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

Not just MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with at least two connected neurons... which excludes Space Nutters. They've already packed their suitcases and are sweating and yelling about the "species" (who is that? Other middle aged white sci-fi nerds?) and the Death Asteroid.

Re:Not just MIT

[gcnaddict]

He's delivered more than you. :)

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

Re:Not just MIT

[flyingsquid]

Anyone with at least two connected neurons... which excludes Space Nutters. They've already packed their suitcases and are sweating and yelling about the "species" (who is that? Other middle aged white sci-fi nerds?) and the Death Asteroid.

Just because they may live below in their mothers' basements does not mean they cannot gaze up at the stars. These people have a vision for the future of humanity. If our species is to survive, then surely it rests in the 'Space Nutters'. Our planet is doomed, you see, and only by settling on another planet can we hope to keep our civilization alive.

That is why I am proposing a program to send them- these, humanities best and brightest, humanity's most promising- into space. I propose to simplify the design of a space colony by building both the biospheric containment unit and re-entry vehicles into a single unit, the Biosphere And Reentry Capsule, which will be used as the colony once it touches down on Mars. This vessel, known as B-ARC, will carry the Space Nu- ah, Space Enthusiasts- to Mars. As the best and brightest humanity has to offer, they will go first. Of course, later, a command module, known as the Administration And Reentry Capsule, or A-ARC wlll go, along with a support module, known as Capabilities And Re-Entry Capsule, or C-ARC.

Re:Not just MIT

[plopez]

Is there a link to that? I have real questions on energy expenditure. How much energy will it require? How many tons of food, air, water, equipment, lubricant, tie downs, clamps, etc.?

Re:Not just MIT

[plover]

All right, but apart from the easy online payments, electric cars, space program, sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

S[pace colonisation

[Anonymous Coward]

>concept is "unsustainable"
that holds in general, not just for this project, sure?

Re:S[pace colonisation

[i kan reed]

"Unsustainable" in the case of a Mars colony means "you run out of supplies and die when the earth based supplier stops delivering." Part of that is just that self-sustaining human-supporting ecosystems are a hard problem. Your conjecture that it's an impossible problem is hard to validate. Maybe you're right, but how are we supposed to tell that?

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Rei]

Thetproblemrwithespaceacolonizationdisiyoutcan'

There's much better ways to colonize the written word than spaces. Try page margins, there's lots of room and they don't interfere as much with legibility.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[ray-auch]

Try page margins, there's lots of room and they don't interfere as much with legibility.

Tried that, I had a great proof of this colonization concept, but this margin was too small to contain it...

Re:S[pace colonisation

[torsmo]

self-sustaining human-supporting ecosystems are a hard problem

So, wouldn't it be prudent to set-up such an environment here on earth, run tests with human inhabitants, and then carry over that experience into building a Mars colony?

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Sqreater]

"Unsustainable" in the case of a Mars colony means "you run out of supplies and die when the earth based supplier stops delivering." Part of that is just that self-sustaining human-supporting ecosystems are a hard problem. Your conjecture that it's an impossible problem is hard to validate. Maybe you're right, but how are we supposed to tell that?

It is up to you to prove (your "validate") that self-sustaining colonies anywhere outside the Earth are possible. You prove the positive, not the negative. Otherwise we'd have to prove there are no pink polka dotted elephants hiding on the far side of the moon.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Immerman]

We've done that, multiple times in fact - I believe Biosphere 2 was the first large-scale attempt, and they were mostly successful despite being hamstrung by the limitation of operating as a closed system - a limitation that a Mars colony would not have. After all Mars has massive reserves of water and CO2 readily available, which plants can turn into all the air and biomass you want, and cellulose can be converted to a number of extremely versatile construction materials. Include sand and eventual mining operations for trace elements and you're well positioned to not only survive but grow and prosper.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[torsmo]

I believe Biosphere 2 was the first large-scale attempt, and they were mostly successful

Would you really consider Biosphere 2 to be a success? Yes, the people in there survived for however long it was, and certainly it was a radical new attempt at facilitating sustenance of an intelligent life-form like ours, but there was a failure in advancing the idea further, and while similar, it is quite different from a Mars habitat.

Mars has massive reserves of water and CO2 readily available, which plants can turn into all the air and biomass you want, and cellulose can be converted to a number of extremely versatile construction materials. Include sand and eventual mining operations for trace elements and you're well positioned to not only survive but grow and prosper.

I don't think growing crops there would be easy. Pollination is a big problem, and having to live on an algal diet won't be easy. Plus, there are the usual phytopathological problems: pests, diseases, parasites, etc. Managing contaminants, the inevitability of escaping gases, making do with extremely limited resources (industrial operations require massive quantities of power and water and I'm not convinced of your vision of growth and prosperity) are only a few of the innumerable challenges that lie ahead in even bootstrapping a Mars colony. Despite how tough it's going to be, I think it is an idea worthy of being pursued, but only after having carefully experimented it here on Earth.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[tibit]

Biosphere 2 has, IIRC, fucked up a rather basic string: that concrete interacts with atmosphere and can be a carbon and oxygen sink. So that was fucked up just here, on Earth. A lesser fuckup can doom a Mars colony, but then, the biggest thing they need is really scale and mass delivered. Large systems take longer to fail, and they may have time to fix them up before they run away catastrophically. Biosphere 2 was too small - even the concrete fuckup would be less of an issue if it was a bigger building with more gas and plant volume.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Immerman]

Pollination can be done by hand with a paintbrush, just as is done in places where the bees have died out. Or we could just bring along pollinators as well. Preferably something edible - farming locusts could be a problem if they got out of control.

Disease and parasites can be largely eliminated by thoroughly cleaning the cargo and colonists. Escaping gasses are a non-issue so long as it's only oxygen and CO2 which are both easily replaced. A pure-oxygen atmosphere might increase fire risk, but from what I can tell it's mainly the partial pressure that effects that, not the presence or absence of inert gases.

It won't be easy, but frontier living rarely is, and I've yet to hear anyone raise substantial problems.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[plopez]

Nitrogen might be the deal killer:
http://space.stackexchange.com...

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Immerman]

There's not really much reason to keep it in the air though - airborne nitrogen is useless to virtually all plants and animals, and if you're recycling you biomass as fertilizer you'll only need to introduce enough trace amounts to make up for incidental losses. Meanwhile as a fire suppressant I can't find any evidence that inert gases are significantly more effective than simply reducing pressure to maintain the same partial pressure of oxygen.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Immerman]

Yes they did - and yet they managed to adapt to that unforeseen complication while still maintaining a closed system for the duration of the experiment. And now we won't make that mistake again. Plus on Mars there's no reason to try to maintain a closed system - you've got an essentially unlimited source of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen on your doorstep. Trace minerals may present a challenge, but importing mineral supplements as your ecosystem grows is hardly a deal-breaker. Especially since it's probably safe to assume that local sources can be found once the colony is well established.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[plopez]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Absolutely required for growing large scale crops.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Immerman]

Plants need nitrogen yes, but they can't use *atmospheric* nitrogen, if they could then there'd be no need for nitrogen fertilizers. If you take a look at the nitrogen cycle you'll notice that it's primarily bacteria that move nitrogen into and out of the atmosphere, to everything else nitrogen gas is inert and useless, and fixated nitrogen remains in solid or liquid form. Now it's a legitimate question as to how well the plants could do without those particular microbes in the soil, the symbiosis may extend to other levels, but as far as nitrogen gas is concerned plants and animals neither create nor consume it.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[angel'o'sphere]

Crops as in grain are pollinated by wind, not by beans, if you meant that.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[angel'o'sphere]

Ok, last post now to you, for today at least.

Do you actually know what 'partial pressure' means!?

Partial pressure means how good the human lung is to 'breath'. It is basically only relevant for oxygen, and partly for exhausting CO2. In other words if the atmospheric pressure varies, for the lung it is more relevant how the actual mixture is, so even if the atmospheric pressure goes down, by adapting the mixture you can have a high enough 'partial pressure' to enable the lung to take in O2 and breath out CO2.

In other words: in a pure oxygen atmosphere everything will burn. As burning as in hell! There is no 'partial pressure' involved!

Re:S[pace colonisation

[torsmo]

Crops as in grain are pollinated by wind, not by beans, if you meant that.

I'm sure it was bees and not beans that you meant to write, but I wasn't only thinking of bees as a pollinating vector (because you'd want more than just staple crops). As you said, agricultural crops are wind-pollinated, because they don't sprout beautiful flowers to attract insec (except I think with maize, which may be pollinated by bees). Pollination by insects is far, far more precise and efficient than pollination by wind. But in the case of a Mars colony, are you going to generate wind to facilitate pollination (not that it isn't possible, but will you get the desired effect)? I think you'd have to painstakingly do it by hand.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[plopez]

Did you even follow the wikipedia link? google up "Haber process". If you want to support any colony of large size you will need some sort of crops which means nitrogen. There does not seem to be much in the soil or in the air, see the Haber process, so large scale Mars (or moon for that matter) are probably impracticle.

