For anyone interested in a good, intense read about surviving alone on Mars, I highly recommend Andy Weir's "The Martian". Fiction (for awhile, anyway) based on science & engineering & human behavior. Don't start it on an evening when you can't stay up all night!
All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
51–60 of 65 posts
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#52For anyone interested in a good, intense read about surviving alone on Mars, I highly recommend Andy Weir's "The Martian". Fiction (for awhile, anyway) based on science & engineering & human behavior. Don't start it on an evening when you can't stay up all night!
Seconded.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#53This 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 bui…
You wouldn't build such a lamp like on Earth. An oxygen plasma with a spectrum filtered glass case, microwave excited to avoid the need for electrodes, would last pretty much forever and be repairable using only in with materials.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#54This 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…
Possibly more so.
I think it was someone working on Curiosity that said mars has just enough of an atmosphere that you have to worry about it, but not quite enough to be useful.
And bearing in mind that when your spacecraft hits the martian atmosphere, it was traveling at interplanetary transit speeds, much greater than orbital speed.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#55We are no where near ready to go to Mars.
What would the impact on the public's psyche be if this mission failed by means of a torturously slow death of the crew? I think it'd be a huge setback for any sort of space exploration to witness fellow humans triumphantly land on Mars and then watch it all fall apart and the crew perishes tragically (being optimistic enough to say they actually land safely).
I bet the Apollo program would have ended much sooner if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never made it off of the Moon.
I have always thought as Cmd. Hadfield stated, that we have to go to the Moon and get it right there first. Go to the Moon, get this space colonization thing figured out and then the conversation on heading to Mars can begin.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Possibly more so. I think it was someone working on Curiosity that said mars has just enough of an atmosphere that you have to worry about it, but not quite enough to be useful. And bearing in mind that when your spacecraft hits the martian atmosphere, it was traveling at interplanetary transit speeds, much greater than orbital speed.
>I think it was someone working on Curiosity that said mars has just enough of an atmosphere that you have to worry about it, but not quite enough to be useful.
It certainly is useful and you can still shed 90-95% of the inbound orbital velocity or even that from an interplanetary trajectory with a reasonable heat shield. It would be far more difficult if Mars were completely airless. You still need retrorockets for landing big payloads but at a discount.
Though the other atmosphered bodies in our solar system: Earth, Venus (cloud deck), Titan can be achieveable with just parachutes.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#57"Gravity on Mars is only 38% that of Earth’s. What this would mean for the long-term health of colonists on Mars is not known" I think this fact is often overlooked. The problem of gravity (and radiation) are probably harder to overcome than food and oxygen.
The human body has the ability to adapt, nobody knows if our body would naturally adjust to that or not, the probability that we just get used to it after a long time living there is actually big. In that case if a person living on Mars for a long time coming back to Earth, he would actually suffer bone loss or things like that.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Possibly more so. I think it was someone working on Curiosity that said mars has just enough of an atmosphere that you have to worry about it, but not quite enough to be useful. And bearing in mind that when your spacecraft hits the martian atmosphere, it was traveling at interplanetary transit speeds, much greater than orbital speed.
I'm pretty sure that was Steve Squyres in the book Roving Mars, discussing Spirit and Opportunity. From memory, a heat shield can get you from escape velocity down to ~mach 3, and then supersonic parachutes can get you down to ~100mph. It's an issue because you've still got to slow down beyond that, but you can't just ignore atmospheric shielding like you could with the Moon (in response to iwwr)
I could be wrong about him saying that in Roving Mars (I can't exactly grep my paperback copy, and Google isn't helping), but I'm pretty sure it wasn't on the subject of Curiosity... I heard it in 2006 or 2007, while Curiosity was still called the Mars Science Laboratory.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#59This article is like a laundry list of what's wrong with my generation. Whiny, cynical, woefully uninformed but happy to share technical reasons why something won't work.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#60Aside 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.
"reality-show-manufactured drama would rob this achievement of the gravitas it deserves"
Worse, it risks completely ruining the idea of human space exploration and planetary colonisation.