Why we cant send humans to Mars yet, and how well fix that. Mock up of Nasas Space Launch System. NASAWhile humans have dreamed about going to Mars practically since it was discovered, an actual mission in the foreseeable future is finally starting to feel like a real possibility. But how real is it Nasa says its serious about one day doing a manned mission while private companies are jockeying to presentever more audacious plans to get there. And equally important, public enthusiasm for the Red Planet is riding high after the Curiosity rovers spectacular landing and photo rich mission. Earlier this month, scientists, Nasa officials, private space company representatives and other members of the spaceflight community gathered in Washington D. C. for three days to discuss all the challenges at the Humans to Mars H2. M conference, hosted by the spaceflight advocacy group Explore Mars, which has called for a mission that would send astronauts in the 2. But the Martian dust devil is in the details, and there is still one big problem We currently lack the technology to get people to Mars and back. An interplanetary mission of that scale would likely be one of the most expensive and difficult engineering challenges of the 2. Mars is pretty far away, Nasas director of the International Space Station, Sam Scimemi said during the H2. M conference. Its six orders of magnitude further than the space station. We would need to develop new ways to live away from the Earth and thats never been done before. Ever. There are some pretty serious gaps in our abilities, including the fact that we cant properly store the necessary fuel long enough for a Mars trip, we dont yet have a vehicle capable of landing people on the Martian surface, and we arent entirely sure what it will take to keep them alive once there. A large part of the H2. M summit involved panelists discussing the various obstacles to a manned Mars mission. Ive said repeatedly Ill know when were serious about sending humans to the Mars surface when they start making significant technology investments in particular areas, engineer Bobby Braun, former Nasa chief technologist, told Wired. The good news is that theres nothing technologically impossible about a manned Mars mission. Its just a matter of deciding its a priority and putting the time and money into developing the necessary tools. Right now Nasa, other space agencies, and private companies are working to bring Mars in reach. Here, Wired. com presents the most challenging obstacles well have to overcome to get to Mars and how to fix them. Getting off the Earth. Before you can run you need to walk. How a 29yearold idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin. And before you can do deep space exploration, you need to get off your own planet. While weve been sending people and probes into space for more than 5. Mars mission would be on a much larger scale than almost anything weve done before. There is no rocket in existence that can take off from the Earths surface and escape its gravitational pull to reach space carrying the weight of a large spacecraft, astronauts and all the supplies and materials needed to get to Mars. Most likely, rockets would have to make several trips to drop off supplies and pieces for a vehicle into low Earth orbit. There astronauts would slowly build the vehicle over time and then rocket off to the Red Planet. That still requires some heavy lifting. The largest construct assembled in space, the International Space Station, has a mass of 4,5. According to Nasa, a Mars vehicle capable of taking people to the Red Planet and back would be smaller than the space station around 1,2. But our capabilities are hampered by the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, which was capable of carrying large masses to Earth orbit with relative ease. Using existing rockets, aerospace engineer Bret Drake, who leads planning and analysis at Nasas Exploration Missions and Systems Office, estimated it would take 7. Mars mission spacecraft. Considering the ISS took more than a decade to complete, assembling a Mars vehicle would require a very long time. But in the future, this task should be much easier. Futurelab at NFER. Welcome to Futurelab at NFER. NFER and Futurelab merged in November 2011, bringing together two charities that share complementary objectives and. Theres nothing technologically impossible about a manned Mars mission. Its just a matter of developing the necessary tools. People who dont drink alcohol increase their risk of dying, according to a new study published in the journal Alcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research. Wired Magazine Pdf' title='Wired Magazine Pdf' />Nasa is hoping to have its Space Launch System ready by 2. Saturn V that carried astronauts to the moon. The private spaceflight company Space. X is also working on its new Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which would have somewhat less cargo capacity than Nasas big rocket but still much greater than anything around today. Falcon Heavys first tests could begin later this year. Nasa estimates it would need to fire at least seven of its new SLS rockets to deliver to orbit the people, supplies, and ships necessary for a Mars mission. And while SLS could help get to the Red Planet, it should be noted that there are other alternatives we could pursue. Fuel storage. Humans arent the only things you want to send on a manned Mars mission. In order to stay alive in space, people need lots of things food, oxygen, shelter, and, perhaps most importantly, fuel. Wired Magazine Pdf' title='Wired Magazine Pdf' />Somewhere around 8. Mars mission is going to be propellant. Trouble is, storing that amount of fuel in space is hard. Objects in low Earth orbit the place youd park your Mars spaceship while you built it travel around the world every 9. During half that time, they experience the intense heat of the sun and then the unheated blackness of space. That difference causes liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel to vaporise. Unless tanks are regularly vented, containers holding these materials are liable to explode. Hydrogen in particular is susceptible to leaking out of its tanks, resulting in a loss of about 4 percent per month. This means that if a Mars mission required a year to assemble in low Earth orbit, it would lose more than half of its propellant before even departing to the Red Planet. At a cost of around 1. Nasa is actively pursuing new technology that would allow them to store propellant in space for long periods of time. Starting this year, the agency hopes to demonstrate the capability for large, in space cryogenic loading and transfer. Such technology would be extremely valuable for a manned Mars mission and could one day lead to the equivalent of a Space Age gas depots waiting to top up a rockets fuel. Advanced propulsion. While you want to get people to Mars as fast as possible to minimise exposure to the hazards of radiation and weightlessness in space, their supplies can leave Earth earlier and travel at a more leisurely pace. A relatively low power engine could push along a large ship carrying astronauts supplies for their time on Mars. In its interplanetary plans, Nasa would like to send such things on ahead of a crew and have them waiting on the Martian surface when the people arrive. The agency is currently working on advancing solar electric propulsion, which shoots ionised gas behind a craft to move it forward. Previous missions, such as Nasas Dawn and the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft, have used this method. A Mars mission would need much larger solar electric thrusters than have been used before. The agency currently has plans for a mission to collect a small asteroid and tug it back to Earth, which could be helpful in moving this technology forward. Landing on Mars. We currently dont have the capability to land people on Mars, plain and simple. This is a fairly recently recognised problem, having only been understood through calculations made in the early 2. Reinventing Your Business Model. In 2. 