New Mars Forums

Just to warn you in advance, Mark, many people here aren't too keen on the whole American Imperialism idea. Besides, the idea that the Roman Empire founded the British Empire is frankly not true, and neither did the British Empire found the USA - I'd say that Americans founded the USA.

Any discussion of a putative 'New Zion' or such should go into the Martian Politics section.

1000 posts! And a day earlier than I expected - I'm very impressed. The 1000th post was made by (relatively) new member Canth.

It would be nice to construct some kind of Mars information website, and I wouldn't rule it out as long as someone else actually wrote the thing and ensured quality control, but it would be a big project. There are already several excellent websites with more Mars information than could be made without a huge effort, including NASA's Mars page and the Nine Planets guide. For now, I'm happy just linking to those pages.

GOM: You're right about the views/posters. I don't think there is any useful solution to this, but it will sort itself out in time. The forums are getting increased traffic every day, and I think in a year or so the complaint will be that there are too many posters, not too little! These things just take time.

Anton: I'd like to hear your suggestions but believe me, it takes enough time trying to get people to write articles and administrating this forum as it is, especially when I have to balance it with university, my weblog, personal site and various other websites... 

It's a well known fact that all Mars Society sites* are badly designed. You could offer to redesign the Russian site if you're interested, although you should think hard about whether you just want to do the redesign, or whether you want to become the overall administrator and update the links every few days or weeks.

There's plenty of other stuff to get involved in - for starters, check out this list of Task Forces that you can join.

*apart from the ones I design, of course 

On speakers and microphones: An idea I had was to have extremely fine locational positioning devices for all spacesuits, so that when you transmit voice from one EVA member to another, the receiver's headphones adjust the voice to replicate the directional qualities of the sound.

So: imagine you're talking to your fellow EVA member, who is behind and right to you. He transmits voice to you, and the sound is modulated so that your headphones mimic the sound that would have really been generated if you were speaking normally in a normal atmosphere.

What's the point of this? It allows more instant direction finding, e.g. you can respond quicker to a colleague saying 'Over here' if you automatically know he is to your left, instead of having to look around. Also, it makes things in general sound more natural.

What? Why would anyone want to shoot down a spacecraft from Mars? I see two (highly remote) possibilities:

1) Attack by a hostile nation
2) Attack by a nation wanting to prevent contamination from 'killer Martian virus'

Now, I don't think that anyone, US included, has the capability to shoot down a spacecraft. But let's imagine they do, they go and try to shoot down a human spacecraft returning from Mars. There is practically nothing you can do to help the spacecraft; stuff like shielding and countermeasures would be too heavy and in any case, no-one is expecting an attack. Interceptors from space based weapon systems are also not likely to work as they are designed to knock out ballastic missiles and such.

So the spacecraft gets blown up. What next? The US finds out who did it, declares war on them, and blows them up. What a happy story.

As for the Martian virus, firstly I think the risk of contamination is negligable. Secondly, the astronauts on board the spacecraft wouldn't try to land without orders - these guys are professionals. I think they'd happily die up there if they knew they were infected with a contagious disease, or at least sit tight until someone could try to rendezvous and give them some medical attention.

Just a quick thought - surely you'll still need to expend significant energy to first get *on* the asteroid, and also to slow down after departing it? However, as a possible source of resources, the asteroid could be attractive.

While I'll admit that in principle, Project Orion could be made to work, I am willing to bet a large sum of money that it will never come to pass due to political reasons. NASA might be talking about reintroducing nuclear power for spacecrafts, but that's a far cry from lifting up hundreds of armed nuclear warheads into orbit - other countries and very possibly US citizens wouldn't stand for it.

It's a shame in a way, because providing that the safe passage of the warheads into orbit could be assured (and that is no simple thing) it would've been remarkably cool to have seen an Orion spacecraft zooming around the solar system.

Anyway, I suspect that by the time we (as in, most of the whole world) are all comfortable with the thought of Project Orion, technology will have progressed to the point where it will not be an effective solution. Hopefully we won't even have enough nuclear weapons to power it by then!

