New Mars Forums

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/15emv9oTFG/
Video commentary on 2D CFD simulation currently underway.

The core vision is SSTO. That is a total of 9 tons of deliverables to orbit: 1 ton of people, 3 tons of deorbit fuel and 5 tons of useful payload to orbit. TSTO ideas are thought experiments to boost our payload beyond 5 tons and are secondary to SSTO which is our core objective. We wouldn't even entertain the idea of 3rd stage. Most we would concede is a suborbital vehicle if our numbers fall short. But we're not there yet so SSTO is still our primary objective.

Have a look in our files section of our website for reference material about the latest research by NASA and China for burns beyond mach 6 and 100,000ft. We are currently doing 2D CFD engine analysis and could use some help to confirm our design capabilities

Files:
http://space-plane.org/files.htm
Videos :
https://www.facebook.com/share/1AetL2Y59C/

Help wanted:

1. Combustion Specialist

We are currently looking for a combustion specialist with expertise in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to run internal flow simulations and assist us with our rocket based combined cycle (RBCC) engine design.

2. Control Expert

We need a control specialist to fix phugoid (pitch) oscillations. You can see this in some of the older Facebook videos when the space plane is not simply fixed to 11 deg pitch.This is a very common problem and we need a control expert to fix this. There might be significant propellant saving in doing so, this will again boost useful payload beyond 5 tons without the need to resort to TSTO.

I came up with this idea because I realized that we could push the comet significantly in just a few days with a practical number of tzar bombs at aphelion where the comet is only 900m/s and 100m/s (a doable delta v with tzar bombs) is as a result of this a relatively a large delta v at this point( equating to 1/9th velocity of comet ) that would be able to change the path of the comet significantly in a multiplier effect. This is a Hoffman orbital transfer where you time your deceleration or acceleration at the slowest and highest point in orbit where you get the biggest bang for your buck in thrusting: it's efficient. But the catch is you will have a relatively short window in time to act. This is why I prefer H bombs as they have the highest energy density and thrust compared to fission reactors containing heavy machinery designed to for a prolonged thrust with heavy fuel rods. Turns out also comets tend to have highly elliptical orbits thus making them the slowest objects in our solar system at that point in their orbits: thus working to our advantage on top of the fact they contain vaporizable ice that we can use as propellant. With fission reactors decades just won't cut it at aphelion as aphelion in this case lasts days not even a year. It defeats the idea of this space/math hack.

The lose gravel is a concern if they divide up the core of the comet. That's why firing in volleys with synchronous detonation will be favourable to mitigate this by pushing the body evenly by covering an entire face with simultaneous detonations. It's not full proof, we might still end up spreading material into a tail typical of it when its closer to the sun but it will still be a partial success if at least 19% of the material hits Mars at 70km/s.

Problem with your decades long idea is isp, it's too low. I looked into it.  Besides, I rather do this in days than years. Also doesn't take advantage of the elliptical nature of the orbits, it's better for objects with circular objects or are much lighter. So I'm already skeptical. Also keep in mind that H bombs contain a lot more energy than uranium/plutonium per unit mass regarding logistics. 2.5 tzar bombs contain the energy requirement you quoted but energy coupling will initially be low at 30-45% and as we chisel out the ice nozzle it could grow to 80% as long as it's ice and not ruble making up the core.

Bottom line: the inspiration for this idea is that we can move massive icy objects not just because they are made of vaporizable propellant but because they have highly elliptical orbits making them movable within the realm of human tech at aphelion in a window of a few days. There is a multiplier effect at aphelion where comets are close to stationary: that amplifies tiny changes there all the way down as big changes to perihelion. The payoff being that at perihelion we have the opposite condition being true that is a super fast 70km/s comet that can deposit vast quantities of heat energy to a planet to melt it's ice caps such as Mars. Heck it doesn't even need to impact directly on the poles! The type of impact that killed the dinosaurs can melt the ice caps on Mars too, makes me wonder if our ice caps also melted because of the dinosaur killing comet.

