{"id":2819,"date":"2012-08-09T19:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T18:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=2819"},"modified":"2012-08-09T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-09T18:08:00","slug":"curiosity-one-of-the-great-engineering-feats-of-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/09\/curiosity-one-of-the-great-engineering-feats-of-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Curiosity &#8211; One of the great Engineering Feats of Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You must have been living on the moon (haha) not to have heard about Curiosity (NASA&#8217;s nuclear powered tank) landing on Mars this week.  As a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/23\/chartered-engineer-a-deserving-goal-or-morally-bankrupt-title\/\" title=\"Chartered Engineer Title Rant\">Chartered Engineer<\/a> myself I confess to being awe inspired and jealous of the team that conceptualised, designed and built what is <strong>a superb feat of engineering<\/strong>.  If you&#8217;re not aware of exactly what was involved, this is one of the best videos I&#8217;ve seen on the subject:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"7 Minutes of Terror: The Challenges of Getting to Mars\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ki_Af_o9Q9s?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve heard say that a manned trip to Mars is 50-100 years away, but that&#8217;s the USA talking.  I predict that <strong>the first human to step foot on Mars will be Chinese<\/strong>, and it will be a lot sooner than that.<\/p>\n<p>There is one good reason why we haven&#8217;t been to Mars yet, and that is, it&#8217;s damn difficult to get the astronauts back home again, because you have to ship all the fuel they&#8217;ll need for the return journey, and a vehicle capable of leaving the Martian surface.  That adds a huge cost and complexity to the endeavour.<\/p>\n<p>BUT, what if it were a one way trip?  You see it&#8217;s not a question of IF but WHEN a mankind-ending meteorite will hit the earth in the future? So I consider this to be mankind&#8217;s greatest challenge: <strong>can we organise ourselves enough to manage to sustainably leave our planet<\/strong>, before consuming all the planetary resources necessary to do it, or having the requisite civilisation destroyed (by a meteorite or ourselves)<\/p>\n<p><strong>One day, a human will leave our planet, never to return. <\/strong> That&#8217;s an unquestionable inevitability.  The question is only when will that happen?  Perhaps that sounds extreme, but as I&#8217;ve said before, if you asked for volunteers for a 1 way trip to Mars, you&#8217;d have a queue from London to Liverpool of potential volunteers!  But our Western sense of sensibility couldn&#8217;t possibly allow for a probably suicide mission.  That&#8217;s why it will be a Chinese astronaut; not only do they have the money to afford it, they don&#8217;t have the same public opinion constraints we do.<\/p>\n<p>If Curiosity does anything, it will galvanise the Chinese into action I think, to push their space program forward.  And on a personal note, if it doesn&#8217;t happen in my lifetime, I&#8217;ll by mightily upset!  \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You must have been living on the moon (haha) not to have heard about Curiosity (NASA&#8217;s nuclear powered tank) landing on Mars this week. As a Chartered Engineer myself I confess to being awe inspired and jealous of the team that conceptualised, designed and built what is a superb feat of engineering. If you&#8217;re not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[303,300,301,35,302],"class_list":{"0":"post-2819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-astronaut","8":"tag-curiosity","9":"tag-mars","10":"tag-nasa","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}