August 7, 2020 Zimmerman/Finding Genius podcast
The podcast Finding Genius with Richard Jacobs has now posted an hour-long interview he did of me about a week ago. It is available here.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
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The podcast Finding Genius with Richard Jacobs has now posted an hour-long interview he did of me about a week ago. It is available here.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
I think that the plans for retrieving samples from Mars need to be addressed more. Because it’s a stupid plan! Perseverance spreading out the sample all over the place is crazy. They should be collected and put on a flat area where a lander has easy access.
And docking the samples with a “Mars Orbital Earth Return vehicle” is madness. I mean, some guy really sat down and thought that up in crazy mood. Better to dock the spacecraft with a separately launched upper stage in Earth orbit, so that enough mass can be landed on Mars to bring the stuff back in one fell swoop. I get this feeling of NASA willingly complicating things just because they enjoy working with complexity. But this is not a chess game for entertainment, they need to do this rationally.
LocalFluff,
I agree that it could be a waste of a rover to run around gathering up samples from areas that another rover has already explored. Wouldn’t it have been better for Perseverance to have its own sample launcher?
Just as there is not much difference between docking around the Earth or docking around the Moon, docking around Mars should also not be a problem. Automated rendezvous-and-docking is already well understood, so it can be performed in orbit around any body, near or far.
As you noted, bringing the stuff back in one fell swoop, a direct return, would require quite a bit more mass to be landed on Mars, mass that could be better spent on experiments and instrumentation. Mars orbit rendezvous means that the fuel required to leave Mars orbit does not have to be lifted from the surface, and it also does not have to be delivered to the surface. When NASA increases the weight delivered to the Martian surface, the landing system gets more complicated, to the point that JPL considered that landing Curiosity was seven minutes of terror. It seems to me that rendezvous around Mars is no more complicated than around Earth, but landing the extra mass on Mars would be more complicated.
To put an image in your head, it was believed that a version of Apollo that was a direct flight to the Moon would require an Atlas-sized lander (almost 100 feet). With the lunar orbit rendezvous plan, the lander and Command-Service module were significantly smaller (around 60 feet, including the manned ascent module). Mars may have an atmosphere for an aerobraking reentry, but then it also has a higher gravity, with double the delta-v, relative to the Moon, required to get into low orbit, so the ratio for the sizes of the lander/return vehicles, combined, would be about the same, around 1/2 of a direct return vehicle.