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The Challenges of Building a Mars Base
ambermichelle writes with an excerpt from an article in Txchnologist: "Going to Mars? Expect to stay a while. Because of the relative motions of Earth and Mars, the pioneering astronauts who touch down on the Martian surface will have to remain there for a year and a half. For this reason, NASA has already started experimenting with a habitat fit for the long-term exploration of Mars. Last year, students at the University of Wisconsin won the XHab competition to design and build an inflatable loft addition to a habitat shell that NASA had already constructed. The final structure now serves as a working model that is being tested in the Arizona desert. Like any home, it's a sacred bulwark against the elements; but not just the cold, heat, and pests of Arizona. A Mars habitat will have to protect astronauts from cosmic rays, solar flares, and unknown soil compositions all while keeping inhabitants happy and comfortable."
Sorry you are, eh? How valorous of you, anonymous coward.
Which space? This thread, that part of humanity's mind-space which deals in such things, or somewhere in between?
Where, for you, is the line 'tween nuttery and not-nuttery? Geo-stationary? Or have you decided, in your ineffable wisdom, simply that whatever now is, is OK, and that we must all lock ourselves into the stultified arena of 'this far, and no further'? Shall we leave the future to the same mentalities of those who proclaimed that Man would never fly, that transmitting pictures through the air was the fevered product of an opium dream?
Perhaps unbeknownst to you, there are many well-qualified people working on this and related matters, things - feasible and practical - and endeavours which may clash with your mindset. Plenty of information is readily available to anyone with a jot of curiousity, to anyone, that is, but a dolt, or a knee-jerk negativist.
Or perhaps you have your own enlightened viewpoint for matters off-planet, the right way, the one true way, which you don't care to share, but rather content yourself with dropping a turd in the punchbowl?