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."

Comments

Find precious metals on Mars

[Synerg1y]

The base will build itself with corporate sponsorship. Problem solved.

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[hedwards]

Or oil, never mind that it would waste an incredible amount of energy shipping it back here, the point isn't the energy benefits, the point is showing those dirty hippies who's the boss.

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[Americano]

My point is for us to build a base on Mars practically

You could have stopped there. It is not an economically feasible operation on any scale larger than "send a couple geeks there to do some science". It may be scientifically interesting, and we may have a lot of NASA geeks get hot and bothered over the prospect of months cooped up in a small cargo container surrounded by inhospitable environment, but there is nothing you can find on Mars (or anywhere else) that would be economically practical to extract and ship back to Earth.

Look at the size and tonnage of the ISS and other space vehicles & modules, then look at their living capacity. You will not have large scale colonization and exploration of space - for economic or survival purposes - without overcoming significant swaths of our current understanding of simple physics.

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[jd]

The usually-quoted metric is a pound of gold per pound of material into orbit. That's just orbit, not getting the stuff to Mars, or then getting the stuff from Mars back to Earth. To deorbit in Earth's atmosphere, you would need expensive heat shielding (or you'll just get a really nice burn) and the more you plan on bringing back, the more heat shielding you need. If we find an asteroid of pure platinum, it might be commercially viable to mine, but we'll need much better launch facilities before space industry in raw material terms is viable.

Now, that's not to say space is useless commercially. Quasi-crystals are found in space and occur there naturally and frequently, you need a lab to make them on Earth. It may well be, therefore, that the value of -finished- products from space would exceed the launch costs in a few cases, even if raw materials are currently off the table. It's simply a better environment for certain things. "May well be" is not the same, however, as "certainly is". If space production of such-and-such was obviously economic, it would be done. It isn't done, so we can assume that there's no obvious case. Doesn't mean there isn't a case, just means it's not obvious.

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[Americano]

Why would it be nice?

Given our current understanding of physics and biology, you would be spending far longer than presently-recorded history traveling in an interstellar "generational" ship to reach the closest stars; there is no guarantee that ANY of them will have earth-like conditions that would be suitable for human life.

We are not going to construct colonies - either floating, or planet-bound, that are of sufficient scale & size to provide any hedge against extinction. The materials, the cost, the risk, and the energy requirements are simply too high.

If you're talking a legitimate hedge against extinction, then you need to:
1) Find another planet that is close enough to earth conditions that it would be suitable for human life.
2) Build a space ship capable of surviving the time required to travel there;
3) Provision a space ship capable of surviving and supporting human life for thousands of years;
4) Build a large enough ship & colonization group that you wouldn't end up with hundreds of generations of inbreeding and genetic defects at the end of the trip;
5) Find a bunch of people who don't mind dooming hundreds of generations of their descendants to life in a tin can hurtling through space, and that they will never, ever see or hear from Earth in any practical manner again;
6) Ensure that no critical part, anywhere, at any point on the trip, goes bad;
7) Figure out a way to land the ship on the far end with all that cargo;
8) Realize that a small gene pool, after thousands of years of travel and introduction to a completely new habitat, may very well diverge from "human" evolution in significant ways such that calling the people landing on the far side of that trip may not be particularly "human" in any appreciable sense anyway.

9) As an alternative to all that, develop faster than light travel or some sort of fool-proof suspended animation, as well as a computer system capable of self-healing and adaption on an unprecedented level, and find a way to power it for thousands of years without error or failure.

In light of all of those limitations, I'd suggest that in the long run, learning to behave like civilized fucking human beings and get along with one another without shitting all over the blankets might just be the easier and more practical way to survive as a species.

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[Americano]

You do realise that there are some planets in our own solar system, right?

*sigh*

You do realize that none of the other planets in our solar system will support human life - that any colony or structure we build there must be *entirely* self-sustaining, self-contained, and extraordinarily fault tolerant - right?

You do realize that building and shipping a habitat that will house a mere handful of people will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's a low-ball estimate, right?

