To send actual humans to the surface of Mars requires several robotic missions first to prepare. If we expect to make fuel for the return journey there, that needs to be happening before the people leave Earth orbit. Ditto for digging the hole and putting in an underground habitat. Building a greenhouse from glass made on Mars. Growing actual food on the surface. Each of these steps are critical and need testing befo…
How about, before all that, we try and inhabit, say, deserts on Earth first? Make that psychologically and economically feasible first. To my knowledge, we are yet to successfully demonstrate that we can maintain a viable, materially-closed ecosystem, without having to worry about extra things we'd encounter on Mars like pressure and temperature differentials and excess radiation. I am all for Mars, 100%. The sooner…
All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#42This piece is quite an interesting read, as well as being well structured and well phrased. This makes it all the more unfortunate that the writer is obviously unfamiliar with the technologies which would be used, and the realities of aerospace projects; leading to a slew of errors. Some of the errors include: 1) Separating oxygen from nitrogen is quite commonly done, and there are at least three distinct methods for…
To your point (3), perhaps it is reasonable to bring a lifetime's supply of vitamin supplements for four people. But with an artificial lamp you would have to worry about bulbs burning out (how many would you need?), and the lamps would consume a significant part of what would have to be a limited power supply in the colony.
To your point (4), that there may exist an even more difficult problem does not mean that building a Mars vehicle is "not especially technically challenging." The author explicitly cites the three recent malfunctions with rocket launches, and the older Apollo, Soyuz, and Shuttle programs all had their difficulties too. Building a Mars vehicle is surely challenging.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#43The point about the overabundance of oxygen (from the plants) that would require venting, but limited nitrogen, which would ultimately result in suffocation is one of those great little details that you don't normally think about when you think about living on other planets. There is so much we take for granted living day to day on a planet that we've evolved in concert with, that it's easy to overlook the little (an…
This problem has been solved, and machines capable of separating gasses exist all over the world; they are commonly used in hospitals to provide oxygen to patients, and for various other purposes.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_separation
How often do these machines need spare parts? And how much power do they consume to operate?
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#44First: I thought this was a well-written article. Second: although it is definitely not something I would seriously consider, I can appreciate that there are some people out there who are in fine mental health and would eagerly go on a one-way trip to Mars. But third, when I read this: Before he’d applied for Mars One, Josh had met a girl at the Redhead Days festival in the Netherlands. Eli did not have red hair, but…
I strongly suspect Josh knows exactly what he's doing, even if it's not exactly what he's saying he's doing.
Yep. He sounds like a really fascinating character, but it seems to me like Mars is not really the key motivation in his life. He sounds like he's running away from something. I hope everything works out for him in the end.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's all fine. But here's the thing: even if the billion dollars dropped magically out of the air, it still only took a billion dollars to develop a new rocket. Doesn't matter where the money came from if that's how much money it was. I don't care if it's public or private money that made SpaceX possible, and it doesn't much matter to me if the tech to go to Mars is all designed from scratch or bought from peo…
No, it took much more than a billion dollars to develop a rocket. You are just ignoring huge swathes of the cost to support your claim. If you estimate the aggregate cost of SpaceX launches, including 50 years of work by NASA, it will be orders of magnitude greater than $1B. I mean, tell yourself whatever you want, but R&D isn't free, and they didn't have to do most of it. In the context of the present thread, since…
There's a big difference from developing the FIRST rocket and developing A rocket. The first one is now built. We now have the people with the experience. It can (and is!) being done.
I'm not arguing the price of the first rockets that NASA built at all. I'm arguing that SpaceX didn't have an extra hundred billion of secret NSA black money that they used in addition to the publicly known about billion that we can be sure was spent.
You can't argue that because NASA spent $20B or whatever in 1960's dollars to get us to the moon that somehow SpaceX's $1B rocket is ACTUALLY a $21B rocket. You could argue that if SpaceX had to develop everything from scratch it would cost a lot more than $1B, but they didn't.
Similarly not everything that it would take to go to Mars is going to have to be engineered from scratch. Especially as launch prices keep coming down. If you could get to orbit for $100/lb it's only 10x as expensive as overnight air freight and at that point weight wouldn't even be a real issue anymore.
