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Ask Slashdot: Technical Advice For a (Fictional) Space Mission?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm just starting to put together the pieces for a fictional story about a space mission. To put it briefly, I would like to give believability to the story: probably set a few years ahead, just enough for the launching of the first colony in the solar system, but with the known challenges posed by the current technology. Is anyone up for a little technical advice on space travel? A few quick questions: As for the destination, the moon and Mars are the obvious choices, but what else would make sense? How long would it take to get there? What could be the goals of the mission? Any events or tasks that could punctuate an otherwise predictably boring long trip? Any possible sightseeing for beautiful VFX shots? What would be the crew?"
A young buy wins a tour through the most magnificent cheese factory in the world, led by the world's most unusual cheese maker. A magical journey through a cheese factory on moon.
So you want us to write a story for you? Isn't this the point of you writing it?
So, you want us to write your book for you?
Trust me. That's what most Slashdotters are hoping for when they are imagining themselves as a part of it.
I recommend Haym Benaroya's book "Turning dust to gold" for start. And my homepage too :)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Is that some way to prepare beef or some such? I don't know much about space cows.
Total immersion Video games
Particularly Zero-G Kickboxing and Wimbledon
Miss Ion and the Galactic Cheese Factory
Ask NASA *ducks*
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
kepler22b - it might have water (just say it does) ;)
it's around 600 light-years away, so we'll need a gigantic self-supporting "noah's ark" type ship to carry us there. it would probably need nuclear power stations on board to supply energy and a highly efficient engine like an ion thruster or that magnetoplasma one that NASA is developing. fun stuff, maybe I'll write a book about it
This place was literately made to answer your question: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/
The entire thing is basically a resource for hard sci-fi writers.
The chinese moon expedition gets off the ground (the rest of the planet having long since given up) for their long awaited moonbase. sadly communications are lost as they leave earth orbit and the chinese hit the self destruct button to avoid losing face. BOOM goes the transfer vehicle and it will be several decades before it is ever attempted again.
If you're looking for technical advice on space flight I would recommend you check out the Orbiter forums. They are the boards for the Orbiter Space Flight simulator. It may be a simulator, but is built to be extremely realistic. You can find a lot of very knowledgeable people on the boards that would probably tell you exactly what you wanted to know. http://orbiter-forum.com/
Make the space itself the target. Being able to live there, to have a self sustainable space colony, or a generation ship, not a way to travel to somewhere else in particular, but the destination itself, Like space 1999, without carrying the whole moon with you.
Other interesting destinations in the solar system, like asteroid mining or exploring moons on the outer planets.
Apparently timothy can't spell. Unless the submitter is referencing http://www.hotelmision.com/. Although who would write a story about a fictional space hotel in the Sierra Madre mountains? I guess we're writing about a (fictional) (space) mountain hotel?
Sounds like a cool way to write a Sci-Fi story.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sorry; I couldn't resist that. Maybe we'll see some interesting answers.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
make it a long term trip + 20-40 min round trip for data / radio.
I would like to give believability to the story
Let things break. Let things prematurely wear out due to the extremely hostile environment, extreme temperature swings, etc. Let things fail to function as advertised by the manufacturer, or some environment issue that was overlooked because of our limited experience in space. Apollo 13 may be a little too extreme but do some research on the day to day maintenance and surprises of the Mir space station.
Look back to the original Alien movie (1979?). On the upper decks of the spacecraft Nostromo (?) officers were dealing with computers, navigation, communications, science, etc. On the lower decks a couple of guys were using wrenches to deal with the plumbing. I always thought that was a nice touch of realism. When we go to Mars the most important member of the crew will often be the mechanic.
The "known challenges" aren't technological, but social (economic and political). Unless you posit some global threat that forces people to "get their act together", you'll need to set it at least a generation in the future.
Even the certainty of a killer asteroid won't do it with this lot!
Mining on Mars:
- Mining underground gives 'free' protection from radiation
- Technology of mining gives something interesting to talk about, once the spacefaring equipment has been discussed
- Similarities between mining and space travel (seriously: both are artificial, hostile, tech-dependent environments) lets you draw parallels between what readers accept as pedestrian (yawn, a mine) and what readers see as amazing (wow, a spaceship!)
- Dangers of mining give a realistic and easy way to introduce drama
- The substance mined would have to be either very, very valuable on earth (basically, you'd need unobtanium), or, very valuable on Mars (basically, anything. Cost for transport from Earth = very high).
-- So, the mine would need to operate in support of a colony. Any local metal or industrial mineral would be useful.
-- By the same token, the mine would have to be small, because it would be supporting a new-ish (therefore small) colony
Mining metallic asteroids:
- Very shallow gravity well
- Massive quantities of very pure metal, if you find the right one: pays for itself
- Should probably be coupled with in-orbit refinery around earth, linked to a shipyard, unless there's a feasible way to bring giant hunks of stuff through the atmosphere without it burning up or destroying cities. This pushes the time forwards a few decades, at least
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
a fictional story about a space mission.
... this has been done before.
Sure, a good story can overcome its cliches, but the fact that submitter apparently doesn't have the first clue about what to write about doesn't bode well for the "good story" part.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I came across an a fairly interesting series on Hulu, Jupiter Moon an interesting story of students traveling as around on an old ship that was built not long after the first colonies. It was a school that faced challenging problems being very far from earth. Another thing you might try is reasearching all the old Apollo missions.
Spell "Mission" correctly. Will help make the whole endeavor more "professional".
To make sense, a manned mission has got to have goals that cannot utilize robots. So, any mission requiring ad-hoc methods -or- environments that are hostile to computers but well within the tolerances of humans. (Medium-to-high radiation where shielding can't be used, for example. So long as the human(s) involved are willing to undertake the risks and there's plenty of donor organs, humans actually aren't too bad in such environs.)
A good example of an ad-hoc mission would be a Mars mission that created a sub-surface colony. Most of the water is underground, the ground's a great shield against both the Martian dust storms and the hard radiation, there's plenty of subsurface methane for fuel, and we already know that there are plenty of massive subsurface caverns that can be exploited. The problem with a robot mission there is that it's also shielded from radio contact, the terrain is totally unknown and we've zero notion of how the subsurface geology will dictate what can and cannot be done. Humans don't need radio, don't care about a few rocks, and can study the geology in a way that no AI can currently handle.
Europa, although an "obvious" choice, is problematic. You don't just need water, you need lots of other resources and Europa isn't a good candidate for supplying those in a way that an exploration can easily use.
Once you're past the moon, fuel isn't an issue. You can slingshot to any planet with about the same fuel budget. Time is the only resource that matters. That makes the inner planets potentially more interesting as the gaps increase dramatically as you go further out. Mercury's rotation is such that you could have a short-term manned mission to the dark side without risking frying anyone and the geology there is sufficiently weird that you might well want someone on the ground.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A few years ahead? Space colony?
