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The atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, 1.93% nitrogen, and 1.89% argon. You take the air, compress it, and let it cool off at night; most of the CO2 will become solid. Then you separate off the CO2 snow and the rest will be 50-50 nitrogen and argon. That combo would be fine for a buffer gas. It might lower people's voices slightly, but argon is actually better than nitrogen in that it won't give you the bends.
The rest of the atmosphere, by the way, is 0.15% oxygen and 0.5% carbon monoxide. Burn them together and you will get energy, carbon dioxide, and left over oxygen. But they are such a small trace of the atmosphere that you would need to concentrate them a lot to get a flammable mixture, and the energy expended compressing and separating probably exceeds the amount produced by the reaction.
This looks generally good, Louis. My comments are two fold:
1. Experimentation will play a huge role and what will be done in years 5-8 will be very much shaped by the discoveries in years 3-4, which in turn will be shaped by the initial discoveries in years 1-2. Hence it is very hard to predict what each subsequent period will encompass. Perhaps that's why you didn't carry all the way through to year 20!
2. It looks like your goals will absorb the entire crew's time, but perhaps a quarter or a third of the crew will need to be devoted to maintenance, and maybe another quarter or a third to exploration and other scientific goals.
I just got my copy of Zubrin's little book "Mars Direct." Don't bother to buy it. 90% of it has been published on the web before, including his proposal to use 3 Falcon Heavy launches to send two people to Mars. It's an old proposal. The heavier payload of the Falcon Heavy does help, but Zubrin also called for use of a hydrogen stage to push everything to Mars and that doesn't exist. If you used kerosene and LOX you'd probably be right back to the 17.5 tonnes Zubrin used as his baseline. Maybe you could stick a Centaur stage on top, though?
The rest of the book consists of a collection of Zubrin's known and also already published rants against VASIMR, NASA, etc. His calculations about the "worth" of an astronaut in calculating risk is interesting.
It is too bad that Musk is skipping a small, initial form of his Mars plan and aiming to start with a huge booster. Risky; if you can't raise the money to build the thing, everything fails. And if the big booster were to blow up on launch and take out a nearby neighborhood, you'd have a huge, fatal problem.
A dragon capsule doesn't carry enough propellant to return it to Earth from the Martian surface, and if it could, it would be too heavy for a Falcon Heavy to push it to Mars. The escape velocity of Mars is roughly twice the exhaust velocity of the hypergolic propellants of the superdraco engines, so the capsule would need to carry about 5 or 6 times as much propellant as its dry mass.
Except it costs half a kilometer per second to get to Phobos and half a kilometer per second to get from Phobos to a decent orbit for trans-Earth injection.
I think you need to consider the role of metal carbonyls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_carbonyl . Zubrin's Case for Mars suggests that nickel-iron meteorite can be blasted with hot carbon monoxide, producing metal carbonyl gas. When you cool the carbonyls they liquify at different temperatures, so a fractionation tower will separate then. You can pour the liquids into molds and drive off the CO and reuse it. You can use it to produce metal powders for three d printers, too. I suspect we won't smelt steel on Mars, but seed iron carbonyl with a certain amount of carbon.
I'm inclined to think Musk has thought through his plan a lot more thoroughly than Zubrin thinks. Musk is thinking much farther ahead than Zubrin, and Zubrin is still mired in some of his assumptions. Zubrin wants to leave the interplanetary transport on Mars as a habitat; Muskl considers that a waste of $100 million because its cheaper to build housing on Mars (that's his assumption) and he wants to fly the habitat home.
Can you give us a link?
Where road clearing is concerned, we already can map the Martian surface down to the meter range and pretty soon we can map it to the 10 centimeter range. Multiple images from different angles will give us three-d. I suspect in 20 years a computer program can be written to select a potential route that avoids crater rims, dunes, and boulder fields, and avoids many very large boulders. With GPS, the astronauts would just follow the preselected route, making any spontaneous, necessary diversions if the mapping data proves inadequate. It may be volunteers could create the potential routes as well.
There will be two types of routes: routes that go from geological feature to geological feature, and therefore will zigzag, and long-distance routes, which will be as short and straight as the terrain allows. The latter can be steadily improved. The former might set off from the long distance route, then return to it, or the former might be the first cut and later developments will straighten the trails to produce a long-distance trail.
