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The Strangeness of the Mars One Project
superboj sends an article written after its author investigated the Mars One Project for over a year. Even though 200,000 people have (supposedly) signed up as potential volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars, there are still frightfully few details about how the mission will be accomplished. From the article:
[Astronaut Chris Hadfield] says that Mars One fails at even the most basic starting point of any manned space mission: If there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, if you don’t know the very dimensions of the capsule they will be traveling in, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it. "I really counsel every single one of the people who is interested in Mars One, whenever they ask me about it, to start asking the hard questions now. I want to see the technical specifications of the vehicle that is orbiting Earth. I want to know: How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled. What’s the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist. You can’t just go to SpaceMart and buy those things."
The author concludes that the Mars One Project is "...at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work."
I am torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I agree with the submission's stance. Those things are custom engineered to perform optimally in the specific problem domain they are engineered for. A space suit worn to do EVAs wont work on mars, or vice versa.
The habitats need to be designed with all manner of ergonomic considerations; people will live the rest of their lives inside the damned thing. They need to be designed to withstand constant ablation by blowing sand and fine particulate dusts. They need to have door seals that are up the the task. They need to have robust circuitry that can withstand the increased intensity of solar storm radiation, since mars lacks a comprehensive global magnetosphere. So many things need to be engineered for, purpose built for the specific tasks at hand, and built to not only last, but last a lifetime, or longer.
On the other hand, the nature of this kind of mission makes it toxic to any world government that would actually be able to accomplish it properly. No politician in this universe wants to be the one who willfully signs the death certificates of highly trained, highly intelligent and skilled people. That's what a manned mission to mars would be. It would require much more than the vertical thrust booster used by the LLM in the 60s to get the crew back to the command module. It would take another complete lower stage rocket. Unless you want to soft-land something that weighs millions of tons, filled with highly volatile propellant on mars so that the crew can get back into space again after the mission period is over, you are planning a one-way trip, and that means consigning those people to die up there.
Politically, a proper mars mission is a non-starter.
That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths. People that dont mind if people die, and dont care about being associated with signing that check. Corporate America, and those similarly aligned to the all mighty dollar.
Sadly, that same sociopathy means that any such mission will be done with duct tape, bailing wire, and discount bubblegum wrappers. Lowest bidder on everything. Minimum training for the mission personnel. A mission that, if it succeeds, it would be a statistical anomaly.
I am conflicted.
I want people to get off this planet. But at the same time, I want them to get there safely, properly, and with the tools they need to actually have a chance to pull it off.
I agree with the article author, that the lack of meaty information about this project is not something that instills confidence. By now, the first round of selectees should be getting initial training. Where are they being trained, and what are they being taught? Did they even get out of their homes yet?
Who knows.
I thought it was just a harmless enthusiast group promoting space travel and stuff.
If they're actually taking people's money as a fee (rather than a charitable donation) when they have no launcher no lander no habitat no nothing, they're selling snake oil.
I have no illusions about Mars One. But I think it's time to explicitly tell NASA to stop wasting money on manned space travel and stick to launching climate satellites and space telescopes and robotic interplanetary missions, something they have had some success at; even there, they need to become much more efficient.
Think about it (if you can):
Wanting something is enough to make it happen.
Wisdom of crowds.
Scientists don't know everything.
You'll be famous.
Sounds like the recipe for external validation that every GenY and Millenial are craving.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Anonymous Coward,
There is much truth in what you write. I got involved in this crowd back in the 1970s after reading Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. It was a thought provoking, impressive book. My involvement, though, was moderate and independent. While, at the beginning of my interest, I wanted to get to L5 by 95, I eventually realized that it would not be L5 by 1995 but more like L5 by 2495. O'Neill made significant proposals that appealed to me. Instead of adventure trips to the Moon or Mars, he -- and others -- proposed doing things like building space based solar power satellites to benefit humans on Earth. They are still in the future, but could come about in the future. There are many problems to solve, though.
Sending people to Mars? Let's see. Mars does not have a geomagnetic sphere to protect it from solar outbursts. People will die if they are on the surface when one of those things happens Martian atmosphere is very thin. At ground level atmospheric pressure is only 1% of Earth. That is not nearly enough. Martian gravity is less than half of Earth's. Is that enough? We shall have to experiment.
There is one place on Earth that explorers have explored since we have had written records -- Antarctica. It wasn't even discovered until 1820. The first expedition to Antarctica was the Scott expedition a century ago. We started building bases there after World War 2. Quite a few humans have now lived there -- at least for a short time. Same gravity, same atmosphere, same geomagnetic sphere. Just much colder.
