Re:Living On Mars? A Little Dose Of Reality
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 2, Informative
Humans to Mars is completely realistic. Here's why all your showstoppers don't hold up.
Yes, launch windows are only every 26 months and you have to spend over a year on mars before returning, but that's not a bad thing. You want to maximize the amount of time you spend studying the planet.
No, you don't have to take fuel for the return trip. You produce it on Mars by extracting carbon from the CO2 atmosphere and combining it with a small store of hydrogen you bring with you. Then you have methane, a perfectly respectable rocket fuel. The oxidizer gets extracted from the CO2 atmosphere as well. You bring a smallish nuclear reactor with you to power all this.
Yeah, you need a big heavy lift vehicle. We've made those before; remember Saturn V? Variants of the Space Shuttle stack can also be used. You can fit all the supplies and cargo and astronauts on one launch to Mars, and send them their return vehicle on a separate launch.
Radiation in space can be dealt with perhaps by circulating water through the hull of the spaceship. For protection from the occasional solar flare, astronauts can cram into a small central heavily shielded area of the craft. Radiation on Mars isn't toooo much of a worry becuase it's got an atmosphere, albeit a thin one, and bags of Martian sand can be laid across the top of the habitat for extra protection.
Yeah, there's a problem with the low gravity in space, but you're only in space for six months at a time. Astronauts recover pretty quickly from six month tours on space stations. Mars itself has over a third of Earth's gravity, so we're *hoping* that should suffice when combined with regular exercise.
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Humans to Mars is completely realistic. Here's why all your showstoppers don't hold up.
Yes, launch windows are only every 26 months and you have to spend over a year on mars before returning, but that's not a bad thing. You want to maximize the amount of time you spend studying the planet.
No, you don't have to take fuel for the return trip. You produce it on Mars by extracting carbon from the CO2 atmosphere and combining it with a small store of hydrogen you bring with you. Then you have methane, a perfectly respectable rocket fuel. The oxidizer gets extracted from the CO2 atmosphere as well. You bring a smallish nuclear reactor with you to power all this.
Yeah, you need a big heavy lift vehicle. We've made those before; remember Saturn V? Variants of the Space Shuttle stack can also be used. You can fit all the supplies and cargo and astronauts on one launch to Mars, and send them their return vehicle on a separate launch.
Radiation in space can be dealt with perhaps by circulating water through the hull of the spaceship. For protection from the occasional solar flare, astronauts can cram into a small central heavily shielded area of the craft. Radiation on Mars isn't toooo much of a worry becuase it's got an atmosphere, albeit a thin one, and bags of Martian sand can be laid across the top of the habitat for extra protection.
Yeah, there's a problem with the low gravity in space, but you're only in space for six months at a time. Astronauts recover pretty quickly from six month tours on space stations. Mars itself has over a third of Earth's gravity, so we're *hoping* that should suffice when combined with regular exercise.