Re:S[pace colonisation

[Immerman]

Yes, nitrogen will need to be imported to grow the ecology, no question. At least until such time as local reserves are found on Mars (nitrogen is one of the four most common elements in the universe - some sort of reserves exist). But so long as the ecology is stable nitrogen is conserved - plants absorb it through their roots, animals eat the plants, and then excrete the nitrogen back into the soil, where the plants can absorb it again. The only way you're going to get substantial losses is if you let the stuff into the air where the inevitable leaks will vent it into the Mars atmosphere.

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?

[aBaldrich]

Argentina populated a very small town for the families of the scientists, with a school, a radio station and little else. It is called Esperanza (hope).

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[wisnoskij]

Mars should have loads of water, you just need to drill a big whole or melt it. Also, worst case scenario you get Oxygen from the water as well. I would think that it might actually be the other parts of our atmosphere that are harder to recreate. You ?cant? just breath pure oxygen. And I hear that we have yet to find a good portable solution to all the radiation you encounter outside of the atmosphere.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[xonen]

You can breath pure oxygen perfectly fine, especially when you lower the atmospheric pressure. On Mars, it would make total sense to breath pure oxygen at 1/5 earth atmospheric pressure. It's also what mountain climbers use to compensate for the pressure drop.

The real issue is fire danger - anything combustible might spontaneously catch fire, so all materials in such environment would have to be fire-resistant. That, or you must wear a helmet all day.

A good example of this is the American vs Russian space technology - the Russians choose for 1 atmosphere pressure and normal (earth) levels of oxygene, while the Americans standardized initially on pure oxygen. Quote: ``The docking module was designed as both an airlock — as the Apollo was pressurized at 5.0 psi using pure oxygen, while the Soyuz used a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere at sea level pressure`` (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... )

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[wisnoskij]

Well I did not mean for a short period of time, I meant sustainable for you entire life (and your life is not cut far short). I sort of doubt anyone has done a longitudinal trial.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[NotDrWho]

Mars has lots of water in the same sense that earth has lots of gold. Getting water on Mars is not just a matter of digging a well or picking up large, pure ice chunks off the surface. It's more akin to industrial mining.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[JoeMerchant]

If you're going to live 24:39/7 in a 100% oxygen atmosphere, you might also want to shave (all the parts) and do everything you can to avoid oily skin. When (not if) the flash fire comes, you really don't want to provide any fuel for it with your body.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Somebody Is Using My]

If the goal were to simulate and test the feasibility of a long-term Martian outpost, that shouldn't be too hard to replicate. Mars has the necessary elements, just not as easily accessible as on Earth.

Create an isolated, pressurized base where the only source of oxygen comes from internal systems, not outside. Place a "factory" by the outpost that pulls in water from the environment at the same rate as it would on Mars (obviously it would discard most of it); crack some of the water to get the necessary oxygen. You are now limited to surviving from canned air, just like Martian explorers.

The bonus is that if there is a catastrophic failure of the systems during the test, everyone doesn't immediately die; they can just open the windows.

Harder to test would be the problems caused by low gravity, lower atmospheric pressure and increased radiation. Well, for the latter I guess we could just open the ozone hole for them again ;-)

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Le Marteau]

They could, y'know, "pretend".

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?

[Motard]

I think that's the point. To see if you can colonize a *less* hostile environment

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

It should also be pointed out that most people respond to such criticisms by saying "But past explorers on Earth did it"! The thing is, humans are adapted to live on Earth. In some locations you don't need any technology whatsoever to live. On most others, usually the minimum is is no more complicated than something along the lines of the ability to make rudimentary clothing and and make some variety of handmade weapon or trap.

Advancing technology increases one's odds of survival, increases an area's carrying capacity, and vastly increases comfort, but ultimately it comes down to, this is the planet you evolved to live on. If you want to live off planet, though, you must use modern technology. You can't just pop on over there and bootstrap it. And if you want to make use of modern technology, well, you have to pay the price to produce it: unimaginably vast mining, refining, production, and transportation chains. Sorry, but that's what modern technology is built upon.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Wycliffe]

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

So it should be easy. We should require anyone who wants to move to mars to spend 5 years in antartica.
Antartica is a cake walk compared to mars. My guess is that a majority of those people wouldn't make it
five years and might reconsider their desire to go to mars.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Wycliffe]

Harder to test would be the problems caused by low gravity, lower atmospheric pressure and increased radiation. Well, for the latter I guess we could just open the ozone hole for them again ;-)

Low atmospheric pressure would be easy enough to test with a (de)pressurized base on earth but then again on mars presumably you could
pressurize the colony to the same pressure as earth.

Increased radiation is also easy enough to test if you really wanted to. There are plenty of sources of radiation from tanning beds to radon to
radioactive waste. We have already done plenty of those experiments (intentionally or unintentionally) on earth and pretty much know the
outcome of those.

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.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Katatsumuri]

Great post. I would only like to emphasize that we don't have to build a 100% self-sustaining colony from the first launch, and that a Mars base is not a closed environment. So, two comforting factors:

1. Importing even only a few small key components (like CPUs or nuclear fuel) can cut a huge part of that tech tree you mentioned, until the local capabilities are improved.

2. We still have a whole huge planet there. It may not have all the same resources we have on Earth, so optimal technological processes may differ, but once you start leveraging local resources at large scale, some inputs may become really cheap and solve parts of your tech tree in other ways than it is currently done on Earth.

Learning how to solve this bootstrapping problem will be one of top benefits we get from this project.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[wired_parrot]

And despite all those advantages in Antarctica, we've only be able to establish seasonal colonies in the continent, and those have been entirely dependent on re-supply from outside for almost all their basic needs. And in Antarctica resupply is a infinitesimal fraction of a cost of what it would be in Mars.

Prove to me that we can establish a permanent, self-sufficient settlement in Antarctica first, and then we can consider Mars.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Two words: Ice cap.

We know that Mars has large chunks of solid water on the surface - depending on your chosen colony site collecting more water could very well mean just stepping outside with an ice axe and chopping a block out of the glacier.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Not really. Antarctica is bitter cold and has horrendous weather. Mars meanwhile is more "termperatureless" due to the near-lack of air, insulate yourself from the ground and you're essentially in a giant vacuum thermos. It also has negligible weather other than occasionally "dusty" thanks to that same lack of atmosphere. A 400mph wind may gradually sand-blast exposed surfaces, but there's substantially less force behind it than a light breeze on Earth. And our rovers have pretty well established that the sand-blasting is not nearly as big a problem as we feared, presumably millions of years of windstorms have pretty much smoothed off all the rough edges on those sand grains.

Meanwhile so long as you build your colony near a glacier you have local sources for all the water and CO2 you could want. Add energy and some trace elements and it's pretty easy to turn that into water, oxygen, and biomass. You can then turn some of the the biomass into micro-/nano-cellulose, which are extremely versatile construction materials. We'd also have essentially unlimited sand available, which is an immensely valuable construction material with a suitable binding agent, and something that wouldn't be available in Antarctica.

Basically we could run a test colony in Antarctica, but it would be even more difficult, and there would be negligible benefits. The technology is mostly well established, and we already have an Antarctic research colony. Presumably the final engineering challenges would be worked out here on Earth anyway, just in the desert outside the spaceport or some other convenient location, going to Antarctica is just wasteful.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Not really - there's plenty of water and CO2 on Mars, and plants are pretty good at converting those into oxygen without the help of any high technology.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Antarctica has a different set of problems, mostly tied to horrendous cold and weather. Mars has virtually no atmosphere, making both of those a non-issue for anything that generates heat locally. Insulate a habitat from the ground and you'll probably need to start dumping the buildup of body heat before long. And those 400mph winds during a Martian windstorm still have less force behind them than a 3mph breeze on Earth: 99.3% lower air pressure also means 99.3% less wind pressure.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Sunlight intensity is about 44% of what is is on Earth, and temperatures average around -55C (-67F). On the other hand at only 0.7% air pressure you're essentially in a giant vacuum thermos, you only need to insulate from the ground.

