New Mars Forums

I've seen discussion of using the Falcon Heavy and the Dragon for a Mars sample return mission. Could the Falcon 9 perform such a mission with a smaller capsule than the Dragon?
Consider two different architectures: 1.)the propellant for the return is carried from Earth,
and
2.)the propellant for the return is produced on Mars. For this, note that orbital observations of Mars show there are locations that have high concentrations both of methane and water vapor. Then those locations could be targeted for the lander. These would also be good locations to search for life. Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal was of taking Mars resources either of the surface or the ground to produce propellant.
For our proposal, there would be a few options for making the propellant. You could take the methane from the atmosphere in the high concentration region, or you could make it by hydrolyzing the water vapor to get hydrogen and reacting it with the CO2 in Mars atmosphere to get methane.
A chemistry question: if you supply an electricity source, could you create methane directly from water vapor and CO2 in the Martian atmosphere?
You would need a power source. For Zubrins proposal he suggested nuclear power. But that was for a large manned lander. For our much smaller lander solar power may suffice.

    Bob Clark

Erm... you don't plough profit back into a company, unless you're either a not-for-profit or a small one agressively focused on growth. I'm thinking of a ROI of 10 years, so we're looking at 0.5-1 billion a year already to the investors, before profit. Add another 1 billion for manned flights, and 0.5 billion for cargo required to expand the base, and we're looking at needing to make 2-2.5 billion each year.

Louis your tiny light weight phones only work because there are cryogenically cooled receivers with big antennas and cpus doing signal processing on the other end.  But I do agree with you in principle.  Here is a break down of what I think it may take. 

On the moon especially the dark side there is very little interference or need for you to restrict the bandwidth (RF) you use.  On earth a consumer grade 0.4kg radio uses 15 watts and delivers 24mbps.  If you broaden the band and use more expensive energy efficient technology you can probably get a few hundred mbps with about the same energy demand but lets say the heat resistant design takes two kg.

Lets assume the solar panels face straight up and there is no active tracking so we need to wait for the sun to poke up a bit more before we generate power so 17 days of dark and 12 of lite.   Modest Li-ion batteries get about 150 Wh/kg with a decent reserve we end up at about 4kg.  One kg for solar panels should be plenty. 

A 0.5" x 35ft extruded carbon fiber rod would be another 2kg, with the lower gravity and no weather it should suffice. I think 10kg or less for each repeater site is entirely feasible.

I can think of two methods for instalation, you drive a rover across the surface or you hop along on a sub orbital rocket hopper.  But none of this matters at all, the cost of installation will inevitably tip the scale to other methods of communication.  Why not just unspool some fiber along the way with the rover or suborbital rocket and get a 300 gbps connection instead.

Okay, so Pandora is worth over $6 billion, with their prices being in the $50-1500 range. I take back my previous post - we could make far more than $10 million off jewellry. Conceivably, we could make over a billion, selling maybe 5 million pieces per year. That would go some way to paying off the costs...

Luna is associated with romance, no? Then we trade off that. Honeymoon suites for very wealthy couples are going to make money, even at a cost of 50 million for a 3 month holiday, of which perhaps half will go to the LDC. If we could get 20 couples each year, that's 500 million. Maybe people could even get married there... all up, tourism might be worth 500 million.

Leaving perhaps $1billion to be made up from volatile sales. At a price of $500/kg, that's 2000 tonnes that need to be sold each year - if in LEO exclusively, then that's 10000 tonnes that need to be produced yearly just for the fuel, so maybe 20,000 tonnes being produced yearly. Anyway, is the market for orbit refuelling for, say, satellites bound for GEO sufficient? Probes? How could the market be expected to change with the addition of on-orbit fuel - considering, for example, that the cost of a Mars mission might be expected to drop to under a billion?

Not really, "surface plasmon polaritons" tells me no more than "negative antimass polaron generator."

Louis, if LENR is for real, then all bets are off - you wouldn't even need to build a Lunar infrastructure to get anywhere, because energy would be so cheap you could launch all you'll ever need. Or not, it does depend on the power/mass ratio of E-cat. But, for the same reason I'm not basing my economics of Gold which may or may not be there, I prefer to use a known energy source.

Adaptation wrote:

I wonder how hard it would be to drape a light fiber optic cable across the surface of the moon as your land or take off.  The from the deepest dark side base it would still take less than 2000 miles of fiber to reach the near side and setup a direct surface station.

mmmh, that would be an heavy baby to launch, transport, & deploy. Here on earth, it's already a tough job; you need a vehicle(truck or ship), skilled specialists, & probably a few other things. On the moon, the lack of proper mastery of the field would add, IMHO, a lot of headaches. A few sats would, I think, be muuuuuch easier.

Correction: a video on youtube says that. Big difference.

louis wrote:

It has been confirmed

By whom?

Rune. Really?

No PM's? What kind of a forum is this? And I know there are mails, but I choose not to use them consciously. Anyhow, on to really important things:

louis wrote:

Criticising the budget is somewhatdifference from saying there is no budget. I think in terms of coms, NASA has so much in place that we would not be reinventing the wheel. Perhaps you would need some small  lunar satellite or two (I don't know)...But generally I think we are talking about marginal costs on top of NASA's coms budget.

If you want to cover a lunar pole, you need at the very least a Molniya constellation. That's a very clever way of covering a planet's pole continuously with just three satellites. For global coverage, it's more on the order of 12-24. Plus spares. Yes, you could piggyback on NASA's Deep Space Network, but that network is limited in both bandwidth and funds devoted to it (and close to maxing out as it is!). Time using it is everything but free, even though it's maintained with funds from a lot of different agencies, IIRC. And buying a satellite bus, even if it is a small, half a ton, short-range LEO platform, is a tens-of-millions deal, instruments not included. The big 5-ton birds in geosync are all above 100 million, most considerably more, and you would need something closer to this to reach the earth from the moon. And then add on top of this the launcher (to lunar orbit, no less, so a Falcon heavy or some other big rocket), and you are getting close to the range of billions to cover the moon in a communications network capable of handling teleoperated ground operations.

It can be done. I even believe it will, and it should. Just not that cheaply.

Rune. Which would be cheaper than planting reapeaters on the surface, but not by that much I bet...