New Mars Forums

Over here in Scotland a private research organisation conducted a lot of research into what was called Waveriders. They used the Shockwave and where able to enter at a much steeper descent. Most designs where variations of slightly rounded triangles.

A lunar mass driver has been envisaged for a long time and there are quite a few plans for its use. There are benefits to a lunar mass driver as it can use the abundant power from the sun to power the driver. Still there are problems.

1) A lunar mass driver will need materials that only high technology ie Earth can make so these materials must be delivered from the Earth. But a lot of the structure can be made from the indigenous Lunar materials.

2) Aiming will rely on when the Moon is in the right position

3) Mass Driving materials is a very high acceleration mission if we need to send people we will need a long track. Probabily the better method is to use indigenous aluminium prepared with Oxygen to make rocket fuel to get people off the Moon with materials and exports sent by the driver.

4) And finally most of the materials are high tech and will have to come from the Earth anyway so you save very little in the way of delta V. But if there was a larger size industrial capacity that a big prescence on the Moon this would be less of a problem so for intial Mars plans it is impractical.

Though if you want a bit way out option for a Mass driver capture an asteroid fire of parts of it from the mass driver you set up and travel using that. A long trip but it would work.

European countries do have a problem in there population demographics. Some countries have actually done something about this. The prime example is France which if anything is bucking the trend and has actually a growing population and this is put down to its 35 hour week and family friendly policies. The trouble being that it seems to make France very uncompetitive with the world.

In october Germany is going to the poles for there general election. The current administration is running far behind what is a more right wing party and this right wing parties main policies are primarily family based with the intention of making it easier to have a family and still have a career. Actually the plan is to loosen up the economic situation in Germany and to actually allow Germany to become the European powerhouse it once was.

The EU though has expanded and the newer states unlike the more staid original countries are places where population growth is reasonably high. The UK for example has used the higher free population of countries like Poland to supply the worker shortage the expanding economy of the UK has short. In the last 9 months over 1,032,000 Poles and other Eastern Europeans attracted by the high wages have moved to Britain and taken up Jobs. Though it is an economic migration very few of these people plan to actually stay instead they will spend a while here making savings while working then go home and use those to start buisnesses or get married.

We in the west do not need to "breed like rabbits" that would be totally unnecessary but that we should provide laws to allow people to work and still have a larger family. There should be tax breaks and benefits to having more than one child. Just making it seem to better for the country to have more children and to put this through education would be a start.

Immigration into a country is not a problem as long as that immigration is measured by the people coming in being able to be absorbed and accepted into that countries culture. Immigration is a good thing especially for the richer countries that can afford to hire the best brains and those immigrants naturally want to take there families with them. The current situation of these eastern EU countries having there young over working in the UK for example benefits both countries. The UK gets jobs done and with posts being filled wages do not have to go up to get people to fill the skills shortages, This boosts the UK economy and stabilises inflationry pressures making the UK more competitive and since they are working they are paying taxes into the national excheguer. Countries like Poland get there young on good wages and money flowing into Poland and with that an Economic boost. This is used to pay for goods and services in Poland and allows Poland to modernise its infrastructure and in the future getting trained people back. Though some will stay in the UK .

Well the Chinese plan to do there first Lunar probe mission in about 2011 and with the intention of an actual robotic landing and sample return about 2017.

Xinhua news article

I would have thought that China could have done missions of this caliber a lot faster than it plans to do so. Especially with the equipment transfers it has recieved from the Russians and the general increase in technology it is getting. This indicates that there is a lot less funds available than we have previously assumed especially after we remember that the Chinese with there lower base costs can stretch there program a lot.

So Red China on Red Mars not so much of a threat now.

It does a bit more than that it actually will put the crews sent to the Moon at more risk. Though I would prefer different the crews will arrive with nothing prepared before-hand so they will need to take every thing with them to make there habitats and to actually start there mission. If though they are sent in a lot smaller craft they have to make extremely sure that they land close to there supplies. If they make a navigational error on the way down and find themselves too far from the supplies this could prove a problem. (the sun playing up even when its supposed to be quiet etc etc). With the lack of an automated triangulation system and our very poor maps of the Moon (they are give or take a 100km in some places, the poles for instance) this could easily happen.

Im not sure why Bob dislikes the NASA plan to actually have a rendezvous before they send equipment maybe he just dislikes the whole idea of rendezvous in the first place. We already know his opinion of the Moon and maybe this is just an attempt to simply get the Moon part of the NASA plan to be treated as a joke and to concentrate on Mars. If that is the case though it is likely if this actually occurs then it will also put a hammer blow to NASA eventually going to Mars. With statements "but all we did was another blasted Apollo lots of pictures nothing else and so why go to Mars to do the same". Nope I would be circumspect about the reasons "Honest Bob" has put the statement out.

Though the interesting bit for me was the challenge put out to colleges to create a telerobotic exploration rover for use on Mars. It would obviously have a time delay loop so that the distance control from Earth could be accurately replaced and the robot tested.

