New Mars Forums

My wife had her first shot of the Astrozenica vaccine on 27th March.  Within 5 days she developed tinnitus.  A few days after that, she suffered dizziness, vertigo, and nausea.  The symptoms have not abated and she now needs an MRI scan to check for permanent brain / nerve damage.  She feels permanently intoxicated.  Tinnitus and vertigo are known side effects of the vaccine.  We both had coronavirus in March last year.  It made us both ill, but we both got over it within 2 weeks.  The vaccine may have caused her permanent damage.

I am more than a little apprehensive about taking the vaccine after her experience.  Whilst both the vaccine and the virus present their own risk, I am not satisfied that viral risk avoided by taking the vaccine justify the risks that the vaccine imposes.  Having both had the coronavirus, we both have T-cell immunity.

What are you talking about, louis? You didn't even read my post!

I have no idea why you're talking about Moderna when I mentioned Novavax. As a protein subunit vaccine (it consists of the spike protein plus an immune booster), it is the closest we'll have to a traditional inactivated vaccine - nothing enters the bodies cells, unlike the AZ and mRNA ones.

I also have no idea why you're talking about children. I never mentioned them. As far as we can tell, kids shrug off the disease just fine unless they have serious pre-existing conditions.

Robotics that can not keep its self powered up or maintained is adding work to the crew to make use of them...plus this increases that mass as to the variety of machines we would want to add in when the budget to get to mars and back is already tight....

Starship is too big for a parachute. I would really like this to work. Elon promised Starship would bring total cost down to $2 million per flight. Not $2 million per unit mass, but per launch. Of course that's cost to SpaceX; expect price to customer to be higher. Still, that would be a dramatic game changer! Even if they never achieve human flight reliability, just as a cargo launch vehicle that would be amazing! As I posted elsewhere, Starship could launch a spacecraft for Mars, then crew could rendezvous with a Dragon capsule. The capsule could stay attached as an emergency escape pod when returning to Earth. If SpaceX does get Starship to work, with reliability sufficient for Earth-to-Earth passengers? I would be pleased.

The latest article from Tim Morgan's Surplus Energy Economics blog makes interesting reading.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpres … for-money/

Beginning in the 1990s, economists and policy makers noticed a puzzling trend of economic deceleration in Western countries.  The cause was a mystery to them at the time.  We now know that this was due to the drag on economic growth imposed by rising 'Energy Cost of Energy' or conversely, falling EROI of end use energy supply.  The financial deregulation of 1990s, allowed debt to grow much faster; loosened lending criteria and reduced requirements for financial transparency, allowing the development of derivatives as financial instruments.  These trends allowed debt to increase much faster and the hope was that this would push along economic growth.  What it in fact did was to allow a growing divergence between the financial system and the real economy of goods and services.  This reached a crisis point in 2005, as the peaking of world conventional oil production led to rising oil prices.  This stoked inflation in the price of real goods and commodities, leading to interest rate rises in 2006.  This resulted in insolvency amongst marginal debtors, triggering the banking crisis of 2007 and the financial crisis of 2007-2009.  Between the mid 1990s and 2006, asset valuations grew explosively and interest rates gradually fell in an attempt to make debt more affordable.  This is a trend that would accelerate after the financial crisis, as interest rates minus inflation fell to zero or even went negative and huge quantities of new money, created out of nothing by central banks, were poured in asset markets of every kind.

Where do we go from here?  The graphs in Tim's report are especially telling.  Much of the recorded GDP growth in Western countries since 2000, is the result of asset price accumulation that results from the spending of borrowed money.  When this is accounted for, real world economic growth barely exceeded 1% since the turn of the century.  Even this does not include the proportion of growth that stems from increasing investment in energy as a ECoE relentlessly rises and ERoEI relentlessly falls.  When this is accounted for, real prosperity has remained more or less flat since the turn of the century, with growth in developing countries offset by decline in developed countries.  In the developed world, real prosperity per capita has been falling for some time.  After tax prosperity per capital is now substantially down compared to what it was in 2000 in most Western countries.  After 2019, global per capita prosperity began to decline as well.

