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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).
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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.