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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.
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Granted, this study is supposedly more than a one man's rant, but I'm afraid that the room for assumptions is too big to guarantee an unbiased conclusion.
It is now Mars One team's move to provide a good rebuttal. So far, Bas Lansdorp's response is inadequate:
...while he welcomed the students' analysis, his company does not have time to respond to all the questions it receives from students and "the lack of time for support from us combined with their limited experience results in incorrect conclusions."
With all that BS at the bottom, it casts doubt in my mind on the actual article.
Their issue was the pure oxygen at sea level pressure.
pure oxygen at 1/5 pressure is still a high density compared to sea level pressure of 15 lbs / sqIn.
Something closer to 1 lb / sqIn would be the right density to prevent any flash up and provide our normal Oxy saturation provided you have a way to balance or remove CO2 from the container.
Do read "How to colonize the Galaxy in 8 easy Steps."
It's still relevant today even with the changes in technology in the last 20 years.
The big problem is all the rocket jocks think that getting to Mars is hard part and they have the idea that since biology and ecology are "soft" sciences that those are just details that will work themselves out. Until someone starts a long term self-sufficient colony on someplace like Antarctica, its really hard to take an Mars colonization plan seriously.
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. (...) doomed colonists isn't going to conjure up, say, a couple tons of neodymium or a self-sustaining CPU manufacturing facility.
Just remember that a lot of that is due to economic efficiency, not because the resources aren't available locally or because there weren't other material choices or simpler technology that would have gotten the job done. You don't need to ship 14nm CPU process technology, if you could replicate the 3200nm, ~20k transistor technology of 1978 you'd have an 8086 chip that is still a decade more advanced technology than what got us to the moon. Instead of neodymium you could probably use a gas laser or iron magnet for most applications, using only common elements. When we look at how we could build a Mars outpost using our most advanced technology and materials it's from our perspective here on Earth where the sourcing and manufacturing is cheap and easily available while the delivery is extremely expensive. If you flip that around to say what's the lowest tech, most easily sourced and versatile alternative they could do locally it might turn out that the must-have part of our tech tree isn't that big after all.
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