New Mars Forums

knightdepaix wrote:

An old idea of steam locomotive could be revive on Mars. Can the Boudouard reaction of carbon monoxide exergonic convertion to carbon dioxide and carbon can be used for driving engine ? At the beginning, the locomotive stores pressurized carbon monoxide which was made using geothermal, nuclear or solar enegy and shipped from local power plant. When the train is running, due to low Martian temperature, the exergonic reaction from CO to CO2 is favored. The heated CO2 exhaust under pressure exhaust is the energy source for locomotive. The carbon byproduct removed at next train station and CO is refueled. The carbon is collected and returned to power plant to regenerate CO using Martian atmospheric CO2.

Why not use stored carbon and liquid O2 as fuel?  Or for that matter, liquid methane and liquid O2?  As a rule, you want the highest energy density possible between refuellings.  Another option might be banks of those super lightweight solar panels that Louis was talking about, feeding energy directly into a third rail.  That way, your vehicle carries no fuel and is lighter and you have no conversion losses.  With so little atmosphere and no moisture, losses will be low.

We definitely need to unite!

I'm no war fanatic, but the old tactic of 'divide and conquer' definitely applies here. Our enemy is doubt. Doubt is everywhere I read about Mars exploration. Investors doubt that there will be profits. Politicians doubt that it will get them reelected. Even some Mars Society members doubt that their donations will actually get humans to Mars.

Now, I know that the many space exploration advocacy groups have widely differing goals. That is why they are not united. Putting them all together would only cause problems. But, the doubt still persists. This doubt may not destroy these organizations, but it greatly slows their progress.

What we need is to find a common goal. I think the one goal that all of these groups has is 'cheap access to space'. Once that cheap access is developed each organization could simply buy a ticket to Low Earth Orbit and pursue their varied goals from there. And, once they all work together and produce a system for cheap access to space, the afformentioned doubts will be greatly overcome.

Here's what I suggest. First, we all form a separate company to develope the cheapest way to get to LEO. (I assume this would employ 100% reusable vehicles, but we'll let the engineers decide that.) Second, each group invests a portion of its membership dues to this cause. This would have to be done year after year until our goal is met. Third, once the transportation system is designed, each contributing organization (or anyone else) can use it for whatever it wants to do.

Doing this would overcome two of the biggest obstactles:
Earth's Gravity - and the high cost of escaping it, and
Doubt - and the lack of investment and support that it creates.

Loius its not the number of growing season as so much what gets grown simutainously that gives you a complete supply of all food types to create meals from....matching cycles to provide just the right amount of each so that any surplus is then canned or preserved for later use in other forms rather than just in raw form...

If it takes x time to grow letuce and you want cucumbers for it then y for cucumbers need to time out such that the cycles match within reason to allow for that meal...this is one of the reasosn that I have said that we need to have a menu with the growing cycles put into practice here first to help guide how we will start growing and continuing to grow without wasting food....

louis wrote:

But you can further divide that by two I would say as I think we could have two tiers of dwarf wheat growing in a single hab.

Tiers? You can't grow tiers with natural light. If you use artificial light, you need power. What's the source of power? Solar panels? So solar panels that currently convert sunlight into electricity with 28.5% efficiency, then LED lights with overall luminous efficiency (including power supply losses) up to 22%. As opposed to ambient light that does not require any conversion, so 100%. Actually, glass is not 100% transparent, and a greenhouse needs a filter to remove UV, so it's 84-85% efficient. Mars has 47% as much light as Earth, so I said to build your greenhouses long and narrow, with a mirror along both long sides. The greenhouse would be twice as wide as high, and top of mirrors would be the same height above ground as the top of the greenhouse, so as much light comes from the mirrors as directly from the Sun, that doubles illumination. Long/narrow because light that reflects off a mirror at dawn will just shine into the greenhouse further down, move to perpendicular to reflection point at high noon, and further up the greenhouse at dusk. So mirrors do not have to track the Sun. Mirror angle will have the change with season, but that means change by 1% every second week. Very simple, no need for solar panels, no need for LED lighting. Manufacturing glass windows and mirrors is far less intensive than manufacturing solar panels and lights.

Besides, during power failure, ambient light just keeps going and going and going and...
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Let's see what happens with Wheat with a small settlement that starts out with 6 people and adds 12 people after every launch window. I assume that the colonists will not have kids until the settlement reaches a population of at least 100 at the earliest, thus negating any possibility of natural reproduction.

I assume that the wheat needs for the Original 6 would be imported with them for the first 6 months, which as SpaceNut said would be around 450 lb. However, afterwards they would need to grow their wheat. As I have calculated before, a colony of 100 would need 5.54 acres for their wheat per growing season; extrapolated to the 6, this would be 0.3324 acres, or 14,479.344 square feet. Each influx of 12 would add 28,958.688 square feet to this necessity. For clearer reference, 14,479.344 square feet is a square of slightly more than 120 ft by 120 ft, and 28,958.688 square feet is likewise a square of slightly more than 170 ft by 170 ft; however, the initial influx of 12 people would add to the initial 120 ft by 120 ft square 88 ft to each side, and the next addition would add slightly less than 61 ft to each side of that square, and so on, so it is entirely feasible for the colonists to overgrow to accompany potential future settlers, especially with the long shelf lives of flour that RobertDyck posted.

