Embarrassing.

The American space agency looks set to pull the plug on its joint missions to Mars with the European Space Agency.

Nasa has told Esa it is now highly unlikely it will be able to contribute to the endeavours, which envision an orbiting satellite and a big roving robot being sent to the Red Planet.

The US has yet to make a formal statement on the matter but budget woes are thought to lie behind its decision.

Europe is now banking on a Russian partnership to keep the missions alive.

Oh yes. You're right about them barreling into the sun's gravity to reach those speeds. They used plain ole' chemical rockets to get there but "fell" towards the sun afterwards. Conceivably a gravity assist (or multiples of them) using the sun instead of jupiter could create a similar solar escape speed, but would take years to achieve if it were even possible at all.

I also agree about building (or at least launching) a nuclear reactor in space. What you're referring to is called a "radioisotope thermoelectric generator" or RTG. They produce a few hundred watts of constant power for a practical lifetime of about 18 or so years. The Russians launched a series of radar satellites from '67-'88 that were powered with real deal nuclear reactors. They were plagued with coolant leaks and other assorted problems (old reactor designs and soviet engineering after all). There are new sealed, albeit lower power reactors out there that run for decades without liquid coolant of any kind.

But anyway, there you go.

I think our best chance of drastically altering our capabilities in space is artificial intelligence.

IF, and that's a big "IF", it doesnt become self aware. And Im not even joking about that. They estimate that in about 20 years, AI will be able to "learn" so quickly that it will be able to increase its intelligence faster and faster by orders of magnitude. It's the equivalent of a runaway freight train. Some of the projects that DARPA is working in right now are pretty disturbing. Their AI experiments are actually quarantined the same way they handle biological warfare labs.

IF we can somehow harness this AI, I think we could develop well, anything. Be it space propulsion, food techs, nano materials, etc. They skys the limit if you have something that has a 10,000 IQ on your team.

AI is a long way off. Before we develop an AI we need to have a bio-computer or Quantum-computer. In order to process information fast enough to support the software for AI. We have things that are close to AI like Watson built by IBM. But all that is, is an advanced search engine. AI would be nice but its a long way off.

As for travel to another star system. Yes the closest start is 4.5 light years away which with current technology would take us just over 50 years to get there. And as you approach the speed of light time for you slows down but it would still take around 48 years of your life to do it. 50 years for the people on earth. We would have to train children to make the trip and send them up at a maximum of 12 years of age. Which means they're training would have to start when they are in Kindergarden. This would put them at 60 when they finally get to the start system. At which point the starship would be a generation ship. Also 50 years is a long time for a trip. In 50 years we went from having computers that had 1khz of processing power the size of a small house to multi-cored computers the size of a notebook that can process in the ghz range. In 50 years we went from having an aircraft that could manage 10 minutes of flight at just over 30mph to super sonic trans-atlantic flights that last 4+ hours. 50 years to go from Wooden concept subs that killed the pilots after 20 minutes of submersion at 30 feet to steel subs able to dive to depths of 35,000 feet and stay submerged for vast ammounts of time.

In short, you have to consider that in 20 years while your constructing that ship just to travel from earth to mars you'll have new technologies that will come out that will greatly reduce the time it takes to travel the distance. Right now it would at the shortest time span take 6 to 7 months to travel from earth to mars and then another 6 to 7 months to travel back. The ship would have to be bigger than the international space station. Have its own reactor core to supply the power needed to run the craft and its magnetic shielding to prevent the people inside from getting killed by cosmic radiation. Or it would have to have so much mass and passive shielding in the form or lead and water to prevent the cosmic radiation from killing the passengers. Current methods of putting a something in space costs right around $100,000 a pound. We would have to get that to around $1000 per pound before we could build a ship of that size. Or we would have to build a construction facility in space and harvest any asteroids, comets etc. that may be floating near the facility. Either way the cost and time it would take will be closer to the 20 or 30 year mark before we actually start building a ship to travel to mars. At which time we will have new engine technology which will more then likely cut the travel time from earth to mars by about half. As well as new building materials, and radiation shielding technologies. Not to mention new energy sources, computers etc. etc. etc. The best thing to do is just get up there and continue our research while we put plans like the 100 year ship on the drawing board for the future and put goals for technological advancements that will help us build and use that 100 year ship.