The continuous rapid growth in debt and financial commitments against declining individual prosperity, suggests that we headed for a rerun of the 2008.  This time, the much greater value of outstanding financial commitments suggest that another crisis could threaten the existence of many  currencies.

Economies have ECoE ceilings, beyond which real economic growth becomes impossible.  Estimates vary as to the minimum ERoEI that a society can tolerate.  This generally depends on the complexity of the economy.  Industrialised countries like the UK, US and Japan, began experiencing secular stagnation when ECoE exceeded about 4%.  The problem is that to keep industrial countries going, a lot of surplus energy is needed to use and maintain infrastructure, as well as provide necessities of life, like food, heat and water.  Motorways and other infrastructure need to be maintained, and this requires a lot of energy.  For this reason, falling surplus energy directly reduces the amount of energy invested in economic growth.  Eventually, as appears to have happened in Western countries, the rate of new grown declined to zero as ECOEs continue to rise.

The ECoE for renewable energy sources appears to be declining towards and leveling off at an ECoE of around 10%.  It is not known how Tim Morgan calculates this, or whether it includes any assumptions on the energy costs associated with intermittent energy.  But regardless, a 10% ECoE will result in contuing decline in per capita prosperity in Western countries, as the surplus energy is insufficient to allow maintenance of infrastructure.  Whilst RE has important niche applications, it is incapable of powering industrial civilisation as we we know it.

Fast charging batteries would place extreme demands on the electric grid.  If transportation is fully electrified, it would just about double total daily electricity demand.  Imagine how much generating capacity would be needed when everyone plugs their fast charging cars in at 7pm and charges them in just two hours.  To meet those sorts of demand peaks, most grid operators build open cycle gas turbines.  They have low capital cost and ramp up to full load very quickly, within minutes.  They are almost certainly what would end up being used.  Fast charging electric vehicles would simply shift combustion from the vehicle to the powerplant.

Remember, radiation on the surface of Mars is about half that of ISS. In order to reduce radiation exposure to that of a US nuclear reactor worker, you have to limit time outdoors in a spacesuit to 40 hours per week. That's average; you could spend 2 weeks outdoors then 8.6 weeks (2 months) without going outside at all. That time outdoors could include a pressurized rover. Who suggested a geologist could take an extended trip in a rover, then spend months indoors? Was it Spacenut? I like it.

I'm not a big fan of "wind in my face". I prefer warm summer weather, hot and no wind. But if you want to feel "breeze" on your face on Mars, realize that would require the same elastic fabric as the rest of the MCP suit. If breathing air for the suit is pressurized to 3.0 psi (20.684 kPa) then the "girdle" on your face must apply the same pressure. How would you do that? I'm thinking a more practical design is something like a closed-face motorcycle helmet, worn on the head, not shoulders. And a breathing mask like a jet fighter pilot. That way breathing air is separated from air over your eyes. So humidity in breathing air doesn't cause your visor to fog.

Alternatively, you could wear a fire fighter's face mask. With soft rubber cover over the rest of your head. Something air tight. The hard helmet was to provide a crash helmet, safety when driving a 4-wheel ATV on the rugged terrain of Mars.

Hmm. Images of fire fighter masks all have a pressure regulator on the mask. An MCP suit could put the regulator in the backpack. Basically 3 hoses: CO2 sorbent to mask with pressure regulator to release O2, from mask to air bladder vest, from vest to CO2 sorbent in backpack. The last connection could be a direct connection rather than a hose. The second hose could connect to the backpack where it connects to the vest. That would mean two hoses from the helmet or mask, with a one-way valved where the mask attaches. These fire fighter masks have a high pressure hose to a regulator on the mask. Keeps the hose smaller, but the mask heavy and not compatible with a rebreather system.
https://assets.plainpicture.com/public- … 495889.jpg https://media.spokesman.com/photos/2015 … ighter.jpg

louis wrote:

The legs are a bit more convincing in that rendering. 

Was it something like 790 tiles on the SN15? Don't think we've seen any fall off yet - a good sign!

SpaceNut wrote:

heat shield close up
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-cont … 50-233.jpg

lunar legs
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-cont … 41-832.jpg

Up until now with no survivors we could not tell but the test run of the engines some came off

https://youtu.be/Lbhai7z2wYo