Slashdot Mirror
Mars One Contracts Paragon To Investigate Life Support Systems
thAMESresearcher writes with news about the progress of Mars One. From the article: "Mars One has taken a bold step toward their goal of establishing a human settlement on Mars in 2023 by contracting with its first aerospace supplier, Paragon Space Development Corporation. ...
The contract will enable the initial conceptual design of the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) and Mars Surface Exploration Spacesuit System. During this study, Paragon will identify major suppliers, concepts, and technologies that exist today and can be used as the baseline architecture for further development. The ECLSS will provide and maintain a safe, reliable environment for the inhabitants, providing them with clean air and water. The Mars suits will enable the settlers to work outside of the habitat and explore the surface of Mars."
That was back when we reached the moon. Does anyone really believe that technology is only catching up to travelling to Mars now? Seriously, who could be that gullible.
This most likely won't result in much more than spending a bunch of money on a design study. Just look at how many times NASA went through billions in studies to come up with zilch eventually. The main difference here, being the private sector, is that sane investors will pull the plug before it reaches mere millions, not billions.
Wake me up when they start building something. Until then, it's PR.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
2023 seems a bit soon for a human settlement. When are they planning on beginning missions dropping habitats, vehicles and other infrastructure on mars to prepare for human arrival? Those missions would take a bit of time.
Floating cities (standard Earth atmosphere is buoyant in CO2) on Venus are a better idea ; there is a zone/atmospheric layer where the N/O2 inside the inflatable city would make it perpetually buoyant, and the temperature and pressure are just like earth normal. One could probably survive exposed with just regular earth scuba gear. Thick CO2 atmosphere protects from radiation, and the CO2 can easily be converted to oxygen and water from the abundant H2S04. Power would come from solar or throwing wires down to collect electricity from the thermal differential of the surface and the cloud layer. even the sulfuric acid 'rain' would be very useful....one probably have to rely on fungus and bacteria for food though, cultured in giant floating industrial complexes. mars has too thin an atmosphere, too cold, too little water, too much radiation. Robots that can hack 480 C temp. would mine the surface for minerals and attach nitrogen balloons to float up ore. I estimate that 20 trillion humans could live comfortably in the atmosphere of Venus.
The extreme lower and higher pressure atmospheric zones of Venus aren't practical, but could be exploited with much effort and technical concern, so I left them out. Possibly, automated industrial centers could occupy those layers. The "Goldilocks" layer has Earth standard atmospheric pressure so damage to the floating dome would not be immediately catastrophic.
Great stuff! Now all they need are some black helicopters.
Does anybody who's optimistic about this remember Biosphere 1 and 2? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2)
Hell, we can't even keep Biosphere 0 healthy...
Of course it's PR. If you check the experience of the team, you'll see that they are mostly trained in PR, not in making rockets. There is one person in the team who knows a bit about space vehicles. The rest is design and social media. They're going to tweet their way to Mars.
Mars One has taken a bold step toward their goal of establishing a human settlement on Mars in 2023 by contracting with its first aerospace supplier
A bold step would be to outsource to a North Korean farmer, contracting a supplier speciallised in aerospace is just a sensible thing to do.
public interest in colonizing Mars to "prove" that "our system/beliefs" are better. is there any way that we can make this a Christians vs. Muslims thing?
The Muslims already have a meteorite, they have no need for any more.
And find all those spacy books from the 1960s and 1970s, it's all in there. They shouldn't forget to pack a 3D printer too, you never know when a Yoda coffee cup will come in handy.
Free Mars!
SpaceX and Falcon9 has proven it does not have to cost nearly as much. Privately and commercially financed projects typically cost much less than government projects. NASA and the rest of the International Space Station partners are using Falcon9 rockets to supply the ISS because it is cheaper. However even if a lot of the cost can't be shaved off I have no problem with with projects like this trying. As long as taxpayer money is not spent let them go for it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What's the point of colonies on Mars and Venus when you can't actually use all that land surface without building structures that practically cover the entire land surface in use (to keep people, livestock, plants etc alive)?
