MIT Study Finds Fault With Mars One Colony Concept

MarkWhittington writes The Mars One project created a great deal of fanfare when it was first announced in 2012. The project, based in Holland, aspires to build a colony on Mars with the first uncrewed flight taking place in 2018 and the first colonists setting forth around 2024. The idea is that the colonists would go to Mars to stay, slowly building up the colony in four-person increments every 26-month launch window. However, Space Policy Online on Tuesday reported that an independent study conducted by MIT has poured cold water on the Mars colony idea. The MIT team consisting of engineering students had to make a number of assumptions based on public sources since the Mars One concept lacks a great many technical details. The study made the bottom line conclusion that the Mars One project is overly optimistic at best and unworkable at worst. The concept is "unsustainable" given the current state of technology and the aggressive schedule that the Mars One project has presented.

Comments

Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Antarctica is the closest environment to Mars that we have. Maybe we should try to get a self sustainable colony there using the same materials we would send to Mars?

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[alex67500]

Except there's oxygen and water in Antarctica, and those would presumably be some of the biggest challenges.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

And how do you replace the drill bits? How do you keep your drilling machine moving - are you making all of its its consumable / wearable parts? How do you get the materials to patch leaks in your pipes as they arise, fix your broken valves, fix your pumps, and a whole host of other issues? How do you produce the power to melt the ice in a sustainable manner? If its nuclear, how do you refine the fuel? If it's solar cells, how do you make them to replace them when they break? If it's heliostats, how do you make the control electronics and the motors?

And for every one of those things, how do you make the raw materials for them, and the hardware that makes it. And for each of those raw materials, how do you make its raw materials and the hardware that makes it? And for each piece of hardware... you get the picture. Modern human technology is built on IMMENSELY large intermeshed technology trees. Sure, with a huge multi-hundred-billion dollar research project to compress it down you might be able to bring it down to say 1% of its materials / parts, but it's still going to be a massive technology tree.

And of course, you have to find all of the base elements on Mars, in quantities that can justify mining. And of course they're not going to all be next to each other, so better get started on your highly efficient planet-wide transportation system.

And yes, efficiency really, really matters, every step of the way. If your solution to something is to use some Super Universal Plasma Centrifuge Refiner to separate out elements from ore and some Super Universal Molecular Assembler to make whatever chemical you need at a rate of a few grams an hour, and some Super Universal 3d Printer to print out whatever pieces of whatever spare part of whatever type every few days, and a Super Universal Assembler of robot arms that can put anything together, and to feed this whole chain you've got the planetary-wide mining and transportation system and extensive power and consumables needs and part wear, then you're on an irreversible downward slope. And the equation gets way harder once you throw humans into the equation because their needs are just so great. The simple fact is, you not only have to reproduce Earth's tech trees, but you need to do it efficiently.

The scale of the challenge of true indepence from Earth is such that I really have trouble envisioning achieving anything even close in the next several hundred years. Now, spare part imports and the like, while producing your own food, water, oxygen, and maybe a couple types of bulk construction materials cast into a couple commonly needed standardized forms? That may be more acheivable. But you're still going to need heavy rockets shooting up parts and hard-to-produce raw materials to you at regular intervals, or your "colony" will enter an irreversible downward slope, and "human willpower" from the doomed colonists isn't going to conjure up, say, a couple tons of neodymium or a self-sustaining CPU manufacturing facility.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[CrimsonAvenger]

We should require anyone who wants to move to mars to spend 5 years in antartica. Antartica is a cake walk compared to mars.

Even better idea: if someone wants to go to Mars, we let them.

Hell, it's not like it's any skin off your nose if someone goes to Mars, unless they're expecting you to pay for it.

"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[Martin Spamer]

This is how good science is supposed to work, peer review to find faults and ongoing refinement until certainty is attained.

If this was not a challenge it would not be Science.

Something More Modest

[Egg Sniper]

You know, the Moon's right there (*looking around briefly*), somewhere. The same template could be applied to establishing an observatory on either of the poles in one of those nice, permanently shady craters. It would be a lot cheaper, a lot safer and arguably add a great deal more to science. Is the Moon no longer sexy enough to capture people's imagination?

While I will agree the Mars One Concept...

[Anonymous Coward]

probably is too optimistic, I truly call into question the opinion that we couldn't make a colony on Mars work with our current technology. Especially if we went nuclear for the initial energy supply it should be possible to put together a ship, or series of ships to land all the necessary supplies to produce a subterrainian habitat suitable for a small human colony, as well as enough supplies and technology to allow them to manufacture the rest once they are there (minus perhaps circuitry and other 'advanced tech' that requires processes that would waste/contaminate large quantities of water and other limited resources.) The biggest issue with such a colony is the simple fact that any failure would require at minimum months to get support/rescue personnel there. In such a situation, running out of anything necessary for their survival would likely mean death unless a resupply was already en-route.

That said, I hope either a non-profit or another non-corporate/non-nationalist group jumpstarts intrasystem colonization, before it gets hoarded by the large governments/corporations people will be fleeing to space to avoid.

Too much oxygen?

[HangingChad]

“If crops grown on Mars are the only food source, they will ‘produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat’ resulting in the first crew fatality after about 68 days due to ‘suffocation from too low an oxygen partial pressure within the environment,’ the consequence of a complex series of events stemming from overproduction of oxygen by the plants.

It seems like an over-production of oxygen on a planet with an abundance of atmospheric CO2 would be a solvable problem. Hasn't this been faced by every grow experiment ever performed in space?

One of the criticisms of the astronauts in the mood landing program was that we quit just as we were getting good at it. Right now we're not even working at developing long-duration space missions. We're not going to solve the problems until we start putting experiments and people up there to start working the bugs out.

Something More Modest

[Anonymous Coward]

While its much easier to get to the moon, it doesn't provide nearly the resources or environment that Mars would. The moon has wild (and long) temperature swings, a very long day/night cycle, no atmosphere & limited resources. Mars has some atmosphere, a more stable (if cold) temperature & a eartlylike day/night cycle. For example a greenhouse, on the moon it would require a LOT of support equipment, lighting for the long lunar night, significant power generation/storage, an large heating/cooling system, atmosphere, soil, etc. Whereas on Mars you effectively need a (robust) inflatable greenhouse, a space heater with an associated power source, some organics to mix with local soil and some seeds.

Re:Not just MIT

[JeffAtl]

To be fair, Musk most likely realizes that societies tend to need a "big idea" to focus on long term investments.

Re:Not just MIT

[Ksevio]

Well he did deliver easy online payment, electric cars, and a space program, so that's a pretty good track record