An equatorial Mars base would likely have a water issue though, while building near ice cap would give you all the water you need. You wouldn't get as much sunlight, but a handful of nuclear reactors would probably be better suited to powering a growing colony anyway.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[NotDrWho]

Nope. Those chunks of ice in the ice caps are actually dry ice (CO2), not water. To get to the water, you have to dig down a ways for it, and it's mixed in with dust and iron oxide.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem being, eventually i want humans to go there or somewhere else. and if the first idiots fumble the ball into "catastrophic failure" territory, that'll really fuck with the funding of people with a legitimate shot. getting burned badly enough might put off trying again for a century.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[itzly]

we already have an Antarctic research colony

Yes, but they get all their supplies brought in. Trying to build a self-sufficient Antarctic research colony would be a lot more fun.

and there would be negligible benefits

Pretty much the same as a colony on Mars.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tibit]

A 70s-level of tech could be achieved with much less, though. A "bright renaissance man" of sorts, living on Earth, with access to the first-hand know-how of right people, could probably bootstrap a couple of rudimentary 10um semiconductor processes - including optics etc., starting with a very limited set of tooling and raw materials. My only worry is really about the materials - are there enough concentrated ores on Mars? From what little I've read it'd seem that Mars's and Earth's geology are totally different and Mars is the last place you would want to mine anything on... Perhaps I'm wrong?

The real bootstrapping force these days is computing power. A couple of modern laptops provide incredible productivity gains over what you had to do in the 70s. So I think that the bootstrap to something like tech from 40 years ago would be possible, but you'd need to have modern computing power handy to do all that. Writing compilers is much easier on a modern LCD than on a home-built green phosphor CRT :)

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Actually the CO2 is only about a meter thick on the north pole, and about 8 meters thick on the south. Plus it's dry ice - hit it with a jet of hot CO2 and you'll melt down to the water ice without breaking a sweat. That's not mining, that's an afternoon with an oversized hair-dryer. As for iron and dust, so what? Dust will settle out once the water is liquid, and there's lots of ways to pull iron out of water, if it's actually at problematic levels. You talk like somebody who's never drunk muddy water straight out of a stream - on Mars we won't even have the diseases and parasites that scare some people out of doing so here on Earth.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tibit]

There's something to this. For reasons we absolutely don't understand, healing even the simplest of injuries takes forever in Antarctica - mind you, even for people who live completely indoors, in climate controlled environment not much different from any modern city dwelling. So, somehow, when humans are in truly alien environment, even if the microclimate is right, they somehow suffer for it. There's no reason to believe that this effect would be necessarily absent on Mars. I'd consider it a nice surprise if it wasn't present there, in fact.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tibit]

In fact, I'd think their problem will be dumping waste heat, as any sort of air cooling would need *enormous* radiators. They might need geothermal cooling, in fact. Especially if they'd use nuclear power with a steam cycle.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

A Mars colony offers both an insurance policy on the survival of our civilization (our species is likely pretty durable, civilization far less so), and a stepping stone to mining the asteroid belt and exploring the outer solar system. It's a long-term investment, but the payoff is very real.

A self-sustaining Antarctic colony on the other hand offers essentially nothing worth the effort. Supplies get shipped in because it's cheaper to do so than to build the infrastructure to make it self supporting. Consider: you'd need big greenhouses and nuclear reactors for stable power through the long winter night. Fossil fuels might do it as well, but that's a *lot* of fuel to fly to the ass-end of the planet, kinda defeats the self-sufficiency goal.

And most challenging of all, how are you going to convince people they should abandon their pleasant life to take up farming in Antarctic bunkers? There's no frontier there worth colonizing, no new horizons, no grand dream to inspire them to commit to a lifetime of hardships - you're just asking them to do a bunch of farming in the least-hospitable place on the planet in order to satisfy your curiosity.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[plopez]

Or ocean colonies. Lots of the same problems. Harsh environment, no breathable air, no drinking water, weak or no sunlight, hull breaches are a disaster, etc. But sending rescue ships are much easier.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[plopez]

How much energy does that require?

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[plopez]

It all comes back to energy. How much energy does it take to first supply and then sustain the colony.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Well, fortunately the ground is right underfoot, and at -55C it should make a pretty effective heat sink. "Geothermal cooling" is a pretty fancy way to say "we're pumping antifreeze through this radiator and a few yards of underground pipe". Though yeah, a nuclear steam cycle would probably need something a bit more robust.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tchuladdiass]

How would the reactors provide power? Remember, Nuke just provides a lot of heat, which is used to boil water to generate steam, which powers dynamos. And they use so much water that they are almost always built near the sea, a lake, or river.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Necron69]

Very good points. If you think about it, humans are absolutely the _last_ 'component' of your colony you want to send up. Every last piece of technology sent along will have to be carefully designed for compatibility, standardization, and have a boatload of spare parts already on the ground before any humans arrive.

It will be a very long time before anyone is mining/smelting or running an electronics fab on Mars. OTOH, think business opportunity! :)

- Necron69

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Not much if you've got a nice self-contained nuclear submarine class reactor at your back, which is almost certainly one of the first things you'd want in a Mars colony - lots of power makes everything easier, and new fuel from Earth is dirt cheap. And if you don't - well it's still just a meter of ice, and you're planning to carve out a lot more water ice than that anyway.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[SecurityTheatre]

enty of water and CO2 on Mars

Citation needed. What is the partial pressure of CO2 on Mars? I'm under the impression it's around 0.05% of Earth. A large gas extraction facility would be required to collect enough CO2 to provide for a modest greenhouse.

I also am under the impression that our best guess is that water is a trace element on Mars. Sure, large scale industrial mining operations could turn up a measurable quantity of water, but I don't think that it's as simple as melting some snow.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[angel'o'sphere]

No it is not.
Very close is something like the Acatama desert in Chile.
Cold is not a real problem, insulation is simple.
Lack of oxygen and the need of air tight housing is a problem.
Actually Mars is in many aspects much better than antarctica. E.g. it has a nearly 24h day/night cycle ... which makes solar energy viable ... in Antarctica you have nearly 6 month night ...
So a self sustained colony in Antarctica is much more difficult, but transport wise a few orders of magnitude cheaper :)

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[angel'o'sphere]

And the americans had a bad accident when a (Mercury?) capsule caught fire an all astronauts inside burned alive.
I'm not sure, but I think that even happened in a simple training on ground.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Well presumably you'd feed the heat from the reactor into a closed-cycle steam generator (Japan has done great work on these in the context of creating the world's most efficient locomotives). You'd then use a geothermal cooling system (i.e. long coils of buried plumbing) to dump the waste heat into the ground. And that's just the final destination - I imagine there's *lots* of ways to use the waste heat directly. Heating and cooking of course, but I imagine melting caves in a glacier under pressure would be an excellent way to drive water into any cracks in the ice and make convenient pressurizable caverns in which all manner of temporary habitats could be constructed. Not to mention refreezing the displaced water into ice structures on the surface.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[fahrbot-bot]

you might also want to shave (all the parts) and do everything you can to avoid oily skin.

So the crew consists of just Brazilian super-models? Interesting. Would probably mesh well with the Mars One funding via reality TV approach. On second thought, I just re-watched "Zoolander" ...

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[angel'o'sphere]

That is nonsense.
Melting/smelting something is extremely energy intense. Only topped by evaporating something.
And especially water (ice) is a bitch in that regard.
Obviously (* facepalm *) you would not use a 100 ton submarine reactor but a one ton mirror concentrating solar beams ...

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[angel'o'sphere]

Erm?
What has the partial pressure to do with that?
And why do you believe you need an 'extractor'?
The Mars' atmosphere is nearly 100% CO2, you simply _pump_ it into the greenhouse. Nothing special to do.
Ofc you have to adjust the pressure in the greenhouse to a level that the plants can breath CO2, according to the 'partial pressure'

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, you write so much nonsense in this thread it is simply annoying.
Where on Mars should the average temperature be -55C?
Certainly not where a human tries to settle first!
At the equator Mars temperatures are usually in the + C range. Still even while the air pressure is so low!
No one ever would settle close to a glacier as you proposed (in other posts), polar night is simply to troublesome, especially for your food plants.

Being a nuclear fan makes you only look completely stupid in regards of colonization.

In how many parts do you actually like to split a nuclear reactor to sent it in space crafts to Mars? And how do you assemble them there? Hu? Or do you want to send all the machinery there to build one from scratch?

I suggest you read "mars societies" project "mars one" to get a clue how simple it actually is to set up a colony there.

The key is solar energy, transforming CO2 and H2O into CH4 and O2 ... and use simple combustion engines ... just one thing.

Habitats likely would be simple inflatable tents.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Mars' atmospheric pressure is about 7.6mbar(0.0075atm), and about 95% CO2. That puts the CO2 partial pressure at about 7.2mbar. Compare that to Earth's atmosphere at 1013mbar and 0.04% CO2, for a partial pressure of 0.35mbar.

