It would be cool if someone were to lead an effort to create a Skype plugin simulating communication with Mars by calculating in real-time the three to twenty-two minute communication delay. Not only would such a free, public, high-profile project have practical applications but it could also allay concerns some might have leaving friends and family on Earth as the public plays with such a plugin.
Category Archives: Mars to Stay
Buzz Aldrin Reaffirms MARS TO STAY!
Buzz Aldrin gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which he emphasized the ‘Mars to Stay’ initiative, excerpts:
BUZZ: I’m convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we’re eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don’t come back? What if they stay there?
SCREWBALL INTERVIEWER: Then you’ve got a bunch of astronauts on Mars going, “Hello? Can I get a little help here? What the fuck?”
BUZZ: But then we send six more people, and now we’ve got twelve. It’d be between three and four times cheaper to send people there and then leave them there.
CRIMINALLY UNINTELLIGENT INTERVIEWER: Do we tell them that in advance? Or do we just wait and spring it on them after they’ve landed?
BUZZ: DID the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that’s what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you’re there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn’t be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you’re there.
SHIT-FOR-BRAINED INTERVIEWER: You’re talking about building a colony?
BUZZ: Exactly! Every twenty-six months, there’s a window of going to Mars that may last for about a month or so. It just so happens that there’s an opportunity to put a habitat on Mars in the fall of 2022. So we put a habitat there and you check it out for a year or so, and it’s unmanned. Then in the spring of 2025, I send a crew and they stay for a year and a half, and then I bring them back. I send another crew in ‘27 and then I bring them back. I send another crew there in ‘29, and they stay. And then in ‘31 I send six more people, three to one of the moons of Mars and three directly to Mars, and now I’ve got nine people there. I can add six every twenty-six months.
More about the ‘Mars to Stay’ initiative can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay
Wikipedia Article on "Mars to Stay" one-way Mars mission plans and a new Twitter hashtag: #UpUrsCowards! >: P
Published an article on “Mars to Stay” one-way Mars missions for pioneering settlers live on Wikipedia. Of course you are welcome to edit and improve the post, please do so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay
Advancing one-way mission architectures as possible, pragmatic, and even ideal serves to make the eventual settlement of Mars that much more conceivable when only traditional round-trip research missions are proposed. We need to create an institutional culture at NASA which considers long-term multi-decade pioneering missions by married child-bearing couples as the norm in long-distance space travel. The days of Flags-and-Footprints followed by regression into multi-decade lulls are over. Tremendous resources humanity has to allocated to NASA for space exploration are not intended to catapult a select few into a lifetime of black-tie dinners and speaking retreats on Maui. The purpose of human space exploration is to develop space-based resources, increase our understanding of nature, and settle the solar system. Traitors return to Earth.
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(On a separate note: for those of you following this blog anonymously you show up as followers under certain settings of Google’s Profile ID. Hope you find such a bug humorous. Actually, there is a new Twitter hashtag which will enable you to track posts to this blog, created just for you: #UpUrsCowards )