Ehmm, have you been following what is going on in the world? I was growing up in the 80's and I remember thinking how lucky I was. I mean we had supersonic consumer jets that could fly us across the Atlantic in 3 or so hours, so by the time I would grow up we would surely have faster and more jets, so I was really looking forward for those weekends in Australia! And then the US had exciting new and reusable space shuttles which could take 7 people up at a time, do their mission and land in an airport, boy was that exciting! I could only imagine how things would be when I grew up with space stations, moonbases (just as long as the moon did not leave its orbit in 1999, if you know what I mean), humans on mars etc.
So you know how things turned out.
You want believable? Put first colony in the solar system at least a hundred years in the future to avoid being alive and mocked when the proposed date has passed and all we have are 30-foot wide cars, 30 angstrom thick phones, 30 inch long penises...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Jerry Pournelle
He wont make your homework for you, maybe he won't even answer to you. But if he does then he could give you some really good starting points for your research.
Good luck
Can't have too many S's on your mision.
Uranus.
2001 trilogy ...just two out of a slew that I can't think of right now
BBC Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
As for the destination, the moon and Mars are the obvious choices, but what else would make sense?
--The Dogstar!!
How long would it take to get there?
--50 million fucking years!!!
What could be the goals of the mission?
--To get to the Dogstar!!!
Any events or tasks that could punctuate an otherwise predictably boring long trip?
--Boring?! You're going to the fucking Dogstar!!!
Any possible sightseeing for beautiful VFX shots?
--WHAT??
What would be the crew?
--Space Hellhounds!!!!
Since most of the replies so far have either been disparaging or been references to other scifi works, I will do my best to actually answer your question.
For the sake of accuracy, I am going to assume the following:
The mission is 1 way.
There will be no resupply operations.
The colony must supply itself with infrastructue and supplies.
That out of the way, here it goes.
First, your crew must be over 500 people, and totally unrelated to each other. This is the bare minimum required for a stable breeding population. Any smaller, and you end up with an unviable population, a la the nazi eugenics colony experiments.
Your crew cannot all be officers, administration, tech heads, et al. You positively have to include blue collar workers. Machinists, assembly workers, etc.
In addition to this, you cannot presume to find food on the planet you are sending the colony ship to. At our distance from the nearest goldilocks planet, we can't even get a gross atmospheric spectrograph, let alone a detailed list of possible lifeforms. This means you have to not only take whatever food your mission needs for the trip through space, but also the means to produce food when you get there. Frozen domesticated animal embryos, collections of edible seeds and plantforms, etc. The works. It also means you have to take horticultural experts and farmers with you.
In addition, there is a lot that can go wrong on such a mission. The colony ship will be in transit for over a hundred years to reach the nearest starsystem using the fastest possible forms of propulsion currently available to us. This *will* be a multigeneration voyage, and shit breaks. You have to be able to fix things and make spare parts. That means you need a complete factory and refinery complex built into the colony ship.
In short, think of a space vessel with the combined cubic footage of new york state, comprising manufacturing, housing, environmental, and food cultivation systems, in addition to propulsion, power generation, water reclamation, and administration systems. You will be launching a small country into space. If it isn't at time of launch, it will be by the time it reaches its destination.
The colony ship will be too large to land on the destination planet. It will need small craft to deposit transplanted lifeforms, colony site construction equipment and supplies, and ground personel on the surface. These craft need to be reusable. The colony ship would BE the supply line for the new planetary colony site. It would stay in orbit, produce and deploy any gps or com system satelite networks, and ensure the viability of the ground based colony as it develops.
In addition to the lander craft, the colony ship would need service and resourcing craft to help keep the colony ship operational. The ship would be too large for unassisted spacewalks for repairs, so some form of space only maintenance and cargo tug craft would be necessary as well.
This means the colony ship needs cargo bays, and docking bays, distributed around the ship.
Due to the size of the ship, some form of internal rapid transit system for the crew will be necessary.
The psychological integrity of the hermetically bottled colony ship population needs to be maintained. Recreational fascilities need to be available, including botanical gardens which serve no other purpose. (This means you need people to maintain them. Some bit of crossover in functionality can be possible with the horticultural experts developing new domestic plant varieties enroute in the botanical gardens.) It needs musicians, artists, poets, movie stars... the works.
The colony ship has to contain epic shittons of water and biomass. It has to be able to reliably handle a growing population while in transit without overloading the environmental systems. It also has to be able to deflect cosmic energy for hundreds of years.
The colony ship has to produce artificial gravity. This means it has to rotate in some fashion, as no other means of simulating gravity is currently known.
If you are going to write a story about such a voyage, you have to explain how the earth managed to fund such an operation, and also why they did it.
The best one would be :
But some other good sites would be
1) bigelow aersopace
2) space ref
3) The Space Review
And that should get your started.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The rest will fall into place.
In Earth orbit, you can always go home in an emergency. Even going as far as the moon, you can manually get home (as Apollo 13 demonstrated 41 years ago, and at least in theory we've learned something since then.
Not so in interplanetary space. You're completely on your own, with no place to run to. Therefore your crew is going to have to be extraordinarily calm and self-sufficient, able to perform emergency repairs very quickly while the emergency is unfolding around your ears, and be able to do so in a cramped environment. Fortunately, there is a pool of people available who have exactly this training and experience: submarine crew.
A submarine damage control specialist would make an excellent crew member for an interplanetary mission. Military members have the inside track to being considered for such missions anyway, and nothing beats a proven track record. Just as military test pilots were the first astronauts, a submariner would be an excellent candidate. Submariners are also frequently trained to deal with nuclear power units and, of course, nuclear warheads. In addition to dealing with tight quarters (moreso on a Russian sub than an American boomer), they're used to operating in an environment in which a shell of metal is what separates you from an instantly-lethal environment. An experienced submariner would have proven they can handle that particular psychological pressure.
Now if you're into intrigues in your story, having someone like that as a crew member allows the opportunity to inject "the mission is actually secretly this much more interesting thing" into the mix. And what if this submariner has for his entire career been a mole for some other government? The Opposition would always be trying to get someone onto a U.S. or Russian missile boat, and what if they succeeded? And then what if that person did so well they were offered the position on the interplanetary mission? Oh, what an opportunity...
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Read Ben Bova's "Moonbase" for a good overview of living in space and on a planetary colony.
If you want it believable you'll want to read some spacecraft design books. "Human Mission to Mars. Colonizing the Red Planet" is on Amazon. Read the many papers it contains. It is a non-fiction solution-guide to colonizing Mars. If you are serious, start there.
This may help - you've probably already read it - at least I hope you have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_mission_to_Mars
Visiting and coming back is relatively simple compared to colonization. That is a completely different issue.
Find some hard scifi stories to steal from or have someone with aerospace engineering experience help you with these items. To be believable, it is not 5 simple calculations. Your questions are NOT something that can be explained in a slashdot response.
Sure, I can tell you that 8.5 months is needed to get to Mars based on a specific launch date based on Earth/Mars locations. That doesn't address weightlessness for all that time, solar radiation, re-entry dynamics, food production, habitat creation, oxygen generators, power generation, months of zero sunshine due to storms, Mars gravity causing muscle atrophy, etc. There are many, many, many challenges.
Even the fantastic Red/Green/Blue Mars books overlooked many of the challenges.
