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NASA Will Award You $5,000 For Your Finest Mars City Idea
coondoggie writes with this snippet from Network World: NASA this week said it would look to the public for cool ideas on how to build a sustainable environment on Mars with the best plan earning as much as $5,000. With the Journey to Mars Challenge, NASA wants applicants to describe one or more Mars surface systems or capabilities and operations that are needed to set up and establish a technically achievable, economically sustainable human living space on the red planet. Think air, water, food, communications systems and the like.
That a week ago KSP went out of Beta?
Time to check whether the base mods have been updated yet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where's my $5K?
maybe a middle-schooler will win some.
Build the city on earth instead. Breathable atmosphere, easy resupply missions, plenty of water.
It occurs to me that a feasable plan for a sustainable mars colony is worth a *HECK* of a lot more than just $5K....
Try increasing that by *AT LEAST* a couple of orders of magnitude.
Offering only $5K for a practical idea that once successfully implemented is going to be quite frankly worth trillions of dollars is really undervaluing the significance of coming up with a workable plan in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Barsoom always needs more egg hatcheries. And air generation stations along the canals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here's $5,000, now do our work for us, while we blow $5billion on climate change boondoggles.
Will they name the idea after you? That might attract a lot more interest.
Easier to get to, less radiation (but enough for solar panels to work), lots of water, no huge gravity well to surmount when coming home.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
But with like laser guns to fight the Martians! Pew pew pew!
Now hand over the $5000! With that much money I don't have to work at McDonalds ever again!!!
Hookers and blackjack.
economically sustainable? Isn't that a little far reaching. We can't do that on earth.
Genetic engineering. That's my short answer.
My first idea is to dig in. Put the people underground, as much as possible. Put critical infrastructure underground as well. No matter how you build, or what you build with, surface structures are going to be vulnerable. Put greenhouses on the surface, put solar panels on the surface, put hazardous research and fabrication on the surface. Put the PEOPLE underground. Dig them in where they can sleep soundly, knowing that they are safe from piddling little things like storms, or meteors, or whatever.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If NASA wants my design, it'll cost them a lot more than $5000. For $5000, maybe I can whip something up in crayon.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I am quite sure with just a few reforms, some of the underground cities used by Martians in the past can be put back into shape - there seems to be too few inhabitants left around there to claim for the vast urban infrastructure that should have been in place back them.
Just watch Bio-Dome.
Only 5K?
We're talking about NASA here people... if they are going to be that cheap in compensation for a great idea... they can go phuck themselves.
First, we have to find the alien reactor...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I'm asking if socialism is allowed or if I get to die a painful death when I fail to pay my oxygen bill...
I could use the $5K, so don't steal my idea.
Yeah, really, I won't even change a lightbulb without getting a signed contract.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Anyone remember the Thunderbirds 2086 episode KUDZILLA?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Because there are no nuclear weapons that can hit mars.
Give $1000 to charity (won't make any difference to Elon Musk) and give the other $4000 to whoever designs the rest of the city around Tesla's Gigafactory and Powerwall products. Unless Tesla are secretly developing oxygen systems for their already ongoing space concern.
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
It needs to have a monorail
Why die on mars when you can live in South Dakota? They claim to have both oxygen and jobs!
Just make a huge bouncy castle and drop it from orbit. They're already good at that!
One of the largest hurdles is bringing all of the resources with you. If you source building materials locally, such as firing brick for bulky exterior shield walls instead of hauling processed aluminum or steel all that way with you, you can save a lot of money and space. Couple that with modern "3D-printing" building techniques that are only just being pioneered, and it's feasible to have bots construct the entire skeleton of the settlement before you arrive to install all the necessary life support equipment, etc.
Here, here's a technically feasible Mars idea.
But wait, that's not a city. Not quite. How about this. There. That was about $5000 worth of work. Pay the man.
Just ask the folks at burning man. They quickly setup and teardown a huge city in an in-hospitable environment.
That's still better than the market rate of $0.10 for 12 ideas. In fact, you'd probably go bankrupt if you offered that rate, which is why they're limiting it to the top 3 ideas only.