In my novel, they started out with "traces" that went from geological site to geological site; upgraded them to trails; widened and smoothed them to become dirt "highways" that vehicles could drive down automatically at up to 45 miles per hour (the speed limit on the gravel "Alaska Highway" to Prudhoe Bay, by the way); then then used an big automated machine to extrude a metal highway surface from a big tank of metal carbonyl. The metal highway had built in methane and oxygen pipelines, so that solar farms and wind turbines could be sited along the highway where water wells could provide a water source that the electricity could convert to methane and oxygen via the Sabatier process. This allowed the various Mars bases to have an "energy grid" and meant stranded vehicles always had an oxygen supply nearby.
These strike me as in the ballpark, Louis. Space X developed the Falcon 9 for $300 million and a NASA estimate was that it would cost them $3.6 billion to do the same. If you multiple your $14 billion by 12, you get about $150 billion, which is about the amount NASA would spend.
The $300 million included the first Dragon capsule, but with the Commercial Crew contract, Space X has been able to spend much, much more on the Dragon 2 capsule. Their landing technology can be applied to a refuelable Mars landing/ascent vehicle; I suspect they could develop a methane-powered vehicle for $1 or $2 billion (maybe less, since they're already developing such engines and many other parts of the technology needed).
I'd land all the food for the surface stay with the crew, so we know they won't get separated from them (and that way if there's an abort the food is with them for the flight home). I'd land a spare set of supplies separately as an emergency. I'd use an inflatable habitat with about 500-600 square meters for 6 people (3 levels, 14 meters in diameter), inflate it in a small crater, and cover the top with sandbags or spray water on it. I'd land somewhere ground ice was a known quantity (unmanned rover preceding the final site selection). I'd land several tonnes of solar panels able to make close to 100 kw of power. I'd send at least 3 unmanned landers ahead with perhaps 14 tonnes of supplies each, one with the inflatable (which would probably mass close to 14 tonnes), one with some of the food and a 5 tonne pressurized rover, one with the rest of the food supplies and some of the solar panels and the greenhouse. I'd land the crew with their food supply, half the solar panels, two buggies (golf cart sized), their medical supplies, and basic science supplies. The rest of the science would go in lander 3.
I've probably forgotten something.
Road go from wherever the base is--and we don't know that yet--to where there are resources and areas of scientific interest, and we don't know where the resources are.
In my novel, one of the first trails they cleared was the "Circumnavigational"; it went all the way around in the "tropical" zone and many of the other roads went off of it. Later, there were similar latitudinal circle trails at 30-40 degrees north and south. One longitudinal trail went from Argyre through Chryse to the north polar terrains. That's a natural geographical route, I think.
In my Mars novel, an artist collected surface materials of different color (white salt, dark basalt, sandstones of yellow and brown) and made labyrinths for walking outside. She also made artistic designs on the ground that one could see from inside. The geologists collected the materials for her on their expeditions. They also collected unusually shaped ventifacts (wind-carved rocks) and salt weathered rocks (think: driftwood art on Earth). There were murals inside pressurized structures. Later when Mars had a few thousand people there was a ballet program for the kids (huge leaps!). Because astronauts tend to be overachieving kids, there were amateur theatre troops, symphonies, rock bands, water color painters, and sculptors working in clay. Electronic art was big, too; it could be exported easily. A Department of Culture encouraged these achievements and provided money for them. Marsian songs developed as well, some with patriotic implications. (Note: I use the adjective "Martian" to refer to the planet and its natural aspects and "Marsian" to refer to its cultural and social aspects and its terrestrial ecologies).
Once there were a thousand or so people, from a dozen or two cultures, there were cultural fairs when people would, for example, celebrate Chinese culture and food on a Saturday. There was a big annual fair with national booths and people wore ethnic clothing. The American western band was very popular.
Basketball was the most popular inside sport, once there was room for a small basketball court. Up on Phobos, once there were larger interior enclosures, the game of striker developed (think of it as zero gee team handball or basketball). Phobos eventually even had a few professional striker teams that were followed by fans on Earth. When there were really large enclosures on the surface, Martian football/soccer teams developed and each "outpost" had its own, which competed against each other.
It takes slightly less delta-v to get to Venus than Mars, and if Venus does the rest of the work, there should be an increase in cargo mass if sent via Venus, but at the expense of a longer transit time (about 300 days, I think).
It was on space.com, too. Really cool!
