New Mars Forums

Oh Brother... GOLD mining as an economic justification?  Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is, even if Mars had deposits far richer then any on Earth (exceedingly doubtful) the mass of equipment needed to establish and conduct modern mining operations is just staggering.  A hundred tons of gold is more then the largest mine on Earth produces from Open Pits that are miles across and which process in excess of a hundred thousand tons of ore a day.  Not to mention the price of gold is horribly unstable in the long term, a few decades ago it was worth a fraction of its present value and a few decades prior to that it was worth even more then today (inflation adjusted), if the demand for gold jewelry declines the price will collapse.

Are we trying to have a serious discussion here or are we engaging in 'soft' Sci-Fi fantasy unhinged from reality?  I'm getting the sense that half this forum is trying to be serious and engage in at-least a minimum BOE calculations and sanity checking and the other half is engaging in the wildest fantasies.  Am I out of line to expect a high caliber of engineering and logical rigor on the forum, I thought that was the point of the Mars Society?

Unfortunately, there are so many unknowns about Mars and about the course of 50 years of settlement, it is hard to predict what the place could be like. My 18-volume novel carried Mars forward about 40 years. It assumed several things:

1. The initial price of launch to low Earth orbit was $2000/kg ($1000/lb) using Falcons and that reusable vehicles brought the price down to about a quarter or a fifth of that over 40 years.

   2. The launch cost from low Earth orbit to Mars was initially 3 or 4 times as much as the cost to LEO and that it declined to a mere doubling after 40 years. So the cost of going from the surface of Earth to the surface of Mars drops from $7,000/kg to about $500/kg. You need to have some sense of this. This decline was accomplished through use of solar thermal rockets (very cheap) for trans-Mars injection of cargo, and them later solar sailers (even cheaper). Humans go to Mars on 6-month trajectories at first, and once fuel gets cheaper, 3-month trajectories. Toward the tail end of the novel, gas core nuclear becomes available and allows the interplanetary vehicles to complete 2 round trips every 26 months, rather than 1. Until then they usually use chemical propulsion; sometimes they use solid-core nuclear engines, but they are so expensive they aren't worth it.

  3. The intial transport vehicle is a capsule with an inflatable hab able to transport 4. Larger habs allow 7 to use the capsule. Then a larger capsule is developed allowing 12 passengers plus an inflatable. Once you are flying a dozen or so of these capsules every opposition, you switch to the caravel, which is an inflatable with a heat shield on the ventral side and a small engine and fuel tanks on the dorsal side. It holds 125-150. When you are flying a half dozen of them, you switch to galleons, which have a similar design to the caravel but hold 450. The galleon II will hold a thousand passengers and is 65 or so meters in diameter and about 15 meters high. Shuttles flying between the Martian surface and orbit are modifications of the second stages of the shuttles flying from the Earth' surface to low Earth orbit, so their technology advances in tandem.

4. Phobos and Deimos are extremely important. Initially, they are the source for methane and oxygen fuel for trans-Earth injection and are visited twice every 26-month period for maintenance purposes (once when astronauts arrive from Earth and once when they depart). Early on, their water, methane, and oxygen are exported to Earth orbit to supply the fuel for trans-Mars injection. Once solar sailing technology comes on line, they are the cheapest source for everything off Earth, it just takes 1-2 years for the items to arrive! Caravels and galleons are placed permanently on Phobos to provide rotating, gravitied housing. Inflatable greenhouses stretch across the moon's surface to export food to the moon, Mercury, Venus and tourist hotels in low Earth orbit. Plastic made from Phobosian chondrite is used to manufacture zillions of export items. A large dry dock on Phobos is the place caravels and galleons are inflated, the different pieces imported from Earth are installed, and the shake-down cruises are between the moons.

5. Mars exports anything it can make a profit on. I am assuming they find some pretty rich gold deposits, and an ataxite or chondrite-enstatite body is found that is enriched in PGMs. Deuterium is enriched in Martian water. I assume that environmental protection hysteria makes it almost impossible to launch reactors, uranium, and plutonium into low Earth orbit, so Mars becomes the main source for radioactives. Because of the high cost of testing gas-core nuclear engines on the Earth's surface, both the US and China set up test reservations on Deimos, where the radiactive exhaust is harmlessly exhausted into interplanetary space.