Presumably the plan here is to not overlook anything "obvious" that their experts somehow didn't think of. Obviously, the actual plans in full detail will be developed by the experts.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Mars is not a "hot" planet. In fact Mars is a cold desert with non-breathable air. Why would anyone want to go to Mars? I would choose the Sahara or the Antarctic before I would choose to go to Mars. Are there any fabulous natural resources on Mars that we are unaware of? Maybe. No, if I wanted to put money, time, and effort into outer planet exploration I would choose one with water, atmosphere, and a significant likelihood of harboring some form of life: Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, or Titan. But here we have a classic example of scientists trying to find a lost key, at night, under the street lamp because that's the only well-lit place.
There are probably 100's of miles of lava tubes in there that could be sealed up. Plus it might be possible to tap any residual heat still in the martian mantle.
What I want to know is where in the world the word 'city' came from in the article's title. There's nothing anywhere close to a city mentioned in the article itself, with the goal of the challenge being to 'establish a technically achievable, economically sustainable human living space'. I don't know about anyone else, but to me, that sounds like an outpost rather than anything like a city.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
So, you put 10,000 lawyers and politicians into a hermetically sealed bag ... you launch that bag into space.
Once you've done that, get back to me and I'll tell you the rest.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"NASA is working on... the rocket expected to launch the [Mars] mission -- the Space Launch System"
My plan:
1. Kill the Senate Launch System and bury it in a landfill
2. Fire everyone who thought it was a good idea
3. Wait around a few years and play Kerbal Space Program
4. Buy a ride on Falcon Heavy R and save a billion bucks per launch
5. Now you can afford to haul more stuff to Mars for a city
Thank you, I'll take the $5000 in cashier's check, Visa or Mastercard.... but definitely NOT American Express.
The answer is 3D printers. They solve all known problems. Just 3D print a massive spaceship, then fly said spaceship to Mars and 3D print yourself a city, then 3D print a breathable atmosphere and magnetic field.
then it wouldn't need to go to Mars in the first place.
I am going to do a Kickstarter with a $100,000 goal to be used to come up with a good idea within a year. The $5000 from NASA will represent a 5% return on the investment, which is very good these days.
I never change lightbulbs because it's a hardware problem, and I'm a software guy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
They're not looking for ideas - just publicity. And they've succeeded with this slashvertisement.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Build a floating city in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
Standard Weiland-Yutani Terraforming station. Go for the best
First on mars!
For communicating, just use T-Mobile. For the quality of the signal that I get, I can only imagine that Mars is where they place all of their towers.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
a) this is marketing
b) They're asking for an idea, not a plan. I'm not going to put more than 5 hours of work into it, but if I've got a notion that I can bounce against some coworkers over lunch, yeah, that's in the order of magnitude, and $5K will pay for a pig roast for the office. .
Offering only $5K for a practical idea
Well, the probably had a big budget increase!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
How about building a welfare ghetto?... These people have no money or food, or education, but they breed like wildfire and manage to maintain an ever-increasing population in uninhabitable areas contrary to the most complex logic. Don't worry about maintaining anything because these types of ghettos flourish without any maintenance already... Cops, Lawyers, Politicians, and Bureaucrats will never interfere in a ghetto which will keep overall costs down. None of these welfare people work so wages are cheap (or non-existant). Forget expensive vehicles that need special expensive fuels - stolen bicycles will work just fine on Mars. Water is not necessary if you just provide some crack or crystal meth... And if you maintain the supply of crack or meth, you can get people to do some amazing things just so they can get their next fix... If NASA puts a massive welfare ghetto on Mars and contols the drug supply, I think amazing things can happen...
Just build a GHETTO. lol...
Aquaponics, mostly automated system to harvest, large scale, all the food ever, 3 times. Different groups to prevent possible farm collapse (which is much rarer with aquaponics anyway)
Insect farming as well. Easy to do, nutritious, wonderful.
If you were to go for animals, chickens would be best, or similar animal, you get eggs and a whole bird to eat eventually.
Fungi are an obvious good one.
Water, purification? Maaan we got a huge ball of fire in the sky with no clouds or atmosphere of worth to weaken it, point a huge magnifying glass at it.
But really, solar panel farm, preferably one that could be constructed with mirrors and less solar panels to keep prices down since, you know, NASA, they don't exactly have a budget. Or a budgie. NASA needs a budgie.
Backup RNG power source or few for emergencies. Send a ship of fuel to them after they have arrived. Or before them.
Those solar panels will need to be cleaned from dust every so often.
