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Ask Joseph Palaia About Building Lunar Machines and Living On Mars
Joseph Palaia is an entrepreneur, engineer and technologist who is working on creating the first permanent settlement on Mars. In 2009, he served as executive officer and chief engineer for a one-month simulated Mars mission at the Mars Society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island in the Canadian arctic. He has played an integral role in two commercial design studies of the first permanent Mars settlement. He is co-author of technical papers on the topics of Mars nuclear power plant design, Mars settlement architecture, space economics and the economics of energy on Mars. In addition to his work on inhabiting Mars, Joseph is also the Chief Operating Officer & Director of Earthrise Space, Inc. ESI is a research laboratory whose goal is to design, build, and operate spacecraft with the help of students. They are currently working on both a lunar lander and lunar rover for the Google Lunar X Prize. Joseph has agreed to take off his spacesuit and answer any of your questions about building moon machines with students, long-term survival in space, and all things Kuato related. Ask as many questions as you like, but please confine your questions to one per post.
With low air pressure, little in the way of concentrated water/oxygen, no arable soil, cold weather, weak sunlight, and limited natural ores and minerals--can any Martian colony ever be anything other than a constant resource sink for its earth-bound sponsor?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Why not Moon first?
Knowing that much of the early science experiments and resources on either the Moon or Mars will be dedicated to finding ways to survive the harsh conditions of either location, what do you see being the second tier science being performed from either location (other than the obvious search for life on Mars)?
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
Will there be subterranean facilities built, or will the base be all above ground? Seems more logical to use the Moons natural resources to protect the astronauts.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
One of the biggest impediments to long-term settlement of Mars is the fact that it lacks an Earth-like magnetosphere to protect surface dwellers from solar flares/CMEs and other forms of energetic particle radiation. Similarly, the very thin Martian atmosphere provides little of the protection that the Earth has from photon-based radiation (e.g., UV/X-rays, etc.)
How much of a problem is space-based radiation for future Martian settlers, and what would be the best way to deal with it?
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
In comparing 4Frontiers and Mars One, it looks like there are two competing companies working to establish outposts on Mars and both have similar plans for funding - virtual tourism and monitoring of the participants.
The Apollo program was an ambitious program to land humans on the moon. If you consider that it started with Kennedy's speech in 1962 and ended with Apollo 17 in 1972, it only lasted 10 years but the astronauts could all be brought back to Earth to live out their lives.
Even though civil unrest and budget issues led to the demise of the Apollo program, and no humans have visited the moon since, underneath it all was a very quick loss of interest by the public. The world stopped to watch Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon, but by Apollo 17, the US broadcasters had stopped live broadcasts and had resorted to very short updates during the evening news.
Sending humans to mars is for all practical purposes a one-way trip and those humans will need to be supported for the rest of their natural lives. They simply won't be able to create manufacturing facilities essential to be entirely self-sufficient. With the loss of interest in the Apollo program and the presumed inability to bring humans back to earth if either 4Frontiers or Mars One programs/companies cease operations before all of the astronauts have died, what happens to the astronauts or what will be done so that they can live out a full, and to whatever extent possible, enjoyable life on mars?
I have read that by introducing fast spreading/oxegyn producing lichens, that Mars' could be 'terraformed' into having an breatheable atmosphere within 300-400 years. If this is correct and feasible, is this dea going to be incorporated into your plans? Thank you and best of luck with this exciting endeavor!
Would they be consider a state of the founding country? What if the colony is founded by a private, multinational company? What laws would apply and how would they be enforced? I'd move to Mars if it meant I no longer had to pay taxes
Is'nt food more of a challenge on Mars than power.
It strikes me with such a difficult project you should tackle the largest problem first.
Even if you need power to create food if you can’t grow food in the first place it would all be for nought.
How do you enjoy living on Mars so far? What's the culture there like? Do you ever miss Earth? Would you recommend it as a retirement destination?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wouldn't a moon base launch facility be more economical, fuel-wise, for the journey to Mars?
The mars atmosphere is 95% CO2. Plants need oxygen and carbon dioxide but maybe some could make use of that high of a CO2 atmosphere.
On the other hand, the sea level pressure on earth is 14.7 psi. The pressure at the bottom of the deepest trench on mars is 0.087 psi - about 6/10's of a percent of the pressure on earth at sea level (somewhere around an equivalent of 110-120,000 feet in elevation on earth). The SR-71 set an absolute altitude record of 85,069 feet so it's the equivalent of being higher than an SR-71 can fly.
In short, plants as we know them won't grow. Food will only be able to be grown in pressurized greenhouses.
Where will you acquire enough toilet paper for long term life support on mars? or, what's the alternative and why it's not being considered on earth right now?
With low air pressure, little in the way of concentrated water/oxygen, no arable soil, cold weather, weak sunlight, and limited natural ores and minerals--can any Martian colony ever be anything other than a constant resource sink for its earth-bound sponsor?