By the way the nears potentially habitable start system is more like 20 to 30 light years away which is well beyond our current human life span. Also we have no idea what the effects of Micro gravity has on child development during pregnancy as well as how it effects the birthing process of that child. Something to think about if your going to create a generation ship.

Yes the closest start is 4.5 light years away which with current technology would take us just over 50 years to get there.

I'm sorry to say that there is no way that with current tech that we could reach the nearest star in 50 years.

The Voyager spacecraft, still functioning as they push out toward what some consider to the be edge of the Solar System, were launched 35 years ago. IF they were pointed at the nearest star (Proxima Centarui) they would get there in 18,500 years.

We can do somewhat better today; technology has advanced, and the Voyagers were designed for planetary flybys within our Solar System, not put on the fastest possible track to reach another star.

Still, the time scales are daunting - using the latest tech, rounding up every uncertainty in our favour, and with a very generous dollop of optimism, the very quickest we could reach the nearest star would be ~6000 years; not 50 years, I'm afraid, or within two orders of magnitude of 50 years.

An under appreciated problem of deep space travel is the environment is like being inside a particle accelerator. Ultra energetic cosmic rays (they were called such before they were found to be subatomic and atomic particles) will bombard any ship in deep space and over the centuries will break up its atomic structure into a kind of "swiss cheese".

Hey! Cultural Divide! How did the mirrors every astronomer around the world has been bouncing lasers off of for the last 40 years get on the moon?

@ Sanescience

I guess that puts holes into a lot of theory's. Best to stop at the nearest Way Station and make those needed repairs.

Good info

@ Spouting Fire,

Valid points. But I'm willing to bet if we get to the level of science that you are talking about in terms of spaceflight abilities, tackling lifespan issues and weightlessness in space wouldnt be much. Centrifigal gravity would be almost a necessity on a deep space mission, for various reasons. Since there is no drag in space, and they dont have to worry about aerodynamics, the options to design the spacecraft to accomondate this are vast.

Additionally, we'll be well beyond the learning curve of putting people into suspended animation (and resuscitating them) before we have the technology to produce a near light speed vehicle.

With the way this country is heading...we will never get out of orbit with any man. For heaven's sake...you have leaders who are doing their best to make creationism be the science which is being taught in our schools. Unlike the 60's when we had leaders who would/could dream...we get "leaders" who should be ashamed to even be running or calling themselves that. Couple that with their supporters...we're heading for another dark ages. Gene Roddenberry and other visionaries we usually have looked for encouragement are rolling in their graves. On the other hand...Mike Judge and "Idiocracy" is our future...unfortunately.

Alan - people have been going to places without knowing what was there since the beginning of man. All the great explores did it and so will more. I would get in a FTL spacecraft in a heartbeat to go somewhere new, without knowing what was there before hand.

NVArt,

The problem with that isn't the will of the explorers, it's the will of the government. And undertaking like a FTL ship would most likely have government backing. We are so removed from death, compared to our ancestors, that governments have become unwilling to risk lives to gain knowledge (or at least unwilling to do so in a manner where one could hold them accountable for loss of said lives). There are many like you who have the courage to explore the unknown with possible risk to life and limb, but you still need funding to explore.

I've said it before, we could make great strides with respect to extraplanetary bases if we were willing to send humans that we didn't intend to bring back. As long as there was a solid plan to ensure that their lives would not be spent without positive results, "boots on the ground" would get much, much more done than robots, and nixing the return trip would make mission planning simpler and less expensive.

Why?

The Sun is indeed getting brighter by about 1% every 100 million years, but if we're still around that would be plenty of time to deploy sunshades in space, or some such thing. The real trouble comes in about 5 billion years when the Sun enters its brief red giant phase.

Think again.....

Actually the Moon is rich in titanium, helium-3, magnesium, aluminum and many other rare metals.

Titan = the largest fuel source in the Solar System. Entire seas of liquid methane/ethane.