00. 3, Apple introduced the i. Pod with the i. Tunes store, revolutionizing portable entertainment, creating a new market, and transforming the company. In just three years, the i. Podi. Tunes combination became a nearly 1. Apples revenue. Apples market capitalization catapulted from around 1 billion in early 2. This success story is well known whats less well known is that Apple was not the first to bring digital music players to market. A company called Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio in 1. Another firm, Best Data, introduced the Cabo 6. Both products worked well and were portable and stylish. So why did the i. Pod, rather than the Rio or Cabo, succeedApple did something far smarter than take a good technology and wrap it in a snazzy design. It took a good technology and wrapped it in a great business model. Apples true innovation was to make downloading digital music easy and convenient. To do that, the company built a groundbreaking business model that combined hardware, software, and service. This approach worked like Gillettes famous blades and razor model in reverse Apple essentially gave away the blades low margin i. Tunes music to lock in purchase of the razor the high margin i. Pod. That model defined value in a new way and provided game changing convenience to the consumer. Business model innovations have reshaped entire industries and redistributed billions of dollars of value. Retail discounters such as Wal Mart and Target, which entered the market with pioneering business models, now account for 7. Nero 9 Full Version Windows 7. Low cost U. S. airlines grew from a blip on the radar screen to 5. Fully 1. 1 of the 2. Fortune 5. 00 in the past 1. Stories of business model innovation from well established companies like Apple, however, are rare. An analysis of major innovations within existing corporations in the past decade shows that precious few have been business model related. And a recent American Management Association study determined that no more than 1. Yet everyones talking about it. A 2. 00. 5 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that over 5. A 2. 00. 8 IBM survey of corporate CEOs echoed these results. Nearly all of the CEOs polled reported the need to adapt their business models more than two thirds said that extensive changes were required. And in these tough economic times, some CEOs are already looking to business model innovation to address permanent shifts in their market landscapes. Senior managers at incumbent companies thus confront a frustrating question Why is it so difficult to pull off the new growth that business model innovation can bring Our research suggests two problems. The first is a lack of definition Very little formal study has been done into the dynamics and processes of business model development. Second, few companies understand their existing business model well enoughthe premise behind its development, its natural interdependencies, and its strengths and limitations. So they dont know when they can leverage their core business and when success requires a new business model. After tackling these problems with dozens of companies, we have found that new business models often look unattractive to internal and external stakeholdersat the outset. To see past the borders of what is and into the land of the new, companies need a road map. Ours consists of three simple steps. The first is to realize that success starts by not thinking about business models at all. It starts with thinking about the opportunity to satisfy a real customer who needs a job done. The second step is to construct a blueprint laying out how your company will fulfill that need at a profit. In our model, that plan has four elements. The third is to compare that model to your existing model to see how much youd have to change it to capture the opportunity. Once you do, you will know if you can use your existing model and organization or need to separate out a new unit to execute a new model. Every successful company is already fulfilling a real customer need with an effective business model, whether that model is explicitly understood or not. Lets take a look at what that entails. Business Model A Definition. A business model, from our point of view, consists of four interlocking elements that, taken together, create and deliver value. The most important to get right, by far, is the first. Customer value proposition CVP. A successful company is one that has found a way to create value for customersthat is, a way to help customers get an important job done. By job we mean a fundamental problem in a given situation that needs a solution. D Carrom Board Game here. Once we understand the job and all its dimensions, including the full process for how to get it done, we can design the offering. The more important the job is to the customer, the lower the level of customer satisfaction with current options for getting the job done, and the better your solution is than existing alternatives at getting the job done and, of course, the lower the price, the greater the CVP. Opportunities for creating a CVP are at their most potent, we have found, when alternative products and services have not been designed with the real job in mind and you can design an offering that gets that joband only that jobdone perfectly. Well come back to that point later. Profit formula. The profit formula is the blueprint that defines how the company creates value for itself while providing value to the customer. It consists of the following Revenue model price x volume. Cost structure direct costs, indirect costs, economies of scale. Cost structure will be predominantly driven by the cost of the key resources required by the business model. Margin model given the expected volume and cost structure, the contribution needed from each transaction to achieve desired profits. Resource velocity how fast we need to turn over inventory, fixed assets, and other assetsand, overall, how well we need to utilize resourcesto support our expected volume and achieve our anticipated profits. People often think the terms profit formulas and business models are interchangeable. But how you make a profit is only one piece of the model. Weve found it most useful to start by setting the price required to deliver the CVP and then work backwards from there to determine what the variable costs and gross margins must be. This then determines what the scale and resource velocity needs to be to achieve the desired profits. Key resources. The key resources are assets such as the people, technology, products, facilities, equipment, channels, and brand required to deliver the value proposition to the targeted customer. The focus here is on the key elements that create value for the customer and the company, and the way those elements interact. Every company also has generic resources that do not create competitive differentiation. Key processes. Successful companies have operational and managerial processes that allow them to deliver value in a way they can successfully repeat and increase in scale. These may include such recurrent tasks as training, development, manufacturing, budgeting, planning, sales, and service. Key processes also include a companys rules, metrics, and norms. These four elements form the building blocks of any business.