A lot of land is not needed to grow food. The majority of the land used in agriculture now is used to grow food for animals such as cows. Reduce, not eliminate just reduce, the amount of meat people eat and a lot less land would have to be used for food.
It's not like surrounding a large area with fencing/walls and letting the cows/crops just grow. You have to cover all those areas or your crops/livestock will die.
I don't know, and I doubt anyone else does either, how much crops can be grown on the surface of Mars. However say 10 people make the trip, they can bring enough food with them for 13 months. With the trip lasting 7 months, if a resupply ship with 6 months of supplies were sent 3 months after they left they would have 4 months supply still left when the resupply arrived. After they did arrive they could plant different crops to see how they grew. Keeping a margin of 4 months of supplies, colonizers should get an idea if they can grow enough food of their own after a year. During that tyme though they can also be mining for more raw building materials. Underground caverns left from mining can be converted to more gardening along with living space. These can be ready made for newly arriving colonizers who arrive with every resupply ship in not every other one.
For that same cost you might as well have colonies in space, and mine asteroids. Then you don't have the inconvenience and expense of being stuck in an inhospitable gravity well.
No, then you have the ill effects of weightlessness and radiation. It's not nearly as much as earth's but Mars does have some gravity. And those caverns left from mining provide shelter from radiation.
I suspect very bad weather damaging your buildings in Mars/Venus is more likely than your space colony being damaged by very bad solar weather or asteroid strikes.
There's little to no weather underground. Bad solar weather is actually going to be worse in space and on asteroids than on Mars. I'm not sure but I heard and believe asteroid collisions are actually worse on asteroids than they are on Mars too.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, 96.5% by volume. Most of the remaining 3.5% is nitrogen. Early evidence pointed to the sulfuric acid content in the atmosphere, but we now know that that is a rather minor constituent of the atmosphere.
Venus is tidally locked, if you cool the atmosphere and remove the green house effect then within a week the entire atmosphere will freeze out!
downdrafts? THRUST ENGINES! and _of course_ a floating city has rigid structure!
The atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, 96.5% by volume. Most of the remaining 3.5% is nitrogen. Early evidence pointed to the sulfuric acid content in the atmosphere, but we now know that that is a rather minor constituent of the atmosphere.
also, claiming that the same terrestrial atomspheric effects on airships apply in the vastly thicker Venusian atmosphere is fairly spurious.
also thermoelectic energy is the way to go on Venus, and it is in effect solar.
"The weather on Venus is extreme. The entire atmosphere of the planet circulates around quickly, with winds blowing as fast as 360 kilometers/hour. Cloud systems can travel around the planet completely in about 4 days. Spacecraft equipped with ultraviolet imaging instruments are able to observe the cloud motion around Venus, and see how it moves at different layers of the atmosphere. The winds blow in a retrograde direction, and are the fastest near the poles. As you approach the equator, the wind speeds die down to almost nothing."
In December 1984, during the apparition of Halley's Comet, the Soviet Union launched the two Vega probes to Venus. Vega 1 and Vega 2 encountered Venus in June 1985, each deploying a lander and an instrumented helium balloon. The balloon-borne aerostat probes floated at about 53 km altitude for 46 and 60 hours respectively, traveling about 1/3 of the way around the planet and allowing scientists to study the dynamics of the most active part of Venus's atmosphere. These measured wind speed, temperature, pressure and cloud density. More turbulence and convection activity than expected was discovered, including occasional plunges of 1 to 3 km in downdrafts.
1 to 3 kilometers, gentle tossing, nothing at all....
Only *mostly* tidally locked, a drastic difference. The local day is 224.7 Earth-days long, nothing could possibly *stay* frozen out. And the atmosphere will have a hard time freezing out in the first place so long as the surface temperature will melt lead. Moreover the high-altitude sulfuric acid clouds would probably be one of the first parts to freeze out, which would increase solar influx tenfold.