You do realize that "6 people in a tin can orbiting one of Jupiter's moons" does not provide any appreciable insurance for the human species against extinction events, right?

If you want to send people to do science for a few months, great. But let's stop pretending that we're ever going to build a large-scale colony on another planet when that planet is fundamentally incapable of supporting human life. The energy, time, and financial costs are far too high for it to be anything but a "because we wanted to see what would happen" sort of thing.

Mars is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. The rest of our solar system is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. This fairytale notion that we're going to magically whisk ourselves away to another planet, star system, galaxy, etc. and live there is just that: a fairytale notion. We better learn to behave well here on earth, because this is all we've got until we learn to violate our fundamental understandings of time & distance to enable faster-than-light travel.

Any attempt to convince yourself that we will build a self-sustaining colony on another planet or other body inside our solar system which will be entirely self-contained & self-sustaining - i.e., capable of supporting human life indefinitely in the midst of an environment that is hostile to human life - is just delusional mental masturbation, and simply enables us to continue behaving in self-destructive ways in our own habitat here on earth.

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[lennier]

The threat we're guarding against is that of having a vast number of people stuck in a single biosphere, all complex unpredictable people, occasionally inventing new and dangerous things. A few decades ago, nuclear war seemed like the manifestation of that. We got past that hurdle with civilisation intact. How many more inventions like that will there be? How many times can we pass the test?

I don't know what new doomsday weapons might come down the physics pipe (at the moment, realistically speaking, it's looking very much like physics has reached a centuries-long dead end and won't even be able to got fusion working, and the huge surge of discoveries in the 20th century was a weird spike anomaly which won't be repeated) - but also realistically speaking, there's no plausible scenario where any kind of war or world-killer device could make Earth less habitable than Mars, without also stuffing the rest of the solar system.

Consider: to get a colony onto Luna or Mars, we're going to have to create a fairly reliable space shipping network. It won't be a case of "one launch, one ship, one colony, no followups". Apollo took more than 10 ships just to put boots on the ground. Soyuz/Progress/Shuttle/Mir/ISS have done multiple service flights per year just to replace consumables. Any longer-term space habitation program will grow out of these existing initiatives, and will require creating a space transport infrastructure which will most likely remain once the colony is self-sufficient. (Bear in mind that achieving true self-sufficiency may be a matter of centuries, not decades; even if Mars Base Alpha can grow its own water and oxygen like ISS currently can't, there'll still be skills and resources like doctors, engineers, replacement seeds, trace minerals, etc which require special flights. Even Earth city-states never became completely isolated from trade.)

Also consider: the energy requirements for regular, reliable space shipping are similar to that required for city-busting weapons. If you can launch a chemical rocket into orbit, you can launch an ICBM to bomb Moscow or Washington (and in fact, in our history, the ICBMs were easier and came first). If you can put lots of cheap fusion drives on commercial rockets, you can probably smuggle lots of cheap fusion devices into office buildings. If you can divert asteroids for mining, you can also divert asteroids to smash Earth cities. So realistically, space shipping will require space policing and the extension across the solar system of (possibly fairly draconian) state monitoring and control of reactor fuel and drive flares - just like our current space traffic control has grown out of NORAD's missile monitoring. And space is lots of empty vacuum, very hard to hide things in, very easy to detect signals from a distance. Habitats will also (at least initially) be very fragile, very exposed to terrorism, and very aware of the delicate social balance needed for survival. So don't expect space to be a big wild west of freedom - expect the opposite, a tiny well-lit, pressurised, glasshouse filled with lots of big rocks and many very nervous people with guns watching everything.

Also consider: the energy requirements for making Earth less habitable than, say, Mars already is, are absolutely stupendous. A simple nuclear war with every bomb we have wouldn't do it. Mars is bathed in radiation as it is; Jupiter's moons have far more; Venus is a hell of boiling sulphuric acid CO2 gas; Luna will just straight-up kill you with vacuum if you get a tear in your suit, and we don't even know how toxic or carconigenic moon dust might be to breathe (tiny nano-chunks of harsh dust, think asbestos). Global warming? Not a chance it could compare. If all the ocean levels on Earth rose ten metres, we'd still be far better off than Mars with its no oceans; at a pinch we could build undersea habitats using a tenth of the technology we'd need to even start looking at Mars. Boil Earth dry, irradiate it to hell, it's still better than Mercury. So u

Re:Find precious metals on Mars

[Princeofcups]

You will not have large scale colonization and exploration of space - for economic or survival purposes - without overcoming significant swaths of our current understanding of simple physics.