6. Mars propaganda, from a very early point stresses that Mars is a very family friendly, safe place to live; no drug trafficing, no crime, a village that cares for everyone (and a great singles scene, though they don't advetise that). The aim is to encourage immigration, to inspire college students to aspire to emigrate to Mars, and they manage to retain 70-80% of the arrivals. You want some people to go back; they will then go to Mercury, the moon, become NASA administrators, etc., and their Mars experience will be useful for Mars's further expansion.

7. Mars is multicultural and very diverse. Early on, a Mars Commission is set up by the various space programs to settle and explore the place. As the flight price comes down, every country wants to have a citizen or two on Mars; it's one of those prestige items a country wants. As Mars gets bigger and more autonomous, it encourage competition. The Americans promise to send 1,000 over the next 10 years? Maybe China should send 1,200, then. That sort of thing.

   8. Livability is an emphasis early on. After 10 years, most housing moves into inflatable "open ground" domes. The housing has large water tanks or agricultural terraces on their roofs for radiation protection. Pile drivers drive steel anchors deep into the ground to hold down the domes and thousands of tonnes of Martian water are added to the ground to form an "ice table" several meters down, to freeze the pore space shut and make the domes airtight. Wells monitor the water levels, inject warmed water into the ground when the dome temperature gets too high, pulls heat out of the ground water layer above the ice in the dust storm season, and desalinates the ground water as it causes chemical weathering of the regolith.

  In my scenario, Mars reaches about 7,000 people in 40 years. Fortunately, whenever the Earth undergoes a recession and governments cut their subsidies, the price of gold goes up, so Martian income stays roughly the same. Population grows by about 30% every 26-year period and starts with 6. As the population grows, they gradually acquire more autonomy. The Commissioner in charge of the entire operation lives on Mars by about year 15 or 20, and the Commission gets abolished in favor of an independent "Mars Commonwealth" about year 35. Because Mars has many of the experts in space craft operation and design, it becomes the center for exploration of the outer solar system and a major economic partner for the moon, the asteroid belt, Venus orbit, and Mercury.

But for those that are real an email to josh or others with a short statement for joining would be all that is needed to correct any unfairness in any blanket banning methods that the board uses.

You all know we are talking fifty years after the first landing here, right? I mean, 25 launch windows. I see a lot of wild optimism here, thankfully tempered by some. No freaking way a self sufficient colony numbering in the thousands is up and running by then, IMO. Try a hundred years, and maybe we are talking. Maybe, just maybe, the exponential population growth is starting about this time. I mean, maybe there are permanent residents by then, a few at most. But most of the money going to Mars in those days is going to be from the government, and for scientific/prestige reasons, I expect.

Eventually, yes, all populations have a geometric growth if the resources are available to do so. Plain mathematics. But establishing a seed for that is going to be much more difficult than some optimists realize, like Glandu, Impaler and others are saying. Maybe we'll get around to trying that 50 years after the first landing. I can guarantee you that is not a given, but if we are being optimistic I'll grant that. But even if the best of cases, by this time frame we are beginning to build in Mars the truly large-scale civilization blocks that will enable that growth, not in the middle of the process. Factories (manufactured with as much martian mass as you can, but mostly imported in terms of cost and man-hours to build them) capable of sustained growth and meaningful production will be coming online by then, and the reusable system that gets people there and back will be entering its mature stage of operations and expanding. The construction methods for building on Mars will start to look something close to standard. It would be a miracle if the legal mess of colonizing another planetary body is solved by then, but that kind of thing always trails after reality anyhow.

The most I would say about this time frame, is that by now the picture should be much more clear as to how the colonization effort will proceed. Most of the important questions about that will be able to be answered by this time, and the next step will be decided then and only then. I would very much like to be there to see that!!

Rune. Imitation is the best form of flattery.

Louis:  Your driver-less car analogy makes the classic mistake that all futurists/tech-enthusiasts makes when they claim rapid advancement in technology, you apply the performance growth rates of computer and information systems to mechanical, physical and chemical systems.  Interplanetary transportation and human life-support on Mars are NOT problems amenable to bulk information processing solutions like for example beating the best Human chess player or driving a car autonomously.  Going to Mars is a problem of engineering ware the bonding energy of Hydrogen and Oxygen and the Human bodies radiation tolerance produce fundamental constraints and our progress is at best linear not the exponentiality that we take for granted in Computing.