Basically Mars has about 20x more CO2 per cubic meter of atmosphere than Earth. Yes, you need a vacuum pump to raise it from 7mbar to 200mbar (the approximate partial pressure of oxygen on Earth, and hence a good candidate for habitat pressure if you're not wasting space with all that useless nitrogen gas) but those are a dime a dozen, and you only need to capture CO2 fast enough to counteract any leaks - the plan is after all to integrate that CO2 into your habitat's carbon cycle, not provide through-flow ventilation.

As for water, I'll quote Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

The caps at both poles consist primarily of water ice. Frozen carbon dioxide accumulates as a comparatively thin layer about one metre thick on the north cap in the northern winter only, while the south cap has a permanent dry ice cover about 8 m thick.[4] The northern polar cap has a diameter of about 1000 km during the northern Mars summer,[5] and contains about 1.6 million cubic km of ice, which if spread evenly on the cap would be 2 km thick.[6]

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Yeah, but you're not doing very much - you only need to clear off a meter of CO2 every winter (it evaporates entirely during the summer) and then you're down to the water ice. Solar power is also an option, but it's considerably less viable on Mars - you're starting out with only 44% of the solar power density, and you can't sustain power generation at night - which will be especially problematic if the colony is near one of the poles to have ready access to water.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

Okay genius - if you're not near a glacier, where are you going to get that H2O? Not a whole lot of readily accessible hydrogen lying around on Mars - you could extract it from some of the rocks, but that's going to take a lot of energy. As for temperature - as you say the air pressure is very low, to the point where temperature is more of a technicality than a concern, the important number is ground temperature, which will be far more stable and FAR more relevant, since it will be sucking heat out of everything on the surface.

A summer day on Mars may get up to 70 degrees F (20 degrees C) near the equator, but at night the temperature can plummet to about minus 100 degrees F (-73C)
--http://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.html

That puts the average temperature (and hence ground temperature) at about -15F (-25C) at the equator. Inflatable tents will keep the air in, but you're going to want some serious insulation underneath them or they'll get icy cold fast. Tents also do absolutely nothing to protect against radiation, and as such they're not really suitable for long term shelter - the surface of Mars receives considerably more radiation that the astronauts aboard the ISS, who are protected by the Earth's magnetic field and several inches of shielding against low-energy radiation. On the other hand if we've got a suitable binding agent we could cover those tents with concrete domes and then bury them in sand, just a few feet should bring radiation exposure down to Earthlike levels. Having concrete on the other side of that bubble-tent will also dramatically improve atmosphere retention, especially if something pointy happen to poke it.

As for combustion engines - you've got a problem there, because producing the fuel and oxygen takes exactly as much energy as you'll get from burning it and converting it back to CO2 and H2O, plus all the losses to inefficiencies in the process. Hydrocarbons may be a convenient energy storage medium, but they are a net energy LOSS when you have to produce them yourself.

As for nuclear reactors - ship the whole thing in one piece - the behemoths that get shipped in lots of pieces are for producing gigawatts of power, we don't need anything like that. NuScale produces a 50MW (160MW heat) 400 ton nuclear reactor 15ft in diameter and 82ft tall, including the steam generators it drives. That's about 7x what the Falcon Heavy will be able to deliver to orbit, but the reactor wasn't designed with mass being such a critical limiting factor, so that number can probably be reduced considerably. Plus there's already far more powerful rockets on the drawing board which should be ready by the time we launch to Mars.

As for solar, the only other viable option for a power source on Mars - well, let's see, IIRC the absolute best laboratory-only solar panels are about 40% efficient, and Mars only gets 44% of the insolation as Earth, so we're talking a best-case scenario of 176W/square meter, or 284,000 square meters of solar panels to generate a comparable 50MW of power. But that's only at noon, lets triple that or so to get the average up to that, call it an even 1 square kilometer of solar panels. How much do you suppose that weighs? Including mounting hardware of course. I found a number claiming 3lb/sqft for a roof installation, using that as an upper limit I get about 15,000tons. Almost 40x the mass of the nuclear reactor, and we haven't even started talking about the batteries we'll need to buffer between production and consumption, which will probably weigh considerably more. We may be able to bring those numbers down substantially, but they'll never be anywhere near the same league as nuclear.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Wycliffe]

It would be interesting to experiment with this. microclimates are interesting. I know in the winter
I tend to like it warmer inside than in the summer. I also know that if it's really cold outside wood
heat seems to warm me better even if the thermostat is the exact same.

One possible theory that might make antartica and mars behave differently is that maybe there is
a minimum amount of cosmic radiation that is needed for proper healing of injuries.
That is one place where mars will have a lot more while antartica has a lot less.
This theory could be tested with an underwater biodome or possible with a tanning bed in antartica.
Mars and antartica are definitely a little bit different but antartica is probably the closest to
mars condition that we have on earth and failure wouldn't necessarily be quite so catastrophic.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[GNious]

That solves the lack-of-CO2 issue in their design.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[JoeMerchant]

Yep - that fits the funding model pretty well, but from a practical standpoint, the astronauts probably need some non-flammable suits. Nothing says the suits can't be see-through, though - for, practical reasons.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tehcyder]

Mars should have loads of water

Probably a good idea to find out before we dispatch the first brave colonists.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tibit]

I only used the word "microclimate" to mean that the air temperature and moisture are maintained at normal levels indoors - to prevent trivializing the problem as "it must be the cold". You get a razor cut anywhere else on Earth, and it's normally no biggie, you don't think about it after an hour or two at most. You get a razor cut on Antarctica, you'll be lucky when it's completely healed a month later. By complete healing I mean a state where the skin has mostly normal properties, same thickness, same resiliency, etc. - basically the things we take for granted.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tehcyder]

It all comes back to energy. How much energy does it take to first supply and then sustain the colony.

Or, to put it another way, money.

We don't have unlimited energy, or money. If we could start up a colony with one rocket's worth of people, a month's food supply and some shovels, fair enough.

It's the cost of continual supply that's troublesome, especially if all we end up with is the knowledge on how to sustain a small colony at vast expense.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tibit]

I must add that this is not about the entire Antarctica, but about the South Pole (Amundsen-Scott Station) and similar inland locations. The coastal areas aren't as problematic, IIRC.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tehcyder]

Not that I'm a fan of going to Mars anyway; it's expensive enough getting out of Earth's gravity well so why waste all that effort just to dive back down into another (especially if you are going to end up living in a tin can anyway)?

Exactly. What is the point of living on a planet when you can't breathe its atmosphere or survive outside without a space suit anyway?

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[tehcyder]

And most challenging of all, how are you going to convince people they should abandon their pleasant life to take up farming in Antarctic bunkers? There's no frontier there worth colonizing, no new horizons, no grand dream to inspire them to commit to a lifetime of hardships - you're just asking them to do a bunch of farming in the least-hospitable place on the planet in order to satisfy your curiosity.

I really do not get the "frontier" thing at all. Going to Mars would condemn you to a life in a roofed prison with a view of dull red rock.

At least in Antarctica you can breathe the air and see some wildlife and spectacular scenery. Plus you can fly home in a day or so if something horrible happens.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Immerman]

That's fine, judging by history the frontier thing typically only appeals to a small percentage of the population strongly enough that they're willing to face the hardships. And that's fine - a frontier can usually only support relatively low population anyway, then after a few generations the frontier is "tamed" and more urbane people start to flow in, and eventually it's not a frontier anymore. Even if you don't understand the appeal yourself you have to acknowledge that some people do, and that that appeal is pretty much the only reason anyone would commit their lives to living in those hardships.

Oh, and my own guess as to the appeal? Some combination of a desire to get away from the stupidity and oppressive rules of existing authorities, the desire to build something new and fresh, the desire to get away from the seething throngs of people that have filled every available niche in your homeland, the desire to live a life wrought by your own two hands instead of just being a cog in the machine, a chance to work to enrich yourself rather than your masters... and many more in that vein - obviously the specific mix will be different for everyone.

But I take exception to the idea that the scenery is any more dramatic in Antarctica - everything is blank white and there's minimal erosion or weathering to make things interesting. Mars is a desert, which doesn't appeal to everyone, but it's well-weathered and full of interesting geological formations. Maybe you'd rather look out across a frozen wasteland, but a dry craggy valley seems more interesting to me.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

Then we get into the efficiency problem. Yes, you *can* cut efficiency - for example, using super-slow, inefficient processors in your example. But every time you cut efficiency on one thing, you increase the demands on everything else. You can afford to lose some degree of efficiency, but what you absolutely can't do is just act like it's a nothing thing.

