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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."
Even that is wrong. Given enough resources and a reduced concern for the health and safety of the astronauts, we could probably reach Mars about as fast as we could build the ship and launch it towards the red planet. We've had the technology to launch - and land - men there since the '70s. But both the cost and risk were considered too extravagant, especially considering the lack of significant reward for all that effort. While a ten-year deadline might be a bit tight considering the US would have to build up the industry to support such an effort, if it really wanted to it could very likely get a man to Mars and back within that schedule. It would just cost A LOT more money than is prudent and we'd probably see a number of astronauts either splattered across the Martian surface or stranded down their until their life-support systems gave out (landings and lift-offs are hard).
Otherwise, most of Regis' other arguments are bunk. It would be a long, cramped, unpleasant journey? People have suffered far worse; the early antarctic explorers, or sailors from the Age of Sail. Hell, we have refugees cramming themselves for weeks at a time into tiny boxes that would seem luxuriously expansive to any astronaut in hopes of reaching a better life. And the lack of gravity only HELPS here; yes, it is initially disorienting to see people hanging at "nauseating angles" but it opens up a lot of wasted space, making what appears to be a very cramped habitat much more spacious because all that wasted space on the walls and ceilings can be put to use.
Nonetheless, I do ultimately agree with Regis' premise that Mars should not be the goal simply because Mars is a dead-end. I mean, what are you going to do once you get there that can't be done here on Earth? Dreams of terraforming aside, in the short term (read: next few centuries at least) man will only be able to live on Mars if encapsulated in climate-controlled metal-tubes. And if people are going to be stuck in metal tubes anyway, it might as well be tubes that can MOVE places instead of being anchored to rock at the bottom of a steep gravity well. L5 colonies, asteroid mining, and ultimately island-hopping our way through the Solar System, the Oort cloud and beyond are far more entertaining and profitable enterprises than being tethered to another planet just because its there. Forget Mars; it's a luxury that we can look into after we get the basics down. In the mean time, if you really want to explore off-world colonization options, use the Moon; it's closer.
What really cemented my belief that going to Mars is impossible with current technology is this article. The biggest thing to me is just how much supplies you need to sustain yourself for the trip. 3 million pounds worth of supplies. That's 60 shuttle launches worth of supplies. Sure there's rockets that can lift more than the shuttle could, but even with those heavy lifter rockets, you're probably looking at around 30 launches just to get the gear into space. Then there's the problem of being stuck in a tin can for 9-12 months, and still being in good enough shape to do something useful once you get there.
If you want to come back, the minimum stay is 3-4 months while you wait for the planets to line up again. And there is no turn around option like with the Apollo missions. Once you are on your way, there's no way to bail out and come back quickly in the event of an emergency.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's about going everywhere else. The tech developed going to Mars will undoubtedly be useful when going other places. You crawl before you walk, you walk before you run.
Then go to the moon first.... Colonize it where the technology can be perfected in a place where help is perhaps a week away and not at least a year away like Mars would be a lot of the time. IMHO we will kill less people this way and still get much of the same technologies developed we will need to keep expanding our reach. Take smaller steps. It's not as glamorous because we've been there before, but it gets us into technology development.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
A Venusian cloud city isn't as "romantic", as you never get to physically walk on the surface... but it is indeed easier (very easy entry, much better radiation protection, earthlike gravity, more frequent launch windows, much easier EVAs, no landing site restrictions, much more sunlight (and nearly doubled due to reflection from below), etc) as well as being more useful. Latency doesn't matter much when operating Mars probes remotely, but on Venus, when any atmosphere-diving surface explorer probe is going to have a very limited period of time at the surface before it overheats, command latency is critical; also, maintenance needs on your surface probes are probably higher, which also calls for humans. Plus, any good Venus exploring program would have power generation/recharging, cooling, and sample analysis done at altitude in a centralized aerial station rather than hauling down (and back up) a lot of sensitive equipment that you have to protect from the heat - which makes it easier to just declare that central station a manned laboratory. You can explore the whole planet rather than just the area immediately around your landing site. And lastly, we've explored Mars way better than we've explored Venus - there's far bigger outstanding scientific questions about Venus than about Mars.
It'd also be a lot more comfortable to live on Venus. Buoyancy = space. People will have a lot of room to move around in. Or grow plants or whatever else. And could potentially walk outside on the surface of the craft in as little as an oxygen mask and eye protection (the CO and SOx levels are too high for the eyes but might be tolerable to the skin). Some SOx-hardy plants might even be able to grow on the exterior of the craft if properly watered and nourished.
I daresay that Venus also has more potential to be profitable than Mars in the distant future. There's a lot of potential for precipitating out exotic compounds in the high pressure / high temperature environment, the Venera probes found some types of lava flows often associated with rare mineral deposits, and there's good evidence to suggest large carbonatite flows which are often associated with even rarer deposits.
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers
Heh... GP poster's clueless.
At 29,029 feet above sea level, the summit is at the altitude that jetliners cruise at. People summiting it without supplimental O2 are insane and I question their having done it to be blunt. I think it's a "full of shit" item- and they couldn't have actually done it even if it's claimed to have been done.