The "waste of money" argument is complicated and subjective in many ways. Americans spend more on pizza, on pet food, and on cemetery upkeep than on the Space Program. The real question is, how much will it cost, and we still don't know. Musk says he can build his transportation system for 10 billion dollars. He created the Falcon 9 rocket for $300 million and a NASA study indicated it would have cost NASA something like ten times as much to do the same. He developed the first Dragon capsule quite cheaply as well. So I have confidence that if Musk can get his hands on 10 billion dollars, he can do what he says he can do (well, maybe it'll cost him 15 billion, but not 100 billion!).
So the cost issue, to me, is moot. In this case, it is being developed by private capital, and private capital can be spent any way the owner(s) want.
We have an Antarctic research program and it costs a few hundred million a year. No one says, why are we spending a few hundred million studying ice and penguins, let's spend it on rebuilding our cities instead. The reason for this is because it is obscure. You wouldn't do that much rebuilding anyway, and the research is valuable (climate change, geology of an entire continent, ecology of the Southern Ocean, ozone depletion, astronomy at the South Pole where there's no water vapor to block the infrared, etc.)
In 1970 I was attending a program on NASA and the cost came up. The NASA spokesman noted that in medieval Europe, they spent a significant fraction of GDP building cathedrals when people were starving, and the inspiration value has endured ever since. Similarly, space exploration will have enduring, historic impacts on terrestrial culture and civilization.
Regarding the limited scientific value, human beings could have done all the research the rovers have done on Mars over 12 years in a few months, and the direct observations would be much richer. If we want to find the history of life on Mars, we need people there crawling around and whacking rocks (I speak as a geologist here).
Regarding the health issues: There are no show stoppers, where the flight to Mars and back is concerned. There are issues of cardiovascular health, for example. Research will probably develop drugs and other ways to ameliorate the issues. The only way to find out is to go, though. Similarly, on the Martian surface there will be issues of radiation and possibly of low gravity. The radiation can mostly be protected against by burying the living spaces, and people won't venture outside more than a few hours a week anyway. I suspect if we ever have 100,000 people on Mars, they will have BETTER health than the average American, because they won't smoke, they won't drink excessively, they won't get hooked on drugs, they won't be obese, and they'll have access to advanced medical technology. Maybe they'll get cancer twice as often, but it'll be caught and cut out before it is serious (and I speak as someone with two minor skin cancer procedures and a missing cancerous prostate).
I don't see moral hazard as a consequence of Mars exploration. We're already raping the Earth excessively. The Marsians may teach us how to preserve our ecology; they'll have to be very careful with theirs.
I agree: we need one settlement for a start and it needs to be at a low altitude and near water. I doubt we need large landing ellipses; Musk can bring things down on a little floating platform and that precision will be possible once a very limited GPS system is set up (which may not require very many satellites). A second or third settlement will be justified based on availability of natural resources. You can have a DaVinci robot for medical operations in only one spot for a long time. A central settlement will be needed to provide a lot of essential services.
Plants need a certain amount of oxygen and a certain amount of carbon dioxide, and a certain amount of air pressure so the water doesn't evaporate out of them. The details probably vary from species to species, too. I'd make sure the atmosphere is breathable so people can do some of the gardening work and can just go in there and be with the plants; the greenery will be psychologically healthy. You can't use a fan to pressurize the greenhouse, but you just use a specially designed air pump. You probably will want to circulate the air of your habitat through the greenhouse because the plants will use up the carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Also, if you have a big barrel full of moist ground with, say, grass or plants growing on top, and you blow the air up through the dirt, microorganisms in the soil will utilize and remove nitrogen oxides and various waste gasses (like fart gasses) that otherwise will accumulate in the habitat's air. A small pond and blowing air through the water will also remove some unwanted gasses and smells. So a greenhouse can play an important role in a closed life support system.
There are lots of ways to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You can run Martian air over a cold zeolite bed and the zeolite will adsorb the carbon dioxide. Or, compress Martian air and cool it off; the CO2 will freeze out. The resulting left over gas will be something like 40% nitrogen and 60% argon, I think. I'd just pump that into the life support system; it's a fine neutral gas combination to add to a breathable atmosphere. I'd also use a different Martian standard atmosphere for enclosures. The Earth's atmosphere is 3 pounds per square inch oxygen and 12 psi nitrogen. I'd use 2 or 2.5 psi oxygen, which is the typical pressure in a lot of Colorado, which people adjust to fine, and maybe 4 or 5 psi of neutral gas (nitrogen and argon). The big issues are cooking and the transmission of sound. Martians may need to use pressure cookers, and they may have reputations for speaking too loudly if they visit Earth. One advantage of argon: it doesn't give you the bends like nitrogen does if you are changing your air pressure, as you might when you put on a space suit.
