Mars One CEO Insists, Our Mars Colonization Plan Is Feasible

szotz writes: Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp has a bizarre definition of the word "plan". Last week he debated two MIT aerospace engineers who were co-authors on a report that said that astronauts would suffocate on Mars if they tried to grow their own food with existing tech. The question on the table: Is the Mars One plan feasible? And the answer seemed to be "it depends on what your definition of a plan is". The stated plan is to send the first humans to Mars for $6 billion by 2027 (twice delayed already). Lansdorp admits they probably won't stick to that schedule or that budget, but that has nothing to do with whether they're going or not. IEEE Spectrum has a write-up of the debate and a link to the MIT team's presentation. It seems the company's looking for $15 million now to fund--you guessed it--more studies.

Comments

Moon Zero?

[zamboni1138]

Can someone please remind me why going back to the Moon and putting up some kind of base there isn't the next step?

I'm all for Humans expanding out into our solar system, but shouldn't we go for extended camping trips in our own backyard before we take the kids on the long haul trip to Wally World?

Re:Moon Zero?

[Wycliffe]

Building a Moon Base and making it self sufficient would be much easier than doing so on Mars. If nothing else, the Moon's only a few days away from Earth, so that emergency supplies could be brought in much more quickly. That means that we'd be able to learn how to construct and maintain a closed ecology without being forced to get everything absolutely right the first time. Then, once we've done that, doing it again on Mars would be much simpler because we'd know ahead of time what we needed to take and what we didn't.

Although I don't disagree with your assessment, the same assessment could be made for doing a "test run" on earth. Antarctica is probably closer to the conditions found on mars than the moon is. It seems like it would make the most sense to set up a closed ecology in Antarctica or some place similar first and test everything out there first. An underwater habitat would also be a good option but would most likely be a different construction that what would work best on mars. A lightweight positive pressure dome that can withstand extreme cold would probably work best on mars. You could simulate this easily in Antarctica with a dome of 2psi instead of 1psi so you could see how it all worked for a fraction of the cost of mars or the moon. Growing plants in this dome and any other tests while monitoring co2 levels and other living conditions. I have a hard time taking any country or organization serious that plans on sending a manned mission to mars if they don't also have a plan to do a test run first at one of the two poles and to my knowledge no one has any plans like this so my only conclusion is that no one is seriously planning on trying to send humans to another planet anytime soon.

Re:Ecosystems are *Really* *Hard*

[captainpanic]

You could of course build an ecosystem, and manually adjust it when it goes off course.

With a bunch of solar panels you can create extra oxygen or clean water when needed.
If some plants or organisms grow too fast, you can just kill them or cut them down.

To create an ecosystem that is entirely self sufficient and stable is beyond our capabilities. And actually, it is very likely that ecosystems are not stable at a small scale. But the entire earth is such a big buffer that it can average out everything. This averaging out must be done artificially in smaller systems.