Hypoxia will cut in well before you summit.
Here's a decent chart of effective O2 availability at quite a few known altitudes.
At the summit of Everest, you have only 6.9% versus 20.9% at sea level.
If you had a cabin rupture of a jetliner at the average altitude of FL300 (30000 ft...) you will have a time to unconsciousness of 1-3 minutes depending on your overall fitness. You will die shortly afterwards. There's a reason they have oxygen masks that pop out on jetliners in a cabin breach condition- that gets auto-triggered at depressure. This isn't because you suddenly lost O2 pressure- this is one of those things you honestly and really can't "build up to" like is implied there. There is just insufficient O2 in the air to function. There's a reason they call it the "Death Zone" on the mountain.
Here's a few parting links:
A Chart of the SpO2 percentages at relative Altitude
A pretty detailed aviator discussion of O2 at altitudes...
Quite simply put...I can't see how **ANYONE** could actually do as claimed by the GP poster there. It's bullshit.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell of a long-endurance spacecraft using the existing state-of-the-art in life-support and logistical technology to endure for 9 months in space. To build such a thing is still decades off, and this is just one of the more trivial details of things that people fail to understand. No doubt its FEASIBLE, but that degree of engineering doesn't happen without a LOT of buildup. Look at the plan diagrams that have been published, they include several generations of technology in this area before we're really ready.
Beyond that no existing technology will land men on Mars with the ability to take off again. A lunar-lander style 'direct descent' would require a huge amount of fuel because the ascent engine would be pretty large, on top of the lander itself, and thus the descent engine would be prohibitively large. This means we have to design some sort of aerobreaking/parachute/glider/rocket hybrid approach. Those which have been used in the past are only good for a up to a couple 1000 kg, not enough for a manned landing by a long shot. Again, its FEASIBLE to do this, but we are at least a decade away from such a thing, maybe more.
So, maybe we mostly agree at some level, but I think your 10 years, even for an insanely useless project, is highly optimistic.
As for your ideas on reasons to go or not go, I heartily concur. Mars is a useless waste of a place to go except perhaps as a science destination, and in that case you can send 100 unmanned rovers per human. While a rover is far less than a human 100 sophisticated rovers with advanced manipulators, semi-autonomy, and sample return capability are unlikely to be outperformed by one miserable man who can only move a few km from his landing point and can't stay more than a couple weeks.
If you want to 'colonize Mars' it would make FAR more sense to colonize Antarctica, or the deep ocean, both of which are infinitely more hospitable and closer.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
52,5km is Denver air pressures with ~37C/100F air temperatures, which seems a nice balance. Plus, it's a "dry heat" ;)
The SOx isn't actually as concentrated as most people picture, it's a diffuse mist... more like a bad smog. Yes, it's corrosive to some materials, but not to everything. Most plastics, for example, are indifferent to it. So are many metals (at practical Venusian concentrations, most metals are probably fine, even steels). And on the upside, you don't have the dust problems as found on Mars, have far less radiation exposure, and far more constant temperatures.
There are of course a couple disadvantages to being at altitude while exploring the surface. One of the most notable is that the winds are far faster at those altitudes than at the surface, so you'd have to play "catchup" with your surface-exploring probes. One way to do that is to have the probes float up even higher than the base on return from a surface trip, into even faster winds. There are also some concerns about turbulence and lightning, although we think these are confined to lower altitudes. Unfortunately, we've explored Venus so little that it's hard to make definitive statements. :P
Another common misconception is that there's "no water" on Venus. Actually, Venus's atmosphere has almost as much water vapor as Earth's atmosphere - it's just mixed in with a *lot* of other stuff, mainly CO2, which is why the percentage is so low. The percentage is however notably higher at "typical floating colony" altitudes than at near the surface. In addition to carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur in the atmosphere, at those levels Venus's atmosphere also contains a number of other useful chemicals - lots of nitrogen (as N2); moderately low amounts of argon, low amounts of helium and neon; very low amounts of chlorine (as HCl) and phosphorus (as H3PO4 - it's more commonly found lower); and trace amounts of hydrofluoric acid and what appears to be volcanic ash/dust (the Venera probes identified small amounts of probable iron and silica on detectors during descent). Thankfully there are notably different properties between the atmospheric constituents - for example, a chilling stage would first draw out a mixture of acids (containing the water and dusts), then the bulk CO2 would freeze out, leaving the N2 and noble gases. Further steps would depend on what the goal was. So if one wants to look at the long term view, there's a lot of potential to produce a wide range of plastics and plant macronutrients just from the atmosphere - although metals and many of the lesser plant nutrients would probably have to come from the surface (such as the tailings from the rocks being studied (nearer term) or mined (longer term)) unless one is highly effective at capturing ash/dust.
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers
Actually, a good pre-requisite would seem to be a space elevator, which would be a better investment now that we are getting materials strong enough to build a tether in principle. Then we could relatively cheaply get a spaceship up there.
== Jez ==
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