Rigid structure for the city, sure. Rigid structure for the massive balloon holding you up, without increasing the mass beyond the point that you are no longer lighter than air? Now that's a challenge. The atmospheric gradient at 54km is roughly 0.36bar/km. Assuming you have some sort of insanely powerful thrusters so that violent downdrafts can only plunge you a km or two down into the atmosphere that means every square yard of your balloon has to withstand almost 7000 pounds of crushing force.
You're right - the thicker Venusian atmosphere would change the buoyancy considerations somewhat. It means that the pressure gradient is MUCH LARGER than on Earth, so the danger of runaway buoyancy effects on a lighter-than-air structure would be far MORE pronounced than for terrestrial airships.
Thermo-electric = solar? Only insofar as solar is one possible source of heat. Most planets also experience considerable heating from pressure and local nuclear activity. Moreover it requires a large thermal gradient to generate power, which you won't find in a strongly mixing atmosphere. And for a given thermal gradient it's one of the LEAST efficient ways to generate power - it only gets used in situations where the thermal power is free and considerably larger than the electric demand, so that the convenience and reliability of not having moving parts outweighs the inefficiency.
Perhaps you should do your homework before calling others ignorant.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
900 degrees produces one HELL of a thermal gradient, you dunce. You are quite wrong in most of your assertions. you keep writing "lighter than air" it isn't AIR we are even dealing with here! hydrogen over carbon dioxide is HUGELY buoyant, dumbass! and no oxygen outside for it to Hindenberg with.
7,000 pounds of force is peanuts to resist, also. carbon fiber handle that like nothing.
Air = ambient environmental gasses. It's one of those terms with no firm meaning. It usually used to mean nitrogen + a bit of oxygen simply because that's usually the environment being discussed. We still call the gas mixture in a spaceship or deep-sea submarine air, despite the fact that it's often a wildly different mix of gasses than what we normally breathe. If you think I'm wrong try attacking the points I made rather than getting pedantic about words with vaguely defined meaning. I'll happily argue with you if you actually have something to say, otherwise piss off.
No, 900F is a middling-adequate heat *source* (but doesn't really compare to the inside of a car engine). A thermal *gradient* also requires a cold reservoir to transfer the heat into, preferably extremely close by since thermocouples tend to lose efficiency very rapidly with length. Now sure, you could dangle a 50km thermocouple beneath your city and rig massive heat sinks on each end to try to transfer enough heat to make a useful amount of power, but frankly the reactor from a nuclear submarine would produce a HELL of a lot more power a lot more easily, and with a lot less mass than trying to use one of our least-efficient power-generating technologies in an extremely sub-optimal situation. It's only even really viable in places like Iceland because you've got massive geothermal heat sources right next to massive supplies of ice-cold water, with power demands low enough that the convenience of solid-state generation outweighs the terrible efficiency.
Sure, lots of materials can withstand the forces in tension, but that's largely irrelevant here where you're trying to withstand a lateral crumpling. Submerge a balloon in water and it will shrink, it doesn't matter how strong the material it's made of is. To make it keep the same volume you need something like an internal latticework of beams that can withstand phenomenal compressive forces without crumpling (that 7000b is after all for only one square yard, and there are a LOT of square yards on a city-supporting balloon), or make the skin itself rigid and thick enough to avoid crumpling. Either way is easy enough to do, until you try to also make it lighter than air.
And while you're right that CO2 is more buoyant than our own nitrogen atmosphere, it's not actually a huge difference: CO2 molecular weight is 44, versus 28 for N2, so it's about 57% denser at a given pressure (slightly less once you factor in the O2 in Earth's air). That's certainly helpful, but not a major game-changer. It just means that to support a given weight your balloon needs 36% less volume than if it were on Earth, which translates to a 14% smaller diameter.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
you don't have enough math to make any of this work, you are just pulling it out of your ass.
carbon nanotubes can more than handle the compression stress, and NO BIG deal if you add some hydrogen for buoyancy underneath the balloon!
hydrogen is phenomenally lighter than a CO2 atmosphere!
Nope, nanotubes are flexible - ever tried pushing something with a string? Hint, it doesn't work very well. Sure, you won't hurt the string, but you also won't accomplish anything. To prevent something from collapsing under a net external pressure you need a rigid structure.