Europa = WATER. 2 times as much as the Earth

Mars = Iron

Jupiter = Gravity. Lot's of wonderful gravity to help us get anywhere in the solar system quickly.

Sun = Solar Wind: Able to push a solar sail to 10% the speed of light.

That's just the start.

The Moon- No green cheese

Titan- Weather report- cold and raining methane at a chilly -290F tourists beware.

Europa- Don't tell the bottled water industry

Mars- Iron-dust devils-one-percent the surface pressure of Earth and also a 24 hour day. Bring plenty of air though. One tall mountain for any hikers.

Jupiter- Don't get sucked in by the Gravity or you might be a couple of inches tall

Sun-Plenty of Sun spots to view (but not to close)

Pluto you forgot- 4 moons now and only 9.5 years to get there. Best to pick up some water at Europa on the way and hope your food supply does not run out.

You are correct Bill, great info. Thought I would have some fun with this.

Bill: So Gingrich wasn't crazy when he spoke of utilizing the moons resources.........

OK.........we get it. Strip mines on the moon and post-Panamax ships to bring the stuff back to Earth.............or better yet nuclear powered smelters on the moon and smaller ships to bring back purified metals.

Pipeline to Titan.

Plastic bags and industrial waste shipped to Europa to pollute the water to bring it up to Earth standards.

Iron from Mars.......same scenarios as on the Moon but more so since Fe not as lucrative as what we get from the moon so many more smelters needed here.

Jupiter's gravity------nothing to bring back and sell there only for speeding up tourist travels

Sun--------Solar sails? where we sailing to BTW?

Technically, you would be sailing to anywhere past Earths orbital zone, that is, away from the sun.

It would be a pretty handy method of propulsion, except that it only works one way...

The biggest obstacle to space exploration is Congress, which continually cuts off funding.

Add that to your calculations.

MWD4LIFE,

Yes, Gingrich was correct. But let's face it, he actually knowing more about having affairs than his knowledge in science.

OBXRon,

Bring fuel from Titan to Earth for consumption is a fools errand. When it takes $10,000 a pound to get something into low Earth orbit, we can only expect that bringing fuel back from Titan would be a "bit" more expensive. I do not believe that "economies of scale" will really make a dent in the price.

The fuel on Titan is best used as a fueling up spot to go further out still.

Yes, Gingrich was correct. But let's face it, he actually knowing more about having affairs than his knowledge in science.

The guy who doesn't believe in evolution or climate change believes in space travel. Almost makes me suspect such a thing is possible...

Most of these people couldn't navigate to their nearest 7-11 store if it was 1 block away without their GPS equipment.

Sp many rocket scientists and so little knowledge.

Wow, there has to be at least one, doesn't there? Anonymous, hiding behind a username and computer screen as he/she hurls insults.

Those two douches' do nothing but insult on every article.

Guess they didn't get enough love as a child......

Sad, really interesting reading the posts here and the different theories and calculations then along come a couple of morons. I think your right MWD4LIFE.

Actually, SpaceX already has a design drawn up for a craft more powerful than the Saturn 5 using stock parts.

100-200k with the soon to be operating space tourism companies. At least the ones that go just to orbit and back. If Bigelow Aerospace is successful there will be a hotel for tourists up in orbit. Plenty of middle class people who are not rich could manage to swing 100k if it was that important of a dream to them and they saved. The poor however (including me), not so much.

Ignore the troll.

In Google, and from NASA.

As you wish.

Explain how the mirrors got on the moon.

OK. You want to see pictures of the moon landing sites Tigerwould?
I guess your Google is broken so here ya go...
w w w (dot)nasa(dot)gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.html

Pigs in space.

Because it costs a LOT of money to put something in orbit using current launch systems, something like $10,000 a pound.

I think the only practical way to deal with long-term exposure to galactic radiation is the development of "energy shield" technology. In other words creating something like magnetic plasma shields (which we are working on, I believe). This is similar to how the Earth protects us from radiation, and would weigh less than the equivalent amount of lead shielding.

The concept is sound enough, we are just limited by energy and our ability to manipulate magnetic fields. And though energy shields are currently science fiction, so too were rocket ships and cell phones.