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."

Comments

It's a design study

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Venus is half the distance versus Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Venus is half the distance versus Mars

[MrMickS]

And what, prithee, do you intend to do about the wind?

Don't pack beans as part of the supplies.

Re:Venus is half the distance versus Mars

[Immerman]

Yeah, I think the technology for that's a bit off yet, we haven't even managed to even keep a probe alive on Venus for more than a couple hours despite 50 years of trying - not even the atmospheric ones. Between the high temperatures, the corrosive gasses, the high winds, and violent lightning storms it's not a friendly place. Definitely not someplace you'd want to experience with only Scuba gear. Not to mention those surface-mining robots will have to survive not only the lead-melting surface temperatures and corrosive weather, but also the 92-atmosphere air pressure - equivalent to being about 1km underwater on Earth.

There's also a major problem with buoyancy - unless your city skin is rigid then any downdraft will cause the pressure to rapidly increase, and the volume to decrease, reducing buoyancy and speeding the descent. Similarly an updraft will cause pressure to drop rapidly and risk bursting the city skin. Airships have to deal with these problems on Earth, but with a much more gentle pressure gradient and non-corrosive environment.

Solar energy probably wouldn't be viable since above the CO2 clouds lie another layer clouds consisting of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid which reflect ~90% of incoming sunlight back into space. As for 1 trillion people living in these cities, what would be the point? Far easier and safer to create vast underground arcologies on Earth.

Mars by comparison is actually quite pleasant. A bit cold, but heat is easy to generate and the atmosphere is near vacuum which makes it an excellent insulator, so you only lose significant heat to the ground. Water is plentiful at the poles and possibly elsewhere underground, and unlimited near-pure CO2 is delivered fresh to your doorstep year round at roughly Earth-normal partial pressure, you just have to compress it and feed it into your greenhouses, no toxic gasses to be removed first. Admittedly going for an unprotected walk outdoors could be painful, but a glorified wetsuit could apply sufficient skin pressure to prevent injury, and a breathing mask would protect your face. Most people on Earth can fairly easily adapt to high altitude air pressures around 1/2 ATM - operate the base on a pure oxygen atmosphere at the same partial pressure and you're only dealing with 1/10 ATM, or about 1.5psi, easy to contain, or add nitrogen to reach a more pleasant pressure - the martian atmosphere is about 2% N2 so it will be easy to replenish. Living quarters can be radiation shielded by the simple expedient of burying them in a few meters of sand - another plentiful and versatile Martian resource. Bring along some sort of binding agent for it and you wouldn't even need much in the way of habitat - just encase some some big inflatable domes in "concrete" and install airlocks.

All in all Mars could readily be colonized using a mostly low-tech approach, ideal for establishing a colony that could rapidly become mostly self-sufficient. If the Soviets had ever made it there their rough-and-ready space program would have been right at home establishing a colony. Venus on the other hand - lets terraform that sucker, it's the only way it'll be anything but a hellhole to us. First we need to unleash some sort of atmospheric organism that will bind all that excess carbon into a stable form... Then we can examine step two in a century or two after the planet has cooled off a little.

Re:2023 seems a bit unrealistic

[toygeek]

Its pretty well established that you don't need people in the mix to explore Mars. Certainly not to choose a good landing spot for habitats. And if I'm going to risk life and limb to step foot on Mars (or to get into LEO for that matter) there had better be a place to sleep, a place to poo, and plenty of food to eat when I get there. Right now we know enough about Mars to pick a good landing spot. We've done it several times for rovers etc. To get humans on there is not only a fantastic challenge, but at this point its not necessary. It will always be cheaper to build a civilization of robots to inhabit- at least they can be solar or nuclear powered. Humans are incredibly difficult to keep alive.

Re:It's been 60 years

[Immerman]

Sure, getting there doesn't have to require anything fancy. Surviving the trip will be considerably more difficult. Actually establishing a Mars base - nothing quite so audacious has been attempted in all of Human history.