I'm assuming the balloon is filled with hydrogen, in fact technically my math is assuming it's actually filled with some magical gas since I didn't factor in the reduction of buoyancy due to the mass of the hydrogen. But it's not the balloon that does the lifting, it's the medium it's suspended in. Double the density of the medium, you double the maximum potential lifting force. Adding hydrogen *under* the balloon will actually be counter productive - without a separating membrane the hydrogen will simply mix with the ambient air and provide no lift. Even worse it will lower the local air density and with it the buoyant force.
And since you missed it 'll go ahead and point out the actual easy solution - overpressure. The balloon will only collapse if the pressure inside is less than that outside, so pressurize the balloon so that that never happens, or at least not until you're too deep in the atmosphere to care anymore - matching the 90bar surface pressure would make the hydrogen considerably denser than CO2 at one bar. H2 molecular mass of 2 * 90 = 180, or over 4 times denser than the ambient CO2. That's actually what they did with the Russian aerobots. You do lose a little lift, but as you point out CO2 provides more lift to begin with and hydrogen is pretty low density - you could increase the hydrogen pressure nine-fold and and still get the same lift as your balloon would provide in a nitrogen atmosphere. Of course it's hard to contain hydrogen against a significant pressure gradient for any length of time, but perhaps they could refine replacement hydrogen from the atmospheric acids.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
duh! you weave the carbon fiber into tension bearing CABLES!
Like Earth's atmosphere, Venus' upper atmosphere has a fast prograde rotation. In fact, Venus' upper atmosphere rotates almost as fast as does the Earth's -- in spite of the fact that Venus proper has a slow retrograde rotation. The slow retrograde planetary rotation and the fast prograde atmospheric rotation is consistent with the hypothesis that Venus as a whole is tidally locked. However, planetary scientists don't yet know enough about Venus as a whole to say whether Venus is tidally locked in the sense that it's total angular momentum is more or less constant.
900 degrees sure as hell boils water, that like ya know RUNS ELECTRICAL GENERATORS!
Tension doesn't help, there's nothing outside the balloon to tie it to. You need compression-bearing beams.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sure, but how do you get the heat from the surface up to your floating city where the air is at Earthlike temperatures? You can't even scatter generators around the surface and beam power up to the city because there's no cold reservoir on the surface to complete the Carnot cycle. Moreover generators != thermoelectric.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
tell that to giant bridge span construction experts
your reasoning does not apply to geodesic structures and they way they carry stress
there are doped carbon nanotube materials with no moving parts which transform heat into electric current at high efficiency!
to say there is no way to harvest the heat of Venus for energy is dim witted trollery, at best!
No argument that tension-based construction has some wonderful advantages (have you seen the tensegrity-based towers? Pretty wild.) , but tension always requires a corresponding compressive element in order to exist at all (or something like the steady-state acceleration of rotation, but that isn't relevant to the discussion at hand). For a bridge the Earth itself provides that compressive component - you're not going to pull the sides of the canyon or whatever together, the earth below simply experiences a tiny increase in compression to hold the canyon walls apart. A free-floating structure doesn't have that option. Try this: inflate a balloon, and then figure out a way to use high-strength fishing line make it keep it's size when you later untie it, *without* anchoring to anything outside the balloon. Pull that off and you'd be deserving of a Nobel prize in engineering.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Whoa, cool, hadn't heard of those before.
It probably doesn't really change anything though - thermoelectric generation depends on thermal gradient - which on Venus would be roughly 800*F/50km, or 0.016*F/m. You'd need some very nearly superconducting material (electric and/or thermal) to concentrate that into something useful.
Certainly it's *possible* to extract energy from the heat of Venus. Just as it's possible to extract energy from the minute mechanical vibrations of the Earth itself. The question is simply whether it's worth attempting or not. In this case nothing you've suggested leads me to believe the yields would be even remotely worth it. Not when you could simply buy a small, relatively cheap and reliable "off the shelf" nuclear submarine reactor instead.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.