Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

Gennaro · 2004-04-05 10:52:19

Okay, I was wrong. Earth atmosphere is 77% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, Mars atmosphere is 2.7% nitrogen and 95.5% carbon dioxide, quite a marked difference.
I fear this makes the amount of nitrogen in Mars soils rather more uncertain, but, the nitrogen in the atmosphere is there nevertheless.
It should be possible to produce ammonia for fertilizer production by synthesizing carbon dioxide and nitrogen out of Martian air, using the Haber-Bosch process, to provide for your needs.

Bill White · 2004-04-05 11:49:22

Okay, I was wrong. Earth atmosphere is 77% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, Mars atmosphere is 2.7% nitrogen and 95.5% carbon dioxide, quite a marked difference.
I fear this makes the amount of nitrogen in Mars soils rather more uncertain, but, the nitrogen in the atmosphere is there nevertheless.
It should be possible to produce ammonia for fertilizer production by synthesizing carbon dioxide and nitrogen out of Martian air, using the Haber-Bosch process, to provide for your needs.

If the carbon dioxide is removed by freezing Martian air below the point of dry ice formation, then what remains would be about 50% nitrogen, correct?

Long term, Mars will need nitrogen but short term nitrogen can be made bio-available by chemical means rather than imported from Earth.

Ammonia based comets will be very valuable to Martian settlers.

RobS · 2004-04-05 20:32:36

My, this has been a busy thread!

WATER ON THE MOON: The evidence seems to be for icy or frosty regolith, not ice. There is certainly frosty regolith; the neutron data indicates hydrogen present in the soil. Hydrated minerals are also possible, but that strikes me as geologicaly unlikely because the water has to be present first, probably in liquid form, to make the hydrates. There's a study that says even 2% water in regolith can be extracted efficiently. There are still the problems of equipment breaking in the ultracold and getting energy into the permanent shadows.

LUNAR AGRICULTURE: Even if there were too little water on the moon for agriculture to be effective, life is in reality about 80-90% oxygen by weight. Water is 88% oxygen by weight; CO2 is 73% oxygen. So if we import carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and combine them with oxygen liberated from lunar rocks, you have the ingredients for agriculture. Assuming the average person needs 1 tonne of agricultural material in a constant recycle loop to be supplied with everything she/he needs to live and assuming that agricultural material is 75% oxygen, one would need to import 250 kg of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium, sulphur, etc., per person to establish the agriculture needed to sustain them That's not an unreasonable amount. Let's say we lose 10% of the material a year from the system because of inefficiencies and leaks; that means we have to import 25 kg per year to replace it. This could also be handled by importing 100 kg per year of steak, caviar, pringles, champagne, Swiss chocolate, Kona coffee, Rice Krispies, etc.; in other words, food items that are highly desirable and not easily made on the moon. If you had a big self-sufficient colony on the moon, the natives would pay for these items willingly in their grocery stores, and once they flushed their toilets they will have contributed them to the lunar ecology.

HOW TO DO FARMING ON THE MOON: I think this idea would work at the poles quite well. Take a flat area in near perpetual sunlight and inflate a hemispherical greenhouse (let us say 30 meters in diameter, as an example). Fill interior with regolith, process it into soil (add organics, soak it in water, periodically drain off accumulating water to remove salts formed from chemical breakdown of minerals). Erect a wall around the hemisphere of sandbags a few meters high to provide protection against collisions from surface vehicles.

A hemisphere 30 meters in diameter rises 15 meters above the ground. Cover the interior of dome with vertical strips, running from near the top to the ground (getting wider and wider as you approach the ground, too, like longitudinal strips on the Earth). Each vertical strip is a set of venetian blinds under computer control. Let us say that today the sun is shining from the "right" side of the dome. Set the venetian blinds on the right side to a horizontal position to admit the light and the strips on the left side to a diagonal position to reflect the sunlight downward toward the ground. As the sun rotates around the horizon, a computer changes all the strips of venetian blinds to admit and reflect sunlight downward. If one wants the plants to have "night," which sometimes is needed, close the blinds on the sunward side entirely.