The actual problem is our ridiculous understanding of economics. So we cannot go to mars because a select group of wealthy and powerful will not get more wealthy and more powerful? That is pretty much what our economics is all about. No, humanity can do these things because they are great to do. In terms of available resources, that is, materials, manpower, and knowledge, we have more than we need to put a permanent habitat on Mars without any significant impact to the workings of humanity, except for the positive. Let's just fucking do it.

Re:Find a big cave

[Moheeheeko]

Just make sure its actually a cave

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Exogorth

I hope they learned something from Apollo 18

[swb]

That those fucking rocks are really spiders!!

Re:I hope they learned something from Apollo 18

[alphatel]

It calls itself a horta.

Challenge 1: Landing

[ReallyEvilCanine]

We can't fucking land more than about tonne on that planet.. Forget the time and the <50% success rate of achieving orbit and landing a probe. We could land on either Phobos or Deimos no problem. Mars has just enough atmosphere to really screw things up.

To even consider going to Mars we first need to send at least 5 rockets full of supplies and land them literally next to each other. We also need to park another 2 or 3 in orbit to hold fuel for Mars Orbit Docking in order to dock and go home within a reasonable time frame. Aldrin's free transfer trajectory is great but unsuitable for human passage.

Get the supplies and contingency machines in place, then think about it. But first figure out how to drop 5 tonnes safely to a very particular spot on the surface. Now do it repeatedly. Because that's what landing on Mars requires.

Re:Challenge 1: Landing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, this space is for space nuttery, not your sober assessment of feasibility and practical limitations.

Re:Challenge 1: Landing

[realisticradical]

So it sounds like there are multiple extremely difficult problems to work through. Isn't that kind of the point of this sort of thing?

Testing is done in stages.

[perpenso]

The NASA video shows them bringing whole hab in on 3 semi-trailers - Why not airdrop the major components in, and see if putting the thing up while encumbered with a suit is feasible.

Testing is done in stages. First see if we have the concepts and solution correct with basic equipment. Then figure out how to ruggedize the equipment. If the concept was flawed or the basic equipment lacking then ruggedizing would be a waste of time and money.

Re:Why have a base above ground?

[Americano]

Maybe NASA is so smart that they've ruled that out already as impractical?

If Sarah Palin can come up with "Drill Baby, Drill," I'm pretty sure the brainiacs at NASA with all their learnin' have at least considered the notion.

Re:Cryosleep

[hawguy]

The obvious and simple solution is cryo-sleep. Just ship some capsules along with a rudimentary habitat, and be prepared to sleep most of the time away. The Mars explorers can't realistically bring 18 months' worth of food and oxygen and medical supplies and whatever else--tampons, contact lenses, etc. So just send a month's supply of food, and they can sleep for 17 months until the return vessel arrives.

I think that compared to the amount of fuel and supplies they're going to have to carry to travel to mars, build a habitat and survive for months (years?) on Mars' surface, supplying them with food on the trip there is not going to be a big deal. The ISS goes through around 3 tons of food per person per year.

Cooling the human body to a near-death state has been demonstrated--actually, it has happened many times when people fall into icy water and are revived many minutes later (google extreme hypothermia).

But waking them up again without a team of doctors to assist is rare.

Another concept might be to simply upload the astronaut's neural net into a very high capacity computer. Once this task is accomplished, the computer can continue to operate a space vessel and otherwise completely imitate a human being's decisionmaking and responses. One possible catch is that the computer, unlike an organic brain, lacks any stimulus from hormonal secretions, adrenaline, etc. This kind of stimulus would have to be simulated. The astronauts themselves would remain on Earth, monitoring the flight. Any mistakes or accidents would be blamed on the individual whose brain had been uploaded, obviously.

