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Russia Plans Martian Nuclear Station
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Russian scientists have announced plans to build a nuclear power station on Mars.
They say that all the necessary technical drawings have now been completed, and all will be ready for the construction work to begin. The power plant should be up and running by 2030."
This is ridiculous, Russia can't afford the upkeep on the International Space Station, let alone Mars adventures, even with the international support the article mentions, this is just hot air. It may be prestigious to be the first nation with a base on Mars, but it just isn't going to happen for Russia in the next 30 years.
Building the transmission lines to bring the generated power to Earth is left as an exercise to the reader ?
They should think first on getting men on Mars. And then back to Earth. Alive. What to do there should be planned later, since of course there will be unpredicted issues about the environment. And there would be no point placing a power plant there if there were no people to use that power for something.
The main thing that will worry most people is where the fuel is comming from.
Uranium may well be available on Mars, but I can't imagine they will have the facilities to mine it.
If that means they have to take it from Earth then it could be messy if a launch goes wrong.
That said, I guess they won't need much fuel, its not like there are going to be any big cities any time soon...
Spell checker (c) creative spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
If you give up on manned space travel, then you'll never develop the experience or technology necessary to make it easier and safer. It's not as if NASA could be researching better satellite technology and then *poof* the next generation of the space shuttle will appear.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
There is a Russian version of the article, in which there is this paragraph (in my translation):
The scientists admit that they have no idea how this [taking large pre-built components and delivering them 300 mln km away] can be achieved. However, they are certain that once the station starts operating, all future inhabitants of Mars will have plenty of electrical power for many years to come.
Now THIS is what I call vaporware. :)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I respectfully disagree. Sure, it's dangerous, but how many of the Mars probes that we've lost would've been had we had (wo)men on them? Sure, they'd cost more and take longer to develop, but I bed we'd learn a whole lot more in the process.
This is one of my favorite quotes (and email sigs), from one in the biz (granted, some time ago, but I think the quote is no less relevant now than back then...and will be for some time).
"Man is the best computer we can put aboard
a spacecraft... and the only one that can
be mass produced with unskilled labor."
--Wernher von Braun
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
They'll do it anyway. And we'll have a half-assed and dangerous nuclear power plant on mars.
While I'm all for a mission to mars, it should be a very well financed, international, and permenent settlement. The people sent there should not be coming back.
.
Lots of would-be aviators got themselves killed in unproven flying (or non-flying) contraptions before the Wright brothers got their plane off the ground. Plenty more were killed trying to punch through the "sound barrier" before Chuck Yeager succeeded. Any kind of experimental or exploratory mission is fraught with risk. Those who engage in such activities are aware of the risks, and choose to take them anyway because they know something good will come out of it either way (you learn as much from your failures as from your successes). That some of them end up dead is unfortunate, but the consequences if nobody did what they do would be far worse.
If we took your advice, it'd still take days or weeks to get from the US to Europe or Asia, instead of hours. You probably wouldn't be reading this message either, as neither of us would have computers on our desktops linked by a global communications network. I'm sure there are more examples, but those are just the ones that come to mind right now.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The Russians? They've got plans for a nuclear power plant on Mars. 10/10 for style, boys. It's refreshing to see a little ambition for once.
Still, there are practical uses. With a reasonable supply of water, a nuclear power plant could be used to create oxygen and hydrogen, both for surviving on and performing experiments, and for fueling any return craft.
The space station was done on a US budget, not a Soviet one. The Russians have always worked with simple equipment where as we take the approach of technology being the answer to all. To be honest, had we really wanted to make it possible for all us to be up there, we would have done simple, repeatable systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Arthur C. Clarke thought we'd be to Saturn by now, and we probably would be if we'd kept up what we were doing in the 60's.
If our governments kept everything up at the rate they were in the 60s, humanity would have been replaced by a series of radioactive craters by now.
All things change for a reason.
Sure, we could go to Mars. But what will it get you? Mars is a dead planet. There may be enough resources to run a colony. Fine, you have a million or so people living in a dome, breathing recycled air, drinking recycled water, and eating hydroponically grown soyburgers. That's just a drop in the population bucket. And if that's the way you're going to live, why go all the way to Mars to do it? Why not just build your dome here on Earth?
Colonies on multiple worlds is insurance against world-destroying events. A very large asteroid impact could disrupt the crust or kick up enough dust to freeze the oceans over, killing most non-bacterial life on the planet. On the more mundane front, toss a few cobalt bombs around and you can gamma-sterilize all landmasses. It is extremely unlikely for a natural cataclysm to take out multiple colonized worlds at once. It is far more difficult for an artificial cataclysm to be propagated between worlds than to have it occur on one world. This makes colonizing (and ideally terraforming) multiple worlds desirable for the long-term survival of our species.
This doesn't mean we have to devote all possible resources to it; just that it's a good thing to do at some point, and a nice long-term goal to shoot for.
Face it, we are trapped in our own solar system. Pioneer 10 has been travelling for thirty years, and is less than 0.03% of the way to the closest star. It should arrive in a little over 9000 years from now. The only two technologies that can get us away, are hibernation, and multi-generation craft. Are we going to put a couple of hundred people onto one of these spaceships and wait around for 9-10 thousand years to see if they find a habitable planet? No, we're stuck here.
First of all, we'd have picked out destination worlds and verified their ability to support life long before sending colonization craft. The cost of building a big enough telescope is far lower than the cost of building an interstellar colony ship.
Secondly, several approaches to building interstellar craft that don't carry their own power sources with them have been proposed. These would allow interstellar craft to reach their destinations within a human lifetime, if we're in that much of a hurry.
Heck, you can in principle do it with a big enough and efficient enough fusion craft (smallest mass ratio you can do it in is about 100:1, but even 1000:1 could be built, albeit expensively).
Assuming less design optimization or smaller craft gives a longer travel time, but I don't see why this is intrinsically unacceptable. Fully colonizing a world will take a comparable amount of time (generations). Terraforming a world (as is desirable if the world is to support human life indefinitely) will take at least that long.
Interstellar colonization is desirable from a species point of view for two reasons. Firstly, there are some classes of catastrophe that can sterilize entire star systems (nearby supernovae are the most popular so far). Spreading between stars, even slowly, would put colonies out of range of such catastrophes in a time much shorter than their expected interval of occurrence, and so is a suitable long-term safeguard. More importantly, launching an interstellar war is possible, and arguably reasonably practical. Launching a slower-than-light interstellar war without some magical new physics making things a lot cheaper is far less practical. Interstellar colonization would give us very good protection against most conceivable species-destroying catastrophes, either natural or artificial.
Thus, as a long-term goal, I believe colonization both in-system and out-of-system is desirable.