L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

oker56 · 2002-11-20 09:17:05

http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Mars.html

Number04 · 2002-11-20 10:30:14

Allot of what he says makes sense. But I still want to go. Who knows what will happen when we get there? What about using mars as a refinery for all the metals on the asteroids? Should we just ignore mars? I think we need to move from the goal of colonizing one place to many places.

Mars will fit into space exploration; we just need to find out when.

nirgal · 2002-11-20 10:53:54

Sorry, I didn't find the article to be convincing at all. Mars fits in right now.

oker56 · 2002-11-20 11:36:28

I just reread some of what Zubrin say's about asteroids. E. Drexler talks about how mining asteroids can provide all the carbonates that the moon lacks in sufficient quantities to be usefull as Zubrin say's. However, Zubrin point's out in his "Entering Space" book that the only carbonatious asteroids lie in the main asteroid belt. Any asteroids that are still carbonatious around earth's orbit would be viewed as comet's which are rare earth asteroids. In other words, the only arguement from Drexler that made me post this here falls under further scrutiny. Mar's is still the place to go.

Mark S · 2002-11-20 12:26:06

I agree with much of the article. I don't think that we should go to Mars until society (whether it be the U.S., another country, or an international consortium / private venture) is ready to make a long-term commitment to space exploration.

Zubrin designed Mars Direct under the assumption that space access will be limited by expensive rockets and infrequent launch rates. It's workable as a plan to get humans on Mars as soon as possible, but what do we do when we start to build bases, and we need to resupply them on a constant basis?

Now imagine we wait 20 years. By then, if we play our cards right, we will have an RLV that will fly routinely and VASIMR rockets for fast, inexpensive transits to Mars. Orbital assembly will no longer be viewed as "undesirable," abort modes and crew safety on the transfer spacecraft will be improved, and routine access to Mars will be affordable.

The people on this forum want to make the commitment to space that is required for Mars exploration. Unfortunately, that sentiment is not shared by the average American taxpayer. Once society grows up, we will be ready for Mars.

AltToWar · 2002-11-20 12:54:46

I agree with much of the article. I don't think that we should go to Mars until society (whether it be the U.S., another country, or an international consortium / private venture) is ready to make a long-term commitment to space exploration.
Zubrin designed Mars Direct under the assumption that space access will be limited by expensive rockets and infrequent launch rates. It's workable as a plan to get humans on Mars as soon as possible, but what do we do when we start to build bases, and we need to resupply them on a constant basis?
Now imagine we wait 20 years. By then, if we play our cards right, we will have an RLV that will fly routinely and VASIMR rockets for fast, inexpensive transits to Mars. Orbital assembly will no longer be viewed as "undesirable," abort modes and crew safety on the transfer spacecraft will be improved, and routine access to Mars will be affordable.
The people on this forum want to make the commitment to space that is required for Mars exploration. Unfortunately, that sentiment is not shared by the average American taxpayer. Once society grows up, we will be ready for Mars.

society has had a lot of time to grow up since the moon landing, yet the US currently the US does not have a rocket that can lift as much as the old Saturns did.

Given nasa's current fixation with LEO space stations and such, there is no guarantee that this will change in the next 20 years.

oker56 · 2002-11-20 16:57:13

Zubrin points out much of that propulsion decline; however, there has been the development of ion engines, soon to be solar sails. Admittedly, those are for in between planet's and not rocketing off a planetary surface, but check this out . . .

http://www.space.com/busines....20.html

Not only that, but scramjet's are on the way; these can make for pretty effective two stage surface to space propulsion systems.

All in all, we'll be o.k.

Phobos · 2002-11-20 21:33:19

The author makes a lot of good points but I don't buy the idea that L5 colonies are necessarily more logical than colonizing Mars. He seems to be setting up a dichotomy by saying "either we'll be building free-space colonies or we'll be colonizing Mars so here's why Mars is a bad choice." Why not do both? If his predictions that the private sector and people who just want to get the hell out of here are the ones who will ultimately develop huge space colonies then it doesn't strike me as relevant whether a government chooses to fund a Mars mission or not. It could only help if the government funded a manned mission to Mars because it will (100% guaranteed) lead to new technology that will make it easier to sustain a human presence in space. And he also doesn't seem to realize that one of the reasons we want to go to Mars is to just do scientific investigation and quench our curiosity on whether there's life or not.

