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NASA Designs 'Ice Dome' For Astronauts On Mars (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The "Mars Ice Home" is a large inflatable dome that is surrounded by a shell of water ice. NASA said the design is just one of many potential concepts for creating a sustainable home for future Martian explorers. The idea came from a team at NASA's Langley Research Center that started with the concept of using resources on Mars to help build a habitat that could effectively protect humans from the elements on the Red Planet's surface, including high-energy radiation. The advantages of the Mars Ice Home is that the shell is lightweight and can be transported and deployed with simple robotics, then filled with water before the crew arrives. The ice will protect astronauts from radiation and will provide a safe place to call home, NASA says. But the structure also serves as a storage tank for water, to be used either by the explorers or it could potentially be converted to rocket fuel for the proposed Mars Ascent Vehicle. Then the structure could be refilled for the next crew. Other concepts had astronauts living in caves, or underground, or in dark, heavily shielded habitats. The team said the Ice Home concept balances the need to provide protection from radiation, without the drawbacks of an underground habitat. The design maximizes the thickness of ice above the crew quarters to reduce radiation exposure while also still allowing light to pass through ice and surrounding materials.
that astronauts will face a frosty reception on Mars.
...do they believe that only one of these many alternatives will be the way to live on Mars.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Trying to colonize Mars with rocket technology is like trying to Colonize the New World with canoes. What's really needed is a way to get off the planet that can do better then 10% takeoff weight to orbit (about theoretical max). Saturn V managed about 4%
They should build their igloos where the water ice is - at a pole. Maybe the Yanks should recruit some Canadians for their mission.
... I do have to admit, this one seems the best thought out (it's been covered here on Slashdot before). The level of detail that they went into on their work was impressive, on every front. Some of the unique concepts are rather interesting, such as having the outer ice shell shaped as a fresnel lens, thus concentrating sunlight to higher levels in the interior. I also like the nested aspects of it - providing a large uninsulated (but pressurized) staging yard (quite useful, particularly once you start ramping up ISRU and need room for lots of industrial systems and feedstock/output stockpiles), and an insulated greenhouse/courtyard around the primary shelter (nice thought toward human factors, as well as small scale agriculture). Having the primary shelter be constructed on Earth and simply landed (with its interior space initially filled up with the hardware needed to make the outer radiation protection / pressure shell) hits all the right buttons as well. Having the "printer" slide along grooves in the shell it sprays out is also a lot more elegant of a design than many other potential alternatives.
Still, there's a massive amount of engineering and testing that would be needed to make such a thing. And a lot of in-situ demo missions as well for each aspect of the technology, especially the (no hardware design given) vaporization-based water recovery system, but up to and including a small scale inflate-and-print testbed.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Self sealing too. Get a puncture? Blast of heat, then cold, and the ice'll seal it up good as new! :D
There seems to be a mix of ideas straight out of his fictional Mars Trilogy here..
For the really really nerdy, who wants to know more about this, I can recommend the podcast Orbital Mechanics, specifically this episode about the Nasa Centennial Challenge: 3d Printed Habitats. (Which the ice dome was part of)
http://theorbitalmechanics.com...
Other concepts had astronauts living in caves, or underground, or in dark, heavily shielded habitats.
Would we not take lights with us?
I've been reading about plans for manned spaceflight to Mars since I was a kid and saw an article in the newspaper about it the day after the Apollo 11 moon landing. That article quoted a NASA source saying we would be on Mars by 1990. No human has been beyond low Earth orbit since the 70s and I fear we may not have the resources or technology to achieve such a dream right now. I hope I'm wrong. It's still worth planning for it - but practically the cost of such a mission, not to mention a permanent settlement, is going to be far more than any one nation can afford. With the US at odds with the EU, Russia, and China I don't see much chance of cooperation on a project of that scale until the Cold War baby boomer generation finally dies off.
People ain't going to Mars to live in ice-cold igloos.
Just live in the caves - there plenty of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caves_of_Mars_Project
Came here expecting to see posts recommending transparent aluminum.
Was competely disappointed.
Will now jump into time machine to read a /. post from 1998 suggesting coating the dome with hot grits.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Will water shield against cosmic rays? Because that's what I've heard the main problem with mars colonization is - there is no magnetosphere to shield against solar storms. One hiccup from the sun and everyone on the surface gets a lethal dose of X-rays.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
That would be Russia. You know, the country that beat the US in most space milestones, yet is somehow lacking in all those supposed space spinoffs.