How would you do this? Dissect a live astronaut's brain cell by cell to determine each neural connection?

Lastly is the idea of telecommuting (similar to the second idea expounded above). A completely automated vessel with remote controls would allow a team of astronauts to "work from home". Unlike an actual trip into space, this virtual exploration would be much safer.

The 6 minute to 45 minute round trip communications lag makes this difficult (but not impossible as demonstrated by the mars rovers).

I think a hybrid of your last two approaches is better than sending men right now - send smart robots to build a base, they can be largely autonomous, and when they need help, they await communications from earth.

Or, maybe instead of sending a large team of men to live on the surface and build a habitat, send a large team of drone robots controlled from orbit by a small team of humans.

Re:not soil

[camperdave]

Its not soil, it is regolith.

We're not entirely sure about that yet. The difference between soil and regolith is that soil has active bacteria and organic material suspended among the ground up rock particles. We've taken a few samples that show no organic material, but the methodology behind the testing and the results is in dispute.

Bear in mind, though, that except in geology papers, regolith and soil are synonyms.

Why isn't it underground?

[Karmashock]

I'm always confused by base designs for other worlds that are invariably above ground. Why waste the protective features of just burying things?

I suppose it's difficult to dig a base into the earth but because there's very little atmosphere to speak of you have no real protection against radiation. And then there are questions of insulation. Put twenty feet of dirt between your habitat and the surface and all sorts of problems go away.

No problem with micro meteorites since they'd have to penetrate 20 feet of dirt to even touch your habitat.

No problem with radiation unless it can go through 20 feet of dirt. I know really hard radiation can... but that has to take most of the edge off it. And if needed you can always go deeper.

No problem with dust storms because it's all raging above you. I suppose a dune could position itself on top of your access shaft but there are some fairly cheap ways to make that manageable.

So on and so forth.

this goes double for the moon. For the love of god there's not even a weak atmosphere on the moon. No protection. Put the facility down twenty feet though and you can inflate your little habitat to your heart's content knowing that the whole place isn't going to get stabbed by a thousand micro meteorites or flash burned by a solar flare.

The only thing that really needs to be on the surface is an access shaft complete with airlocks. A communications array so you can broadcast to orbital relays or directly to earth. And some solar cells. Bury everything else.

If we build underground we might not even need those somewhat elaborate bubble walls they're talking about inflating. We might just be able to get by with something to harden the earth up and then maybe a spray on polymer to make sure the walls are airtight.

If people want to see the surface they can use one of the video feeds or climb up the ladder/take the elevator to the surface.

Re:Why isn't it underground?

[msobkow]

Because it's VERY expensive to ship earth-moving construction equipment (sorry, MARS-moving equipment) through space, and it'd take far too long to dig a habitat with a shovel.

Re:Air drop that puppy

[White Yeti]

The HDU work to-date has focused on developing processes, procedures, and some technologies you'd need to live away from Earth. The first assumption is, "We have a habitat." They're still figuring out where to put lights and bunks before building expensive hardware for tests in near-Earth space. With current Administration/NASA plans, the next step is a Lagrange point and/or asteroid. Mars (and those siting and assembly issues) will have to wait...

Re:Find a big cave

[jandrese]

Um, the Mars Science Labratory is going over there with a RTG as the primary power source. The reason the rovers don't explore underground isn't the terrain handling (they already do their own navigation) or the lack of sun, it's the fact that you can't transmit data back out of the cave.

It would be possible for the MSL to explore a cave a little bit, but I'm sure that would cause a lot of nail biting over at NASA.

Re:Find a big cave

[Lumpy]

" it's the fact that you can't transmit data back out of the cave. "

Bet you $1000 I can. It's actually east to do.

It's not possible to communicate to a satellite in the sky with microwave signals from a cave that has no direct line of sight. but it is indeed very possible to transmit data out of a cave and back in. It is done all the time. See how they map the aquifer caves in florida. guys can walk around above ground to follow and talk to the divers underground in the cave and under water.

