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

[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 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?

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: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

[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.