Bad news. The Moon is surprisingly radioactive.
 

Well I’ll keep quiet about the six Apollo missions to the moon and why that wasn’t brought up then...

But here is the article of what was discovered and is news now.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/moon-s...yV7U0OGWnlPgKQ

Yep, that pesky radiation always was a big problem and everyone knew it.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/world...scn/index.html

Okay, the moon is off my bucket list.

Mars will be a serious challenge with conventional space flight and two to three years in space. If they can’t keep multimillion dollar satellites from failing due to solar storms near earth, a human body is toast in a few years time in open space.

They will just have to learn to bend and warp that space-time to get to places. :D

Franklin Chang Díaz is a pioneer. As a child, he dreamed of going into space. As an adult, he made his wish come true. Diaz was the first naturalized U.S. citizen from Latin America to become an astronaut. After making seven trips into space, the MIT-educated Díaz retired from NASA and set his sights on speeding up the journey to Mars. A trip using chemical-powered rockets takes nine months—Díaz has developed a plasma-propelled engine that he says will cut the journey down to just over one month. We visit Ad Astra Rocket Company in Webster, Texas, to see the project Díaz has been working on for 40 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBVs9ZwA-Q

One either has to be clueless (very unlikely for an astronaut) or really have “a pair” made of titanium to even imagine traveling through space...

Read this and imagine the hostile environment and the hopeless situation one could wind up in without so much as a warning out there. http://www.solarstorms.org/SWChapter6.html

Very cool but... Mars surface has serious radiation levels as well. Many times Earth’s and if we are only now finding out about the moon... maybe much, much higher? The astronauts would have to be protected at all times, not only while in space but the whole time..

It is supposed to be a one way ticket for first settlers? So a life in space suit forever, if that is even possible? Materials that are delivered ahead of time to construct shelter by 3D printers or by astronauts themselves? How about a sustainable food supply for the rest of their lives?

I don’t see a solution other than robotic construction of protective shelter ahead of arrival of humans there. :scratch2: I think a mission to Mars is a pipe dream for now. Probably not in our natural lifetimes. :no: Way too many challenges to overcome. People manage to perish getting lost on our own planet which is a paradise by comparison.

Dammit, I seriously was going there this fall to just get away. I guess it’ll be Vegas now. **kicks rocks**

I just look at the pretty high def film of the rovers on Mars. That will do. All those wasted dreams and dollars. Pardon the pun, but I don't want to wear a Rad spacesuit 24/7.

From the article I posted earlier in the thread.

“Microscopic current flows can flip a computer memory position from ‘1’ to ‘0’ or cause some components, or an entire spacecraft system, to switch-on when it is not supposed to. When this happens, it is called a ‘Single Event Upset’ or SEU, and like water they come in two flavors: hard and soft.

A hard SEU actually does unreparable physical damage to a junction or part of a microcircuit. A soft SEU merely changes a binary value stored in a device’s memory, and this can be corrected by simply ‘re-booting’ the device. Engineers on the ground cannot watch the circuitry of a satellite as it undergoes a discharge or SEU event, but they can monitor the functions of the satellite.

When these change suddenly, and without any logical or human cause, they are called ‘Satellite Anomalies’. They happen a lot more often than you will ever read about in the news media” :smoking: