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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?
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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Total immersion Video games
Particularly Zero-G Kickboxing and Wimbledon
Ask NASA *ducks*
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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.
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.
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
Uranus.
... this has been done before.
Next you'll be telling us that 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back' has been done before and no-one should write another story with the same idea.
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.
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.
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.
Yes please!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
...alien bursts out of girls (naked) chest and eats boy, ripley chimes in with "get away from her you bitch!" and mows it down with a minigun... NEVER gets old (i love you ripley *mwah*)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I had mod points for you today...
I can see the fnords!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.