Martin Brown wrote:
Sea Wasp wrote:

John Schilling wrote:


Your argument might as well be that wintering over at the South Pole is
as easy a trip as a weekend in the local state park, for a Boy Scout
troop. Because, see, only incompetents would make the trip without
adequate training and equipment, therefore the Boy Scouts will have
right training and equipment whether they're going to the state park
or Antarctica, therefore it's just as safe and easy either way.


Not really. It does depend on the assumptions you make, true, but
you exaggerate a number of issues. Mars offers opportunities to
support your marooned astronauts, assuming they brought the right
equipment,


Which includes a fully robotic hospital to care for the invalid humans
whilst they re-adjust to Mars gravity after 300 days weightless.

No, actually. They spend most of the trip in Mars gravity. Read The
Case For Mars.



Going to the moon is a picnic by comparison and we haven't done that now
for more than three decades. AT the moment we can't even fly the shuttle

Which is irrelevant as the scenarios assume that we have, in fact,
created the appropriate tech. If we can't get there, there wouldn't be
any concern about how you'd do a rescue mission, would there?



If you assume they each start out with optimal equipment for the
mission in question, they should be roughly equal.


Do you have any idea how much equipment and food that would be for Mars?
(even allowing for subsistence rations and make/find water on planet)

Yes, I do. And so does Zubrin, who among other things worked on these
sorts of things at NASA.



The KEY point about BOTH of them is that it is a nontrivial effort
to mount a rescue mission unless (in both cases) you have such a
mission STANDING BY. To just throw together something that would reach
the moon with sufficient capacity to go down, retrieve your
astronauts, and come back home safely is, likely, somewhat cheaper,
and certainly faster,


And faster is pretty important when you are mounting a *rescue* mission.
Not much use turning up so late that they are all dead.

Depends on what you're rescuing them FROM. If you sent them somewhere
that they have limited X (food, water, etc.) and they cannot get more,
then yes, time is the issue, and what time they have will be dictated
by X. Which is why a prudent mission would start off with the proper
survival stockpile.


Again, read Zubrin. I'm not going to try to type in ~300 pages of his
text, where he covers each and every objection, ranging from the
radiation issues to the food/transport issues to the gravity issues
and on and on and on. If you've READ it and you have cogent arguments
to take apart his reasoning, that's fine, I'm interested to hear them
(it won't make any difference in the Boundary universe since the
book's already published, but it makes a difference in this one) but
so far the most I've seen someone do is say "well, some of his
assumptions may be optimistic" which is about as weak an objection as
one can get.

--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/seawasp/