And it's not like you face this efficiency problem for just one thing - say, processors. You face it for *everything*. Want to cut the list of plastics you have to manufacture? Sure, you can, but that means that you're going to have parts in different environments wear down and break faster, which means more replacement parts. Want to use iron magnets? Fine, but that means that your motors are going to have to be way larger and heavier, which means a lot more manufacturing for all of the other components and a lot more wear on your machines from the added weight. And on and on down the line.

If your response to the tech tree problem is just "simplify even if it costs you efficiency", you're going to eliminate yourself from the game long before you've simplified even a percent of the tech tree.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

Except for the fact that to maintain that crew with sledgehammers, you have to make sledgehammers (yes, they do wear), but more importantly, to maintain your crew you need and vast quantities of food, oxygen, CO2 scrubbing, space suits and repairs, lodging, light, medicine, and about 50 other things, each of which have massive interlocked tech trees of their own.

You've made the problem far worse, not better.

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

Just think of the concept of a petrochemicals industry on Mars where you lack oil as an input - petrochemicals having a tremendous range of differing properties being one of the most fundamental aspects for modern space technology. Your first step has to be to make oil in the first place, which means freezing out CO2 from Mars's incredibly sparse atmosphere. You also have to spend a tremendous amount of energy electrolysing mined water ice (mining being a very resource-and-wear intensive process) to make hydrogen (which tends to embrittle the materials that work with it, and electrolysis itself is hardly a wear-free process - and we won't even get into the power aspect). Then you need to make town gas from a high temperature catalyst bed reaction (which you poison with time and have to regenerate, and repair the reactor itself). Then you have to turn the town gas into oil via fischer-tropsch, again, another high temperature catalyst bed reaction. But the chains from fischer-tropsch aren't going to be suitable for all products, so there's a number of other processes with various consumables. Then you've got your right mix of hydrocarbons, but that's hardly all you need, most petrochemical products aren't just carbon and hydrogen, there's chlorine, fluorine, and all sorts of other things to react with it in many different processes, nasty chemicals with long tails... it's just a tremendously, tremendously difficult task.

This stuff is very hard to do as-is on Earth with massive resources and international trade and billions of people. On Mars? No time soon, that's for sure...

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

Sorry, 70s level tech is a still massive, massive, massive interconnected tech tree reaching across the globe with billions of people involved and billions of tonnes of industrial equipment involving over a hundred elements comprising hundreds of thousands of compounds used to produce tens of millions of types of industrial components.

"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.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars One was the furthest thing from science as possible. It was a religious event.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[Mr D from 63]

Of course, just because it is challenged, doesn't mean it is science.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[wisnoskij]

A plan to colonise Mars is not Science, it is simply a plan.... It does not matter how many blinking lights or "Lasers" it involves, "a plan" never gets promoted to Science, as it is a completely different thing.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[just_another_sean]

How do you know this? I've browsed their site a bit and I don't see any mention of religion anywhere.

I don't doubt you, just would like to understand what you mean if you can provide a link or something...

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[itzly]

The total lack of design details should give you a hint.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[AchilleTalon]

Exactly, it relies entierly on faith for one part and mysticism on the other part.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[wonkey_monkey]

Of course, just because it is challenged, doesn't mean it is science.

Then that means... I'm science!

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[Zalbik]

This is how good science is supposed to work,

Huh? Colonizing Mars is not science. It's engineering.

Now, peer review is also a good idea in engineering, but so are things like detailed design specifications, planning, prototyping, feasibility studies, etc.

These are areas in which Mars One is severely lacking.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[just_another_sean]

Thanks, that explains it and your metaphor is spot on. I did initially read it literally and thought you meant they were Mormons trying to go to space. Was waiting to read their first ship would be called the Mayflower or something :-)

Now that I think about it I think I just came up with an acceptable plot for a SyFy Channel movie of the week!

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[hey!]

Except this is engineering, not science.

Engineering is by inclination more conservative than science. That's because the failure of an engineering project is more catastrophic than the failure of a hypothesis, which after all is a result. But ultimately, after the engineer has done all he could to resolve competing priorities of cost, schedule, safety etc., it's whoever is bankrolling a project that decides to pull the trigger. The Apollo program was incredibly dangerous; more money and time might have mitigated that, but they were on a hard deadline to get to the moon by the end of the decade and were already spending an almost unthinkable fraction of the nation's GDP (0.8%) to do it. So they went ahead anyway. They lost three men on the ground and of the 33 they sent into space came within a whisker of killing five of them: all three on Apollo 13, and the LEM crew on Apollo 11 who almost ran out of fuel looking for a safe landing spot. And while you might point out that the Apollo 11 LEM crew still had 25 seconds of fuel left when they touched down, compare that to the margin of safety we set for aircraft, which can still glide if they lose engines.

While I agree broadly with the conclusion of the MIT critique, what I'm suggesting is that the engineering enterprise might have a degree of freedom they may not have considered, which is a willingness to take high levels of human casualties. The degree to which we value human life is a recent innovation. In the 1830s, trading ships began traveling between New England and California. That meant crossing Cape Horn in the winter, one way or another, and the casualty rates were appalling by modern standards. Sailors were routinely swept off the deck or fell from ice caked rigging to near instant death in freezing waters. But this was viewed as an acceptable price to pay in order to supply the New England shoe factories with cheaper leather.

While I don't think the proposed schedule is at all feasible, just from the time it will take to decide to *do* this thing, we might not necessarily have to wait until all the safety concerns are addressed to contemporary standards for things like ships and aircraft. Of course I wouldn't dream of boarding a ship to Mars unless I was 99% certain of surviving to death by old age, but some people might be happy to do it with 50%, or even less. Of course populating the mission with the wing suit contingent might have other unexpected effects...

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[Immerman]

The difference is that the Americas were *profitable* - all those natural resources ripe for the pillaging from people who didn't even have steel knives, much less gunpowder. Meanwhile Europe had already largely strip-mined itself and had a huge population of downtrodden poor jumping at the opportunity to sell themselves into servitude harvesting those resources in return for the chance to eventually claim a plot of land for themselves.

Mars and the moon meanwhile have, for now, negligible resources of value to Earth, and nobody is interested in making business investments that won't pay off in their lifetime. The technology however is relatively well established -we've been keeping people alive in sealed cans for decades, all that changes on Mars is that you've got gravity to help keep them healthy and all the water and CO2 you could want on your doorstep, so those hydroponics projects can be scaled to the point where they're actually recycling air and feeding people instead of just being a proof of concept.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[tchuladdiass]

That 25 seconds of fuel was landing fuel. If they ran out before landing, they would have pushed the abort button and shot back into orbit with the takeoff fuel allocation. Now I don't know if this was automatic, or if the launch fuel physically separated (to absolutely prevent using it for landing), so that could have been a factor also.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[tehcyder]

He was using "religious" in the sense of "based on faith, rather than science" not specifically Christian/Muslim, or whatever.

Re:"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[tehcyder]

Of course populating the mission with the wing suit contingent might have other unexpected effects...

I've always thought that anyone who would choose to go on a one way trip to live in a Portakabin, eating algae and breathing other people's recycled farts should be locked up for their own safety. But here on Earth, where it wouldn't cost so much.

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?

Re:Something More Modest

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. There's only so much you can squeeze from a dead radioactive dry dusty rock with nothing on it. Just like people thought Venus was this warm, soggy tropical paradise, if a bit cloudy, back in the 1950s. People dreamed about that too.
Then we found out about the 450C sulfuric acid clouds, the molten tin lakes and the almost solid atmosphere...
Strange how no one ever claims our technology will get better and living on Venus would be possible because solar panels would work better closer to the Sun...

Re:Something More Modest

[AC-x]

Then we found out about the 450C sulfuric acid clouds, the molten tin lakes and the almost solid atmosphere...

It's pretty nice at 50km up though...

Re:Something More Modest

[Slizzo]

Problem with your idea is that you would be adding mass to the moon (sending comets into the moon) and if you do that enough you've increased it's mass. That causes issues with things down here on Earth. And we're already causing enough problems for ourselves environmentally.

Re:Something More Modest

[quantaman]

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?

Exactly. I see two major advantages to a Moon base.

1) You have the ability to re-supply them on a reasonable schedule when you inevitably discover they need critical item X or they're all going to die.

2) People can come back so it doesn't have to be a one way trip.

If you want to go to Mars a Moon base should be a pre-requisite as a proof of concept to make sure your system actually works. Sure the environment is slightly more challenging but it doesn't compare to the challenge caused by the distance and gravity well of Mars. The fact they're not talking about going to the Moon tells me they're not really serious about going to Mars either.

Re:Something More Modest

[Egg Sniper]

In terms of contributions to science I was thinking more of the near future. Certainly if both worlds were the same distance away, and the same size, Mars would be the clear choice. Mars is, indeed, a much better candidate for terraforming, although the effort needed to do so makes initial human habitation seem trivial. Also see quantaman's post below.

