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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.
This, like most plans about survivability on Mars, is fantasy level design. Just have to carry the water in supply ships or bring it with you around each transport ship (once we make ships that do that) or mine the water from the Martian surface (hopefully it's about the same as what we need, right?).
I believe, the only way to live on Mars, in the forseeable future, is underground. That has enough problems to make it impractical in the next century. It's been particularly biting that In the 80's we thought we'd have flying cars and instead we got the "don't pokemon and drive" freeway warnings.
If we can get something long-term set up on the Moon, we can handle Mars. Humans haven't been willing or able to try yet. It should net some tasty govt grants though, eventually (eco-dome experiments primarily resulted in a terrible movie).
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Any kind of agriculture is going to depend on artificial lighting no matter what. 44% of the light that reaches earth reaches mars, virtually all plants that are used by agriculture require substantially more light than this. If you don't believe me, put a heated greenhouse without any artificial lighting up in the winter in a non-equatorial latitude and see how well things grow. Things like rye and wheat may be able to survive pretty cold temperatures when sprouting and getting started but they grow best in long northern summer days of 14-18 hours. Don't even start thinking about most vegetable crops. Supplemental light is absolutely required and it's presence would block most natural sunlight. On earth a greenhouse can be designed to cheat a little by simply extending the day because while the days might get be short in winter, the sun is still relatively strong. On Mars, even high noon sun isn't strong enough to do much with.
I just wanted to thank Rei and wierd_w for some topical, intelligent hilarity.
Seems like most of the comments on slashdot these days are made by dumb people, are not topical to the thread they're posted in, and usually have to do with Trump or Clinton.
It's good to see some engineers getting lippy with each other over things like the definition of glass. That's why I come to slashdot - to find people smarter than me arguing about interesting things.
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.
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