[Spaceships] [High-Tech] [Action] Cydonia Or Bust, TL8

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Ten years is my lower limit. This is harder than the Apollo Program (sending a dozen people to live for a few years on Mars is a wee bit more difficult than sending two to live a few days on the Moon- and no country has been able to put men on the moon since the 1970s). Similarly, if you ignore all necessary testing and trial runs, send only veterans with curiously short CVs and interesting gaps in their training schedule, and use a drive which scraps half the satellites in orbit with EMP, how do you hope to convince anyone that its just an ordinary expedition?

You don't. The 5-10 years was if this was a flat-out emergency using a large portion of the entire nation's effort put into it, including bypassing political and environmental consequences of using nukes and being willing to risk losing significant numbers of astronauts to failures.

Also, the OP never said anything about this needing to be secret. Since it doesn't need to be secret, you can presumably use whatever means are necessary to accomplish the goal, and if your goal is to do it ASAP - I think we could manage it in ten years time.

And yes, a suicide mission is definitely one method of making this go by faster, and I certainly didn't include 'living for several years' on the budget for that 5-10 year plan.

EDIT: I'm assuming the goal is the alien trans-dimensional stabalizer or something that else that would, if taken out, prevent the aliens from taking over the Earth (or killing us all). I'm further assuming that we know that if we do not succeed, we're all screwed. And that this is public knowledge.