The real problem with that is that you have to carry the water around with you, as well as separation and storage equipment for the hydrogen and oxygen; this is why cars that run on hydrogen in the future will not make their own hydrogen from water but will simply load up from hydrogen filling stations.

Also, it might be useful to find out what the specific impulse of hydrogen+oxygen is.

It's quite a nice argument by Zubrin, but along with its positive points it has its flaws. Yes, there probably are not insignificant numbers of meteorites from Mars hitting Earth, and in fact from analysis of Martian meteorites it's been found that they don't get baked when entering our atmosphere - their interior stays at quite a nice temperature (for the microbes, if there were any).

But there are a few problems. How long would a Mars meteorite be in transit for? Conservatively (and uninformedly), I would say at least a hundred years and probably a lot more than that - perhaps tens of thousands or millions. During that period, even toughened bacterial spores would have a hard time surviving. Also, there is the trauma that the microbe-bearing meteorites would undergo as they get ejected from Mars.

The simple fact is that any sample return mission will bring back Martian rocks in pristine condition, far quicker and more gentle than any Mars meteorite. I still think that there is a nonzero possibility of Mars microbes surviving a journey from Mars to Earth, but it's not as simple as Zubrin might make it out to be. We just don't know enough about the numbers or the conditions of meteorites that arrive from Mars.

About China: They've just announced plans to construct a crewed space station. There are no details to support this intention, but that's usually taken as a sign that they don't want to give too much away. This follows the success of their third test flight for the now man-rated Shenzhou spacecraft, and is in addition to their already-stated plans to put a man on the Moon by 2010.

Unlike the ISS, I think that China will probably do well with their space station. This is simply because they have neither the resources (i.e. a space shuttle) to construct an ISS-style spacestation, nor the experience (spacewalks). Instead, I imagine they might do something like Skylab - a single-piece spacestation that can be constructed much quicker and easier. They won't have to deal with funding difficulties in Russia, and indeed they won't even have to worry about health and safety regulations since they can do what they like.

Of course, this will result in a smaller and less capable space station than the ISS, but it will be far more cost-effective.

Edited By Adrian on April 03 2002 at 05:18

Forget vanilla ornithopters, check out NASA's new 'flexible flier'. There's an article about it in the newest Wired, which I've transcribed below (it's not online yet):

Birds do it. Bees do it. So do houseflies and even bats. But just how they change shape during flight has eluded aircraft designers since Orville Wright watched gulls wheel over Kitty Hawk. "I call it efficient multipoint adaptabiity," says Anna-Marie McGowan, manager of the Morphing Project at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The 90 engineers and scientists working on the project are dreaming up aircraft that morph in flight and are lighter, faster, more efficient and safer than anything in the skies today.

Start with the skeleton. Rather than using standard aluminium and carbon graphite, McGowan is experimenting with a flexible, bonelike structure of carbon nanotubes - tiny capped cyliners of carbon molecules created under extreme heat. Some 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, carbon nanotubes are 180 to 600 times stronger than steel.

And forget wings as we know them, fixed in shape and controlled by mechanical and hydraulic flaps and ailerons. Morphing planes would have temperature-sensitive shape-memory alloys embedded with heating coils that would curl, twist and extend, depending on conditions. Strings of small air vales called synthetic microjets would line the leading or trailing edges of the wings and change airflow by blowing or sucking. Wings would be thick and long for low-speed takeoffs and landings, then re-form to be thin, short and swept for high-speed efficiency.

McGowan imagines the craft's skin embedded with piezoelectric material, which sends an electric current under wind pressure and changes shape when charged. Like animal skin, it would monitor surface pressure and twitch to further change the plane's shape. "At first you'll see some of these things retrofitted on current aircraft," McGowan says. "But long term, you'll see radical changes in the way planes are built." In other words, let's do it.

(by Carl Hoffan, in the Must Read - Margin Notes section of the April 2002, 10.04 edition of Wired).