I dont think the Mars society has lost its way I just think we are on the verge of progressing somewhere and we want to take the first step. I suspect that a lot of people where expecting the new rocket architecture to be announced and were disapointed that it was not. Nothing like eager anticipation to be dashed to put a small downer on things but think of the arquements that would have livened the confrence up if it had been announced.

this is the domain of independent tests and the ability for continous testing and whole year marks to show what a candidate is truly worth.

Not a hundred percent accurate but then again what is in this world

I suspect the Chinese space program is not what is causeing the USA concern. The Chinese are renovating an ex Soviet Aircraft Carrier. The political meaning for this is obvious. To dominate the area around China and this includes the islands of Taiwan and even Japan aircraft from mainland China is all that is needed but an aircraft carrier only is for the use of force presentation. This will give China a chance to increase its prescence in the Pacific. This is not a great concern unless China begins to build its own indigenous fleet of Carriers where this ex soviet one will give them experience in such operations.

And as a further aside the Chinese PRN have already built there own class of anti aircraft/missile aegis class of cruisers. And certainly it has built or given orders to build more than is necassary to protect the current PRN's naval strength.

Definition of an Empire,

A large multi ethnic state ruled from a single center. Most often created by cooercion but to be successful must be able to get the various states that form its makeup to want to be part of the Empire.

The Achaemenid Persians where a succesful Empire they managed to keep the various minorities in there Empire reasonably happy. They fell to a military genius and where subsumed.

The Alexandrian Empire was not succesful it managed to cooerce many nations under it but fell apart and disintegrated when the central leadership failed.

The Chinese where a sucessful empire but though a strong central authority dominated and surviving military invasions they eventually disintegrated under internal pressures that weakened them

The Romans again where an empire that was succesful but fell to internal weakening and to being destroyed by outside pressures.

The Spanish Empire was succesful but wracked by internal pressures it collapsed

The British Empire was succesful but weakened after fighting other emerging empires internal pressures made it collapse.

Now America stands at the door of becoming an Empire it has cooerced other ethnic societies into its control but has yet to state it is an Empire. But if you see the trend of the ages you will see that the main cause of the failure of these Empires is always an internal failure and unless conquered by a more powerful force it is this that will make an Empire collapse.

America is an Empire but it has competitors and it has internal pressures. One of the greatest is that it struggles with the term imperialism. Empires are not necassarily a bad thing they spread new inventions and generally ensure there citizens a chance to have a good life. They do bad things too but it is often outweighed by the good they do.

At the moment the USA is not a state that is going to collapse but there are pressures that could do it. It is time for the USA to accept what it is and gird itself to the struggle that is keeping an Empire going.

Fortunatly we can automate the process by pumping the hot water to a series of loops outside to cool the mixture if we find it is getting too hot. Especially if they have a high surface area and we can use these only if we truly need too. Hopefully the insulation we use will mean that heat loss from the colony is small at night.

I certainly hope that a Uv protection for greenhouses has been done but as stated with a lot of googling and asking people who deal with the glass industry I have still to find anyone who has such a coating that does not reduce the visible light spectrum. It does not mean it does not exist just I have not found it yet. You will also see in my post that it is the plastic that is sunblocked and I have even mentioned it still glass is the cheapest stuff we use even when toughened enough to protect a greenhouse on mars. It will be glass we use there as it will reasonably easy to make more as long as we have silicates and if we have to create a thick anti Uv layer it is that layer that makes the glass more opaque.

We are not exactly going to have one greenhouse are we. If we have a group of them then the likehood is that we will need different operating tempatures for the different plant types we grow. There is also the likehood that for purely morale reasons we might create a garden dome just for people to be able to walk into and see greenery.

With this in mind we can use a cooling system and pump to move heated liguid to warm the greenhouses that need more heating and cool the ones that dont. If we use the idea of a large tank reservoir that is sealed we can pump heat into it and have for all intents a large fish farm.

We will only need such a complicated cooling system if we do insulate the greenhouses and domes to the point of little heat loss during the night. But we can use the problem we create as a solution to other issues we have and hopefully reduce the power we need to have to divert from the Nuclear power plant that is essential to any base or colony plan we have.

Interesting but most Uv protection coatings on windows only reduces the amount of Uv that penetrates. Mars though has not atmospheric protection at all and as such the most dangerous bands of Uv light will have unlike on the Earth free access to the surface. The best Uv protection I have found from a lot of googling and asking glass companies is to stop all but 8% of the Uv light and this begins to make the glass very dark. Add the increased protection needed to strengthen the plastic and the extra Uv protection it is likely that Mars greenhouses will have rather dark windows

The trouble with heating a permafrost is it melts and you get sinkage. So any heat exchange to a Martian permafrost has to be carefully done. Still it should be possible to get heat flow reversed during the Martian night by a heat exchanger and get some return.

There are certain plants that benefit though from a very warm enviroment this is in the form of the sea weeds and algae. Heating that amount of water would be very energy intensive but with luck we should get a decent return in the form of food.

Still a lot of work to be done on this whole genre.