Re:Something More Modest

[sconeu]

Yeah, but the moon is going to explode in 2049, as a giant space chicken (or something) hatches from it.

Re:Something More Modest

[Immerman]

Well, I'm fully convinced that Mars is a much better colonization candidate than the moon, but I think you may overstate things a bit. Yes, you've got plenty of water and CO2 that can be converted to air and plants, but if you want to go the inflatable greenhouse route we may need some really impressive plants: even if the dome filters out the UV they'll still be exposed to a steady diet of high-energy EM and particle radiation, and there's no way to shield against that while still allowing sunlight in. Hear on Earth we've got 60 miles of atmosphere doing the job - a similar mass of sand (14 pounds per square inch, or about 1 yard thick) will do the job nicely, but you're not getting any sunlight inside, so you need artificial lighting instead.

On the plus side, as long as you're bringing your own lights anyway a polar colony looks a lot better, what with those giant blocks of ice lying around for the taking.

Re:Something More Modest

[Immerman]

Even dumping the entire asteroid belt on it wouldn't make that much difference, the total belt mass is estimated at only about 4% of the moon's. Tides would get slightly stronger, but I doubt it would be enough to substantially disrupt anything - the tides have been weakening since the moon was first formed and started spiraling away from us, a 4% mass increase would only set the escape back by 2% of the moon's current distance, which would set the fading of the tides back about 200 million years.

Re:Something More Modest

[WrongMonkey]

That's why it makes sense to colonize the moon first. The moon is a harsher environment, but it's easier to deliver emergency supplies or launch a rescue mission. Colonize the moon, develop the technical experience and Mars will be a cakewalk.

Re:Something More Modest

[Immerman]

It does seem that way, but Mars has it's own advantages:
- Readily accessible water (but that's possibly also available in a couple places on the moon)
- Lots of CO2 delivered to your doorstep, 25 hours a day.
- The fact that plants are really good at turning those two into food, oxygen, and construction material.
- a 25 hour day versus the 708 hour lunar day (which would render solar power largely useless, and make outside operations challenging during the two-week long night.
- smooth, weather-worn sand instead of the extremely sharp and abrasive lunar sand that wreaks havoc on things like the rubber seals keeping your air inside where you can breathe it.

Also, energetically speaking Mars is less than twice as far away as the Moon. Admittedly once you factor in the geometrically increasing fuel requirements it gets further, but we can still only send a few rockets to the moon for the price of sending one to Mars, and if you want to get back again, well one round-trip flight to the moon isn't *quite* as expensive as a one-way trip to Mars. But on Mars you have essentially unlimited water - add energy and you can easily convert that to hydrogen peroxide (aka rocket fuel) to fuel the return trip. It's not a one-way trip so much as a very long gas-break. Refining fuel on the moon is going to be considerably more challenging.

Re:Something More Modest

[SecurityTheatre]

giant blocks of ice lying around

Just making sure you're aware that the ice caps are dry ice (CO2), not water.

Re:Something More Modest

[Immerman]

False. The top surface is dry ice during the winter, but under that are massive deposits of water ice. And even in the winter the dry is ice only about 1m thick at the north pole, and about 8m at the south.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Re:Something More Modest

[Immerman]

If it's just mutation, then you're right, probably nothing to worry about. Worst case you keep a small shielded greenhouse just to produce fresh seed. But that's the question isn't it? Those exposed greenhouses will be getting bathed in a LOT more radiation than the ISS. The ISS is after all largely shielded from the solar wind by the Earth's magnetic field, and is shielded against low-energy radiation as well by virtue of the metal walls. The astronauts on the ISS also have the ability to retreat to heavily shielded areas during a solar flare, plants in our bubble greenhouse won't have any of those benefits.

There's also the fact that those plants won't just be surviving, they'll be trying to grow - and cell division puts organisms at their most vulnerable in the face of radiation bombardment.

I really hope we'll be able to field such greenhouses, I just think that's one of those areas we could stand to do a bit more research on before betting the lives of our colonists on its viability. Then again maybe I just don't know where to find the right research.

Re:Something More Modest

[Immerman]

Those numbers agree with the rough numbers I've found - Mars' surface gets hit by ~2x the radiation as the ISS astronauts. Considering the recommended career dosage limit is about 1Sv I'd call that a lot - you'll reach your limit in three years instead of six, and from there on out it's a study in exactly how much can you personally take before cancer and/or radiation poisoning sets in. Call me crazy but doubling my dosage level under those conditions is "a lot".

Also, we're talking about plants in an inflatable greenhouse here - there's not much radiation shielding to be had without blocking sunlight as well. And while the workers could no doubt retreat to radiation bunkers during a solar storm, they're unlikely to have the time or space to protect the plants similarly. As for that 20% radiation spike - that's lovely and all, but we've monitored far, far more massive spikes. We've even been hit by them a few times in recent decades here on Earth, and been narrowly missed by even worse ones. It's just a numbers game - in any given year you're unlikely to get hit by anything too serious, but sooner or later you will be, it's not a question of if, but when.

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.

Re:While I will agree the Mars One Concept...

[Immerman]

You mean like the hundreds of technical people on your average nuclear-powered submarine who are dedicated to keeping their reactor running, potentially for years on end during a long mission? Oh wait, no, there aren't actually all that many people maintaining the reactor because it's designed to be a largely self-contained, low-maintenance device, even when being knocked around by torpedo blasts.

And once you have a few dozen megawatts of heat and electricity at your disposal keeping people alive on a "dead rock" is relatively easy, especially if you have essentially unlimited CO2 and water on your doorstep as you would at a well-chosen colony site - plants are really good at converting such raw materials into food, air, and construction materials. You'll probably even have a bunch of energy left over to refine some of that water into hydrogen peroxide to fuel return trips for those rockets.

Re:"yet-to-be invented oxygen removal technology"

[tomhath]

Mars atmosphere is not air

This is news?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Mars One is HUGELY optimistic. Optimism is great as a general life trait, but its a terrible way to design things.

Re:This is news?

[painandgreed]

Just like sailing to the New World and setting up a colony was an optimistic scam. Why do you care so much what other people do with their money?

No, when they left for the new world, they actually had working ships and intended to go. Mars One, not so much in either capacity.

To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Katatsumuri]

"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."

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, his response is to belittle them and criticize their experience, while offering zero evidence to dispute the claims. Argumentum ad hominem & argumentum ab auctoritate.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Rei]

Argumentum ad logicam.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Stuarticus]

limited experience results in incorrect conclusions.

I bet those stupid kids haven't even been to Mars!

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Alomex]

But he isn't saying it's impossible. He's saying that the current plan is insufficient, and you can ask the residents of the lost colonies in colonial USA.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Katatsumuri]

Mars One does not claim that the current level of detail in their plan is sufficient. The problem is they are handwaving by saying "well, we will outsource the design". Perhaps it is good to push for more details by analyzing the currently available details like this. But while doing so, one necessarily makes a lot of assumptions, so it is unfair to present it as if the whole idea is proven unsustainable. And that is the impression people will get from articles like this. There must be a way for a more constructive discussion.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[dryeo]

There's possible and there is practical. While we're on the cusp of it being possible, it'll be a long time before it is practical.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[ColdWetDog]

Romanes eunt domus

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Alomex]

I think experience in places like the McMurdo station in Antarctica is that you need massive supplies. The only realistic plan would be to send literally hundreds of tons of materials together with robots to do prep work before the first permanent resident planted foot on the surface of Mars.

Not impossible by any means, but one or two orders of magnitude harder than the Mars One Colony makes it look like.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Katatsumuri]

That's the experience with antarctic bases because it is cheaper to send supplies there. The balance is different on Mars. There was no experiment so far wit an explicit goal and sufficient funding to achieve as much self-sufficiency as possible in Antarctic. Space station is closer, but it's a closed system, so also different. We can use our experience from both cases, but Mars will be unique.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Katatsumuri]

Yes, that is an important distinction. But in recent years, the gap between possible and practical tends to shorten quite fast. I guess they take advice from the "singularitarian" type futurists, and base their plans on the expectation of accelerating growth in available technology and resources. That is a risky bet, but until they actually send a person to space, they only risk as much as your next TV startup. And who knows if that will ever happen. However, there is hope they will help to promote and advance the necessary technology.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Immerman]

No, but we did it in Biosphere 2, and it worked out pretty well except for some carbon-balance issues that would have been easily resolved if you were running carbon-negative greenhouses on Mars supplemented by atmospheric CO2.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[angel'o'sphere]

The answer is completely adequate for a company.

If you believe otherwise I challenge you, if your time permits, to give a comprehensive rebuttal to my claim :)

WTF should I have the need as a company, desire, demand, obligation to teach students who took wrong conclusions about my business?

