New Mars Forums

http://www.space.com/news/050414_meet_mike.html]Call me "Mike"

Insert an aerogel layer in the fabric. And if made in zero-gee, aerogel is quite transparent.

In my opinion, venting heat out of the human hab areas will be more difficult than staying warm. Largely unoccupied areas will need heat piped in but that heat can be scavenged from all the other hot areas of hte settlement.

We have discussed before the heat plumes that will likely rise continually from any habitat. And at a MarsHome workshop it was agreed that keeping any permafrost under the settlement from melting was quite critical.

Heh! Letting your Mars base sink because waste heat melted the permafrost into liquid water would ruin one's whole day. Heat disposal is a bigger problem if you dig deep.

I am not (no longer?) a big underground guy. Using bulldozers to pile water ice laden reogllith on top of plastic habitats?  Perhaps.

Nukes are essential but will not avoid the need to harvest as much sunlight as possible. Using mirrors aimed at a greenhouse is one step and using light tubes to funnel light from further away is another.

I am merely counting pennies and light tubes allow us to gather a few more cents. There is no panacea there.

= = =

Food growing on the Moon will be a very difficult business, I agree. Lunar insolation is ideal for industrial processes however.

Lunar solar furnaces can achieve fairly high temperatures with little capital investment.

= = =

Given the relative delta V needed for Earth to L1 versus Mars to L1 - - it seems possible (although far from assured) that a Mars colony might raise a few scraps of hard currency by selling food and water to Luna.

Absolutely Mars (together with Phobos/Deimos) could raise cash by selling food, water and fuel to as asteroid belt bound exploration mission.

Reactors need to be re-cored or abandonded and replaced once their fuel runs out. Navy ships go thropugh extended dry-dock and re-fit whenever a reactor runs out of fuel. IMHO, nuclear power is not a panacea for a decent energy budget, its a pre-requisiste.

Sunlight can be concentrated by inexpensive passive mirrors fed through light tubes and "supplemented" by grow lights run by the reactors. There will be no energy to squander, even with nukes.

Many years ago on a (defunct?) message board we discussed the sulfur lamp and LEDs are low power grow lights. Sulfur lamps look like a good choice (there is one in the Smithsonian) - - solid state, with no moving parts, full spectrum light (unlike LEDs) and power consumption comparable or better than LEDs which are damn efficient to begin with.

A necessary back up system, IMHO

= = =

The Moon, by comparison has an overkill of insolation.

Just no CO2 and little (perhaps no) accessible H20.

Edited By BWhite on 1113488965

Yup. Smack into the hidden shoals placed by the harbor entrance.

= = =

I have read that poetry is highly agonistic

Despite all rumors to the contrary.

Edited By BWhite on 1113417755

http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id … ert=0]Link:

Regular Soyuz at $25 million & Proton at $40 million?

Hmmm. . . .

All money is green, at least US currency. If the Vatican chooses to write the necessary checks, they will be going.

Equatorial orbits mean the developed world is pretty much safe. It also means that equatorial nations would stand to benefit from their location as asteroids are digested and their materials returned to Earth.

If a large Ni-Fe asteroid were inbound for an equatorial orbit, to plane change away would require quite a substantial burn, no?

I have been starting to read up. As a liberal arts major its a wee bit harder for me.   :;):

Anyway -

Start with nickel carbonyl gas formed by adding CO gas to a ground up Ni-Fe asteroid. [There are plenty of hurdles I will merely skip over and I will simply assume a supply of nickel carbonyl gas! - - I acknowledge major hurdles to obtaining nickel carbonyl gas.]

Nickel carbonyl gas is nasty stuff but if you are on the Moon, its a nasty place to begin with, right?

At 180 degrees C - - yup 180 which is not all that hot - - and at "low pressure" (exact pressure remains out there in google-land) nickel carbonyl gas will deposit pure nickel on a mandrel and release CO for re-use.

Okay, here is my working idea for a lunar nickel vapor deposition device:

Create an aluminum mandrel on Earth. Attach it to a fabric inflatable reaction chamber. Hence low in mass and easily shipped. One side of the mandrel is exposed to allow direct delivery of sunlight.

Deploy the aluminum mandrel on the Moon with the mandrel at the focal point of a solar furnace and the fabric otherwise in shade. Fill with nickel carbonyl gas and allow the nickel to deposit on the mandrel to recover the CO gas.

Heck, I envision making nickel plates maybe 1 meter by 1 meter with interlocking grooves along the edges (like tongue & groove floor tile) and use 1/2 inch nickel plates as a building material. Nickel is easily welded. Assemble the tongue and groove plates and weld for a final seal.

= = =

By the way, M class asteroids with high nickel percentages are also high in platinum! Finding a way to dispose of the nickel before shipping to Earth increases net platinum percentages delivered to Earth.

Edited By BWhite on 1113086947

I believe you need a rather substantial differential in heat to run an engine.

Several years ago, I started looking into an idea to add solar heating covers to the pool that holds our town's treated wastewater (i.e. water that has already been treated for release into a nearby river) with the intention of running some sort of heat  pump using rather large quantities of municipal water as a heat sink.

As I recall, it was not at all easy to make electricity in this fashion. But air conditioning and heating? Very much easier.

God Bless Representative http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar … tml]Walter Jones (R - NC):

And GOP Senator http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local … html]Wayne Allard:

His beef? The scripted Social Secuirty "town hall" meetings with pre-chosen actors lobbing the Prez softball questions about the non-plan plan to raid social security.

Edited By BWhite on 1112995610

My belief (without benefit of ANY recent research) is that TANG was allowed to say NASA included it with food rations but paid nothing to NASA specifically for marketing rights.

Even if we agree to allow NASA to market =HOW= that is done remains a huge issue.

Selling non-exclusive media rights for the next lunar landing would probably raise the most money with the least amount of fuss. If a network wants access to NASA video and audio feed they pay a pro-rated share of a predetermined fixed fee.

No limit on the number of networks which can sign up and carry the broadcast, but if a network does not pay its pro-rata share then it cannot broadcast the video/audio.

= = =

Set a number at say $8 billion dollars for "return to the Moon" - -  which would include plenty of media content before and after the actual mission itself.  If FOX, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC all signed up, each would pay $1.6 billion (the actual exact number tweaked by market share).

If CNN opted out (for example) then it would be $2 billion each but CNN would be blacked out of the media feeds. FOX, of course would trumpet how "un-patriotic" CNN was being by not joining in.

This gives NASA another $8 billion for its missions.

Edited By BWhite on 1112980044