I'd very much like to see some credible work on miniaturizing and simplifying Industrial infrastructure (got some links?), so far all I've seen are weak appeals to things like rapid-prototyping systems which will supposedly make everything we need.  My family is one of tool and die makes and we understand the iterative nature of all these tools, simple tools make complex tools which make yet more complex tools.  A rapid prototyping machine is for just one thing prototyping, it's not a substitute for a full industrial infrastructure, it lacks the volume, reliability or flexibility of fundamental industrial tools like a lathe. 

Any kind of Mars raw material production like glass, steel, ceramics is incredibly hard to do, these things are cheap on Earth because they are made in HUGE quantity (efficiency of scale) using equally huge amounts of cheap fossil fuel.  Attempting to produce these things in small scale let alone on another planet is going to be far too expensive until the scale of production reaches thousands of tons and populations would need to be in the range of 100k to millions to both need that much and to make that economically attractive. 

Remember that the cost-benefit analysis to create locally vs imports is not just a lineal comparison between a piece of manufacturing equipment vs a pile of finished goods.  Equipment will require a continuous stream of replacement parts and spares, it will require additional energy supplies and supporting infrastructure too.  And most importantly Labor devoted to using the equipment and actually making the goods that are no longer being imported.  More people means every import that people need which the new local productivity is not satisfying increases and cascading 'multiplier' effects cause yet more multiplication.  In the end the volume of imports ONLY GOES UP as a place becomes more established and more sophisticated, the very idea of sending equipment for 'living off the land' as a means to reduce imports is fundamentally self-defeating.  You pay the cost to establish local production of a settlement that has already grown past the tipping point for cost effectiveness so more of the supply stream can be devoted to growth.  You establish local production so you can send MORE not LESS to the colony.

Viking was big and heavy and nothing but rocket braking to landing,  all the way from the end of atmospheric entry.  I don't see why that can't be scaled up to any size.  Might not be the lowest propellant mass,  but we already know it worked twice in a row back in 1976. 

GW

Population growth has always been exponential,  not linear,  regardless of all known circumstances.  The first trips to Mars will be small handfuls of people,  even when we finally decide to establish our first (probably experimental) bases.  Very late in the 50 year interval proposed in this thread will be actual colonization ships.  There are pulse propulsion ships we can conceive right now that could carry 10's of thousands,  or more,  even 100’s of thousands,  in a single trip.  Typical exponential growth,  just different circumstances than we have seen before. 

The best near-term solution to finding out "how much gee is enough" is the proper experimental facility in LEO.  It's a multi-level centrifuge,  shaped like a frisbee disk,  spinning.  1 gee at the rim,  less (proportional to radius) at each deck closer to the center.  It has to be large so the rotation rate can be slow enough not the bother the typical human middle ear.  That's somewhere under 4 rpm. 

Radius for 1 gee is 56 m at 4 rpm.  We're not talking "Battlestar Galactica" here.  How about several thin pie-slice sections launched separately by existing launchers,  and just docked together in LEO the same way we built the ISS?  What is so bloody hard to understand about that?  Or to do?

I rather suspect that once we actually investigate this,  we'll find 0.38 gee on Mars is more-or-less enough to maintain some acceptable level of health,  just maybe not quite as good as we enjoy here at home.  I'm not so very sure that 0.17 gee on the moon will be enough,  but I know nothing for sure.  If it is,  fine.  If not,  then that conical centrifuge idea is something the base will need for long-term residents.  Size it for a vector sum 1+ gee at its rim,  at spin rates under 4 rpm.  It's nothing but right triangle trig.

Perhaps 4 hrs per day exercise at 2 gee would be efficacious.  Who knows?  We need to run the damned experiments with that frisbee-shaped lab in LEO,  that we have never had.  We need to do it now!  There is not much more important for NASA (and ESA and JAXA and Roscosmos and all the rest) to do,  than that.  Except maybe re-start nuclear propulsion of all kinds. 

As for Deimos/Phobos first-or-not,  it makes more sense to me to make one damned first trip,  and visit the surface and one or both moons,  all in the one trip.  Just get it done.  Since you don't really know what you'll really find as "ground truth" on any of those 3 locations,  you have to carry the fuel and supplies to make the trip,  regardless.  Carry ISRU gear and try it out,  but absolutely do not bet the crew's lives on it.  Not that first trip. 