To get the tech out to those aphelion is another subject but I'm optimistic because we can use the tzar bombs them selves as a kind of Orion/daedelius style ship to get the bombs there or net the comet and hitch a ride there.

If it were me I would send an AI controlled ship to the comet with many Tzar bombs each with it's THAAD like propulsion system which is very accurate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM

With AI the ship near the comet makes independent decisions without lag of Earth to comet communications. Then it fires the nukes like flying torpedoes in formation like in the scene with the sphere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6oZTq_KsXc

Multiple blasts that trigger simultaneously at various strategic spots. The AI will also model the comet body using sensors to figure out composition of mass the best it can. It will model rotation, mass, composition, orientation, velocity, acceleration etc etc then calculate a strategy to move it to the desired trajectory and create firing solutions. After the detonations it will then repeat above process iteratively.

There's been like 3 interstella comets coming into our solar system, I think their all comets and one of them will make a very close pass at Mars. Would be a great candidate to deflect to hit it so we can warm up the planet and melt the ice caps:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-on … UpfNYm6kns
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/03/scie … t-3i-atlas

So we will now not need preassure suits nor jumpers! Just a scuba tank and regulator for the oxygen while photosynthesis does its thing when we plant trees and algae in liquid water lakes.

Interesting! Yes I agree this is good news. If SpaceX can install hall thrusters it will make the fuel tankers recoverable and boost the efficiency and speed of the entire flight profile including return of the expended tankers and transit of the crewed ship.

You cannot replace this idea completely with the electric propulsion simply because they do not have sufficient thrust to speed up transit to only 15 days like chemical rockets can, however they can help boost it slightly with the chemical rockets doing most of the push. And they can help recover the expended tanker over a long period of time (months-years).

I got ChatGBT to generate the numbers for the new propulsion system. I will get to work to integrate this idea into a 2.0 version of my idea and see what I come up with in a few weeks. Notice thrust force for the electric thrusters are way too low to replace chemical rockets rather than augment them. Having about 1200 argon thrusters (equivelent mass of 1 raptor2 engine) burn for 15 days would consume only 87 tons of Argon!

I did however compare an equivelent mass of Argon thrusters to a single unit of Raptor 2 which is 1.5 tons. And I had some interesting results:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ba566f-5ac8 … 211ad20d73

1. An equivelent number of Argon thrusters can give the same amount of impulse(push) of a raptor 2 engine burning in 1 second in 24 minutes.

Seems that the 15 day journey allows the same amount of impulse by hall thrusters to give an equivilent push from raptor engines burning 500 tons of fuel. That means it's possible to save 33% of chemical fuel by using these Argon thrusters complimenting the Raprtor 2 engines.

Many thanks for your contribution!

I've updated the original post but here is the main thing: 2 rockets gets us to 10km/s which is 25 days transfer. To get the speedy 2 week 14 days transfer need 2 more rockets, check original post for details or just read the screenshot below.

Google Spreadsheet showing the numbers here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ … drive_link

https://photonbytes.com/2025/01/23/55km … -idea-2-0/
Updated my website with an article on this.

If you refer to the illustration above you will see that to get half a bar you need to go down to roughly 50km and to get a full bar it's only another 5-10km which is an additional 10-20% more depth. I would argue that if 0.5 bar is advantageous in anyway for plant life you could do some hydroponics and/or greenhouse at the 50km level but you might as well have both that and the full bar levels in your tunnel and have both so that you can also have medical and housing facilities on the 55-60km level. This is because air is compressible. So you get an exponential type gain by extending the bottom a little bit more.

Regarding the pressure discussed by AI, those pressures of thousands of bars are only exerienced by the rocks being compressed vertically, not by any aircavity down to that level. If you have a cavity in the crust down to that depth it can support any air pressure from 0bars to the thousands you quoted. But when you connect that air cavity to a vertical tunnel to the surface of Mars the limit drops to the weight of the air column in that tunnel all the way up to space. In fact the air preasure will then be fixed to whatever the weight of the air column would be. If you try to add more air preassure it will simply push more air out the tunnel. If you try to reduce the pressure without an airlock it will do the opposite and suck air in.

