The Freedom To Fail: Simulations And The Future Of Our Species

"Plans are useless. Planning is everything." - Dwight David Eisenhower If all goes as planned, in 18 days the hatch will open and our one-year mission to simulated space will end. Thanks in part to this mission, if all goes as planned, a generation from now we'll be waist-deep in our first attempt to land humans on Mars. Between now and then, plans will accumulate: a plan for building a launch vehicle; a plan for getting our stuff there (hopefully, most of it in advance); a plan for how to select and train and feed and water a crew of four or more for three years. Sometimes, twenty years feels like enough time to make all this happen. Then, I remember how long it took to plan, design, build, test, launch, and land the Mars Curiosity Rover: ~2004-2012. When a robot's one-way trip was eight years in the making, twenty years to get people safely to Mars and back suddenly seems like a mighty tall order. Fortunately, we've already started. Our mission is proof of that. To be fair, it took ~8 years to build not 1 but 2.5 Curiosity Rovers: the one that went to Mars, the one that lived in the test bed on Earth, and the one that existed in pieces in a software and hardware testing lab. Credit: By NASA via Wikimedia Commons. Simulations like ours are a critical part of any serious endeavor. The reason is simple: humans need to practice in order to get things right. Whatever we attempt - be it a geometry problem, a round-house kick, or an asteroid rendezvous - the odds of our suc...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news