We could go with commie-block tier housing, or go all fancy and have tiny houses for each person or couple.
Having working quarters on the outsides and living on the insides is better for many reasons.
1) You can have the working quarters colder since you will be actively working with things, and will actually be dressed up.
2) the heat from the living quarters wouldn't be lost as much since it would float around the working quarters before it reaches the outside edge of the colonies.
This would mean you wouldn't need to have stupidly expensive insulation. (of course, it will likely need to be to kill off cosmic radiation anyway!)
You NEED to use the materials there as much as possible to cut costs. There is a whole planet there of resources.
Sand can still be used to fill walls. The planet might be a massive desert of corrosion, but that is incredibly useful to fill spaces between two walls to create a thicker wall to keep out radiation and keep heat in.
Most heat will only be lost through radiation anyway, the atmosphere isn't dense enough, fast enough, or commonly windy enough, to be a serious threat to heat loss. It's ability to rip heat from the colony shouldn't be that high. (at least, I believe it is. everything I have seen on wind would say so, I know there is stupidly fast winds due to said lack of density)
Regardless, this sort of structure is most efficient anyway. Not like there is much to look at on Mars.
Oh hey, a gray-ish red mountain, amazing. Oh hey, what's that, oh, just another gray-ish red mountain. AWE!
That solved 4 problems fairly well, food, water, power and housing.
Everything else that stems from that is gravy.
Sure it is overly simplistic in description, but the smarter people will know how to put these together, I am just too lazy to type something more descriptive.
'sa weekend job mate.
My favorite structure on Mars is the giant clockwork thing in Watchmen. But I guess that doesn't quite meet the breathable air requirement.
allow gambling, alcohol, drugs, sex and no taxes on mars, and the city will build itself
It doesn't occur to the future citizens of New New Delhi
Volunteer the entire Tea Party to go colonize Mars.
Table-ized A.I.
That's my suggestion. Biosphere 1 and 2 were both failures. We don't know enough to make sustainable closed biospheres work on Earth, much less in orbit or on Mars. When we have something that lasts 10 years, we might be on to something. Until then, practice, practice, practice... Baby steps. How about an L5 or two to start.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Don't worry, they're not actually looking for ideas. They have tons of ideas. They have people whose whole job is to come up with ideas. They have an army of very knowledgeable volunteers in groups like The Planetary Society who'd write detailed thousand-page treatises on solid waste recycling on Mars, in exchange for just knowing that the human race has an off-world outpost. They're not lacking for ideas.
This contest is just a way to get people to start thinking about a serious effort to go to Mars, as opposed to the Mars One suicide fantasy mission. $15k worth of prizes is cheap advertising. And maybe, just maybe, if enough people start talking about going to Mars our eternally-opportunistic politicians will decide it's a safe bandwagon to jump on and cough up some real support.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
worth a *HECK* of a lot more than just $5K....
Don't be greedy, that's half the NASA budget for 2015.
When at first the holes will be pure research... so when they big enough start building.
"Run a competition to scour the brains of everyone, make trillions of dollars then insult the genius who came up with the idea with a financial slap."
Do I win?
Screw Mars. Cloud cities on Venus is much more feasible long-term.
We're scouring the galaxy for Earth-like planets when Earth's twin lives right next door. Sorry, but it's not Mars. We just have to adjust the thermostat a bit...
Why, copy the Moonbase Alpha of course!
Fame is something only the mentally retarded care about. The "best" idea they come up with this way is going to be a far cry from the best solution. There is a reason the phrase "you get what you pay for" exists - it's freaking true.
Don't ask Americans they only know about cartoons and that is the limit of their interest or thinking, instead get with the only viable program MARS ONE. Their people are way ahead of America for a city on Mars. Go to their web site and just look at their designs! After all you are paying the Russians for all sorts of space related easy to build items like: rocket motors,rides to the ISS and many many others. SO USE SOOM SENSE for a big change and go with a winner for a change go help MARS ONE,
Mass-produce millions of fuel-inefficient cars. (maybe call Nascar about installing a track or two)
Create huge landfills to emit lots of methane; possibly filled with garbage from earth.
These two things combined should get the Mars atmosphere nice and dense for our fragile human bodies!
And what ever you do, DO NOT USE RENEWABLE ENERGY! As this will no doubt rob the atmosphere of the precious greenhouse gasses needed to keep the planet habitable.