Mars offers some serious hurdles compared to the moon.
- It's further away with a considerably greater orbital specific energy, so considerably larger rockets are necessary especially since:
- There's going to be a much longer trip outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, so much heavier shielding and/or much greater speed will be necessary, and we don't really have much experience with actually providing such
- Longer trip times (most plans I've seen call for at least 1-6 months, one-way) means we need much better life support systems. A lot of that has been developed for the ISS, but operating without hope of resupply makes things dicier.
- Extended stay on Mars: this is a serious endeavor. Maybe we can just drop an ISS-equivalent system and have it function well enough for a while, but more likely we'll need a more self-sufficient ecosystem, and there's still very limited research as to how to actually pull that one off.
- Return trip: Not only is Mars much further away than the moon, it has a far more substantial gravity well: so we'll need a bunch more fuel, almost as much as for the trip out. The obvious solutions are to either make it there (a potentially major undertaking on a hostile planet), or send it ahead, probably via the interplanetary transport network (in which case we need to worry about what years of radiation exposure is doing to it) Also:
- Takeoff could be a problem. While SpaceX and others are working on it no-one has (so far as I know) ever successfully built and tested a reusable launch vehicle, which means we need to design something new that can land and take off again, even if only under 1/3 G.

None of those are inconsiderable problems, and we don't have a Cold War dick-waving competition going on to anymore to goose things along. Part of me wishes the war could have lasted another decade or so to actually get us established in space - then again considering how close we came to WW3 on multiple occasions it's probably just as well it ended when it did.

Re:2023 seems a bit unrealistic

[Immerman]

Actually, you'd probably want to send most stuff by Interplanetary Transport Network ahead of time, or at least via a more efficient (and slower) orbital transfer. The humans with their need to eat, breathe, and avoid prolonged high-intensity radiation exposure could then make the trip much more quickly and have their supplies waiting for them. (possibly leaving years apart, but arriving at the same time) Or assuming a site was selected ahead of time everything could be dropped from orbit to the desired site before anyone leaves Earth, just in case there are any major landing disasters involving critical equipment.

Re:It's been 60 years

[MrMickS]

- Return trip: Not only is Mars much further away than the moon, it has a far more substantial gravity well: so we'll need a bunch more fuel, almost as much as for the trip out. The obvious solutions are to either make it there (a potentially major undertaking on a hostile planet), or send it ahead, probably via the interplanetary transport network (in which case we need to worry about what years of radiation exposure is doing to it) Also:
- Takeoff could be a problem. While SpaceX and others are working on it no-one has (so far as I know) ever successfully built and tested a reusable launch vehicle, which means we need to design something new that can land and take off again, even if only under 1/3 G.

Visit the Mars One website, there is no return trip planned. They go to great length to explain the reasons for this, most of which make some sort of sense. The main reasons are the fact that there is no available technology to do it, so that would delay the mission and increase the cost, and the weight considerations of sending a vehicle capable of making the return trip with all of the necessary fuel etc.

A further consideration, and not an insignificant one, is the impact on the bodies of the crew/colonists of an extended time away from Earth's gravity well. In order for the base to be established and real work to be done the time on Mars would have to be more than a few weeks.

This is quite a brave adventure and an attempt at colonisation rather than a flag planting exercise.

Re:It's been 60 years

[BradleyUffner]

Why would having a colony in Mars actually be better than having a colony in space instead?

A colony on Mars would have access to planetary resources, such as ice, to provide water, oxygen, and hydrogen. The settlement could also theoretically be excavated below the surface and covered with "soil" to provide better radiation shielding. The presence of an atmosphere, even if it's a lot less than Earth's, gives at least a little bit of safety and time to respond to life support emergencies than a space station would. It would act as the first stage for longer term, higher population, colonization than could be supported on a space station.

Re:It's been 60 years

[Immerman]

Don't forget CO2 in those planetary resources - Mars has roughly the same partial pressure of CO2 as Earth, it's just that that's all there is (also conveniently some trace nitrogen) Just pump it into your greenhouses and the plants will do the rest.

Also sand - add a binding agent and you've got "concrete", if you can find resources to make the binding agent locally so much the better, but even without that all you need to build a basic habitat is an airlock, a big inflatable dome (doesn't even have to be that durable), and enough binding agent to coat it inside and out with a nice thick layer of "concrete".

Re:It's been 60 years

[Immerman]

They both have their advantages. A space station can never hope to be self-sufficient though, well not without mining asteroids. In fact an asteroid base dug into a large asteroid make even more sense - lots of raw materials, and all that relatively useless rock still makes great radiation and meteorite shielding. Otherwise you need to make it yourself, and we're talking something like a yard or two of lead (or equivalent mass of other stuff - on Earth we've got ~60 miles of air) to shield against cosmic rays. It doesn't take nearly that much to stop the rays themselves, but the resultant cascade of high-energy ionized particles is even more dangerous, which is why they don't even attempt to shield against them on the ISS - better to be occasionally struck by a cosmic ray than continuously bathed in ionizing radiation.

