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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.
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'
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
Just watch Bio-Dome.
First, we have to find the alien reactor...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
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.
Build a floating city in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
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
My favorite structure on Mars is the giant clockwork thing in Watchmen. But I guess that doesn't quite meet the breathable air requirement.
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.