Actually there is a lot of water, oxygen, minerals, etc "nearby" in asteroids. Once we get to the point where we can build a Mars colony we should be able to harvest the asteroids for what is needed.
Do you have any plans to construct and take along a small (e.g. washing-machine sized) factory that can run on solar power and spits out small amorphous silicon solar cells?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
... You could look to build a colony that can produce basics - water, air, staple food, rocket fuel, energy - locally, but they'll be doing it using equipment shipped from Earth, that will need spares etc from Earth, and they'd still need a whole bunch of enabling material shipped out ...
Initially. However societies tend to eventually want to produce critical necessities themselves. Such equipment will eventually probably be made locally. To avoid such pressures two regions must be part of the same society, such as regions within the same country. Full peers in the social and political sense with their counterparts on earth.
There is probably lots of iron oxide on the Martian surface, and you'll want the oxygen and iron.
:-)
Have you considered what kind of reducing agent you'd bring along to reduce it? Or are you planning to reduce something else electrolytically (e.g. aluminium) and obtain it that way?
Cheap reducing agent would probably also come in handy to remove the perchlorate from the soil so your worms and plants thrive a bit better
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Considering the advances we are making in robotics, what is the justification for having humans in the settlement already in "Phase 1"?
It adds a huge overhead to the project; not only in the obvious forms such as food, water, air, radiation protection, space suits, which are all heavy and extremely costly to ship to Mars. But also in the form of safety standards (equipment failure on Mars will likely mean the death of the person operating it). And it also leads to the problem of biosphere contamination.
I think it is very obvious that the scientific ROI is vastly higher for an installation that is strictly electricity driven. Achieving ore extraction and flexible equipment manufacturing so that the base can both replenish itself and expand seems both more economically rational and technologically feasible. And once that is in place, we can get a nice little settlement ready and pre-built for when the first humans arrive.
Most of the science-fiction movies and anime I've watched show humans living in space as though it were simply an extremophile version of Earth. The space children of the future might wear space suits when they go to school but are otherwise no different from the astronauts of today. To me, this depiction of ordinary carbon-based humans living in space seems to belong to the same quaint category as the flying car and Star Wars.
Instead of thinking up some grandiose terraforming scheme or building gigantic space stations, wouldn't it be more practical simply to let information technology progress first to the point where we can copy our minds to artificial bodies that can survive in space without the need for artificial gravity, thick radiation shielding, or cold sleep?
What about sending up a handful of terraforming, replicating nanobots that will eat up all the bad stuff and poop out good stuff on Mars? This seems like the cheapest option, and there is only one technology barrier: inventing the nanobots.
Considering that Mars is even more uninhabitable of a place to live vs any place on Earth I am wondering which technologies that are being developed for living on Mars may help us live sustainably in rather uninhabitable places here on Earth such as Death Valley or the Atacama Desert?
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Assuming we send people to Mars, we either need to send a way for them to get back (very expensive), or send whatever the colony needs for survival long-term (also very expensive), bearing in mind that people's medical needs tend to increase as they age. A compromise would be to send the colony first and come up with return tickets later.
What do you see as the comparative economics of each approach? Roughly how much more expensive would this make the trip?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
To date, all attempts to create a sealed and self-sustaining biome have failed; Maintaining the air quality over long periods of time is presently an unsolved problem. At present, there's no way for your settlement to completely untether from Earth: You will need regular shipments of supplies, if only to maintain the air quality. Supplies which can only be replenished through industrial processes available here.
How do you plan on addressing this major problem?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Concerning building living areas, I remember reading in an old Popular Science an idea of building low cost 'moon-homes', and even space stations, via a machine that would scoop up lunar soil, compact it into cubes which are somehow sealed. Then, taking advantage of the moon's low gravity, the cubes can be 'catapulted' precisely to anywhere on the moon, or space, to be caught and stored until later use and assembly. Have you and your students given this idea any consideration, or would spraying sealant on pre-existing cave floors/walls be more feasible for living quarters?
I wrote an essay about this in more detail here. To try to sum up: People often talk about colonizing another planet like early settlers colonizing the New World. But that's a bad analogy. Early settlers had dramatically simpler technology trees that they could readily assemble with their bare hands. Human survival on Mars depends entirely on new and replacement parts using modern technology (everything from CO2 scrubbers to space suits), which means to be self-sustaining, you have to implement a large chunk of our modern technology trees on Mars. How would you plan to do this staggeringly massive feat?