Why not do you own trivial research?
A boy finds out that he is actually a Martian, and that there are many Martians living amongst the humans on Earth (which they call Puggles). He also discovers that his parents were killed by an evil Martian King who wants to rule all the Martians, but whose ship crashed into an asteroid years ago during a failed attach on the protagonist's birth cache ship.
The protagonist is taken to a special school in Area 51, where he falls in love with a Venutian girl. However, this relationship is made extremely complex, as she can't be in direct sunlight (the cloud cover on Venus prevents this). Also, in her true form, she is a horrible parasitic being who sparkles and glitters.
Furthermore, the protagonist discovers that the one thing he has from his dead parents is a dvd containing the Bing search engine code. Strange reptilian monsters, referred to as Mozillas, are after him, trying to reclaim what is theirs.
Eventually, things reach a climax, when, with winter coming, and his instructors with arrows through their knees due to a series of freak accidents, our hero steals an rocket ship and flies to Mars. Despite an attempt by his iHal to throw him out of an airlock, he eventually reaches Mars, where he is able to climb Mt. Olympus and destroy the One Bing, thus saving the solar system.
The End.
Check your premises.
Check out Stephen Baxter's Titan. Almost exactly that scenario, and brilliantly done. If you can come close to that then I look forward to reading your work :)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Titan (one of Saturn's satellites). I believe it took Cassini-Huygens 7 years to reach it, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-Huygens
Titan shares similarities with Earth, which makes it a good candidate for science fiction, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon) for an extensive description.
It has among others lakes of liquid methane (not water, too cold there), a lot of water ice, an atmosphere with seasons, wind and rain (although not of water).
I would also emphasize social problems (as mentioned above) such as people getting along, people willing to reproduce (being attracted + having a decent libido), people not willing to kill each other. Brining genetic diversity issues in sounds good too: if 20 settlers go colonize Titan, then after a few generations they might all turn out stupid. You can even use it as a funny metaphor with any colonized country, e.g. by naming your spaceship the Mayflower.
Don't forget mission members' ability to deal with common medical problems (e.g. violent toothache that requires quick surgery). And of course don't forget the totally new diseases that humans have never been exposed to such as Titan's purple death.
If you are looking for paranoid scenarios then I recommend playing the first part of the Knight Of The Old Republic II, The Sith Lords video game, where a single robot exterminates the crew of a whole mining station and turns everyone against each other in a clever and funny fashion. That is, if you can play through it without having the game cashing.
http://www.hobbyspace.com/ has collected blurbs and links to just about everything space related.
I also recommend you read "The High Frontier" by Gerald K O'Niel, and "The Rocket Company"
by Patrick J. G. Stiennon & David M. Hoerr
One Wikipedia article that you absolutely must read if you want to do any sort of "serious" Science Fiction involving travel in the solar system is to read up on Delta-v for travel in the Solar System. These articles are essential:
Make sure you read up on very real "spaceship" (as opposed to spacecraft) that is being proposed by NASA engineers: The NAUTLUS-X
Travel in space is all about energy, and you need it in heaping piles that are incredibly efficient in how that energy is used, as well as fuel sources that are incredibly dense in terms of potential energy storage for such a journey. All of this is in terms of how you get there, and to be perfectly honest there are still a whole bunch of unknowns. More importantly, there is very little if any sort of biological research that has gone into the long-term effects of partial-gravity environments, considering that the Apollo missions were mostly like weekend camping trips rather than any sort of serious attempt to stay somewhere for a substantial period of time.
One thing that I find especially sad is that there has been absolutely no research at all to find out the physiological impacts of zero-g environments, much less partial gravity environments, upon the gestational development of a placental mammal. You hear all sort of conjecture flying about from supposedly intelligent scientists on the matter and talk of sterilization of the first participants to long-term stays elsewhere in the Solar System, but I think all of that is a bunch of hogwash as the proper answer is simple "we don't know". There might not be problems, but there might be issues too, or potential ways to mitigate the issues that come from having sex in space and producing children. Note here I'm talking even studies of mice, rats, guinea pigs, or any other kind of creature has never been studied in terms of what happens when they produce kids. Mice have gone on board the ISS, but they are intentionally kept separate and explicitly not permitted to have sex. I think this is something criminal in terms of keeping that sort of knowledge from being developed, and is to me one of the things that should have been studied years ago, particularly in light of potential plans for travel to other planets. Make a wild guess as to what happens, and know comfortably that nothing has been studied so the ideas of a 3rd grader is just as good as a PhD in terms of this particular issue.
There are terrestrial studies (stuff done entirely on the Earth) of population groups and the minimum number of people you may need for a viable self-sustaining population. Even there, however, don't get hung up on the piddling details of what it takes to make a sustainable colony as no colony is going to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity, unless your story has an apocalyptic flavor and the isolation from the rest of humanity is part of the story itself.
Some overlooked issues include worrying about base machines that make machines. In spite of some very interesting progress along the way, I don't see 3D printers becoming the ultimate source of tool making on Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, and good standbys of things like a lathe, grinder, and other machine shop tools are going to be critical items to take on any sort of extra-terrestrial trip. I envision that one of the very first tasks for
The world finally realizes how fucked up capitalism is after global financial markets implode on themselves, and the US loses its reserve currency status and becomes a more dangerous place to live than Mogadishu. Then like-minded people begin establishing non-profit companies using government loans to drive the greedy corporates out of business (mass marketing driving consumer sentiment, competitive pricing, etc) and the non-profits eventually band together when they have a combined revenue higher than most countries, form an R&D group and develop a fleet of horizontal takeoff and landing single stage to orbit space planes with an operational launch cost to LEO of under $100/tonne so that then space becomes truly accessible to the average person.
Have Congress cut the funding at the last minute.
Bark less. Wag more.
Read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
-- QED
When you say, "a few years" I assume you mean less than 10 years. I think that's too soon unless something really lights a fire under our asses. The first part of your story would have to be about what that is. Depending on what it is, it might weave itself throughout the fabric of the story. You could go for the "runaway greenhouse global warming" scenario, in which case any number of publishers will take it and any number of AGW zealots will automaticly have to buy it. A more difficult but perhaps more interesting sell for me would be the ongoing global financial crisis leading to the space industry as a Keynesian stimulus, in cooperation with major world governments. The tension amongs an international crew is always good for some drama.
Ah, but you wanted technical advice. In just a few years? Russian craft for manned LEO. Recycled US electronic tech based on our probes for high reliability in deep space, and long durations. The physical craft for deep space, now that might be a bit more of a challenge. We could use Mir tech I suppose, but it's getting kind of old. Given the short timeframe, how about one last shuttle launch? It doesn't have to re-enter and there's a lot of space in the cargo bay. Break those bad boys out of the museums, send 'em to Mars. Bonus points if you can figure out how to land a shuttle there. You've got the atmosphere, but no runway. Runway building robots, yay... but... not enough time. Retro packs for the shuttles, have 'em land like in Space 1999. That'd work on the Moon too, which is a more realistic target for all of this...