Re:Sober Assessment

[ReallyEvilCanine]

Heh. me giving a sober assessment.

It's not about the will to do it (although that does play a role). The minute the copycyt Chinese land on the Moon the US -- possibly together with Russia &/or the EU -- will put an Apollo-type effort into getting to Mars. Hell, Just read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars (ISBN 978-1-85168-780-0) and see what nearly insurmountable problems there were in getting to the Moon, and she really only deals with life sciences, not physics.

The problem is that we can't realistically get a payload of sufficient size there. The technological hurdles are easy; the problems are physics and biology. We can build a dozen rockets, take advantage of orbital mechanics for unmanned segments, launch 'em off three full-size gantries together so that one launch window serves three machines.

But before we even think about getting the people there we still have to figure out how to arrive, orbit, and then land precisely -- repeatedly -- unmanned, all while dealing with the 8-minute radio delay in the best of circumstances.

The problem of human physiology is even worse than the physics problem. We can come up with odd trajectories and multiple burns and en-route dockings to provide additional fuel to carry such things out. Have you ever seen the astronauts coming back from 3-6 months on the ISS? It takes a huge fucking crew to get them out of the return vehicle and into recovery. It takes three strong men just to pull those poor bastards off the couch and out of the capsule. And that's from LEO. There ain't no recovery crews waiting on Mars.

Re:Find a big cave

[jd]

You can have relay stations. That's not a problem. Yes, the rovers can do their own navigation, but caves aren't the same thing as strolling along the surface. Spelunking requires skills that even the most advanced robots to date have enormous difficulty with -- unpredictable traction, corners that require flexibility, debris around which there is no good path, the fact that the original pothole will more likely be a vertical drop than a nice, easy drive-in, etc. (Chances are that most of the entrances will be ancient sinkholes - there may have been a shallow sea on Mars but with no significant moon there would be no tides and therefore no caves formed from the lateral pounding of water.)

The flexibility plays into everything else. There are "snake" robots that can handle the kind of terrain we're talking about. They're designed to and do a wonderful job of it. Those snake robots are not, however, equipt to lug around nuclear batteries. Their ability to climb up vertical walls is astonishing but relies heavily on being able to cling to that wall. Adding a few kilos of battery would not only shift the centre of gravity in the wrong direction, it would vastly exceed the gripping ability of the robots.

Re:Find a big cave

[jd]

A nuclear reactor will produce -specific- isotopes. Each type of reactor will produce a given set of isotopes, the ratio of which is unique to that reactor.

Reactors that specifically produce Plutonium-238 (not all forms of plutonium are useful) aren't common, since plutonium-239 is what is wanted for 99.9% of all terrestrial plutonium usage, and separating something with equal charge and very very nearly equal mass would be hard. The Curiosity rover, recently launched, has one of the most powerful Pu-238 batteries ever produced, at a whopping 110 watts. For climbing vertical walls, this is useless. There is also a well-known and well-publicized global shortage of Pu-238. Fast breeder reactors produced Plutonium (which is why they were popular in the Cold War) but modern reactors produce little or none, giving them zero weapons proliferation risk (which is why they can be safely exported to non-signatory nations).

For serious energy density, you'd have to go to Polonium-210. US reactors do not produce Polonium. The only source is in Russia, which is why when the former Soviet spy was poisoned with Polonium in Britain, it took scientists around 5 seconds to figure out where that would have come from. Do you seriously, seriously imagine the Russians are going to sell NASA a whole bunch of Polonium? Especially with all the political battles over anti-missile systems, etc?

As for the number of reactors, several nations started shuttering theirs after the disaster in Japan. Those that remain open are being scrutinized over safety. Jerry-rigging them to produce Polonium would produce a political nightmare that the nuclear industry is not going to want right now.

Re:Find a big cave

[jd]

Oversized pebbles are not "significant moons". They would not be capable of generating tidal forces large enough to gouge through rock. They're also modern captures, so are completely irrelevant as the oceans on Mars existed only for the first few hundred million years. 4 billion years ago, neither was there and therefore neither did anything.