If companies had that obligation, the question about renewable energies, solar/wind especially, how power grids work and what you can do to improve them, what plug in hybrids or electric vehicles can do for grids ... all that would be well known facts for the general public in the USA! If US power companies would be obliged to educate/inform the public how simple the transition actually is, no one would argue about it!

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[dryeo]

They're ignoring a lot of the prep work that needs to be done to even entertain the idea of a long time research station, little well a colony. Need to do lots of exploring to decide on an ideal spot, somewhere with readily available water for a starts and most people forget that Mars has the same land area as the Earth. Then there is the new technology that will be required such as a nuclear generator that functions on Mars, something that should be quite possible but will require engineering and testing and likely re-engineering. Machinery to mine the atmosphere is another big one, going to need nitrogen at least. Then there are the other practical problems that might show up such as the effects of the finings (Martian dust) which may get into everything and being mostly iron oxide could be hard on electronics.
As long as it takes 16-18 months just to make the trip, things are going to be slow.

Re:To quote Sir Arthur Clarke...

[Katatsumuri]

There is no formal obligation, of course. It's just that this study has some apparent authority, and can be bad for Mars One PR. And PR is currently the main driving factor for them.

Mars One lacks a great many technical details

[itzly]

You can stop right there. A project like this needs a lot more of the details to be filled before we can even start to take it seriously.

Re: Mars One lacks a great many technical details

[painandgreed]

Do _we_ need to take it seriously? If _they_ can get it funded and moving then good on them.

Well, they are basically conning people out of their money to try and get this project moving as they have no good plan or potential to do what they say. The entire thing seems to be one big crowd funding campaign with no option but failure. They're never going to get their project funded and moving in anything like its current state and I would say _we_ probably should inform people of that.

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.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[itzly]

We can start performing some experiments on Earth first. Drop a few people in the middle of Antarctica with a few tonnes of supplies,and let them build an airtight habitat while never taking off their space suits.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[bill_mcgonigle]

but the study claims that they would be unable to vent ONLY the oxygen and would be forced to vent nitrogen as well

It's too bad we don't have any experience with binding oxygen to other chemicals.
There's a whole planet full of rusty soil to be had - I don't get why anybody is advocating for a sealed-ecosystem as if they're on a space station.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[Wycliffe]

Exactly. I didn't understand this part. If there really was too much it seems like it would be a simple
enough solution to either let in some co2 from outside, vent the excess oxygen out, or a combinition
of the two. Assuming you had proper ways of measuring the concentration of oxygen and co2 then
getting the right balance seems relatively straightforward.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[painandgreed]

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?

I really wouldn't call Mars' atmosphere much of an abundance. In a lab on Earth, the average Mars atmospheric pressure is considered a medium vacuum. We can get gas out of it but it will take a lot of pumping and energy to do so.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[Immerman]

VR and remote control won't be worth much on Mars, where communications with Earth have a round-trip ping time of between 10 and 60 minutes. Either your robots are basically autonomous, or they're useless until the colonists arrive.

And why do people keep suggesting Antarctica? Antarctica is *cold* and has horrendous and unpredictable weather, both of which complicate things dramatically. A Mars habitat on the other hand will essentially be in a giant vacuum thermos, only the ground can be said to have a temperature for practical purposes, insulate your contact surface and your biggest problem becomes shedding waste heat.

Testing a habitat in the desert would be at least as effective, and far more convenient.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[Immerman]

Indeed. Also I imagine raising locusts or other insects for food would help dramatically - they both breathe oxygen and convert the plant waste that we can't digest into meat 90% efficiency, reducing the amount of plants that have to be grown for food.

And as an Earth-side bonus eating insects might get a nice "Astronaut food" PR glow that would help the Western world begin to adopt a far healthier and more environmentally friendly meat source.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[Immerman]

So, explain again why they would be filling their atmosphere with an inert gas? Virtually all plants can only absorb nitrogen from the soil, and they don't exhale it, while animals don't use airborn nitrogen at all. It does help to reduce fire hazards, but I can't actually find much reference to the risks of fire in a low-pressure oxygen environment (such as a a pure oxygen atmosphere below 1/5th sea-level pressure), and my understanding is that the risks are primarily related to partial pressure rather than the presence or absence of inert gasses.

Re:Too much oxygen?

[Immerman]

Oh, quite so. That's also why deep-see dives cut the percentage of oxygen way down. Which is why you'd presumably run a pure-oxygen atmosphere at about 2.8psi - that gets you the same amount of oxygen per breath as at sea level, but keeps the fire danger to a minimum. Theoretically you could even bring that pressure down to 1.4psi or lower for altitude-acclimated individuals, but that's bringing the boiling point of water down dangerously close to body temperature, and I imagine having your bodily fluids boil away when you run a fever would be a Bad Thing (tm)

Re:Too much oxygen?

[phantomfive]

We have trouble achieving that even in Arizona.

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.

Yesterday's news...

[Anonymous Coward]

And we have yet another example of yesterday's article here:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Re:Yesterday's news...

[Anonymous Coward]

What "science and technology" are behind Mars One? More like fantasies and escapism. Modern science and technology are definitely showing us that a Mars colony is a stillborn idea. I think it's hilarious you linked to an article about science but don't even understand what science is. Other people in this thread are able to, why can't you?

Maybe more like "Space Nutters hostile to any science that says no one's going anywhere", or "Space Nutters throw tantrum at anyone that expresses doubts about the Holy Space Future as depicted in naive 1960s propaganda". Slashdot space matters, science for nutters?

Why this conflation of space and science? We stopped sending people to the bottom of the ocean too, where are the Aqua Nutters?

Re:Yesterday's news...

[jdschulteis]

Why this conflation of space and science? We stopped sending people to the bottom of the ocean too, where are the Aqua Nutters?

James Cameron went to the bottom of the ocean just 2.5 years ago.

Re:Yesterday's news...

[butalearner]

What "science and technology" are behind Mars One?

I know you're trolling, but it's really a pretty impressive list. The technology for the communications system, for example, already exists and is in use around Earth and Mars, though they plan to bolster that. We have spacesuits that would work on Mars as-is, though they'll probably want to create Mars-specific ones that reduce the bulkiness and make it more flexible (we're already doing this, by the way, look up NASA's Z-2 suit and Dava Newman's Bio-Suit). We have done lots In-Situ Resource Utilization tests in simulated environments on Earth, and one that extracts oxygen from the atmosphere is likely heading to Mars on the next lander or rover. They'll need to make sure that technology scales up and they have enough easily accessible source material, but that's what the unmanned launch is meant to do. It calls for the as-yet un-launched Falcon Heavy and modified, human-rated Dragon crafts, but SpaceX is on their way to developing their own versions of it. Bigelow Aerospace has created expandable space habitats including one attached to the ISS, I don't see why they couldn't do so for the Mars One food production habitats. I don't think Mars One had a lot of info on how they might grow food, but if you check out the report, it has a pretty fascinating proposal for that aspect, i.e. what crops to grow, how it might fit in the proposed space, and how it affects resource usage. And we're growing lettuce on the ISS using hydroponics right now. And so on.

Sure, the reality TV funding plan is something of a joke and there are plenty of technological hurdles to overcome, but what's important is that Mars One has a starting point and is apparently paying people to execute it and independent researchers are looking at them seriously, pointing out issues, refining the plan, and suggesting improvements. This report might have found lots of problems, but it is nevertheless a very strong step toward fixing them or creating something better.

Re:Yesterday's news...

[plopez]

He also raised the bar.

Re:Yesterday's news...

[plover]

So we send them with one suit each, no fabric, and no sewing machine? "Oops, it leaked, I guess you die then."

Although it would certainly reduce the cargo space taken up by a "lifetime supply" of food and water.

Re:Yesterday's news...

[tehcyder]

I know you're trolling

The definition of a troll is not "someone who says something I don't like, and in a slightly facetious way".

I find "Space Nutters" to be a reasonable description for people who simply will not accept scientific and technical reality, and especially for those people who would apparently condemn themselves to a one way ticket to Mars.

Link to actual study

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, since this, after all, news for nerds and stuff that matters.

http://web.mit.edu/sydneydo/Public/Mars%20One%20Feasibility%20Analysis%20IAC14.pdf

not Holland

[CAPSLOCK2000]

The country is called "The Netherlands", not "Holland".

Re:not Holland

[phantomfive]

The region is called Holland.

Go to Mars to die

[BringsApples]

If we're going to send people into another planet, why not first see about sending people that are already dying? It seems to me that it's possible that moving out of your planet's magnetic field could have implications beyond what we'd normally expect.