I was going to suggest http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/, but based on your questions, I think a better place to start would be
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceDoesNotWorkThatWay
I'm a member of the stardestroyer.net forums, and there are some very sharp people on that site who would be happy to give you a hand with the technical side of things. They also have a user-fiction section just for writing stories, and some of the ones posted there are pretty damn good.
Just be polite. And make sure you have a thick skin. And do your homework first.
As for your questions, I can take a stab at them...
As for the destination, the moon and Mars are the obvious choices, but what else would make sense?
Near Earth Asteroids, Venus (reasonably habitable 50 km up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities), Phobos, Deimos. Moons of Saturn might work, Titan and Enceladus being the more interesting ones.
How long would it take to get there?
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/appmissiontable.php
Also the rest of the atomic rockets site I just linked has very good stuff for just this type of question.
What could be the goals of the mission?
There are maybe three broad categories, I'd say: political (Why did we go to the moon anyway? To rub it in the Soviet's faces.), monetary, and scientific.
Beyond that, well, you tell me, you're the writer. He3 mining on the moon? Political/Religious refugees? Life found on Mars means everyone wants to go see it? There are a lot of semi-plausible explanations. Which is all you need to start a rattling good yarn (sometimes not even then).
Any events or tasks that could punctuate an otherwise predictably boring long trip?
Micrometeroid punches a hole in the ship. Solar CME event burps a lot of radiation at the ship. The engine stops working. The AE-35 communication dish develops a fault and they can't talk to earth. The plants (the ones that provide air and feed people, you know) get sick/die. The biologist comes unglued and murders someone. I mean, this is stuff off the top of my head, man.
And there's always turnaround day for continuous acceleration ships. (The fastest way to get anywhere in space besides FTL travel is a continuous acceleration route, where you burn the engine to speed up halfway to your destination, then flip the ship over and burn the engine to slow down. Flipping the ship you have to do with the engine off, so everyone goes weightless for a few hours or a day while the ship turns end for end.) In some universes this is traditionally accompanied by a celebration or a special dinner or something, along with funny things like (say) bolting the floor furniture to the ceiling or having the most junior officer head up dinner instead of the captain.
Any possible sightseeing for beautiful VFX shots?
Space is beautiful, kid. There are always good VFX shots.
What would be the crew?
Captain, doctor, science, communications, pilot, engineering (the astute among you will notice I'm actually listing off bridge positions from the original Star Trek...)
Ok, come on, kid, I'm not going to do all your homework for you. If you can't even be bothered to look up or think up common crew positions, why bother helping those who won't help themselves?
Seriously, most of this stuff could be answered with some intelligent usage of Wikipedia and Google and a few hours of spare time. I answered this because I was bored and was familiar with it, but if you actually care, why aren't you looking this up for yourself? If you did already, say that you did, but want geek's valuable opinions. (and they'll fall all over themselves to give it).
Because right now the summary looks like you are lazy and can't be arsed to look this stuff up yourself. Do your homework, and intelligent people will be much more interested in helping you help yourself.
...about a trip to "mars". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZo36huahoI Summary:
"Presented by David D. Levine.
In January 2010 I spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. Although the Martian conditions were simulated, the science was real, as were the isolation, hostile environment, and problems faced by the six-person crew. Although my official title was Crew Journalist, I soon found myself repairing space suits, helping to keep the habitat running, and having interplanetary adventures I'd never before imagined. My talk on the experience is profusely illustrated with photographs and has gotten rave reviews. Please see http://bentopress.com/mars/ for more information."
Have a look at 'The Case For Mars' and 'Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization' by Robert Zubrin. The first bascially explains step-by-step how we can use present-day tech to send humans to Mars within a decade and goes on to explain how it would be possible to terraform the planet with Martian natural resourced etc. The second book reaches out further, exploring the idea of using Mars (for example) as a stepping stone for missions aimed outside of our solar system.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/misconceptions.php
A site devoted entirely to helping with exactly that issue.
If you want to write an essay for college, copy from Wikipedia. If you want to write a science-fiction story, copy from Slashdot.
By the year 2025, China surpasses US in terms of economic output. It will have pebble-bed reactors ready for production. In 2020 - 2030, China should have a space station in orbit. By the year 2050, China should robotically colonize and mine the moon for Helium-3 if fusion power plants prove to be feasible.
This is as realistic as possible.
They attempt to make Mars habitable by pummeling it with comets in an attempt to deliver Mars with water, methane, etc. The pummeling also heats up the planet. They retrieve the comets from the kuiper belt using gravitation towing. The towing is done by probes or piloted by humans, your choice. Something goes wrong. A Comet heads toward Earth or towards the habitation zone on Mars. Or a whole of comets get disturbed due to the slightly chaotic nature of the solar system. Also, the pilot is a women or an android or both.
Because you never know....;)
Deep space (outside the van Allen belts, i.e., anything but low Earth orbit) has a serious amount of radioactivity. This takes two forms
- Solar flares (where the solar radiation suddenly increases by many orders of magnitude). These require shelters, with warning times in hours. The worst (biggest) flares could kill an unprotected human. These are most likely to occur at certain times of the solar cycle, and there might be a few a year to really worry about then.
and
- Galactic cosmic radiation (high energy particles - aka cosmic rays). The lifetime occupational dose for an astronaut would be reached in about 2 years. So, these can be (more or less) ignored for voyages, but cannot be ignored for habitation. In particular, a pregnant woman will need serious shielding.
Now, there is a wrinkle in shielding for high energy galactic cosmic radiation - these particles have kinetic energies > the rest mass energies of pions, protons, and the like, and, so, when they hit a nucleus in the shielding, they turn into a shower of pions, protons, and the like, each of which itself has enough energy to be dangerous. On the Earth, we avoid this as this all happens 20 + km up. In space, that means that a modest amount of shielding can make things worse if it is close to you. So, you either need room, or a lot of shielding, or both. And, if people work outside (or in lightly shielded auxiliary ships or stations) they need a solar flare warning system plus some sort of shelter within easy reach.
So, if by colony you mean "a place where children are brought to term," you need to address this. That, to me, says that the first colonies (under that definition) will be either on the Moon, in lunar caves (aka lunar skylights), where 40+ of rock will provide excellent shielding (and where lunar ice likely exists and will be much easier to access than at the Lunar poles), or in a O'Neill type cylinder or habitat, where there is enough space to shield the inhabitants properly. If I had to guess, the O'Neill cylinder / habitat would be at least 1 km long, and would be made from either Lunar material (brought up by a Lunar Space Elevator), or from an asteroid (and probably made in place, i.e., using asteroid material without moving it very much.
By the way, water (liquid or ice) would make an excellent shield, if you don't have megatons of rock handy.
Mining missions and sustained occupation of the Oort cloud and asteroid belt getting resources for a drained earth, you could have hollowed spun up asteroids for gravity and growing food, mining of the Oort cloud for fuels and rare elements, and a 30 billion human population existing primarily in space with a possible sub-plot of near star travel using asteroid habitats.
Personally I would stay away from the Moon and Mars, done to death and really boring terrain, though if it's fiction you could throw a few deserted alien cities on Mars or wreckage on the Moon.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I work as a script doctor in Los Angeles, I studied Astronautical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, and my senior thesis was on the viability of a Martian colony.
