My point is contingency planning. It's something that humans do.
Yes, and that is something that is done
in spades in human space missions.
A mission to Mars is a massive and respectable goal for humanity. I'm just saying that, out of respect for the challenges, contingency planning should not be left out of such a massive plan.
It's not. Just your fantasy of having a fully trained doctor along for the ride. That will come in time, but it won't be part of any early missions. Countless people have already looked at this infinitely more than you have and they have arrived at the conclusion that a doctor does not need to be part of any initial exploratory/setup/early trips.
[/quote]
It seems to me that if the mission is to include only a crew of four, then the only way to do that is to strip away all of the contingency plans and close our minds to anything that might go wrong - hence all of the objections to people like me who try to raise the issue of contingencies. Do you see?
[/quote]
Nope.
The 4 number has been carefully arrived at for many reasons, including as a huge part of the contingency planing.
It allows for no more than needed in order to have two teams of two. e.g. No one ever goes alone, only in teams of two, and then you have a backup team.
Two scientists and two engineers makes sense. You have one in each team to meet the scientific goals, and you have one in each team who can fix stuff and solve problems.
A doctor doesn't go along for the ride for the same reason a pilot does not go along for the ride. They are essentially dead weight unless something goes drastically wrong. In which case it's more probably they are all screwed anyway.
Test pilots made sense for the early Apollo missions, because, well, they were test flights in unproven hardware, unproven terrain, unproven flight dynamics, unproven systems etc.
A mars trip is a completely different ballgame.
Perhaps one of the engineers could have test flight experience though, that wouldn't hurt.