Depending on what you actually find on those surfaces,  subsequent-trip missions might look quite different.  But the history of Mars exploration is that our picture radically changes each time we send a new probe.  Each one's findings overturns some part (up to and including all) of all previously "thought-to-be-known" results.  It won't be any different when we as a species finally summon-up the gumption to actually send men there. 

Ground truth has always,  always,  always been at least 98% at variance with what we thought before we went there (robot or manned).  And,  no two sites have ever been the same anywhere,  not here,  not the moon,  not Mars.  (I predict not anywhere.)   

You have to take that into account when planning a mission,  manned or not.  Most of the manned mission architectures I see proposed for the moon,  Mars,  or the NEO's,  ignores that very inconvenient fact of life.  As a species (or as any individual institution)  we have not adequately learned that lesson yet.  But we certainly need to.  It would make life easier.  And more certain. 

Just some thoughts from an old guy.  This stuff really is more art than science.  (Something corporate managers desperately hate.  Politicians and bureaucrats,  too. )

GW

I don't think we'll be going to Mars properly until we have an established cis-Lunar economy. If we can get started in 2020 on that, then I think we'll be in a position to colonise Mars in the early to mid 40's.

I must ask where you think Mars will get it's money from, louis. You're talking about billions of dollars being paid to workers on Mars each year, into Terran accounts, and hence acting to remove money from the Martian economy....

50 years at a 2 year and 7 week cycle means only 23 misson can be run and to go from zero to 10,000 is not only a massive flight count but also a mucher larger crew carrying capacity from LEO just to mars....and when factoring in the consumables to support the crew just on the way out means not even possible in my mind....

OK, I liked your thinking, but I can think of alternative futures, and so I will play the skunk as I often do, and stink up things a bit.

I agree that it may be a good plan to start by having orbital facilities for young babies.  I will go further and say that perhaps it would be good to consider a possible future where indeed childhood involves prolonged presence in the orbit of Mars.  I specifically am looking at Phobos and Demos.  Any use of them will require a deaper definition of their nature, so a program of discovery specific to them is essential to planning for Mars in my opinion.

Specifically I am leaning on this type of question.  What is the nature of Phobos and Demos?  It is apparent that they have hollow space inside of them per this reference:

http://nineplanets.org/phobos.html

Phobos and Deimos may be composed of carbon-rich rock like C-type asteroids. But their densities are so low that they cannot be pure rock. They are more likely composed of a mixture of rock and ice. Both are heavily cratered. New images from Mars Global Surveyor indicate that Phobos is covered with a layer of fine dust about a meter thick, similar to the regolith on the Earth's Moon.

I cannot prove, and do not know if there is a significant ice content, but apparently it is not yet ruled out.  Some speculation has it that Phobos and Demos are not Asteroids, but Outer Solar system objects.  If so, then they started with a lot of ice, and may still retain some of it.  Who knows, perhaps even some Ammonia deep down?  (Nitogen).

I unlike many of you at this time would settle for an personed expidition to Mars which would be preceded by unpersoned probes, to futher analyze Phobos and Demos.  That first personed expidition could first do some expiriments on utilizing the resources of Phobos and Demos, and hopefully would include the process of sintering the dust of the surface into a radiation shelter somewhere.  Further hopefully they could dig into a moon to Ice.  I am hoping that large sections of permafrost did exist, because it might suggest that hollows could be created in which spinning habitats could be built.

Obviously the ice would have value as life support and propellant.

I cannot give a date, but I will stick to your first mission date, 2020?  Lacking any other notion of certainty.

A point I have read is that it is thought that Phobos and Demos will contain fragments of rock from various era's of the history of Mars.  Certaily this would be a useful byproduct.  Obviously the samples will fetch money from scientific institutions that which to test their theories of reality against the evidence it might offer.  That point was where much of the early rocks of Mars have been altered those fragments on Phobos and Demos could be representative of pages of history for Mars.

I think that a mission to transport machines to Mars and also land them on the surface may be too ambitious.  Yes, if contamination is not an issue, then perhaps a few landings of humans here and there, but I see that the main effort should be interplanetary travel, and no big effort for direct human landings from Earth.

I feel that Phobos and Demos could be integrated into a infant economy compising NEO objects, and Lunar telerobotic products.  I feel that bases on Phobos and Demos could earn money by hosting scientists from Earth who would study rock samples from Phobos and Demos (Mars fragments), and indeed samples from Mars, and also with telepresence the environment of Mars.