The optimist in me thinks we humans will, eventually, live and work in places other than Earth. It is going to take a good bit of learning, though.
Enough for now.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
We have to think of everything -- and more. We should have solved the problems the people on mars will face before we send them there. There should be at least three well-tested working backups for everything thats needed: water, food, housing, etc... Medicine needs to be advanced far much further, so that possible cancer from the radiation can be healed or prevented.
If these conditions are provided, we can try to get to mars without a large risk. We will need unmanned testing missions before. We will need a shitload of money.
Its far more likely that we will send people that die early. We will have to realize that that will be a send-and-die mission. We don't have the patience to build, test and plan for a mission this complex and large.
Our long term goal should be on how to bootstrap an industrialized system from some rockets we sent there. Things you can manufacture on mars will be cheap, but things you need to send there will be expensive. When you've reached the point where you can build a rocket (or at least the heaviest parts of it) you can get back. This can be as simple as the fuel, and dumb parts of the lower stages.
Typical non-profit entities have grandiose goals such as eliminating poverty or feed orphans or some other goal that tugs as the hearts (and purse strings) of a dedicated and forgiving audience. They usually have no idea what they are doing and are making it up along the way. Of course they try really hard and maybe they accomplish a few things along away, but of course they never really "solve" the problem. If they do they find something else.**
Meanwhile, the principal of the organization get to earn a living doing what they enjoy with other folks footing the bill.
Take it for what it is people. People gotta earn a living somehow...
**for instance, the March of Dimes was started to stamp out Polio. After the vaccine was developed (none of their funding contributed to the Salk Vaccine, it was spent on palliative care), they had to find something else to do, they simply didn't wind down, which is why you have to start with a really really grandiose goal to make sure it doesn't happen to quickly
Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.
Space is mind bogglingly large but despite that the Earth is fucking huge. Helpfully it's also absolutely drenched in the sort of things us humans need to survive. With a bit of preparation we can readily travel to just about anywhere on the surface of the Earth. To simply survive we don't need to bring significant amounts of our home environment along with us.
The Earth is also jam packed with resources. The idea of mining asteroids and comets is laughable. It's ridiculously expensive to actually do and nowhere even remotely close to being cost effective. It's not even a question of profitability, it's simply wasteful to expand the resources to mine a single asteroid when a single mountain on Earth is far more accessible and likely has a much better yield of industrially useful materials. It simply does not make sense to pay thousands or millions of dollars a pound for carbon, ice, or silicon (the primary component of most asteroids and comets). Even for space based industry, launched prices of a thousand dollars a pound means it's more economical to build stuff on Earth and launch it into space.
The idea of "spreading out the species" is another very silly idea. It would take a ridiculous amount of resources to build even a remotely sustainable colony somewhere else in the solar system. There's simply nowhere else in the solar system where humans can easily survive. Even with a self-sustained colony on Mars the odds of humanity being wiped out by a natural disaster (asteroid, etc) aren't significantly improved over all of humanity on a single planet. Without a full ecosystem a Martian colony would eventually die out, likely long before they were able to build their own means to spread to other planets.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
vs
I'm creating a kick-ass OS that'll totally blow minix and gnu/hurd out of the water and I'm offering a lifetime license for only $5-75 for early adopers on Kickstarter
Mars One has as much substance as a MLM pyramid scheme, lots of hype and glossy marketing which not only siphons away funds that could have gone to serious projects but will likely backfire on everyone else when the bubble bursts. There's a difference between thinking outside the box and not really trying, particularly using other people's money.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You have somer serious misconceptions in this post.
The ability for adults to digest milk has nothing to do with "settling down". Adults producing the lactase enzyme is a result of natural selection favoring humans that could digest dairy in regions where it was a viable food source. Both goats and cows are grazing animals and so prehistoric humans that drank their milk didn't have to "settle down" to herd them. Humans remained fairly nomadic until large scale agriculture developed. Lactose tolerance came long before agriculture. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
This is incorrect by several orders of magnitude. Clothes don't allow don't make parts of Earth more habitable. If you're stuck in the Alaskan wilderness you can still die of exposure even if you have warm clothes. Clothes tend to allow people to more comfortably live in some areas but they don't do a lot to make those places livable. Shelter makes inhospitable parts of the Earth livable, clothes let you get between different shelters.