Stretch over the top of the dome and some meters above it a big kevlar anti-meteoroid blanket. This can be done simply by erecting six or eight steel towers around the greenhouse, maybe twenty meters beyond it (so that the kevlar blanket has a seventy-meter diameter) and stretching the kevlar blanket across the space. This will protect the dome from vertical micrometeoroids and many diagonal ones (but not the few horizontal ones). If a small puncture occurs, cover the horizontal opening around the dome with black plastic sheeting to stop the sunlight, let the dome cool off, then mist the inside with water and see where ice is deposited outside in the cold vacuum; then patch the hole. Micrometeoroids will be exceedingly rare anyway.

NITROGEN ON MARS: No problem, I think. Liquify the carbon dioxide and remove it, and Martian air is something like 2/3 nitrogen and 1/3 argon. Argon's inert. You could probably run the combination through a standard system for making ammonia or nitrate fertilizer. The argon will pass through unused and the nitrogen will get consumed. Maybe the argon will have to be removed as well, but it would probably be easier to redesign the process to function in the presence of the inert argon. Once complete, the exhaust gas would be very enriched in argon and could be processed to extract argon, which is a potential propellant for ion engines.

-- RobS

Euler · 2004-04-05 22:37:58

The nice thing about Mars is that a Martian colony does not have to import anything. With high concentrations of C, O, N, H, Fe, Si, Cu, Al, and other useful elements, Martians can build anything they need. C+H=fuel, plastics etc. Fe+C=steel. Si=glass, semiconductors etc. With a day that is close to 24 hours and high levels of most important plant nutrients, Mars should be able to support agriculture without terran imports. Eventually, Mars will probably import high-tech products from Earth while exporting natural resources and low-tech goods.

Josh Cryer · 2004-04-05 23:56:08

Bill, I was thinking Venus would be a really excellent place to make plastics. Lots of solar energy, plenty of carbon, but a lacking of hydrogen, perfect bartering situation (unless hydrogen can economically be derived elsewhere; solar wind, perhaps?).

Anyway, it could be theoretically possible for us to bring the necessary nitrogen we'd need without it being any problem. Granted, there is enough on Mars to derive from the atmosphere, at least for initial colonies with not as many people, but say we were going to the moon where there wasn't any nitrogen; our ecosystem would be essentially closed, we could reuse the nitrogen (and all chemicals) we have indefinitately. Having to rely on what little resources you have does impact an expansion potential (Mars still wins hands down as far as being able to land, and expand, and basically build a city independent of the outside), but it wouldn't really prevent you from surviving. It would just make it a risky endeavour. I'd rather be stuck on Mars with broken tech than anywhere else in the solar system. At least on Mars you can make do. Your scrubbers break, no problem, derive oxygen from water. Need a steel metal bar to get your dozing machine going but can't wait for a shipment, maybe build your own smelter using Martian clays inside of a small dome, could work for rudimentary objects, like bars...

RobS · 2004-04-06 10:47:22

If they want nitrogen on the moon, the cheapest way to get it would be to import it from Mars, probably in the form of ammonia. Carbon can be even more cheaply imported from Phobos and Deimos; they seem to be carbonaceous chondrite.

Water is 8:1 oxygen to hydrogen, but rocket fuel is 6:1 because the excess hydrogen protects the parts from oxidation and lowers the molecular weight of the exhaust, thereby increasing the exhaust velocity. That means any lunar fuel making operation will produce huge amounts of surplus oxygen. One solution would be to extract water from Phobos, break it down, and use the oxygen to "burn" carbon out of the chondrite, then use the sabatier process to produce methane from the carbon dioxide and hydrogen. This will produce methane and oxygen, but not enough oxygen to burhn the methane efficiently. So you use the oxygen and some methane to push the rest of the methane to lunar/earth lagrange 1 or to low earth orbit, and you use it as propellant with lunar oxygen. Clever, eh?

The moon could also import methane or carbon black from Phobos as a carbon supply for making steel, extracting materials from lunar regolith, agriculture, etc.

-- RobS

idiom · 2004-04-21 22:11:16

Mars needs domes, people, nitrogen and hydrogen.