First, your space mission will probably be done entirely by robots if you're going fully for believability.
Second, something the aerospace industry and now NASA are playing with is additive manufacturing. Google it if you don't know. But that's the future of space exploration right now because it completely changes what is possible. Rather then sending a probe or a mission to a given location and then waiting for it to die only to send a replacement years later. We can instead repair, upgrade, and replace sophisticated machinery with little more then a radio signal given that the machine has the on-board capability to recycle/refine, manufacture, and assemble it's own parts. It's still early days for this technology but it's already working. They can make aerospace parts with the sophistication of human bone. Lighter, stronger, cheaper. There is also the ability to print circuits on paper using metallic ink. I don't know how that would be recycled and reused in space but possibly the circuits could be scraped off the material when not needed and new circuits printed as needed. Finally, we're starting to play with truly programmable chips that will allow you to change the internal nature of their circuits with programming. This could allow for on the fly changes to chips. A full upgrade might not be possible but you could re purpose just about any chip that uses this technology.
3. Bacterial engineering will likely be the future of low energy refining technology. If a robot needs to break down minerals on another world it probably doesn't have the luxury of a blast furnace or huge vats of chemicals. Instead all it might have is a little packet with specially engineered bacteria, a little heat, some water, some oxygen, and time. The process seems slow to us but the energy investment is so low that for the same energy it would take to run a tiny furnace you could instead farm tons bacteria working on breaking down a given mineral. It's vastly more efficient. At intervals the robot can harvest the processed mineral, feed in more material, and give the bacteria whatever they need to survive. Even if the robot has to leave the system for a time and most of the bacteria dies. It's unlikely that it will all die so it can be restarted rather easily. And even if they do all die, all it takes is a few more cells added from storage to get hte process going again.
I don't know what you intend with your space story. But that's what comes to my mind.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
1. Enceladus (because it "is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it")
2. You might want to get in touch with these guys http://www.l5-series.com/ one of them worked at nasa or esa and you might be interested in the series too
If you're thinking colonization, plan to use and coordinate between more than one ship. You're moving at incredible velocities, but need to avoid a collision and need to not have long waits between arrival times, even though they'll all be following similar paths. An accident with a ship early in the launch could leave debris that is problematic for those that follow.
Even with a good sized fleet, the ships would have to be immense... too big to easily launch from the Earth's surface in one go. Use the moon as staging and assembly area where modules are pieced together to make a larger whole.
Talk about advances in using nuclear energy for propulsion. I don't mean (just) nuclear electricity generation, and I don't mean Orion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)]. I mean real research into more efficiently using the massive energy created from nuclear reactions to propel the craft in space. The steam=>turbine process we use today is just not very efficient at converting that energy into something usable, but in space there might be more options. Because of the risk of contamination, use conventional rockets to first reach the moon and for the initial escape when leaving the moon.
Just preparing the launch from the moon is a process that will take nearly a decade, so go epic and start somewhere in the middle.
Know how to slow down. You'll want to get the ship going as fast as you can. One benefit of somehow harnessing a nuclear reaction is the ability to constantly apply thrust. But you need to plan for a way to slow down as well. Use your destination's gravity to help. Since you're bringing a fleet, you might have a couple ships pass just too far from the planet, miss their chance, and shoot off into space with no hope of recovery before life support runs out.
Destination: you need a place where you can sustain, indefinitely, near-Earth temperature and gravity, water, breathable atmosphere, and the radiation protection provided by the outer layers of the atmosphere. Such a place does not exist outside of Earth in our Solar system, so you'll have to make one up.
First up is heat. The only thing in the solar system that puts out enough is the sun. Unfortunately, it has far too much heat for any planetary orbit closer in, and far too little for any planetary orbit further away. We're lucky Earth is the distance from the sun that it is. We'll have to make do the a gas giant, since they also radiate heat. They don't radiate enough heat, but it's the best we can, few people will know this, and it is fiction, after all. I propose Saturn. Prior missions to Saturn have taken a little over three years. With the upgraded propulsion, look to do it in about 1/4 that.
Next up is gravity. Humans can do very well on low-G, with astronauts spending over year in space without too many ill effects, so anything 1/4 the size of earth on up is fine. You ought to be able to pick a nice rock out of Saturn's asteroid belt. It's good to be a little on the small side, because that will make it easier for your colonists to leave their new home and mine Saturn's rings for resources. For water, let's suppose the particular rock is chosen because it just happens to have a nice supply underground. Your colonists will actually mine for water.
The asteroid will also have a cave system. Your near-future colonists will have no hope of terraforming a breathable atmosphere, so their plan will be to seal existing caves, and to create oxygen atmosphere within those caves by boiling it out of the water they mine. Good thing they brought a lot of uranium. The cave system will also provide the needed radiation protection in place of an atmosphere.
I think that about covers it for now.
Make it beleivable: During the journey to mars, yet another bank crisis yield US budget to its knees, and the new house decide to cut budget by yanking NASA. Your crew is on its own.
If it is a first Space Colony, it will be to the Moon.
Transit time is about 3 days.
You will be sending Robots and People.
You will be building mining and refining facilities, as well as living facilities.
Agriculture will be quite different, due to the 14 to 15 day long days and nights. Plants we use are adapted to 24 your days. It may be more or less, and longer light than dark cycles. Agriculture will be a VITAL skill. Plan on about 5-10% of your people being ag specialists. Most of the people will be miners. This will be about 40-50% of the people. Maintenance and repair for equipment will be another 20%. Administration will be another 10%. Teachers, medical and Scientists/Engineers/Computer Jocks will be the remainder.
There will probably be more Men than Women. Don't take Children on the first trip. They will follow later. So will extra Women.
The Moon is a good choice because there are lots of resources there. It is easy to ship back to the Earth. An electromagnetic catapult will be able to launch anything in an iron container back to the Earth. With a small packaged rocket on board, it could enter the atmosphere and fall to a recovery zone. There is not product that can be shipped back to Earth to pay the way for a colony with a two way trip, but one way back is easy and fairly cheap. If you don't need to make Rockets, or only small thrusters, then it becomes easy.
Like the early British Colonies in North America and Australia, The colonists will have long term contracts. 7 years was the standard 300 years ago, it may just be that way again.
It will be a small group. It will grow, as the colony gains enough by shipping back to earth, the Colony can pay for more shipments of colonists. there will probably be another shipment of people every couple of years. More, if they find a valuable deposit of something like Rare Earth elements. That could make it as often as a couple of times a year.
With small groups, and necessarily limited living space, there will be a lot of human drama.
The food supply will be quite limited at first. Algae is a very boring diet. Vegetables will be slower, and much more limited in availability. Meat will be a terribly expensive luxury for probably the first decade. Things we might not like will be the easiest solution. Worms can be made into a substitute for hamburger, and they don't take up much space. Worms will also be a necessary part of the ecology.
It is necessary to have at least three steps in the food chain. The plants are one step, the decay of the matter is another step, and the worms eating the byproducts are a third step. Each step eliminates some pathogens.
