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Let's Not Go To Mars
HughPickens.com writes: Ed Regis write in the NYT that today we an witnessing an outburst of enthusiasm over the literally outlandish notion that in the relatively near future, some of us are going to be living, working, thriving and dying on Mars. But unfortunately Mars mania reflects an excessively optimistic view of what it actually takes to travel to and live on Mars, papering over many of the harsh realities and bitter truths that underlie the dream. "First, there is the tedious business of getting there. Using current technology and conventional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars would be a grueling, eight- to nine-month-long nightmare for the crew," writes Regis. "Tears, sweat, urine and perhaps even solid waste will be recycled, your personal space is reduced to the size of an SUV., and you and your crewmates are floating around sideways, upside down and at other nauseating angles." According to Regis every source of interpersonal conflict, and emotional and psychological stress that we experience in ordinary, day-to-day life on Earth will be magnified exponentially by restriction to a tiny, hermetically sealed, pressure-cooker capsule hurtling through deep space and to top it off, despite these constraints, the crew must operate within an exceptionally slim margin of error with continuous threats of equipment failures, computer malfunctions, power interruptions and software glitches.
But getting there is the easy part says Regis. "Mars is a dead, cold, barren planet on which no living thing is known to have evolved, and which harbors no breathable air or oxygen, no liquid water and no sources of food, nor conditions favorable for producing any. For these and other reasons it would be accurate to call Mars a veritable hell for living things, were it not for the fact that the planet's average surface temperature is minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit." These are only a few of the many serious challenges that must be overcome before anyone can put human beings on Mars and expect them to live for more than five minutes says Regis. "The notion that we can start colonizing Mars within the next 10 years or so is an overoptimistic, delusory idea that falls just short of being a joke."
But getting there is the easy part says Regis. "Mars is a dead, cold, barren planet on which no living thing is known to have evolved, and which harbors no breathable air or oxygen, no liquid water and no sources of food, nor conditions favorable for producing any. For these and other reasons it would be accurate to call Mars a veritable hell for living things, were it not for the fact that the planet's average surface temperature is minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit." These are only a few of the many serious challenges that must be overcome before anyone can put human beings on Mars and expect them to live for more than five minutes says Regis. "The notion that we can start colonizing Mars within the next 10 years or so is an overoptimistic, delusory idea that falls just short of being a joke."
He's not saying we should never go. He's just giving a reality check: there are technological problems we need to overcome first, and at the rate we're progressing, we won't be there in the next 10 years. To shoot people toward Mars before those problems have been solved would be irresponsible.
We have been maintaining human life on the space station for years
The ISS is under the Van Allan Belts. It's also frequently resupplied from Earth.
with individual stays lasting longer than the trip time to Mars.
And they're experiencing all sorts of medical problems because of it.
And once there, water and soil could be extracted.
(Gotta love the passive voice. Always a favorite of PR firms and politicians.)
With what kind of (heavy) machinery would the water and soil be extracted? And what would power it? Don't say "solar power", because the Sun appears much smaller when viewed from Mars, and thus receives much less energy.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
And once there, water and soil could be extracted.
(Gotta love the passive voice. Always a favorite of PR firms and politicians.
Gotta love the passive voice Nazis; if they don't have anything else to say, that's always a good cheap shot. No content whatsoever, but whatever.
We could extract water from the soil, because it is present in subsurface ice, as well as in the form of water of hydration.
With what kind of (heavy) machinery would the water and soil be extracted?
Shovels.
And what would power it? Don't say "solar power", because the Sun appears much smaller when viewed from Mars, and thus receives much less energy.
Solar or nuclear, take your pick. Each has advantages.
Incident sunlight is about 500 W/m^2, about half that at Earth's surface, although it depends on season and dust loading in the atmosphere. You don't seem to be aware of it, but we have been operating a solar-powered rover on Mars for well over ten years. We know solar energy works on Mars: we have done it, we are doing it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Nuclear war could cause extinction on Earth. Some engineered super-plague could also wipe us out. Advocating for keeping all our eggs in one basket just because you can't think of any existential threats (or search for a list of them) is silly.
The Moon is not better than Mars. It has a much harsher thermal environment due to its complete lack of atmosphere. Mars is very cold - but its pretty consistent. The Moon has wild variations in temperature depending on if you are in sunlight or shade - and the night lasts 2 weeks. The first lunar night it had to endure pretty much killed the Chinese moon rover. Non of the Apollo missions spent a night.