Space suits needed on Mars don't need to just keep people warm or dry but provide them with a breathable atmosphere at a workable pressure. They'll also need to have facilities for hydration and feeding since they'll be self contained. A space suit capable of keeping someone alive on Mars is much more than mere clothing.
This is just fantasy. Genetic engineering could in the future filter out congenital diseases or make everyone lactose tolerant but it's a little absurd to state as a matter of fact that we could engineer ourselves to live on Mars (or some other planet). Large complex organisms like humans can't be easily adapted for life on Mars or elsewhere. We're not tardigrades or bacteria. Even if we did manage to somehow engineer ourselves to live on Mars or elsewhere those creations would no longer be "ourselves". They would be a wholly new species and incompatible with our own. They would as as alien to us as native Martian bacteria.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't think it's that we need to not send repair materials, but they should be included up front. Consider them as consumables.
For example, salt water is (currently) best dealt with by sacrificial anodes. It's dirt cheap (when you don't need to lift the mass), and it works very effectively. You just need to make sure to launch with enough of them to supply a large safety factor. This is engineering 101. You don't build products that rely on critical parts you anticipate becoming unavailable. You make sure there's enough of them, or you redesign.
You build in enough consumables to replace the parts that can go wrong (which is a very lengthy list--sorry, no magic bullets) and you also build in a system to transition away from supply missions before you exceed the normal working life--NOT the safety factor(s). Mining will be crucial to human expansion; indeed, this is one of the twin reasons to expand. We want a backup for humanity and more space for everyone, but we also simultaneously want to expand our mining territory. I'd rather turn Earth into a nature preserve, as we only have one of it, and do the mining somewhere else that's already barren and dead.
Mars One is a sad scam. It is not real. It was never intended to be real, it has always been intended to separate gullible people from their money.
Bootstrapping a space based industry would be fantastically expensive. Delta-v is the least of your concerns with space based industry. It's the simple questions like "how do you lubricate mechanical compoentns" or "what do you do about swarf in microgravity?" that are the really expensive problematic things. The bootstrapping needs to find viable solutions to those problems, launch it into orbit, assemble it, and then maintain it until a point where it becomes self-sustaining (assuming that point exists).
It's more likely that the cheapest solution will be manufacture finished items on Earth and launch them into space (what we do now). It's not likely there exists a break even point for space based industry. There's just way too many small problems to overcome to make it really feasible. The ISS cost about $150 billion to construct, a minimally feasible space-based industrial base would likely need to be at least an order of magnitude larger. The comparable investment in mining, refining, and manufacturing on Earth would yield significantly higher output.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
political freedom for starters.
I stand astounded. Whatever makes you think that living on Mars will bring political freedom? How are those ideas even connected?
Everything about Mars suggests that political freedom is virtually impossible. You will not be able to pay the cost of your transfer to Mars (including the tons of food and supplies needed to keep you alive there). This means that to convince someone to pay for your trip to Mars, they will require something from you in return. The basis of life on Mars is obligation - your obligation to the government or company that paid for you to travel there.
In addition there is the issue that nobody on Mars will have any money or any means to make money. There is no resources , no soil to grow crops, no infrastructure to support primary industry or manufacturing. At best people might trade the various things they brought from earth. And themselves (i.e. prostitution), although the notion of sex will be less attractive after the radiation sickness kicks in.
Mars will be like prison, without any chance of escape. Linking life on Mars with political freedom is simply laughable.
Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.
It might not have occurred to you that you caused that orwellian state. Who is to blame for the state of Western democracy but ourselves? In which, you will just take that corruption with you to Mars. Unless you view yourself and coincidentally your fellow travellers as somehow more enlightened than the rest of us - do you think that?
A human would have approximately 5 to 10 seconds in which to respond to the tear in their suit, and if repressurized within 60 seconds, have a fairly good chance of survival.
From the source:
Source:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...
The use of a form-fitting pressure suit, like that used by a fighter pilot (or those being demoed by MIT for use on mars, which have form-fitting metal coils to supply mechanical compression) would buy the suit occupant even more time in the event of a tear in the suit by preventing ebullism, and resulting drop in blood pressure, and resulting loss of consciousness.
There are a number of potential mechanisms that could be implemented into a space suit of the MIT type, that would make abrasion type holes in the suit less lethal, such as the non-newtonian silicon shear thickening liquid that is used in ballistic vests. A thin layer of this inside the suit would harden under the pressure being exerted on it by the occupant of the suit against the reduced pressure outside, exerted through the tear. This would reduce the effects of the hard vacuum on the suit occupant, buying more time to apply an appropriate patch to the suit.