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.

 

 

 

Mars or Bust

 

Last week (May 6-8), George Washington University hosted the second annual "Humans2Mars" Summit.  Hundreds of scientists, astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss what it will take to get us to Mars. Manned space flight into the solar system has been dormant for decades - basically ever since the US beat the Soviets to the moon. Since then, no one seems to have had the energy, the imagination, or the resources to put together a program to get a human being beyond Earth orbit - not even to the moon.

The goal of the H2M conference was to address the major challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030. Agenda topics included human and robotic precursor missions, science and engineering needed for the program, creating a viable space economy, agriculture and food production, biomedical challenges, international cooperation and other subjects. Among the many agenda topics were robotic and human precursor missions, launch systems, Mars transit challenges, space suit design, biomedical challenges, entry, descent and landing, in situ resource utilization, surface power, science goals, agriculture and food production, international cooperation, and creating a viable space economy. [Picture is from the NASA website. "This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light."]

Well at least people are beginning to think about it. And it's not just limited to the H2M gang. The April issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" had an interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Space Adventures and the head of two other companies including Planetary Resources, which plans to extract minerals from near-Earth asteroids. James Fallow's article was titled "Life on Mars". Anderson's vision is breath-taking: "In the next generation or two - say the next 30 to 60 years - there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony." He thinks the location of this permanent colony will be Mars and that it will grow within a hundred years from a few thousand people to a few million. Anderson considers economics to be the only real challenge - that technological and engineering solutions already are available. Mining the asteroids is the path he thinks will make the economics attractive.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the featured speakers at H2M, has devised a master plan for missions to Mars – the “Aldrin Mars Cycler” – a spacecraft transportation system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Aldrin explains the concept in his new book, Mission to Mars. The cycler would require a "substantially large vehicle that would provide radiation shielding and spacious quarters in order to guarantee the safety and comfort of outbound-to-Mars and inbound-to-Earth astronaut crews." The Aldrin Cycler would travel around the sun, making close flybys of Earth and Mars - a trajectory that is continuously repeated every two and a half years with astronauts boarding and disembarking the cycler via a "small but speedy space taxi". Taking advantage of Newton's Laws of Motion, the Cycler could shuttle continuously "without requiring a significant amount of propellant to keep on track." [Photo is of Buzz Aldrin on his moonwalk.  Buzz was the second man on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Mission to Mars gives a comprehensive picture of the "Flexible Path architecture" for going to Mars. Flexible Path architecture combines a lunar strategy with near-Earth-asteroid-mining missions and uses the Martian moon Phobos as a way point to Mars. Aldrin suggests that "going to Mars means permanence on the planet. It cannot be run as a series of one-shot deals as were the moon landings - you know: fly there, plant a flag, take a picture and come home. Rather this will involve astronauts committing to "living out his or her life on the surface of Mars." As he points out: "Living far from Earth in a remote and confined will surely induce physiological and psychological stresses." Hmm, to say the least...it will also take a pioneering spirit beyond anything we have had on Earth during the Age of Exploration from the late fifteenth century on. Indeed the permanent residents of Mars will be homesteaders rather than explorers. In Aldrin's vision, they will employ in situ resource utilization to reduce the costs of resupply.

It's good that we dream these dreams. Without such, we will never move into the greater universe. But there is a practical side too - namely, the benefits Earth can derive from a permanent colony on Mars, which has, after all, a land mass equivalent to that of Earth.

(To be continued...)

 

Links

 

News article on H2M conference from space.com .

 

Humans2Mars Conference website

 

Space Adventures website: "the only company to have sent private citizens to space"