Mars Or Bust (Continued)

This is the second of two posts on the colonization of Mars.

We can overcome the technological challenges of getting humans to Mars. We can select the right kinds of people for a colony. But how do we make the venture self-sustaining? The costs of getting a person to Mars are untold times greater than sending an expedition across the Atlantic ocean to set up a  Jamestown colony or settling the American frontier with homesteaders. Obtaining the resources for self-sufficiency will require much development and innovation. Unless we want to limit the colony to billionaires who can pay the cost of their own ticket, government support will be needed. Since no single nation is prepared to prioritize these costs for the foreseeable future, the most likely case would involve an international cooperative effort.

Complementing this international, government-supported effort would be investments from private entrepreneurs willing to invest their capital for some share in the eventual long-term benefits. The emphasis here is on long-term.  Benefits from near-Earth asteroid mining, the first potential source of income, will take decades to become profitable. Likewise, a Martian colony will take decades to become self-sufficient. Among the first, and, according to Buzz Aldrin (Mission to Mars), imperative steps for the latter is in situ resource utilization (ISRU). ISRU projects would include "extraction and long-term storage of oxygen and/or hydrogen from available Martian resources..., hydrated minerals on the surface, and digging into Mars to utilize subsurface ice....[New] ISRU can be tapped, such as methane, perchlorates, and sulfur." The vision is to reduce the need for resupply missions by extracting from the Martian environment "water, oxygen, silicon, metals for life support, rocket fuels, and...construction materials."

The same long-term time frame holds for the technological spinoffs that will inevitably result. Looking back at the earlier space program, we see a slew of these spinoffs. Kidney dialysis machines, CAT scanners, advances in water purification technology, engine and exhaust dampening insulation, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) technology, vacuum metallizing techniques, cordless power tools and appliances, and surface enhancement coatings are just some of the 1400 documented NASA inventions from the space program - primarily from the Apollo Missions. What innovations might we expect from the Mars project? Perhaps there will be innovations on how to grow crops with minimal fresh water, materials science advancements coming from combatting the high levels of radiation, new techniques for mineral extraction, processes for weather control, or inventions that we cannot even imagine now. [Space.com webpage] 

Another benefit noted in Mission to Mars is that Mars, with a surface area equivalent to the land area of Earth, makes possible a "second home for humankind....Not only is the survival of the human race then assured, but the ability to reach from Mars into the resource-rich bounty of the Martian satellites and the nearby asteroids is also possible."

How long all of this will take is anybody's guess. Eric Anderson, in James Fallows' April Atlantic article, estimated that in 30 to 60 years we would see an "an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony". In 100 years the colony would "grow from a few thousand to a few million".  Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson laid out another scenario in his Mars trilogy. Red Mars, written in 1993, had the first human colonists arriving on Mars in 2026. Green Mars had a thriving, terraformed Mars complete with plants in the early 22nd century. Then 100 years after that, in Blue Mars,terraforming had advanced to the point where liquid water - in the form of rivers and seas - could exist on the Martian surface.  Ben Bova also has written on the colonization of the solar system - starting with Mars - in his "Grand Tour" novels (1992-2009).   In Bova's chronology, the international project to colonize Mars gets underway in 2020 - 28 years from the publication of Mars.

Hmm...I'm beginning to see a trend here. Every time someone guesses at a time frame for the start of a Mars project, it's about a generation away -28 years (Bova), 30 years (Anderson, lower estimate), and 33 years (Robinson). It kind of reminds me of my former life as an engineer. As chemical plants would be starting up for the first time or restarting after a maintenance downtime, a critical step would be the startup of the "process compressor". No matter when you walked into the control room and asked when the compressor would be starting up, the answer was always "in about 3 hours". The good news is that the compressor and the plant always did eventually start up. Hopefully the same will happen with Mars.