I am satisfied that Phobos and Demos could be good happy places for a significant growing population.  I would like to see at least 5000, as an Arc in case humans on Earth fall prey to their occasional bouts of mass stupidity.

I should think that that phase could last for 30 years, very optimistically from 2020 to 2050.  But by 2050, I would have no problem imagining a very large orbital population.  Perhaps 100,000.

It all depends on the evolvement of an economy, and technology.  I feel that the human race is just on the edge of a real technology that could transport people from Earth orbit to Mars orbit at a reasonable cost, particularly if large amounts of water could be had from Phobos and Demos.

At some point in the developement of Phobos and Demos, yes a starter population on the surface of Mars.  More of an experimental station, where methods to adapt to Mars could be worked on.  Once that fire got burning, it would have a orbital economy to link to for it's growth.

At that point, it would seem reasonable to me to inject greenhouse gasses into the Martian atmosphere from Phobos and Demos, because they also appear to have significant Carbon.  The injection of Hydrogen might scrub the Chlorine out of the Martian atmosphere, allowing the formation of some incresed Ozone.

So, by 2070, a path towards a Mars where the average pressure is 11 Millibars, and Ozone makes it easier for plant life to prosper on the surface.  By that time gentic engineering may have also unlocked some of the impediments to primitive plant life living on Mars.

I know that it is typically supposed that it might take 100 years to warm Mars up with a facility on the surface producing greenhouse gasses, but what if Phobos and Demos really took off economically, as an integrated part of a near solar system economy?  One short cut might be to add some greenhouse gasses and to then impact a NMO (Near Mars Orbit object) or two onto the CO2 deposits in the south polar ice cap.  Perhaps that could short cut the 100 years to get to 11 Millibars average down to 50 years?

Summary:  I think that if Phobos and Demos have the characteristics I have suggested above, that the habitation of Mars is best achieved by a two step process, habitation in orbit, and then habitation of Mars itself.

Glad you liked the data,  Louis.  I worked hard on that,  to make sure it was both usable and reliable. 

As soon as there is a reliable lander,  I'd bet Musk will scrape up the money and go to Mars,  without NASA if he has to.  But the lander is the missing tinkertoy in our toybox,  as far as Mars is concerned. 

Exactly what kind of a lander you build depends in great part upon your basic mission architecture.  For first-visit explorations,  I just don't see the sanity of sending the Earth return vehicle to the surface of Mars.  That's the same weight penalty that almost forced Apollo into a two-launch-one mission architecture.  Doing a lander ("lunar orbit rendezvous") made the moon shots do-able as one launch-one mission.  That was fortunate,  because back then,  orbital assembly by docking was beyond our reach.  Docking capsule with lander was a stretch,  back then. 

There are serious difficulties landing things over about half a ton on Mars.  Aerobraking is not sufficient because the "air" is just too thin,  yet thick enough for significant entry heating.  It simply takes rocket braking,  and that means propellants and stages if chemical.  Yet,  it has to be clean aerodynamically,  and it has to have a heat shield.  It cannot be built flimsy and light,  like the Apollo LEM.

Unlike the moon,  there's enough gravity on Mars to put a two-stage rocket-braker out of reach with chemical propellants.  Three or more stages makes for a very large vehicle with a fixed payload mass and volume.  Tiny things like a small sample return we can design,  but how big a thing does it take to carry 1-6 men to Mars orbit?  That's huge!

I think the lander is the critical design issue.  Orbit-to-orbit ships we can build.  It's that lander that drives things to distraction.  That's the solution we lack.

I suspect you could do it single stage rocket burn descent and ascent with a NERVA-like solid core nuke and LH2.  (I'd really like to see a water nuke,  but nobody ever built one.)  Single stage landers can be made refuellable and reusable.  That opens up a whole new slew of mission design possibilities.   

The government has a monopoly on things nuclear here in the USA.  If ever there was a critical enabling technology needed to send men to Mars,  it is a practical Mars lander.  Single stage nuke is the practical one,  or so it seems to me.  So why is NASA screwing around with a gigantic shuttle-derived launch rocket,  when a practical lander is what we really desperately need?

I hate how politics has killed what once was a shining example of a government agency. 

GW

What would it take to do a tethered drop from orbital platform of the crews capsule into the atmosphere such that once the capsule is down far enough for parachutes to deploy tat the orbiting platform does a burn to slow the capsule before releasing it from the tether....