Re: NASA's Moon Crash Friday Morning
Not quite. More trips means more fuel. Every extra trip, that's an extra launch vehicle you need to send up.
Currently, although preliminary, the plan is to launch an unmanned return vehicle to mars that would land and create fuel for the return trip. Later, a manned Orion (or Orion derived) ship, launched from earth on an Ares rocket, would carry astronauts to Mars. That plan for the future is one of the reasons they were originally designing Orion to land on dry land (they later decided to have Orion land in water to save the weight of the air bag system). Considering it's not going to happen for another 20 years, that's obviously preliminary, but that's likely what the mission is going to look like, not like the 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mission to Mars, etc hulking superstructures.
Not quite. More trips means more fuel. Every extra trip, that's an extra launch vehicle you need to send up.
Currently, although preliminary, the plan is to launch an unmanned return vehicle to mars that would land and create fuel for the return trip. Later, a manned Orion (or Orion derived) ship, launched from earth on an Ares rocket, would carry astronauts to Mars. That plan for the future is one of the reasons they were originally designing Orion to land on dry land (they later decided to have Orion land in water to save the weight of the air bag system). Considering it's not going to happen for another 20 years, that's obviously preliminary, but that's likely what the mission is going to look like, not like the 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mission to Mars, etc hulking superstructures.
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