New Mars Forums

Hi Yang, do you know anything about the taifun that was about to strike the Chinese coast a few days back? I hope it hasn't caused any major trouble there like Katrina.

Was just watching CNN, that FEMA official is a joke, he's telling they needed time to mobilize the national guard and get them in before they could be supplemented by active duty personel.
Did this Iraq war confuse them so much they don't know the simplest basics anymore?
You send in the regular forces first and don't wait for reservists to get assembled before you do it. And don't tell me thousands of troops appearantly aviable are not enough to keep some f*cking drug addicts with guns from raping and harassing people.
With all the air transport power they could have had them in a matter of hours, not days.

Well anyways I hope things are turning for the better finally, they should accept the water treatment machines, they are pretty new and were built exactly for this kind of situation where you need fresh water made out of filthy.

I agree, clark.

Welcome to the forum Frank,

I guess most of us have already heard about the Red Colony site of yours, which is yet another useful contribution to the space movement.
About the fragmentation I have to say that we are making progress anyway, just look at the emerging suborbital market, the nanotube people or the Mars analog stations of the MS.
This is the beauty of it, that it has already become far more than a single organization and is in the process of becoming a second way to reach orbit without the help of any government (other than just allowing it to happen).
People all around the globe are working towards the same commong goal, even though most of them don't even know about each other.
Advocacy is still a very important part of the whole, we need to get as many people involved into space related work as possible.
For lack of qualification, never let that stop you from trying out new things, you can learn anything you want if you just stay at it.
For me it was Tsiolkovsky whose biography proves this best, I mean if he could do the things he had done out of that situation most of us can do it also.

So just keep up the good work, we are on track even though it is still a long way.

What if the suit is designed in a way that the top of the suit can be fitted into some sort of docking adapter and opened wide enough that the astronauts can climb out through the top.

The suits would stay outside all the time connected to these locks like the gloves in a sandblast machine or a sterile room. They could be turned inward to clean the inside and cleaned by compressed CO2 on the outer side.

??? Heavy lift would help a lot to initially set up a space elevator, maybe the will be no other way to get the first ribbon up without in orbit construction.

I wonder how an electrical cable would interact with van Allen Belt radiation and what effect it has to the molecular structure of CNT. Taking a few grams of the material and exposing it to radiation here on Earth would be an interesting project.

Hmm that guy looks more like a Roman senator than a Scottish rebel to me.

Current situation in Germany is a new Communist party has been founded and allied with the former East German Communists, together they're at 10% now in the polls.
This has changed the situation, what looked like a sky high victory for the conservative coalition before is now a very close game.
While both the traditional left and right wing parties are denying to work together with this new party it could result in a grand coalition of the two largest parties, namely the conservative Christian Democtrats and the Social Democrats.
Now some important reforms have already been done by Schroeder, but it was the refusal of his party to continue the reforms that caused him to go for early elections in the first place. I have some doubts that a grand coalition would be able to agree on coherent reforms, but we'll see.

The question about demographics came up only in recent months in Germany, the left wing answer to it was to go for more immigration to get enough people at working age into the country. But then a professor calculated we would need something like 200 million immigrants in the next half century to keep the percentage of working people high enough, so now a more family encouraging policy is now being discussed by all parties.

What I'm missing in all the election campaigns is to make technological progress an agenda. This shows most people are still not getting it, the root of the problems with the economy are the restrictive policies against technologies like genetics, nuclear power or the lack of investment in spaceflight. Some people here obviously are of the opinion that we can stay wealthy indefinitely just by producing expensive cars and this one is a big mistake.

Hmm very interseting simulation there, too, looks quite detailed. But is there really no way to interact in the game? I mean it's useful to have the AI take over micromanagement of the colony,  but it would be interesting to try out different infrastructures and see which performs better.
Are there any resupply missions from Earth? This is another issue where one could  think of endless variations.

Anyways it must have been a tough job to make the AI completely independent on this scale, that's impressive. Congratulations for the people who developed it to this degree, always good to see others working on space related projects, keep up the good work.

edit:  Lol, the job chart reminds me of the upcoming election, was already figuring out which coalitions would get a majority.

Just found the Marsbase game the French chapter of the MS is developing.
Interesting game, definitely worth a look.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/salotti/marsbase.htm

That would help but there will have to be ventilators if natural flow is insufficient to exchange the air between different areas. This is because you will want to get the CO2 out of the living quarters and to the green houses even with mechanical aid if a natural flow isn't enough.
Alternatively one could try to filter out the CO2 and release it into the atmosphere near the living quarters and let some stream into the greenhouses. It might be too difficult to separate the small amount of CO2 to bother with though.

Still, it is not sure that air circulation alone will also be enough to exchange the heat, too, we need a design for a specific base and look into this matter with the whole system in mind, not just a part of it.

I'm just guessing but there might be mirrors that don't reflect UV light, maybe something like a prism that breaks up the light into spectral colours. We could use these exclusively to light up greenhouses rather than bothering with UV blocking windows if they can't be made any better.

A one way mission would be possible from the day any mission to Mars is doable at all. Returning the crew after a minimum of two years of being isolated from any resupply is not easier than sending a resupply capsule after this time.
But I'm realistic enough to know that the first one will be a return mission if it is done by a government space agency, which I'm not 100% sure about after seeing this fuel tank debacle, it's definately not going to happen in this style.
Anyway I wouldn't support a one way mission without the option to return at the next window and would leave it up for the crew to decide if they want to stay.
Even for a two way mission, there will have to be a couple of long duration missions to the Moon before to test out as much of te equipment as possible with a fast emergency return option.

For the waste heat don't forget that the base temperature of Mars is some 60K lower than that on Earth, so you still have a temperature difference of about 100K, and this closer to absolute zero than on Earth making it more efficient for the same difference.
Anyway this is just wild guessing without doing some basic calculations.

GCN, you're right with not using pressurized CO2 within the base, maybe it would be good to add heat exchangers and a second water loop for habitable parts of the base, if it doesn't decrease efficiency too much.