I've added some pylons in the close up versions of my illustrations, it's just a draft but these can be floors for the basement of a skyscraper that can reach kms above the surface because of the deep foundations and lower gravity, nevermind the lighter than air internal balloons I originally proposed!

https://photonbytes.com/2025/01/23/55km … -idea-2-0/



Eventually we can have either the entire building and basement 1 bar or each floor can have a set preassure for whatever biological reason wether for plant life, habitation or medical. Obviously there will be 1-5 elevators. Or else it will take days to walk up and down like in Apple TV's "Silo". If big enough could be a space cannon/gun to launch people/payload up to escape velocity, which for Mars would be 5km/s. Easy! At this point you might think the original reason for this structure is now gone but not really because if there was a natural disaster, the bottom section of that tunnel basement remains the "safe zone", the building might be compromised but everyone on level -55km will survive as long as the cavity holds.

Oxygen is lighter than CO2. Yes this is true, forgot about that! I did factor this in in my crater idea to do the same thing with a comet instead of a drill Thanks for reminding me!

Original Article:
https://photonbytes.com/2023/01/08/micr … r-on-mars/

I have updated my article accordingly:
https://photonbytes.com/2025/01/23/55km … -idea-2-0/

Humans can settle in the Oxygen bubble cavities that are above a lower CO2 zone that has a water lake that the nuclear thermal reactor uses as a radiator thus keeping it warm. This CO2 zone can be rich vegetation zone with algae and trees converting CO2 to oxygen that floats into the habitable region accessible by ramp.

I'll just hit the topic of why we should bother with this idea if we can just drill shallower and live still live in cavities. We can also do that and I expect we will do that before doing anything remotely as big as my grand 55km tunnel. The motivation is to completely eliminate the risk of sudden death by decompression. While it's true that drilling only a couple hundred meters will surfice to live in a cavity, you will still need airlocks. The dread of death is still shadowing you constantly. By having a "safe zone" that risk is completely eliminated, no human or mechanical failture will doom anyone. By doing it this way we use natural forces to survive and anything down in the bottom of that 55km deep tunnel should make a cavity large enough to make it worth while and therefore should scale up habitation there that will be much cheaper and economical to live in. This zone can act as a fall back position and emergency zone for any kind of medical emergency suffered by surface dwelling stations. They always have a place to fall back to instead of relying on ships in orbit for support.

Not to mention the science and geology we can do will be priceless in studying the formation of Mars and the Universe. I am assuming the lower gravity will make such a deep tunnel more practical vs Earth.

This is just a basic idea, obviously as said previously we need that silo too which isnt shown in the updated illustration above, we can also enhance this tunnel with "skyscrapers" along the sides of the tunnel/silo that are preasurized between floor levels for the upper levels where the atmosphere is thinner. The lower levels only need to keep the CO2 out and the O2/N2 in so they won't need such expensive barriers. I will have to make an illustration for this soon. Lastly there is also the option to add a skyscrper on top of the tunnel that gives dwellers observation power and if we really wanted to we can replace the entire tunnel air with Oxygen Nitrogen after the photosynthesis down in the lake converts enough of that CO2 into O2. This can be a multi phase project. A skyscraper on Mars is easier to build on Earth due to lower gravity. There is also the option to enhance the structure with lighter than air internal balloons using Hydrogen that wont combust in the Martian CO2. This idea I have touched in my article about lighter than air structures for Earth:
https://photonbytes.com/2023/05/10/ligh … km-height/

Also doing it this way we are actually terraforming Mars without the need for airlock or preassure barriers. Although if we end up adding dwelling spaces along the tunnel as an underground building we end up adding those redundancy barriers much later anyways when we have sufficient Oxygen to live along the vertical silo.