MIT Study Finds Fault With Mars One Colony Concept

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

Comments

Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[alex67500]

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

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[Rei]

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first?

[CrimsonAvenger]

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

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

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

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.

"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting

[Martin Spamer]

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

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

Something More Modest

[Egg Sniper]

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

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."

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: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