>if you’ve already gone to the moon I think you’ve already solved the hardest engineering problems involved in going to Pluto.
You specifically mention “footprints” on Pluto. The life support requirements alone for a multi-decade journey will be orders of magnitude harder than anything we’ve done so far. Depending on the trajectory we’d be looking at ~20 − 46 years of spaceflight (with shorter ones generally using more delta-V). I was going to say you’d also need to bring fuel for a return trip, but your astronauts would die of old age by the time they got back!
Funnily enough, last night was the first time I did a manned moon landing in Kerbal Space Program with the Realism Overhaul mod (which adds things like realistic engine performance, life support, etc). Even as a veteran player it was no easy task. Landing on Pluto would be insane: you’d probably need to put somewhere on the order of 10,000 tons of mass in LEO, plus a way to keep your astronauts alive. By contrast a manned moon landing requires about 100 tons in LEO.
Getting to Mars is a big jump compared with going to the moon, since you’re traveling 500-1000x farther on any efficient route, and have to do much more to keep the astronauts from getting irradiated, or hopelessly weakened by the lack of gravity. Getting to Pluto is 100x farther than that, so you would need to do some special things to, e.g., not have your astronauts die of old age on the trip.
This is all true, but these jumps in difficulty are nothing compared with the jump in difficulty of getting to the moon (or even LEO), versus getting between any two points on Earth.
>if you’ve already gone to the moon I think you’ve already solved the hardest engineering problems involved in going to Pluto.
You specifically mention “footprints” on Pluto. The life support requirements alone for a multi-decade journey will be orders of magnitude harder than anything we’ve done so far. Depending on the trajectory we’d be looking at ~20 − 46 years of spaceflight (with shorter ones generally using more delta-V). I was going to say you’d also need to bring fuel for a return trip, but your astronauts would die of old age by the time they got back!
Funnily enough, last night was the first time I did a manned moon landing in Kerbal Space Program with the Realism Overhaul mod (which adds things like realistic engine performance, life support, etc). Even as a veteran player it was no easy task. Landing on Pluto would be insane: you’d probably need to put somewhere on the order of 10,000 tons of mass in LEO, plus a way to keep your astronauts alive. By contrast a manned moon landing requires about 100 tons in LEO.
Getting to Mars is a big jump compared with going to the moon, since you’re traveling 500-1000x farther on any efficient route, and have to do much more to keep the astronauts from getting irradiated, or hopelessly weakened by the lack of gravity. Getting to Pluto is 100x farther than that, so you would need to do some special things to, e.g., not have your astronauts die of old age on the trip.
This is all true, but these jumps in difficulty are nothing compared with the jump in difficulty of getting to the moon (or even LEO), versus getting between any two points on Earth.