It will be necessary to absorb the CO2 and burn the methane and other gasses that are byproducts of people, and the other living things. As strange as it seems, oxygen will be used up to treat the air after the ordeal of generating it in the first place. Air monitoring and treatment will be more important than water monitoring and treatment.
Dust on the Moon is a problem, it is very abrasive. We know a lot about dust collection and filtering. We will need to know more.
Power is an issue also. You can do anything if you have enough power. Nuclear power would be ideal, but is very heavy to ship from Earth. Solar is easy to come by, and can be produced locally. The problem is that it's not there half of the time.
The problem with Solar is solvable though. In the late 1970's NASA worked out a system for space. It's an Aluminum/Oxygen fuel cell. During the day hours, refine aluminum. Capture the oxygen given off. Process the aluminum into sheets. During the night weeks, use the fuel cells to provide the power to keep the plants and people alive. It's just a question of waiting for sunrise.
These fuel cells can operate vehicles too. This is a game maker. It is a way to use and store power. Aluminum can on the moon be like gasoline is on Earth.
Socially, this will have some dramatic results. Long hours during day weeks, and
Seems to me that Mars and the moon are dead ends because there's little economic reason to go and exploring isn't sufficient reason to justify the establishment of a colony.
I really think that Saturnian moons are the best bet: Plenty of complex molecules from which to manufacture stuff, some atmosphere, enough gravity to be comfortable and no expensive gravity well. Plus you might be able to have an economic reason to be there - perhaps refining hydrocarbons and flinging them on slow trajectories back to LEO.
We still won't be able to loft a colony in one go, nor will we be able to move it all out of the gravity well in lumps without expending HUGE amounts of fuel we just won't have. Simply put, you will need to put a limited colony on the moon or a captured asteroid for the purpose of mining the resources the actual colony will need. With every resupply, add an number of people until it is fully manned and fully functional.
I recommended the moon for a few simple reasons: It's close, and a set distance (give or take). It has materials we can use, and since it is tide locked, a colony will always (or never) have a communication link. Finally, with only 1/6G, and no atmosphere, it presents little problem getting mass off the surface as opposed to a full G. This makes the moon an ideal launch platform for further colonization of our solar system and beyond.
The trick is that we have to figure out how to incite companies to want to do this. Business can be convinced, and will stay interested, which is something one cannot say of governments. The US has an attention span half live of only 4 years, so if a politician did something about colonization, the odds are that another would reap the rewards while he would get blamed for the costs. Since political parties flip flop, again, the odds are a Democrat would start it (or Republican if it could be said to have something to do with national security), but the opposite party would cash in, even claiming to have had the foresight to authorize it.
Back to business... figure out what is on the moon in massive supply that would make it worthwhile to go there. This is how to sell it and make traction. Yes, this discussion is way past theoretical at this point, but you need a factual (or at least consistent) framework to make a believable and entertaining story. This post will posted anonymously, but I will sign it so you can find me with some due diligence if you wish.
-I. M. Patient
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/kepler-22b/ At 1% of the speed of light (which is still probably technically impossible) it would take 6000 years. People would have to "sleep" (cryogenics?) to reach it. The craft would be massive, containing thousands of individuals. It would accelerate constantly to the halfway point then decelerate constantly from there; that would be a challenge in and of itself. Lots of interesting stuff that you could just make up from there. :)
I suggest you read the novel A Lion on Tharthee by Grant Callin. It discusses the engineering challenges of making a self-sufficient environment to support human life far away from repair shops and spare parts. (It's just plain a fun novel too, worth reading for its own sake; you might want to start with the novel that came before it to get the full story in the correct sequence.)
Out of print, but you can get it used through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Lion-Tharthee-Grant-Callin/dp/0671653571
For non-fact, you should probably read the book Halfway to Anywhere by G. Harry Stine. I say "probably" because I haven't read it yet, but everything I have heard about it is good.
We managed to go to Earth's moon by the quick-and-dirty method, with a single rocket launch; it makes much more sense though to build out some infrastructure. A spacecraft for a Mars trip should be built in Earth orbit. There should be some way to cheaply send up things like fuel that are tough and expendable; maybe a linear accelerator on the Equator or something. I think Halfway to Anywhere talks about such stuff.
I believe the title of that book refers to a comment by Robert A. Heinlein: Once you have escaped Earth gravity, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.
Michael Flynn wrote a series about a serious plan to get into space by private industry in the near future. I think the first novel in the series is called Firestar. IIRC they used a super-cannon to send fuel canister into orbit; someone called the cannon "God's Own Shotgun".
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Don't trust Klingons
Check out http://spaceshipearthbeta.com for a Bucky-esque overview of a potential mission. I think a Lagrange point is a fun alternative destination to Mars and the Moon. Email me if you want to brainstorm.
Read it, then add your own sauce.
http://www.maryroach.net/packing-for-mars.html
For our first colony, the Moon or Mars makes sense. The Moon would be the easier choice, while Mars would be much farther away and perhaps be more interesting for that and other reasons. Ganymede or the other two big icy moons of Jupiter would be interesting too. Or maybe the first mission to establish a mining operation on an asteroid?
Depends. The Moon, a few days. Mars, with current technology around six months, although that could be reduced if you use plasma propulsion for example.
Maybe a precursor/pathfinder mission to prepare for the following big colony missions? Or maybe just a research base?
Just from our space missions there are a number of problems that has occurred in reality. Problems with heating or cooling, explosions, fires, collisions between ships, problems with carbon-dioxide scrubbing, loss of attitude control... The problems alone that can come up are many, if you add in the danger of space flight, the human factor, computer hardware/software failures. Also, radiation, micrometeorites, the effect of low G on the human body, the possible effects psychologically of living for months in a confined space far away from home, etc. Tasks could include course alterations, scientific experiments and observations, daily maintenance, etc.
On Mars of course you have the Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons, dried up floodbeds, craters, volcanoes, dust deviles, the annual dust storm that pretty much covers up the entire planet... etc. If you establish a base on one of Mars's two moons, Mars itself would be prominent and probably a beautiful sight in the sky. On the Moon, all kinds of interesting things. Mountains, craters, maria, etc.
I'm thinking international, no matter if it's a government project or entirely private endeavour. Men and women, of course. For the establishment of a research base, I would have only adults. Could be different on a larger colony mission of course. Artificial intelligence would be part of it, whether it's the ship's computer, robots or intelligent systems built-in in the spacesuits for example.
Try to see each planet as a time/profit solution.
Colonies are made for a reason. Almost always for the home's needs.
So:
Mercury: Sunlight; rapid transit; low gravity.
Venus: Atmospheric mining? Colonization is not a commercial issue. So it would be a long term{social,religious} issue.
Earth: Sorry. Already here. Accept for the L4 and L5. Moon? Again. What can it provide the home commercially?
Mars: A bust. This is a burnt out world. Like a white dwarf, it's past it time. To make it useful to humans (a curious requirement), you need to increase it's magnetic field (get the core turning). Local increases are pointless. They actually help strip the atmosphere. Then there's a gravity well with little at the bottom. Read some Larry Niven about that. Mars is a racial project, and as we don't have racial energy yet, not really a good subject for a story (not the yet).