If it can get those as fast as possible it can get to pre-industrial pretty quick. There is a lot of stuff you can do with lumber and rubber. And steel, masses of steel.

But the key item is population. Big families. Which actually means young colonists.

You could also dump your life sentences there Australia style, which has a lot of economic upsides. Could the cost of keeping someone incacerated for 40 years be less than sending them to Mars one way?

An economy needs to grow from literal grass roots. If you import to much stuff that is not elemental, to much cultural baggage and luxuries then you won't get the beautiful geographic seperation that humanity needs to progress.

SpaceNut · 2018-11-25 17:20:28

old topic that Louis would have fun in

louis · 2018-11-26 01:41:40

I give you control of all the Earth's land surface and of its water (many trillions of tonnes of resources), and tell you that you can use them as you see fit. You can also charge people to undertake scientific experiments on the Earth's surface, to make films anywhere on the planet, to visit anywhere on the planet as you see fit and for the use of accommodation.

Would it make sense to then say - "Oh, but you are not going to make any money."

No, it would be absurd.

That's the way I feel about Mars. Yes, getting there and surviving is expensive but there is no way this isn't going to generate huge amounts of revenue.

SpaceNut · 2018-11-26 18:01:33

Its not that you can not profit from the work that you do it that you can not speculate on ownership and transfers of real property.

You can mine all that you want but you can not fight over the location that you are mining in as you both qualify to mine there. That makes for a cooperative team for what needs to be done for both equally.

If you own a ship then you profit from selling the rights to transport others cargo.

If you own the ship that brought the supplies there you own the right to control what gets done if they were not paid for before transporting them.

What you do that can be used by others there is up to the one that did the work to make it possible.

louis · 2018-11-26 18:36:40

Yes, I think I broadly agree with that. It's control of the interplanetary transport system and the life support/accommodation systems on Mars that are the decisive factors and that will make you a revenue generator. People are seriously underestimating how many universities, companies and space agencies will want to have a presence on Mars asap. They control hundreds of billions of revenue and will be prepared to spend billions to acquire that presence.

I think people are having a problem seeing this because (a) we tend to reference the Moon landings which were almost virginal in their lack of commercial exploitation and which just petered out (b) they just don't realise how quickly the human presence on Mars is going to expand and (c) they can't see how Mars will interact with orbital and lunar tourism to create this tremendous interest in space. The starting gun on space tourism has truly been lifted now...it goes off in the next five years. Nothing will be the same after that.

Land ownership doesn't really affect economic output. It is more a vampire feeding off economic output. Hunters, gatherers, nomads, fisher folk and countless other have turned a profit without "owning" any land. The land is just there and they use it (and there is nothing in the OST to stop you doing that as long as you have the approval of a signatory - not necessarily the USA remember, Panama will do just as well).

SpaceNut wrote:

Its not that you can not profit from the work that you do it that you can not speculate on ownership and transfers of real property.
You can mine all that you want but you can not fight over the location that you are mining in as you both qualify to mine there. That makes for a cooperative team for what needs to be done for both equally.
If you own a ship then you profit from selling the rights to transport others cargo.
If you own the ship that brought the supplies there you own the right to control what gets done if they were not paid for before transporting them.
What you do that can be used by others there is up to the one that did the work to make it possible.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2023-09-11 15:48:35

SpinLaunch and Sumitomo team up for Low-Cost Space Solutions
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Spin … s_999.html

a way of transporting hardened Low tech exports to orbit and then send the products to Aseroids and other offworld colonies like Europa or Titan?

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#26 2004-04-05 10:52:19

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#27 2004-04-05 11:49:22

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#28 2004-04-05 20:32:36

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#29 2004-04-05 22:37:58

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#30 2004-04-05 23:56:08

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#31 2004-04-06 10:47:22

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#32 2004-04-21 22:11:16

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#33 2018-11-25 17:20:28

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#34 2018-11-26 01:41:40

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#35 2018-11-26 18:01:33

Re: Martian Economics - Imports, exports or independence?

#36 2018-11-26 18:36:40

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#37 2023-09-11 15:48:35

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