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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.
Trust me. That's what most Slashdotters are hoping for when they are imagining themselves as a part of it.
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/
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?
Seriously, this may be one of the worst "Ask Slashdot" I've seen in a really long time.
I've started writing a few months ago as a career change because of health issues. Research is part of writing, what he's doing now isn't research, he's just asking to be given everything. I don't know how he'll manage to write anything with that attitude. That may sound harsh, but he or she needs to read on the topic, do some research, build up ideas, and then ask people if those ideas seem interesting or not, plausible or not, etc.
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
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.
What's up with Timothy is that he wants to write a story about spays.
which is totally what she said
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.
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*)
Read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
-- QED
...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 think the setting is all there is to a story...well, that explains a number of popular movies that wouldn't know a story if a transformer turned into one right in front of them.
There are no bonus points at the end of the ride for doing things the hard way. Research is research. You are being silly if you think it is noble not to ask questions or survey groups of people. Would you chastise a Business/Systems Analyst if they asked questions about how the business worked from SMEs and users? Of course not, it is part of researching. A very good research technique is interviewing and/or surveying others who are experts or who have more knowledge on the topic than you do. This is what this guy is doing. So don't get all uppity because this guy is exploiting an avenue of research that you didn't. And no he is not asking you or anyone here to write the story, so people here need to stop exaggerating this. He is trying to get help in creating a believable context. If you could prove that this is his only form of research you might have a case. In any case, good luck on your writing anyway.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.