Mission to Mars
I think the best they can hope for is a Twix.
Mars wannabe spacecraft Orion got stuck on the ground at Cape Canaveral after a number of delays to its scheduled launch. The first test flight of NASA’s new human-carrying space shuttle has been beset by problems, including a boat that wandered into the red zone, a “second stage propellant conditioning issue”, and finally, …
There are no Twixes. My colleague just phoned about a minute ago to say Boots do not sell them, so my request for lunchtime chocolate was denied.
So I've gone to SpaceX. I'm having a Double Decker, which is how they've designed the cabin for Dragon 2. With the pilots sitting in the pointy bit above the rest of the crew.
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This might cheer you up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo.
Do you mean the Up Goer Five XKCD?
Still a great XKCD, clever and surprisingly accurate too.
The Orion doesn't use 8 parachutes at once; no more than 3 are deployed at a time. 2 drogue chutes to stabilize the capsule, which are then cut free; 3 pilot chutes to pull out the main chutes before the pilot chutes are cut free; and then the 3 pilot chutes.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Orion_Parachute_Sequence.jpg
My over-sized Kerbal landers might use 12 parachutes at once, but not Orion. :)
An ancient tradition from cavemen thru roving tribes to the signalling towers along the walls of China moving on to the US Civil War Signal Corps towers spawning countless US Forest Service fire lookout sites onto LEO Russian MIR station and USA Skylab= 20 years later the LEO-ISS is a hopefully start of a permanent station orbiting Earth... a human presense to look around and sound alarms seems to built into our DNA.
IMHO= ORION is NASA's next step to Station keeping beyond Earth... The USA is not alone...China, India, Japan, and Russia all have similar stuff on their planning boards... All are real projects towards placing lighthouse / fire lookout sized stations on Mars... Commercial interests can build the plantations and towns that may follow= the mindset of the folks there is entirely different, station keepers enjoy the isolated, solitary life, and plantation folks / boom towners tend to be agressive colonizers.
Even if the Mars thing goes anywhere there will probably be other stations on other rocks in our Solar System within the Mars time frame...hardware is in the first step... finding huge quanities out there of easily mined fuel and raw material for expansion is going to make it actually possible for robots-anyway.
'Bladerunner' anderoids may be our actual future in space due to Radiation problems that can't be fixed by shielding (hope they remember us)...RS.