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How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger published a piece that touched on one of the most vexing issues surrounding NASA's "road to Mars," that being that of cost. How does one design a deep space exploration program that "the nation can afford," to coin a phrase uttered by the old NASA hand interviewed for the article? The phrase is somewhat misleading since one of the truisms of federal budgeting is that the nation can afford quite a bit. A more accurate phrase might be, "that the nation is willing to spend."
Obviously the least expensive in terms of consumables.
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
If you want to make Mars at all realistic, you need to start by building a set of space and mars-dust hardened machinery capable of doing remote controlled construction. What we send would need to have the ability to tunnel, create cement from Martian soils, smelt, and construct buildings. All to create an environment that might be capable of sustaining life. This is because keeping astronauts alive is orders of magnitude harder than anything else we might conceivably do.
Technologically, we're no where near there yet. Counter-intuitively, the hardest step is the first one: getting out of our own gravity well. The minimal amount of material that we would have to get into orbit to be able to construct a settlement is considerably larger than the International Space station, which is, I remind everyone, the most expensive human construct - at $100 billion dollars. The next most difficult stage would be landing on Mars with precision, not breaking anything.
Right now, China is extending over it's neighbors and other "contested" areas. Russia is trying to recreate the soviet empire, then there are a lot of countries trying to develop nuclear weapons while led by sociopaths ...
If you discount so easily the need for military might, then history has nothing for you.
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
Which is exactly why as a space systems engineer, I'm working on Seed Factories ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ). Fully automated self-replication is hard. Instead, a Seed Factory grows grows from a starter set by three methods rather than one:
* Diversification - making new machines not in the starter set
* Scaling - making different size machines (usually larger), and
* Replication - making exact copies of what you already have
Your starter set allows you to make *some* parts and materials locally. The remainder is imported. As you add more machines, you can do other processes and make other products, and reduce how much you need to import.
Rather than try to make it all automated, you use remote control and *some* live humans where necessary. Thus an asteroid processing plant in near-Lunar orbit, or robots building a Lunar base can mostly be controlled from Earth, with occasional human visitors to fix things. Once you are producing food, water, oxygen, fuel, etc , then you can bring in more permanent occupants. The same goes with Mars. Start with a control station on Phobos, which is close enough for real-time VR. The crew remote control surface robots who prepare the landing site. Once enough equipment is set up down there, humans can follow.
Other people are working on finding asteroids and how to bring them where you need them. That's why I'm working on self-bootstrapping factories. Once you have the raw materials, you have to make useful products out of it. Launching whole industrial plants is too heavy and expensive. So you want to make most of the equipment on-site if you can, out of the materials you are mining.