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Sorry. This is not my opinion this is fact. If you've come to this site in recent days you see a front page dominated by political threads (and mostly US-related) threads. Gotta be a killer for any Mars-orientated site. You can ignore that fact if you want but it's still a fact. No person interested in Mars would expect to find a front page dominated by American domestic politics.
Completely agree.
I am sure the content of the book's great but the graphics!!! We need to move away from the 80s red dust vibe! It's horrible!!
Let's use more real colour. Let's picture people more as they would be on Mars ie in pressurised environments, indoors or in vehicles, not undertaking hazardous EVAs.
My feelings exactly... That's actually one of the reasons I'm taking part in this discussion.
Thank you all for the welcoming comments – having lurked here for many years, I really appreciate being able to contribute to a constructive discussion. I've emailed Casey Handmer to invite him to join the discussion, and I hope he does. I would be very interested in hearing what he thinks of e.g. using basalt instead of steel, and the challenges of producing the necessary quantities of plastics.
Speaking of constructive thinking about solutions for establishing a sustainable human presence on Mars, there's a new book coming out that looks to be interesting – I hope these solutions are realistic, and take the challenges discussed here into account:
https://www.marssociety.org/news/2020/0 … RO7FQJqVKM
By the way, referring to the earlier discussion about the challenges of how low Martian temperatures can affect the structural integrity of materials such as steel, do you see any potential problems for e.g. the outer layers of Starship when used as an interim habitat, as has been suggested by SpaceX?
While not an engineer, it's always been surprising to me that so many/most design concepts for Mars habitats fail to take the challenges seriously – materials, pressure, construction methods required, etc – and it's refreshing to see such a well-informed discussion. Thank you all for sharing your expertise and thoughts!
I found this post on Casey Handmer's blog about using a thin, flexible tensile membrane supported by its own pressure to pressurize large areas for habitation and manufacturing very interesting, as it addresses many of the problems you've been discussing in this thread, and also addresses the need for large amounts of space to create an industrial base, which is seldom discussed:
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019 … ver-rated/
Do you think this concept holds up? Any thoughts?
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