The dust on the Moon is entirely un-weathered, and is likely to present a hazard due to being incredible abrasive. Mars dust is probably easier to deal with
The martian atmosphere provides CO2 - that is 2 useful elements you can get just by sucking it through a pump. Any materials you want to use on the Moon must be mined from rocks, and that is harder.
Finally, the Moon is too close. One goal of an offworld colony is a break from lots of the crap here on Earth. A place where you could conceivably still get a connection to Earth internet (albeit with seconds of lag) makes this harder.
The people who reduce Mars resource extraction to simple "We'll simply do this, then that" statements have clearly never had to work building or maintaining mining, ore processing, and refining equipment on Earth, let alone on Mars ;) We've never done any sort of actual mining on other worlds (no, using a RAT or taking tiny dust samples is not "mining"), and most of the stuff one might consider even close to "refining" we've done in space has proved to be a maintenance nightmare. Seriously, how often has the ISS lost things like its oxygen generators, its urine reprocessor, etc? And all of these are quite toward the easy end of "refining" tasks. Heck, the oxygen generator literally just dumps its hydrogen overboard and they never attempt to tank the oxygen. I remember that one of the reasons that the oxygen generators were failing at one point was that the water they were feeding it was "slightly too acidic". I mean, seriously, and you want to use dug-up muddy Mars ice with who knows what in it as your feedstock? And that's when the system's not trying to kill you - they've had corrosive chemical leaks, near-fire situations, etc.
Everyone who says "We'll just dig up X for resource Y" as if it's just that simple needs a serious reality check. These systems can take decades to refine to the point where you can rely on them being dependable enough for the long periods of time involved in a Mars mission to have peoples' lives hinge upon them. And they're anything but "simple", even for the simplest tasks like water production and oxygen generation.
To reduce risk, reasonable mission profiles for Mars that involve in-situ actually call for a long "prep phase". In such a phase, one tries to produce everything robotically and then store it, with the idea of having everything present on-site and ready when people arrive. That way, if the system fails, or produces resources that for some reason or another are not usable, people don't die. But it also means long delays before you can launch people, even after you get the mission there.
One example is with MOXIE. They're considering including it on the Mars 2020 rover (although somewhat controversially - I wouldn't be too shocked if it got cut). It takes CO2 from the atmosphere and makes O2 and CO - both just released to the atmosphere, no attempt to store it. The idea being that the atmosphere should be a more consistent and reliable source of raw materials than mined water ice. If it works right and lasts, then the idea is to make a 100x bigger system with its own dedicated high power RTG (read: expensive), as well as tankage, compressors, etc and send that to Mars, leave it running for 5-10 years, and if it completes storing up enough O2, then use that for a human mission. So this would mean:
1) Hope that MOXIE doesn't get cut before launch ... competing with a wide range of other scientific proposals for mission money. Hope it gets approved.
2) Hope that Mars 2020 makes it into the 2020 launch window
3) Arrive at Mars after a long cruise phase. Hope that there's no accidents in launch, transit or on landing.
4) Spend enough time with MOXIE operating to prove that it actually works in a Mars environment (dust storms, radiation, temperature swings, etc). Hope it actually works.
5) Take proposals for the expensive oxygen generation mission
6) Hope that people are willing to go ahead and lock future manned missions into a particular site chosen that long in advance, before the mission hardware is even designed.
7) Spend years building the refinery-craft, hope for no cutbacks or cancellations.
8) Launch the refinery craft, hope for no accidents.
9) Wait through cruise phase (hope for no accidents) and landing phase (again, hope)
10) Hope that the new system actually works as desired for many years on end (which means keeping breakage-prone things like compressors running for long periods of time).
11) Hope that a manned Mars mission actually gets funding -
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers
140 watts for 4 hours a day? That data, along with a little math and a sense of reality should tell you how wildly impractical solar is. It isn't just the enormous quantity of solar panels you need to generate a significant amount of power, but the batteries required to store the energy for the other 20 hours a day. Sadly, many people here on earth have similar fantasies about solar powering our own world. However, no amount of faith will bend reality.
On the other hand, the Liquid fluoride thorium reactor provides an extremely dense source of energy, which could enable significant activity on mars. The LFTR concept was originally developed for powering an aircraft, which should give you an idea of how compact it can be. It was never quite practical, because of shielding requirements, but that is not a problem on mars.
The truth is, we aren't going anywhere until people can learn to accept and embrace nuclear power. After that, we will have a boundless supply of energy, that will enable all manner of progress. It will also do so with the smallest environmental footprint of any existing option by far, and with the least loss of human life, even considering solar and wind.