Re:Go to Mars to die

[BringsApples]

I like how this conversation went from "Maybe we can't live outside the magnetic field of Earth" to "Let's bring a lot of drilling equipment too!"

Re:"yet-to-be invented oxygen removal technology"

[tomhath]

Building a climate controlled, pressurized, artificially lighted building large enough to produce any food would be a huge challenge. But even that wouldn't do enough photosynthesis to convert a significant amount of CO2 to Oxygen. This isn't science fiction, where you can ignore reality.

Mars One is a TV-show

[CAPSLOCK2000]

Mars One is a commercial TV-show. The goal is to make money for the producers. The entire project is financed by making television about the endeavor. Actually reaching Mars and building a sustainable colony there are secondary goals. The project can be a succes without ever launching a single rocket, as long as people are willing to pay for the show that is produced around it.

Although I'm a bit cynical about the probability of reaching Mars I think the idea of financing a spacemission by selling TV is pure genious. The landing on the moon is one the highlights of 20th-century television. If so many people want to see it there must be an opportunity to make money.

Re:Mars One is a TV-show

[Katatsumuri]

There's also hope that to keep the impression of working towards a real colony, they might sponsor some space-related research & development. And there is some value even in simply making the colonization idea more popular and raising discussion about it. Now, for example, whoever plans a Mars colony, will know he has to address some points mentioned in this MIT study.

Wait...

[argStyopa]

...you're suggesting a project announced to great fanfare on the web might not be realistic or even possible?

But...they have a website!

(Anyway, I'm sure the process of tearing their plan apart was actually a fairly interesting engineering exercise.)

Low pressure pure O2

[rossdee]

"The real issue is fire danger - anything combustible might spontaneously catch fire, so all materials in such environment would have to be fire-resistant."

As Grissom, Chaffee and White would testify

Re:Low pressure pure O2

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

 

Re:Low pressure pure O2

[alexander_686]

Oddly enough, according to the article, one of the criticisms of the project is that there will be too much oxygen, not the lack of it. They plan on growing their own food, which means the plants will need to intake CO2. There will not be enough humans / animals to convert oxygen into C02. Over time, 62 days according to the article, the amount of oxygen will go up and the plants will die off, and with no food source the humans will die.

Re:Low pressure pure O2

[angel'o'sphere]

You did not read carefully.
The article did not say they die on lack of food but overproduction on oxygen.
The plants wont die (*facepalm*) the Mars atmosphere is nearly 100% CO2, super easy to pump it inside!

Re:MIT, be constructive

[itzly]

Maybe putting a bomb under the whole project is the best use of time and money there is.

Unreputable?

[frostfreek]

The article itself seems to be valid enough... but then, at the bottom, there are the following "You May Like" items:

• NASA caught deleting UFO photos from its website
• UFO flies over NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover
• Astronomer discovers animal life form on Mars from NASA images
• UFO: NASA reveals Biblical-like Spacecraft

With all that BS at the bottom, it casts doubt in my mind on the actual article.

Re:"yet-to-be invented oxygen removal technology"

[mcgrew]

Plants don't need sunlight, they just need light. Scientists and engineers (Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it) who have been in space say they see nothing unrealistic about Andy Wier's The Martian. Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it. You can light your plants with electric lighting. The problem would be how to generate the electricity.

Not Just Mars One

[WrongMonkey]

The paper uses Mars One as an introduction, but its really a rebuttal of any attempt to colonize Mars using current technology.

Re:Not Just Mars One

[Katatsumuri]

It is largely about Mars One and their timeline. For example, they assume Falcon Heavy to be the largest available transport, while SpaceX Raptor engine and Mars Colonial Transporter may become available shortly after the Mars One projected dates.

It is impossible to imagine every possible approach to build a Mars Base, so it is logical that they evaluate a specific plan.

They also make a lot of assumptions, for example: "If crops grown on Mars are the only food source, they will produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat." I imagine that beside traditional crops, one could use algae, bacteria, maybe insects to try and balance that. Also, as a Mars base is not a closed system, this balance could be supported from the outside environment.

Re:Not Just Mars One

[WrongMonkey]

The only assumption is that the colonization would be done with CURRENT technologies. The Mars Colonial Transporter, algae or bacteria as primary food source: these are still all on the drawing board, at best. Even the Falcon Heavy is a still in development.

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.

I have a solution for the oxygen

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't many homes/hospitals have "Oxygen concentrators", who's sole purpose is to remove oxygen from a nitrogen/oxygen/trace atmosphere? They aren't perfect (~90% oxygen) but they also aren't designed to be so, and they don't appear to use any consumables requiring only power for their compressor. I would assume that it would be pretty easy to engineer such a device to achieve much higher concentrations. A 2 minute internet search seems to blow one of this "studies" main premises out of the water.

Stop that stupid clarke quote forever please

[aepervius]

"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"

I highlighted you what's the problem with the quote. It is big honking ad hominem. Judging an opinion on the age of whom did it is wrong. You have to look at the argument. And if the argument are based in ground science then so be it, unless you disprove the science the argument stands. It does not matter if the scientist is young or old.

Stops that stupid citation from Clarke please. Bring argument based on evidence or critique argument based on evidence of the opinion of a person, do not do it based on gender, age, skin color, religion, or whatever other argument you may find about the person.

Re:Stop that stupid clarke quote forever please

[Katatsumuri]

Your point is very logical.

My point was that it is sometimes hard to prove something impossible, because there are innumerable, sometimes unexpected, ways to approach the implementation. I picked that quote as a quickly recognizable meme with a similar message that saves people some processing time, because they already met it and considered it. Please don't take it literally. The elderly scientist obviously does not apply in this context.

The MIT study does not seem to raise any fundamental reasons (like speed of light, mass of Solar system, anything like that) why a Mars base is impossible. They nitpick around the engineering details, some of which are their own assumptions. If you like finding logical fallacies, the whole thing has signs of a strawman argument.

Re:Stop that stupid clarke quote forever please

[angel'o'sphere]

You highlighted the wrong part.
he is almost certainly right that would be the right part.

If you have evidence that old fucks, who spend their whole life figuring stuff, are more likely to be wrong than a youngster who never worked in that topic: be my guest! Share your evidence, conclusions and your data!

The quote is absolutely not ad hominem, it is the nature of human beings. Regardless how genial you are, without knowledge of the topic your thoughts are pointless. The more knowledge you have, the more likely it is that you are old, as acquiring knowledge takes time, time implies age.

A no brainer. Sorry, that I'm older than you and feel slightly insulted.

Maybe it's a stupid suggestion...

[denzacar]

But wouldn't periodical burning of something made mostly out of carbon fix that, at least until enough humans arrive?

I'm not saying it has to be a bonfire or even a candle lit dinner... but a small object, burned in a burning chamber of some kind?
And hemp grows anywhere, right?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

MOD PARENT UP

[Katatsumuri]

The parent post has the perspective that many other posts here lack.

MOD PARENT UP

[Katatsumuri]

Nuclear reactors may be heavy, but they surely do not necessarily all require hundreds of people to operate them.

Re:ack

[plopez]

yodel-ay-he-hoooooo

Partial pressure

[Immerman]

Nope, wrong again, you're really not very good at this game. I'd suggest at least double-checking Wikipedia before you try to impress others with your knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Partial pressure has nothing specifically to do with humans, it's simply the fraction of the total pressure attributable to the gas in question - basically the pressure you would have if you magically removed all other gases from the volume in question. And it works out to be total pressure times the percentage of total mass attributable to the gas in question. At sea-level the partial pressure of oxygen is 21% * 1013mbar = 212mbar. Human lungs don't really care much what else is in the air (as long as it's inert), and we can breathe just fine if you remove all the other gases and put us in a pure oxygen environment at 212mbar, that used to be the normal procedure for spacecraft before the Apollo disaster (which happened during a test run on Earth, where the capsule was running a pure oxygen environment at atmospheric pressure, or 5x the normal partial pressure of oxygen.)

Theoretically we could even survive at 100mbar of pure oxygen (equivalent to 1/2 atmosphere pressure with a normal air mixture - or high enough altitude that you'll probably want a few weeks or even months to acclimate before exerting yourself), but at that pressure the boiling point of water is getting perilously close to body temperature, which could unhealthy consequences if you should run a fever.

As for fire hazard I'll freely admit I'm not well informed - but what I can find suggests that it's primarily the partial pressure which is a problem - that is to say the danger is related to the number of oxygen molecules within a given volume, and isn't dramatically affected by the presence or absence of inert gases.

Don't rain on their parade!

[lems1]

I say let them at least try. This is good for Earth in so many fronts and especially is good for the human gene pool as a whole.
The first ones to reach Mars will be laureated with Darwin Awards anyway ðY