Complete commitment. Never coming back. Just forget about the "culture of safety and political correctness". It's a one-way human mission to establish a necessarily self-sufficient and permanent outpost -- on Mars. A planet that is six months through space away from earth. The transportation pod that one rides in will also be home upon arrival at the red desert surface. Similar to a small Airstream trailer that travels millions of miles through space and has soft landed into the Australian outback on a hot day.
"It is important to realize that this is not a "suicide mission." The astronauts would go to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers of a permanent human Mars colony.... abandoning the need to send the fuel and supplies for the return journey would cut costs dramatically, arguably by about 80 percent..."Source: To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars, The Journal of Cosmology, October-November, 2010.
This earthling plan to colonize Mars is not at all like what England did with Australia in the 1700's. The astronauts that land on Mars would not be outcast convicts from over-crowded prisons here on earth. And they probably would not be young.
"You would send a little bit older folks, around 60 or something like that," Mr. Schulze-Makuch said, bringing to mind the aging heroes who saved the day in the movie "Space Cowboys."Source: The Washington Times
"Initially, colonists may be preferred who are beyond their reproductive age, because their life expectancy is likely to be 20 years or less, and secondly, the first settlers will endure some radiation damage to their reproductive organs, both during the trip to Mars and on the Martian surface...The advantages of a one-way human mission are many-fold including a dramatic reduction of costs ... and that no [post-mission] rehabilitation program is needed ... [for colonists] remaining on the low-gravity surface of Mars ...".Source: To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars, The Journal of Cosmology, October-November, 2010.
Think of it as an exclusive retirement community in a low-gravity, oxygen-deprived, dry-heat climate.
LIFT (acronym: Link I Found Today)
Simply the last segment to read at the end of this post and may or may not be in any way appropriate or relevant to anything ...
"Old People in Space", The Colbert Report, video segment (5:28).
Next scheduled post: 3.17.11 (Subscribe FREE to receive email notifications.)
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