As for artificial "gravity" - that means spinning, which causes a lot of headaches both literal and figurative. Not least of which is you probably can't spin an asteroid nearly fast enough without ripping it apart, at least not without adding extensive, expensive, and time consuming reinforcements, which means either abandon the asteroid and it's shielding properties, or hollow it out and mount your "spinning wheel" station inside it.

The advantage of Mars is that it has real gravity and lots and lots of convenient raw materials: sand ("concrete" with a binding agent), water, and carbon dioxide being the big ones that spring to mind. It also has the potential to grow into a true colony, even nation(s) on down the line whereas a space station is unlikely to ever grow past city size. Not immediately important perhaps, but a valuable consideration for the long-term survival of our species. I think part of the idea is to try to get a handle on the whole offworld colony thing in the most hospitable location we can find - we can then take what we learn and apply it to colonizing significantly more hostile locations like asteroids or the moon (lots of great potential for a moon colony, *after* we have a vibrant space program).

Re:It's been 60 years

[Immerman]

Not just attached to, the space station has to be *inside* the asteroid if you want to use its mass for radiation and meteorite shielding, otherwise you'll need several meters of manufactured shielding. And if you're in an asteroid field then everything from pebbles to mountains are bouncing off each other around you, even if infrequently. A little extra shielding is a Good Thing. More is Even Better.

It's true that a wheel shape isn't necessary, but it's a convenient shape to maximize the "ground" area at a given "gravity" and with a given amount of material, which I'm assuming is probably a consideration for a city-sized station. A "spinning bucket" is perhaps convenient for a long-haul spaceship, but not really ideal for a city, especially when you consider that you're almost certainly going to want convenient high-volume access to the "axle" for docking, or more likely some sort of personnel transfer mechanism to get to the non-rotating part of the station that's actually carved directly into the asteroid. Trying to get on and off a spinning bucket would be a nightmare...

As for why Mars has more growth potential - size and resources. The combined mass of the entire asteroid belt is estimated at only about 4% the mass of the moon, just the very surface of Mars offers more than that, and on Mars unlike anywhere else in the solar system except Earth you get free air delivered directly to you wherever you are, even if you do have to feed it to some plants first. And you're right that it would basically be space-stations on land, but with the important distinction that you could still go outside for a walk with a breather, and you can set up new cities/outposts in a much more organic fashion, just put up a new marscrete dome and call it good, unlike the necessity for a spinning habitat.

That's not to say that city-stations couldn't band together to form large loose-knit associations, but the thing about asteroids is they're a bit chaotic - no two follow quite the the same orbit, so unless you line everything up like a string of pearls in the exact same orbit you're going to have to be continuously fine-tuning their orbit to maintain any sort of alignment. Not a fixed alignment is necessary, I just suspect it'll be very difficult for anything like a cohesive "nation" to form when cities that are neighbors today may be millions of miles apart in a few years.

Re:It's been 60 years

[falconwolf]

The mining module stuck to the asteroid does not have to spin. The space station 1g part does not have to be a wheel shape nor does it have to be attached to the asteroid. It can be a "bucket" + tethers + docking hub + counter weights (supplies etc).

Without spin I don't know how there will be weightiness and it's been shown that weightlessness has ill health effects.

Why would Mars have greater potential to grow into a true (and thriving) colony or nation, than a collection of space stations? On Mars the atmosphere will remain 1/100th that of Earth, the "gravity" will remain 38% that of Earth. That isn't going to change for a long time. So all your living areas are still going to be like space stations. So where's that greater potential going to come from?

Living chambers can be dug into the ground, the deeper it's dug the more radiation shielding there is. The video linked to shows shelter being setup on the surface, with a roving robot assembling it with delivered supplies, before the first humans arrive. Those first humans can then tunnel and mine into Mars to get the raw materials to build underground shelter. which they would be carving out of Mars.

Then there's transportation. Are your mines and living areas all going to conveniently be in the same spot? If they aren't how are you going to transport stuff/people from one place to another? Flying is difficult in 1/100th air. Building roads in Mars isn't going to be that cheap. Shoot stuff from a gun?

Mine first then convert empty chambers into living quarters. For transport, use the same sort of, if not the same, rovers to explore Mars before the first humans arrive. Of course the first settlers won't be getting very far very fast but as the settlements expand they can be tied together via railroad trains, on or under the ground. It can't be much more difficult to build tracks on Mars as it's been on earth. We might even be able to use robot rovers for that. If they can build shelter I'd think they can build railroad tracks too.

Falcon