Mars Mission a "NO GO" say Experts - Confirming Psalms 115:16

photo: qz.com

Via Yahoo Finance:

If you haven’t heard, there’s a plan to start up a colony of humans living on Mars in the near future.
If the next decade goes as planned, the not-for-profit organization, Mars One, will launch a manned mission to Mars that will land the first human colony on the red planet in 2025.
Here’s the catch: Those who leave Earth for the 7-month-long ride in space will never return.
The four-member crew will learn to call Mars — a freezing, barren, lifeless planet — home. Forever.
That may sound great to the tens of thousands of people who applied, but Mars One is going about their grandiose plans all wrong according to retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Right now, Mars One is focused more on raising funds and selecting crew members than developing the technology needed for the trip. And the technology, Hadfield told Elmo Keep, writing in Medium, is the most basic starting point for any space mission.
“There’s a great, I don’t know, self-defeating optimism in the way that this project has been set up,” Hadfield told Keep. “I fear that it’s going to be a little disillusioning for people, because it’s presented as if for sure it’s going to happen.”

And…

Here’s a short list of what Hadfield told Keep we need to know before living on Mars:
How do you completely recycle your water?
How do you completely recycle your oxygen system?
How do you protect yourselves from radiation?
How do you not go crazy?
How do you set up the politics of the place and the command structure, so that when we get it wrong we won’t all die?

 Via http://news.com.au

A NEW report has exposed one of the big problems confronting our ambition to send humans to Mars – galactic cosmic ray radiation.
Cosmic rays consist of high energy particles. When humans leave the earth’s atmosphere, these rays can kill cells and even cause cancer. They’re also extremely difficult to shield against, Wired reports.
The new study, published in the scientific journal PLOS One, says astronauts could receive doses of cosmic ray radiation exceeding their lifetime limit after just 18 months (for women) or two years (for men) on the International Space Station.

And…

 “The type of tumours that cosmic ray ions make are more aggressive than what we get from other radiation,” says radiation expert Francis Cucinotta, who wrote the report.
That conclusion obviously has wider repercussions for extended space travel. If we’re going to send anyone to Mars, we’d better be able to protect them against the effects of this radiation. Cucinotta estimates that, as technology currently stands, an astronaut’s lifespan would be shortened by 15-24 years by a trip to the red planet.
NASA does take steps to ensure its astronauts don’t vastly increase their chances of dying from cancer. Once an astronaut has spent too much time accumulating radiation in space, they’re grounded, Wired reports.

Via http://qz.com

 I’M SORRY DAVE… Yes, the people going to Mars on a Dutch reality TV show will die. 

Mars One, an organization based in the Netherlands, has been recruiting amateur astronauts to send on a one-way, televised trip to Mars, with the hopes of building a colony there. The organization says that the technology to do this exists, or will be ready by the time of its expected 2022 launch date.
Not so fast, say a group of strategic engineering graduate students at MIT. A simulation of the Mars One plan (pdf) shared with the public at the recent International Astronautical Congress reveals the colonization project will likely end in disaster unless expensive changes are made.
Mars One plans on sending crews of four every two years to the Red Planet, where they will live inside space capsules and inflatable  habitats, wringing water from the martian soil and growing much of their own food. The researchers took into account the various factors necessary for survival—maintaining a breathable atmosphere, avoiding starvation and dehydration, preventing fire and depressurisation—to see what the colony would need.
It takes 68 days for the first crew member to die.
That projected fatality is the result of suffocation, space style: The researchers found that growing plants would increase the amount of oxygen in the air to the point where it would need to be vented outside of the habitat to avoid increasing the pressure within the life support unit.

Some things never change…

Source: http://ppsimmons.blogspot.com/2014/12/mars-mission-no-go-say-experts.html