Space X has just updated the data about the Falcon Heavy here: http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy . The payload numbers have been increased almost 20%!
Payload to LEO: 63,800 kg
Payload to GTO: 26,700 kg
Payload to Mars: 16,800 kg
Payload to Pluto: 3,500 kg
This means that two Falcon Heavies have about the same payload (127.6 tonnes) as the Saturn V (118 tonnes originally, 140 tonnes eventually). Mars Direct was designed based on a 140 tonne to LEO rocket able to throw 40-46 tonnes to TMI (depending on the delta-v needed). So the Falcon Heavy is getting rather close to those numbers, and of course it is a LOT cheaper; at 90 million per launch ($180 million for two), it can put almost as much into LEO as a Saturn V, whose launch in today's dollars would be over a billion dollars. I would not be at all surprised that a few tweaks (a larger second stage, for example) wouldn't push a Falcon Heavy's payload up to 70 tonnes. That's only another 6%!
The other thing the US government did to settle the west is give railroad companies vast tracts of land along their routes, which immediately became valuable once the tracks were built. Transportation was the key to settling the west and the government did a lot to bring it about. There was the legal structure, a reliable court system, and a stable money supply as well.
Transportation is the key to space exploration as well. Space X has repeatedly said it is a transportation company, not a settlement company. That is why they designed a system to get people to Mars, but no plan for habitats or surface vehicles. They may have to do those other things, but that's not their plan.
Low Earth orbit is half way to the entire solar system in terms of energy. If you can get things there cheaply, you've licked the major transportation problems. Space X figures they can build their massive booster and Mars transporter for 10 billion of investment money. That's something they can raise themselves if they are a near-monopoly for cheap transportation to LEO, a destination that will expand in demand manyfold once you can get there cheaply. Even if they can earn only 5 billion that way, if they have a proven track record, they can borrow the rest. Elon seems to be very good at leveraging investments.
Well, the budget doesn't have practically any increase, so it isn't that great, and it zeros out some important science programs related to climate change.
I am a retired scientists as well, Oldfart--I have a Masters in Planetary Geology--and I totally disagree with you about the scientific value of the moon. We have learned vast amounts about the origin of the moon, the early history of the solar system, and the early development of the Earth as a result of the Apollo missions, and there is a lot more we still can learn. The way silicates differentiate in low pressure, low water environments inside the moon compliments our knowledge of their differentiation in the interior of the Earth and helps us understand silicate chemistry in general. That will help us understand the evolution of the interior of Mars, just as the surface of the moon teaches us about the surface of Mars. It has been estimated that every square kilometer of the surface of the moon has thousands of fragments of Earth, blasted into space by impact, that fell there. Dating those pieces of Earth will help us reconstruct the fist half billion years of terrestrial history and possibly figure out the evolution of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the origin of life on Earth. The moon is like Antarctica; a treasure trove for science. The moon and Earth are end members of a planetary spectrum with Mars half way in between, so the three of them teach us something about all three.
Zubrin in the Case for Mars sais that the methane / oxygen ratio of the Mars vehicles would be 3.5 to 1 because the mean molecular weight of the exhaust gas is less (CO weighs less than CO2) and that increases exhaust velocity, even though the combustion is incomplete. Hydrogen/oxygen engines apparently burn at 6:1 O to H even though the stoichiometric ratio should be 8:1.
That's going to be a good sized rocket! Also, in response to Musk's announcement that he'd fly two tourists around the moon in 2018, the Washington Post published an article about a leaked document Blue Origin provided the Trump Administration proposing a cargo lander able to take 10,000 lbs to the moon by the early 2020s. It's beginning to look likely that people will return to the moon some time in the next decade. If nothing else, someone needs to develop a simple lunar lander capable of being launched to orbit by a Falcon Heavy and propelled to the moon by a stage lifted to orbit by another Falcon Heavy. Two of them can put 106 tonnes into LEO, not that much less than a Saturn V, and with our improved technology the result should be just about as good, though it'll be MUCH cheaper.