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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?
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!
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?
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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.
Could you expand on this question:
Like all colonies on Earth from the Imperialism era where there was the land grab in Africa to the American colonies: Once colonies become self sufficient their cultural base wants increased taxes because the colony operates like corp, but the people living there treat it as home and want independence from a culture that is not in touch with their day to day lives. How do you suppose to guarantee funding for Mars exploration while protecting the future of the endeavor from the issues of taxation and right of governance when the colony does become self sufficient?
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?
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?
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
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
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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.
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