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Tonight a Dragon be launched

Whilst we all hope space X launch goes well , apparently we should be able to see it from UK is sky stays clear , at around  8:30pm when you spot the International space station (ISS) , at :8:50 you should see the dragon space capsule moving towards it , although still be pretty light in sky , but its hard not to miss ISS as its a bright as venus has been.

I don't know if general space travel gets discussed on community message boards , but it is rather energy intensive and polluting as a tourism idea and am a bit puzzled why NASA wants to go to moon when we can already get to mars and supply it , but the supply system to mars even for 12 people would be massive , at around 1/3 the size of the earth and an ave temp of -35oC , its going to pretty hard to grow crops and magnetosphere is less (but not as less as the moon) so high radiation levels possible .
  • Mmmm launch delayed till Saturday , one idea I was thinking about was water , if it were possible to design a sort of canvas water bag say around 5000lit within a support of say 4 and a propulsion system , you could launch it into space , the water will freeze and expand (hopefully to the shape of the bag ) and then you propel it to mars and drop it in on big parachutes or glide in on a sledge and you have your fresh water supply , all be it frozen , but I guess the problem is , accurate delivery of pre supplies before your colony arrives .The green houses would have to be thought about as the winds are quite abrasive so any glasing system would have problems , generally plants could cope with higher radiation but I doubt humans could spend much time out in the lower sunlight levels , so we would probebely ;iive underground , so need to have tools and machinery to do this , probebely be electric but colony power system would need a lot of thought , fuel cell is difficult , certainly have to supply oxygen , so NASA would need some sort of heavy goods delivery system into the thin atmosphere that is accurate to a specific drop zone ,to save having to move stuff around .
  • I think the reason that NASA wants to go to the Moon is that nobody has landed a human on any planet since the 1970's.  Any technology used to do that is now utterly obsolete, and anyone working on it will be long since retired.  It makes sense to practice on something closer to home, so there's some chance that things will work when the first person gets to Mars.

    We have now sent several robots to Mars, but an awfully high proportion have crashed into Mars, rather than landing on it.
  • Another reason for going to the moon first is that heading for Mars from the gravity well of Earth limits the size of the payload significantly, but if you start from the moon (or even better, moon orbit) you are already 1/4 million miles from Earth and Earth's gravity pull is already reduced to less than 0.1% of Earth's surface gravity. The amount of fuel needed is therefore significantly less, and therefore the potential payload much greater.
  • yes but doesn't the fuel from the return trip from the moon equal the escape energy?
  • Yes it is technically a difficult environment and engineering challenge , I think it takes 14 months to get there and how you get back is a real challenge , but my thinking is you put the cost of the moon base into the more expensive mars mission , be a really big supply train, probably a sort of space station for mars with a docking for your space travel ships and some sort of drop system to surface , then you don't have all the hassle of trying to lift from mars surface with a large ship.