New Mars Forums

But that is the first part of the article and it goes on to show just why the belief that the moon treaty is failed is wrong.

And no private company is treated as anything but as an agency of the Goverment it is registered to. Certainly the PRC and Russia have stated as such.

I can assure you that in space Microwave transmission works much better than here on Earth.

One way to build things on the Moon is to simply put regolith in a mold and microwave it making quick easy bricks.

Some plans to do that with making roads just involve a rover microwaving the regolith to make a hard surface.

This will go off topic slightly but has to be said.

Currently all the samples from the Moon are scientific samples for the exact purpose of furthering knowledge. They where never commercial samples.

Many people consider the only treaty that space missions are bound too is the Outer space treaty. Unfortunatly that is not the case. The Moon treaty of 1979 is still present and for all intents the countries of the world have acceded to that treaty and it considers the USA to have done so. And all missions into space have to have a country of origin and even if a private company they are licensed by that country.

Trying for commercial mining and resource hunting even if selling asteroidal material could well have a sting in the tale as all mankind could ask for some of the profits.

It is an intresting fact that most rare Earths we mine here on the Earth are the result of lunar ejecta that has hit our Earth. And that our supplies of this essential elements are running short.

And that with current commodities prices PGMs and now Gold are worth the lunar mining and return.

Still the major bar is political under the current treaties space missions are under make any materials garnered the property of all mankind.

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When it comes down to it.

We will colonise Mars only when we send enough people that we dont just have one base but many. Each will be located next to a resource they can supply to other bases. This is the experience that we have learned from our ancestors who colonised the Americas. It is the ability to increase population that makes a succesful colonisation and bases kept in Isolation waiting for resupply will fail. All I can say to this is Roanoake and Darien.

These bases will rely certainly in the initial to middle stages on supply from the homeworld nation. But the future if that country keeps its nerve is to create another extension of itself.

Sorry Midoshi I believe that Spacenut is talking about the Phobos-Grunt probe losing orbit.

The answer to that is it is already losing height but it really depends on the next few days and it may be only that this probe has before it starts to burn up.

There are three stages in the terraforming process these are Initial, Partial and of course full.

Mars at the present does not have a carrying capacity the missions sent there will have to be housed in specific habitats with the same tolerances as if they where in deep space and if it comes to leaving Mars at this state then the new home of Humanity will be O'Neill type colonies in space. These will be safer and have access to much more wealth in the form of asteroidal material than any Mars colony.

Certainly I dont want Mars to be the equivalent of an Antartic research base. This is a deliberate statement as Mars does have water and volatiles locked into its surface and if we stick a building on top and add heat we have building damage.

So we want to Terraform Mars well the first step is to add light and heat. Soletta arrays increasing the suns luminosity on Mars will be the cheapest option. Soletta arrays are large mirrors of thin reflective material and we have been testing the development of these as sails. This will have two effects the first is of course Mars gets brighter and Warmer and we begin to notice an increase in Air pressure. But the effect is also to improve our ability to grow crops and of course to create Farms.

Bioengineered crops designed for the low light enviroment of Mars grown in CO2 pumped in from the Martian atmosphere filled Farms could produce our first product available to the rest of the solar system. It will be cheaper to grow a lot of food on Mars and to deliver it across the solar system than to send it up from Earth. We have to assume and rightly that Mars will not be our only point of interest and that we will be resource hunting in the asteroids and of course developing the Moon and further out. Mars has less gravity and we could build larger farms without the need to provide artificial lights if we go this way. This means in any economy that using NIMF rockets or mass driver technology Mars could provide food across the solar system to our other outposts where the further they go out the less sunlight they have and of course space used up for plants is less space used up for something else. Of course extra light and heat also allows solar power to really begin to function and as air pressure increases so can we use windmills this provides us with more electrical power on the surface but that is just a bonus.

This is initial terraforming and cost/benefit analysis is reasonably cheap cost to build and maintain with a very large benefit.

Partial terrforming where we get to the point air pressure is such that we have plants growing outside will depend on how we get about it. We need to increase the atmosphere and to provide more heat be it large heat producing reactors on the surface or to start a super greenhouse effect by use of chemical plants etc. Do we send kuipler belt snowballs to Mars to impact on the surface, possible? We may not need to do that depending on just how much volatiles are locked up in the surface and poles of Mars. The cost is unknown but large but the benefits is to safety and that carrying capacity of the planet. If we only need a face mask and warm clothes to walk around the planet that is much better than full spacesuits.

Full terraforming now that is hard to speculate. Just how do we give Mars a magnetic field?

Sorry Glandu.

The Space Shuttle would not have been launched to fix this probe it only cost £170 million. The launch costs of the Shuttle tended to be in the excess of $500 million.

There is also the slight issue that it is a Russian/Chinese mission and it would take literally years to plan out.

So lets hope Roscosmos can fix it and send it on its way but to be really honest it does not look good and the curse of Mars has claimed another mission.

PS welcome to New Mars.

Hi Folks.

What in my very poor way is trying to have in place a set of groundrules or guides to people to know what is and is not acceptable. It is though I know a difficult and rather thankless task to perform.

In this I think the basis should be that we can discuss current space policies / NASA leaders, Spaceport USA etc which also tends to lead us into defence and fiscal policies but that we keep this tight. We can discuss treaties and proposed treaties as to how they effect space and any space related announcements by political leaders. We do have to be careful that with certain countries were we do not actually know there full intentions in space and even here on Earth.

We probably should have a rule that come election time especially in the USA that no discussion about Democrat/Republican who would make the best president etc be allowed it is not as if many of the people who could vote on this will decide purely on a candidates Space policy.

Whatever happens I agree with Clark I dont want the point belabored so I dont intend to address it after this posting.

JoshNH4H I agree that the republican/democrat catfight etc has no place here but the no politics rule was an attempt to be black and white and that just could not work. We are in a situation where certainly the western world appears to be retrenching from space and discussing that will drop us into politics and talks about the recession and of course people blaming one party or another. We have to have a discussion about how to get the entrenching stopped without getting stuck in a useless blame game.

A further example is for us space advocates is that we could not really talk about how to get elected officials to support space more and just who to write to get that support as it would have been a breach of the rule even though we had a section for this. It never happened as common sense applied but it is an example of what the rules should allow us to do.

True but we also started to lose a lot of those who where here only for space and we do have a broad kirk and that means the political spectrum was very wide. In the lead up to the elections in the USA it did become a bit daft.

How about  "AT LAST"

The way things are going it might well be the first words spoken on Mars.