That is optimistic; and yes it is the kind of thinking that allowed NASA to achieve what it did. I just don't think 1960s computers or alloys were up to it. They didn't have friction stir welding. Didn't have aluminum-lithium alloy. Didn't have graphite fibre composite for landing legs. Yes, the modern F-1B engine proposed for advanced boosters of SLS perform exactly the same as F-1A engines available in 1969. Yes, the F-1A was just as good. But, these other things were necessary to get it to work.

What If NASA Had Continued Its Lunar Program?
http://specials-images.forbesimg.com/im … ?fit=scale
In this handout photo provided by NASA, U.S. astronaut Edwin E. ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr., Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11, poses for a portrait taken in July 1969. He and mission Commander Neil Armstrong were the first persons to land on the Moon. (Photo by NASA via Getty Images)

This question originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Robert Walker on Quora:

Could we have established a colony on the moon if NASA’s lunar program had continued?

Oh, I think quite possibly. They’d have found the ice and carbon dioxide and ammonia and other volatiles in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles. Also, the lunar caves, which may be up to 5 kilometers in diameter, and the peaks of almost eternal light at the poles, ideal for temperature and solar power.

The moon actually looks rather favorable indeed, compared to Mars nowadays, now that we know of those resources.

There may be hundreds of millions of tons of ice there, and also many millions of tons of CO2 and ammonia. And the peaks of eternal light have the most continuous sunlight available on any large body in the inner solar system (apart from possibly Mercury), and they have steady temperatures, varying by only ten degrees C either way. The average temperature may seem rather chilly (at -50° C), but that’s warm enough to let you keep a habitat at a comfortable temperature of 20° C  with aid of a solar collector.

The caves on the moon are also a unique resource, as they have the potential to be far larger than caves on Earth or Mars due to the low gravity. Larger even than city domes.

There are also many metals available. And 0.5% of the soil is pure iron, which can be separated by a magnet. The soil is very fertile, tested by growing plants in actual real lunar soil.

So — they wouldn’t know any of this, of course, but I think that if they’d continued with the explorations after Apollo 17 in this alternative past history, they’d have found it all out in the 1970s. We can never know what would have happened then, and can’t say if it would have been a better history, but yes, I think that this might well have led to permanent long-term bases on the moon by now.

I think it’s also the obvious place to go next today.

Mars does have ice, but — if you think about melting it all — do remember that it has large areas of desert, dry for a long way down in the equatorial regions. Though there is water chemically locked in the sand, it’s still as dry as our Sahara, and is not just a smooth ball. Much of the water would drain away into the desert sands. And it doesn’t have much ice compared to Earth. Not only does it have much less than the water in our oceans, it’s got only a fraction of the total amount of ice in Antarctica too. It had oceans in the past. Nobody really knows what happened, but the latest evidence from the Maven spacecraft suggests that most of it was lost into space. A small amount might have ended up in the deep hydrosphere kilometers below the surface.

There is also ice in the equatorial regions of Mars, deep underground, and again we are not sure how much. I’m not at all sure you could create oceans there if you raised the temperature somehow. Also, that would need large planet-scale mirrors or massive industrial levels of production of greenhouse gases as part of a project that would last thousands of years – and with much that could go wrong. There is no way you’d change the planet over a decades-long timescale or even a century or two by these methods. On Earth it took hundreds of millions of years, and that is in an orbit much closer to the sun than Mars.

The moon at any rate has many advantages over Mars. It’s much closer, far easier to supply, and easier for rescue efforts if they are needed. As rich in resources as Mars, I’d say, for up to thousands of people at least, and the peaks of eternal light particularly are amongst the most hospitable places you could hope for outside of Earth. The long-term effects of lunar gravity is a big unknown, but that’s also true for Mars, and you can’t just draw a straight line between Earth and zero G. The human body is complex, with many interacting systems that would respond differently to different gravity levels. So, it could be that lunar gravity is better for you than Mars G, or  worse, or that different gravity levels may be optimal for different age groups or health conditions, or there may be individual variation. There is no way to know except with experiments.

So, I think based on these recent discoveries about the moon, which they could have discovered in the 1970s if they had kept going — you can present as good a case for near-term settlement of the moon as for Mars, and perhaps a better case,  since it is so close to Earth.

So yes, they could have set up a moon settlement. Not sure if you would really call it a colony, as it would surely be dependent on Earth for many things. Nowhere in space is anything as hospitable as Antarctica or our driest, coldest, harshest deserts, and we don’t colonize those. I think it would have been more like a settlement-type base, not a colony — and not approaching self-sufficiency, at least not yet. Like an Antarctic base, you’d have many people on Earth to support each person on the moon. But the explorers and scientists in the base would be finding many things of value on the moon by now, making it worthwhile for us to support them, just as we do with scientists and others in Antarctica.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/ … 1a51d83edd

louis wrote:

Brilliant news! Congrats to everyone at Space X for this marvellous achievement. The era of cheap space travel beckons... Can lunar hotels be far behind?  I don't think so.

Why not? If you can pay the cost of rockets over multiple trips instead of just one, then that makes space tourism achievable. Do you think rocket fuel is the primary cost of space travel? The thing that's holding us back is the cost of Space Travel. NASA really hasn't addressed to cost of getting into orbit for several decades! the main stumbling block is we haven't got a vehicle that can reach orbit in a single stage, then land and be used again. SpaceX simply recognizes the fact that single-stage to orbit is not worth pursuing, and has instead pursued multiple reusable stages to orbit instead, We have spent billions on trying to achieve the former, and the former is not really achievable with chemical rockets, and we are unwilling to go nuclear!