Asteroids: Been done. See Larry Niven.
Jupiter: Interesting subject as our knowledge is changing a lot. Again. HomeColony interaction; where is the money or motivation.
Outward it just gets worse for story telling. You need what's available, material in cold storage, someplace else, to make the outer solar system worthwhile.
It has an atmosphere dense enough not to require pressure suits. With a source of oxidizers, the atmosphere could be used as fuel. It has a fluid cycle similar to Earth. Landings can be done entirely by parachute.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Stephen Baxter has written many good books with similair concepts, and he too strives for realism. Ben Bova also has his "tour of the solar system" group of books, about colonies and events at numerous locations around the solar system.
Some points to ponder:
Why build a colony or even just send an expedition?
The answer to that would be your underlying theme, or at least influence the events. Is it to escape disaster? (slightly plausible) As part of a new space race, an expensive folly just to "win" (which might be likely given China's push for space)? Or will it be commercial driven, large corporations striving to make a profit somehow?
I think the Commercial approach would be most likely. In the near future governments aren't going to have the cash for such a large project - but there's major mining companies making billions of dollars profit every year (hello BHP and Rio Tinto - combined would be something like $25 billion a year).
Probably the best bang for buck mission at present would be to mine asteroids, either in-situ or diverting them to Earth orbit. They have a lower delta-v requirement than just about anywhere else in the system (so less fuel/thrust required). And, one metallic asteroid has an average mineral worth of about $1 trillion or more on todays market (iron/nickel/zinc mostly I think, plus gold/silver/lead/etc). The problem is mining it, refining it, and getting it to the market - a huge challenge.
Unfortunately recent bad news about the radiation hazard in Space from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has made the outlook for Space settlement very bleak right now. Every space short story I have ever written is now rubbish. Bummer!
The problem is that there two types of radiation hazard: (1) Galactic cosmic rays (GCR), and (2) Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). The first, GCR, is 24/7 and present low-level, but penetrating. The second, CME, is 0 to 5 times a year and deadly intense, but not penetrating. Up until last year, in our stories we assumed that the CME was the biggest danger, but the LRO reversed that understanding. You could shield from CME as the incidents are rare and one meter of lunar regolith is plenty of shielding. But GCR would require 5 meters of lunar regolith for shielding and are a constant threat.
The problem then is that space travel as normally depicted, people running around with little shielding for most of the time and then only having an occasional emergency to respond too, is impossible. The people in our hard science fiction stories now must the fact that they are paying for their adventure with substantial lost of life expectancy and likely later ill heath. Bummer!
There are solutions to this problem but they call for very advanced technologies and concepts. This will take a lot of work. Maybe the place to start is with science fiction stories.
Tom Riley TomRiley@woodwaredesigns.com http://woodwaredesigns.com/woodware.html
The next logical destination after the Moon is an Near Earth Object (NEO). They offer a real threat to Earth that people can appreciate (the dinosaurs did not at their peril); they are fairly easy to get to; they probably have valuable resources for future space missions; and they had something to do with the start of life on Earth.
A believable mission would assemble in space, perhaps sling shot around the Moon, and travel for a few weeks. It would then orbit around the NEO for most of a year with space walks to the surface and then return again in a few weeks. The return ship would end with a very dramatic reentry at very high speed.
The orbits of a NEO and Earth are nearly the same, so they move close together and then apart, typically on a yearly cycle. This means that the trip there and back would be short compared to Mars but the stay is locked in at about one year. Out out when they are closest. Come back the next time they are close again.
Unfortunately, typical NEO's are unattractive assemblies of rocks and dust in the shape of a potato and the size of Manhattan. They also tumble slowly and are covered with fine dust that is bad for your high-tech equipment.
The problem is making the story dramatic when enormous effort and expense will be put out to make it as boring and risk free as possible. (Apollo 13 made a great movie but a lousy Moon trip!)
Tom Riley TomRiley@woodwaredesigns.com http://woodwaredesigns.com/woodware.html
Look at Dan Brown, his books are absolutely bogus and downright wrong, but they sell. People don't want to read "real" they want stuff that works in the plot.
Don't use page after page about how this thingie magic spins and creates normal gravity - it's there, it's done; flip of a switch and gravity is normal, smack into a small roid and your hero needs to go space walking to fix .
Also remember to have your usual team, one black guy to sacrifice, one hotty for the hero to score, a scientist, someone plotting to make everything blow up (a nice twist would be a mormon or scientologist?) and one hero.
Head for Europe (moon, not continent) and find underwater starbases or whatnot. Look at what Charles Stross has been doing with the Atrocity Archives series, really good books, based on earth with "believable" twists.
Oh, I'll take 25% for the ideas if you use em.
You really are off to a horrible start. If you don't know enough about the mechanics already, you're just going to end up pulling a star trek and it won't be as believable as you want. "Pulling a star trek" is a modern version of dues ex machina, where you invent some technobabble to cause or escape the crappy lot device you constructed.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
To Rise from Earth is an account of the basic physics of space travel. A few years since I've read it, but as I recall it goes over the basic concepts and destinations quite well.
Robert Zubrin has written two books which would be worth a look - The Case for Mars about a practical scheme for mounting expeditions to Mars in the near term, and Entering Space which takes a wider view within our solar system. Finally, John S Lewis' Mining the Sky gives the rationale and practicalities for mining asteroids - how you might do it, and what sorts of materials you would profitably extract from them.
There are any number of other books out there, but these should get you started. Good luck!
I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic
Your information is a bit old. Reproduction of rats in micro-gravity and zero-gravity has been being studied the last few years: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=rats+reproduction+microgravity
They tried everything from taking pregnant rats into space to observe the effects on fetal development to fertilizing embryos in microgravity to the effects of microgravity on the reproductive organs of rats.
Long trip, hibernation, mysterious monolith, what appears to be failure of AE-35 earth tracker, but is actually onboard computer psychosis.
Basic question is what you mean by "colony". My personal guess is that what you will get are initially expeditions where a few humans visit, do research, leave instruments and go home. After that you get "mining camps" -- long-lived outposts where humans are based for a few years to do jobs that can't be done by robots managed from Earth. The ISS is a very minimal example of this in LEO. If the work is producing sufficient return (in science or good or whatever) then these camps gradually expand as it becomes convenient to base people there for longer and to make them less dependent on services from Earth. Eventually you get something which actually can survive on its own and trade with Earth on a more equal basis.
The moon is surely the first target for expeditions, followed by near-Earth asteroids, then the moons of Mars, then Mars itself, then maybe more distant asteroids.
Which, if any, of these ever progress to the "mining camp" stage depends on what is discovered. We might want to mine the moon for He3 or for mass for orbital construction, but it's fairly easy to teleoperate machinery on the moon from here.
Asteroids might be targets for actual mining, aiming to shop back metals carbon and (maybe) volatiles to Earth orbit, or even eventually to Earth. The problem is that they are very spread out. There's no obvious place to have a colony or camp which is more convenient for very many asteroids than Earth is.