Is it kind-of crazy to talk about $100/lb launches right now? Yeah sure. But Musk has said that it's $200k worth of fuel to launch a Falcon 9, which has a 30klb payload to LEO. That's $6/lb in marginal cost plus whatever overhead on the rocket. Suddenly $100/lb doesn't look quite so batshit insane.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#46Aside from all the serious problems, their puny budget being probably the biggest, what always bugged me was the reality show aspect... What an ugly way to even think about achieving such a great feat. Are they picking their candidates like Big Brother does, with the egos and sex appeal? Will there be fighting? Sex? I mean, if the viewers get bored, and this will be a pretty long show with a pretty small cast, what happens then? And how will people even react to watching someone die in a "show" like this? Wouldn't this actually be the most perverse form of human exploitation ever conceived?..
I don't think this nasty idea even deserves this much work to write about it. I'm sorry for Josh, but I hope they do not succeed. I do not want to see the horror that this could turn into. Let's not mar space and Mars with this bullshit.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#47This piece is quite an interesting read, as well as being well structured and well phrased. This makes it all the more unfortunate that the writer is obviously unfamiliar with the technologies which would be used, and the realities of aerospace projects; leading to a slew of errors. Some of the errors include: 1) Separating oxygen from nitrogen is quite commonly done, and there are at least three distinct methods for…
> Building a vehicle to carry sufficient fuel and supplies for the trip to Mars is not especially technically challenging, when compared to the design of an earth-entry vehicle. Earth orbit rendezvous allows for the assembly of massive (though expensive) space vehicles such as the ISS.
Of course, they do have to land on mars, don't they? Isn't this roughly similar (and thus similarly as challenging) as earth re-entry?
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#48To send actual humans to the surface of Mars requires several robotic missions first to prepare. If we expect to make fuel for the return journey there, that needs to be happening before the people leave Earth orbit. Ditto for digging the hole and putting in an underground habitat. Building a greenhouse from glass made on Mars. Growing actual food on the surface. Each of these steps are critical and need testing befo…
How about, before all that, we try and inhabit, say, deserts on Earth first? Make that psychologically and economically feasible first. To my knowledge, we are yet to successfully demonstrate that we can maintain a viable, materially-closed ecosystem, without having to worry about extra things we'd encounter on Mars like pressure and temperature differentials and excess radiation. I am all for Mars, 100%. The sooner…
> I am all for Mars, 100%
I recall a pretty good article shared here a while ago about how Mars makes no sense as a target compared to Mercury. You can put people on the dark/light edge of Mercury and find a pretty good temperature. A tiny solar panel can generate gobs of power. There are minerals worth mining on Mercury.
Because Mars has no magnetosphere all habitable structures will have to be well underground to protect against radiation. It's really not more habitable compared to other solid bodies as you might expect.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#49Aside from all the serious problems, their puny budget being probably the biggest, what always bugged me was the reality show aspect... What an ugly way to even think about achieving such a great feat. Are they picking their candidates like Big Brother does, with the egos and sex appeal? Will there be fighting? Sex? I mean, if the viewers get bored, and this will be a pretty long show with a pretty small cast, what h…
This is an excellent point; reality-show-manufactured drama would rob this achievement of the gravitas it deserves. Humans are given to pettiness on occasion, it would be a tragedy to elevate and preserve those petty moments when memorializing a new human epoch.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about, before all that, we try and inhabit, say, deserts on Earth first? Make that psychologically and economically feasible first. To my knowledge, we are yet to successfully demonstrate that we can maintain a viable, materially-closed ecosystem, without having to worry about extra things we'd encounter on Mars like pressure and temperature differentials and excess radiation. I am all for Mars, 100%. The sooner…
We already comfortably inhabit a desert, we call it Los Angleles :-) Perhaps a better example is the underground city of Australia, Coober Pedy. Non self-sustaining examples exist in the Antarctic as well. The point being, Earth has hard to live in places, but not a lot of motivation for living in those places. Mars as a sort of sex appeal to it "Mars!" but its a valid question what happens once people figure out tha…
Vegas baby