Well, you mean the Soviet Union. At its peak the Soviet Union had about the same population as the US has now: 293 vs. 319 million. Russia currently has a population of 143 million -- still a big country, but laboring under both a smaller population, smaller per capita wealth, and a system that funnels that bulk of that wealth to a small number of kleptocrats.
The thing that makes the difference in any technology race is human capital. You need large numbers of people, and you have to make good use of them. Hundreds of millions of uneducated peasants or unskilled laborers adds nothing to a country's technological might.
What made the US a powerhouse in the middle twentieth century was a large, educated middle class. Sure, Singaporeans are better educated than we are, and it shows in their outsized tech footprint for their population; but that population is only five million. The country to watch is India, which has a middle class larger than the US middle class. And it's the middle class you want to pay attention to, because there's where you have the combination of education and numbers necessary to be a tech innovator. When it comes to brains you need BOTH sheer numbers AND quality.
Unfortunately the US middle class isn't what it used to be. In 1968, we had a GINI coefficient of 38.6. GINI is a measure of income inequality; that would put us roughly in the neighborhood of Japan today. As of the last available data US GINI was approaching 48 and still climbing rapidly. That puts us in the neighborhood of Mexico, heading for Zimbabwe territory. Even Russia has more economic equality than we currently do.
It's not inequality per se that's the problem. There is nothing inherently bad about rich people having lots of money. In fact all other things being equal that's a good thing. But if you want a middle class family to put even one of its on average 3 children through a four year engineering degree, that family is going to have to come up with a lot of dough. The total costs of a four year STEM degree is $180k, and the median household income is just a hair over $50k. And while there is considerable public and private support, the cost of higher education has risen over the past thirty years while middle class incomes have stagnated. Income stagnation wouldn't make any difference if prices stagnated too, but they haven't. Some things like TVs and cars have got cheaper in real terms, but other things like education and health care have risen faster than inflation. People are getting priced out of the education market, and that reduces the net size of our national tech brain power.
If we want to remain a world leader in technology and science, we need to maintain and support the army of brains it will take to make that happen. In the 60s there was a distinct understanding that this undertaking was a national priority. Americans today take tech leadership as some kind of birthright, which it is not. That means we have to expect to fall behind India, China, and whatever kind of European Common Market remains after Brexit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Seriously, a lava tube while being darker, would be relatively even-keel on temps. In addition, it would do a better job of protecting from meteorites. Finally, with a lava tube, simple seals can let in light, but increase the pressure just a little bit to the point where plants can survive ( with artificial lighting obviously ). With a bit of genetics, we can figure out what plants can actually exists on Mars surface.
One thing that would be nice to see Musk do is send a couple of large wing flyers that can stay about 500-1000' above ground and get close-up pix of areas that he will be looking at for colonization. I would guess that more than a few tunnels can be found that would be ideal for this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the structure is just ice, it would be awfully brittle, and more so the colder it gets. Something like pykrete made with water and the martian soil should be rather more reliable over time.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Looks like a nice concept for a low-energy house in circumpolar regions. The HVAC unit can be connected to the outside atmosphere for ventilation, or detached in case of a chemical or nuclear hazard. It might not survive global warming though.
Let's just assume the following...
We haven't colonized the moon yet, and that's just a few days away. What makes anyone think that a manned mission to Mars (let alone any attempt at colonization) would be anything more than a multi-billion dollar suicide mission? Apollo missions were all just a simple malfunction from certain death. That Apollo 13 made it back alive was part luck, part good timing of when the service module exploded, and part *real* men (not millennial snowflakes) working 24/7 back on earth to get them back alive.
As for Antarctica - while supplies and help is less than a day away anywhere on the continent, it's nowhere near the conditions you'd find on Mars because you have water sources (lots of freshwater ice), food sources (penguins, seals, fish, etc..), and oxygen. So long as you have shelter and a heat source - you can live your entire life there - and help is generally a day's flight in and out of there. People do it all the time north of the Arctic circle.
Take for example asteroid mining, how long have we heard about that?
About as long as we've been hearing about rockets that land on their tail and self driving cars and handheld communications devices that connect to anyone. :-)