Mars might be a source of volatiles (ice) for Earth orbit, or a research target -- for example if life, or clear evidence of complex past life was found.
Everywhere else is really too far away and/or too hostile to be a near future target.
The one thing that young, or new writers have a hard time understanding is how much *READING* is an integral part of good writing. Sure researching the plausibility of your invented tech in a sci-fi piece is something that great sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and others all did, but there is also a lot of reading and research that needs to be done on how to handle the more compelling aspects of your story need to come together. Sure, the tech plays a part, but you're not writing a tech manual. You're writing a story about PEOPLE and the tech is either a setting or a character (or both) a la the ship Serenity in Firefly. Good fiction writing in general deals with human topics, social issues and visions of the past, present or future. Writing is not a visual media, so the imagination can often fill in tech blanks, but if the human interest story is not there as the main scaffold, you're writing will not be that successful.
Anthony Zappero has some really interesting things to say about space travel http://www.neofuel.com/inhabit/inhabit.pdf It's a bit scattered but I found it really, really interesting.
Professional writers spend a lot of time doing research. Lots of research. This means reading material about the subject matter. Use Google and see what's online, but also read a few dozen books from a good library. That being said, you don't need a lot of technical detail; you're going to write a story. That involves realistic characters, dialog, and relationships. This is what will make you succeed (or fail) as a writer.
Keep Doing Good.
based on asteroidal ore (1920s): http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/ ..."
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Bring a towel.
Mars fan boys will cry, but you should consider sending your mission to Phobos to establish a sheltered (from gamma radiation) base there. Prior to that mission, a lot of equipment and robots would be landed on the surface, along the lines of "Mars Direct" but with only sample return ever needing to leave the surface - not trying to launch a manned rocket (consider how much is required to make that safe to attempt here on Earth.
When Phobos base is established, the explorers would command a large crew of semi-autonomous robotic explorers. They could also use telepresence - giving your explorers a better experience of 'being there' than they'd get actually being on Mars surface and limited to staying inside a base or rover 95% of the time and in a highly constraining pressure suit and helmet during their small amount of time "outside". Safer, more efficient, more productive, and your explorers can effectively teleport around the surface of Mars, but until they get a satellite network up they'll have windows of access (helps constrain and shape your story, creates some tension). Even after getting the SatNet up, the lag for access to the other side of Mars will make telepresence poor. Given current robotics plus maybe 10 years more progress, a robot and telepresence rig should be quite convincing. (In zero G, full body tracking and haptic feedback rig can more easily and convincingly simulate "being there" without a lot of Rube Goldberg mechanical stuff.)
The 1990s called. They want their VCR clocks back.
A big religious cult/group gathers enough money from followers to build a nuclear fueled multi-generational colony ship to a nearby star.
The Mormons, for example, were told to sell all their possessions, ride a ship to America, and march across the USA to hunt for a good place to settle down away from pesky detractors.
Table-ized A.I.
At the year 2099, after the 3rd world war, and a huge asteroid impact, mankind decides to visit the most promising solar system bodies for sustaining life, in order to evaluate them for colonization.
Make a big space station/ship, complete with rotating sections for artificial gravity, that uses nuclear propulsion to accelerate to relativistic speeds.
The ship would have lots of people, from every kind of profession. It would also have science labs, entertainment and sport centers, even prostitutes (do not forget the sex part, if you want to make it as realistic as possible).
Provide the ship with landers, so as that people can land on smaller objects.
Also let the ship generate an electromagnetic field around it, just like Earth, so as that it is protected from radiation.
Use slingshots around planets (or even the Sun) to propel the ship (together with nuclear propulsion), in order to be even more realistic.
Assemble the ship in orbit (unlike a recent scifi movie).
Describe, to your best ability, the air and water systems of the ship, as well as anything else required to have a functioning living space. For example, deal with the problem of garbage.
The spaceship would have enough supplies for a 5 year mission, and it will finally return to Earth. Forget the stuff about the one way missions, it is bullshit. Mankind needs hope, not darkness or desperation.
Describe the true emptiness of space and use real distances and planetary positions.
Colony would be at L5 of the earth moon system, and would be made economically viable through processing of lunar, and asteroidial resources, and manufacture made possible by them. Oxygen, silicon, aluminum, and titanium from the moon, via moon based mass drivers (linear induction motors, superconducting "buckets" accelerating the payload, releasing payload, decelerating, and then going back to the start of the mass driver. Heavy elements from nickle iron asteroids, carbon, and hydrogen from carbonaceous asteroids, and comets. In this way, deep planetary gravity wells are completely avoided. Imports from earth would be high value to mass things like electronic components, and bearings.
You wrote:
probably set a few years ahead, just enough for the launching of the first colony in the solar system
I think a good analogy is Antarctica as it is now. It is a cool place to set up a research station, and maybe a cool place to visit. But I would not want to live there.
But Antarctica is only very cold. The Moon has no atmosphere and Mars has very little. Both have very limited gravity, which could give all sorts of problems for a stay longer than a few years. Though the Moon is a few days away, Mars is half a year journey, or at least a month is you have a higher energy engine. Radiation is a problem. Lunar soil stinks of sulfur, and I would wager to guess that Mars probably stinks too.
It would not be a colony of people on their last dime wanting to start anew on a new world, cause any habitat to support humans would be expensive.
I don't think we will see a colony for the next hundred years or more. I would go for a research outpost, though.
That aside, it was pointed out that having realistic orbital mechanics would add a sense of realism. Two ideas for sending a large expedition to Mars would be either:
1) Have a large, initially unmanned space habitat vehicle slowly spiral up using solar electric ion propulsion to a high energy elliptical orbit (where it would have large doses of Van Allen Belt radiation if people were along for the year long ride). The habitat would have all the supplies and place to live for the voyage, the landing craft and other equipment for the expedition. Once it has almost enough energy to break out of orbit, a very minimal, but very fast, crew taxi would deliver the explorers to the habitat. It can be fast in that it only has the crew and capsule and supplies for a couple of hours as it rendezvous with the habitat as it passes close to the earth, on its final leg before leaving orbit.
2) Have a reusable habitat (or just a landing vehicle for the Moon) parked at L1 or L2 for rendezvous with an unmanned refueling/resupply craft, and later crew capsule. Initially the habitat and supply ships may need to spiral up like in idea 1, or would be sent on multiple heavy lift rocket flights (the smaller the rocket the more flights, the more complexity to the mission).
Once it gets to Mars it can do either an Aerocapture (where it goes through the atmosphere to slow down into orbit) or an Aeroentry (where it slows down for an immediate landing). Both would probably take advantage of inflatable conical balutes (See NASA's HIAD -- Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator) to protect the spacecraft and increase the air resistance.There has also been a lot of look at skip entry, where the spacecraft bounces off the atmosphere intentionally before entering for a landing. The latter is just what Apollo Astronauts worried might happen if they entered the atmosphere incorrectly--here modern engineers use it to their advantage.
I could go on an on but I do not wish to write your book for you.
go do some reading on the www.nasaspaceflight.com web site. LOTS of info to help you out..