To elaborate on what I mean by "technology trees": Let's say you have a metal part designed to handle high temeratures, say, in some forge. High temperature alloys are typically some mix like titanium, nickel, and iron. So now we have three metal requirements; let's trace back the one that's usually easiest. Iron is typically produced from iron oxide, coke, limestone, oxygen, and fluxing agents such as fluorspar and magnesium minerals, as well as insert gases to ensure proper mixing, water for watercooling of parts, etc. That went from one required resource to "a bunch". Not to mention all the new parts you need to maintain and replace when they break: crucibles, slag skimmers, tubing of all sorts, valves of all sorts, cranes with cables and pulleys, bearings, and on and on. Now, iron oxide is readily available to be mined on mars. The others not so much. On Mars it gets a bit easier using the Linz-Donowitz process instead of a blast furnace, so you'd probably burn methane from the Sabatier process with insufficient oxygen from electrolysis with low-sulfur iron ore (sulfur reduced by yet process to generate the sulfuric acid needed for other industrial processes, since getting sulfur from petroleum isn't possible on mars). Limestone isn't as readily available on Mars; you need to use oolitic lime, or maybe dolomite as a substitute. And of course you need to mine and refine your fluxes (each of them having their own refining proceses).
Notice how quickly it expands? It keeps on going because each of those processes have their own inputs with their own processes and even something that sounds extremely simple - say, mining some abundant mineral - would involve a staggering array of mining machines (each with tons of parts to wear down and break, as well as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, etc), bucket loaders, trucks, separation processes (float baths, etc), ball mills, and of course various leaching and rinsing stages, all imparting their own dependency trees. Modern technology is dependent on tech based on tech based on tech; it's the nature of the beast.
If you want to try to at least simplify the "refining" stages, yes, there are other less "industrial" processes that can be used for isolating minerals, like, say, plasma centrifuges. But the rub is that everything has an opportunity cost, and when you're making yourself consume vast amounts of energy, labor, or separation facility resources in order to produce only small amounts of resources, you're imposing brand new requirements on what your colony must produce to yield those newly-imposed demands. Then on top of this, you have the fact that not every resource will be found in one spot. As on earth, Mars would need to ship resources from all around the planet. So you need to have a planetary transportation network that can move things in bulk, with minimal energy usage and usage of other consumables.
Raw elements must become compounds and alloys, in a variety of forging and refining processes (just think of the crazy complexity of an oil refinery and chemical plant for an example). Compounds must become parts, in a variety of casting and milling processes (and with the scale of all of the above, "one-off" rapid prototyping processes like 3d printing don't cut it except for suitable rare parts, or you hit the
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Not as easy as it first sounds. Just to mention two big problems:
1) Plastics vs. martian dust. Picture what will happen probably within a matter of days as the whipping (low density, but high velocity) wind induces static charges on the thin plastic like rubbing a balloon in your hair.
2) Lifespan: Clear plastic films have enough trouble with ionizing radiation limiting their lifespans on Earth. A greenhouse on earth made of untreated polyethylene film is generally good for only one growing season, and polypropylene, two. Various chemical additives can extend the lifespan to as much as 10 years before they start to fog up too much or become too brittle to be practical. The factor that ages them is ionizing radiation, which ruins the bond structure by creating free radicals that catalytically destroy the film. Ionizing radiation on earth is very limited. Not so on Mars. Not to mention what most plants think of ionizing radiation, too...
Not saying they're impossible, but there's some really big challenges to deal with here... it might even just be easier to take the sun out of the picture and grow plants underground using electricity and lightning.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Also, a sexy dwarf-hooker complete with machine gun could add considerable interest to the project, don't you agree?
Wow, so you completely ignored the triple titties for the midget?
There currently are midgets, there are not women with triple titties therefor I would have to say that the triple titty women would garner much more interest than a midget chick with a gun.
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For issue number one, wouldn't grounding work?
For issue number two, initial greenhouses may be made of plastics, but I would think glass may be made on Mars before plastics considering the lack of oil so any subsequent greenhouses would be made of glass.
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Death.
The exact means of death though has not been determined, but most probably death will be the direct result of the crash. Crashing on Mars is not very forgiving. If anyone survives the initial crash they won't survive long enough for a rescue mission.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
It's hard to find words for the kind of abject abuse and ethical poverty involved in raising children in 1/3 G, in an environment that is otherwise much more hostile than Antarctica.
And there's our clue that colonies (as opposed to bases where adults work) are not feasible for the forseeable future: Antarctica doesn't have even a single colony.
At which point, what is Mars for?
Mars is closer to the asteroid belt and would make a more practical outpost for mining and processing operations. 1/3 the gravity of earth aids such operations that need to be ground based rather than orbital. Plus without a biosphere to protect such processing can be "dirtier".
Does grounding a balloon work? Nope. And the dust will cling to practically anything anyway, it's just especially bad for something like a thin plastic film.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
I would like to know your thoughts on muon fusion for mars and trips to mars. muon fusion is a great alternative to nuclear fission if muons are available, and outside of earth atmosphere there are a lot of muons although I admit I don't know if there are enough to provide adequate power. upside is safety, simplicity, need to protect against radiation anyway.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Never really got off the ground so far though...
See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.
Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319
Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg
A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).
This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
Still, I thi
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.