Anyhow the author tries to bolster his argument against Mars by saying it isn't suitable for a variety of reasons for colonization and I just didn't agree with any of them. For instance, he says the atmosphere is useless, well, hardly! And there's no reason mining on Mars could't be automated as it could be with an asteroid. I think it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to set up colonies on the Martian surface than it would be to tear asteroids apart to create huge rotating wheels or cylinders in space. He might have a point about Mars's gravity being too weak to keep people in good health over the long term, but we just don't know yet so I can't buy that argument either until more data comes to light. I think he could have made his argument better by stating what he thinks the government should be doing instead of going to Mars. Maybe argue why the money that would go into a crewed Mars mission would be better spent on developing systems that would allow economical and mass access to space.

dickbill · 2002-11-21 11:37:18

I also found nothing convincing in that article. The gravity, the atmosphere, the ressources, everything can be tailored to the need of a future martian civilization. This is what makes Mars settlements interesting by the way: nothing is easy, nothing is given for free, if you go you have to work hard, but if you work hard, you will be rewarded, either you, your children or your ideas.
This is exactly what made America attractive to Europeans in the past. Same spirit.

I would hate to go to a place warm at 37 degre C, with a sea, and a night club close to a bar with couch potatoes babes slowly tanning in the hot sun, the death of humankind lay there.

Bill White · 2002-11-21 11:55:17

I would hate to go to a place warm at 37 degre C, with a sea, and a night club close to a bar with couch potatoes babes slowly tanning in the hot sun, the death of humankind lay there.

Okay, so maybe living in such a place is bad - long term - but visiting once and a while sounds like a good option, at least to me. If only the couch potatoes were at least a little bit athletic, sailboats and snorkelers plied to warm seas, the drinks were free and Jimmy Buffet tunes filed the juke boxes.

dickbill · 2002-11-21 15:41:40

I would hate to go to a place warm at 37 degre C, with a sea, and a night club close to a bar with couch potatoes babes slowly tanning in the hot sun, the death of humankind lay there.
Okay, so maybe living in such a place is bad - long term - but visiting once and a while sounds like a good option, at least to me. If only the couch potatoes were at least a little bit athletic, sailboats and snorkelers plied to warm seas, the drinks were free and Jimmy Buffet tunes filed the juke boxes.

I also enjoy to go there sometimes, diving. So here you mark a real point: if Mars settlement equals working 24hours and 5 minutes a day, the settlers will be exhausted in 6 days, they will need to relax and have some fun, a "7th day" to rest.

Can you really have fun in a confined habitat, just reading, watching TV etc., given the lack of space it's difficult in my opinion. It is then very important to create big spaces for leisure, big parks with warm pools, like an Eden in the middle of a rough desert. Here is another analogy for Mars: the biblical promiss land that MArtians have to terraform and work hard on for 40 years before they or their children can see the blue and the green.

Josh Cryer · 2002-11-21 15:56:22

L5's article was written a decade ago, and then it probably pertained more than now. Now we could concievably go to Mars and jump start Martian colonization merely by using a cheap Mars Direct type system. If millionares start going to Mars and setting up permanent bases, the infrastructure for lesser wealthy people would be built. Then more people could go, and I think that's basically the basis for Zubrin's ideas. I really wonder why Bill Gates hasn't done this. He would be in the history books forever if he was the first person to land on Mars, no one is going to care a few hundred years down the line that he had a monopoly on Operating Systems. He certainly has the money to get the job done, he should just do it.

Of course, everyone is right that the resource questions within that article were largely L5 bias, and not thought out very well. You're going to have these sort of problems no matter where you go.

And if Mars settlement really equals working more than a few hours a day... well, I pity those Mars settlers who do.

oker56 · 2002-11-21 17:48:34

Very interesting that somebody else should mention Bill Gates because I also thought so, and e-mailed him or his people about it.

Needless to say, they never have replied. It has been a week or two now.

oker56 · 2002-11-21 17:49:26

did you want to see my e-mail to Gates?

RobS · 2002-11-21 20:16:40

This is a rather old article. Its advantage, for us, is that it reminds us of the arguments made against Mars exploration. Some are outdated; we know it needn't cost trillions, and we know the surface does provide radiation shielding. Others are right on: it may very well be that 0.38 gravity isn't enough for healthy humans, long term.

Another thing about the article to remember is that it cites all the psychological and mythic reasons for going to Mars, and calling them "mythic" does not diminish them. Mars has far more potential to excite than visiting an asteroid named, say, 2002AG11.

Finally, remember that the L5 arguments have now collapsed in the face of their own economics. We can't go to L5 to make a profit OR to Mars. If we want the Earth to have cheap electricity, it will remain cheaper to cover every roof on Earth with solar panels than to build the equivalent area in space. We get about six times as much power per square meter in space, but the construction and launch costs are a lot more than six times as much.

So the article has many lessons for us.

-- RobS

Bill White · 2002-11-21 22:10:16

I tend to favor joining the L5 "city in space" idea with Buzz Aldrin's ideas for free return cyclers.

Why use "ships" to transport people to and from Mars using a free return trajectory? Once there are settlements on Mars, a city in space could earn extra revenue by transporting people and supplies and the permanent citizens of the "cycler city" would be at home every day of the trip.

Eccentric orbits between Earth and Mars can be compensated for with solar ion propulsion.

Why would anyone want to build a stationary space city, anyways?

oker56 · 2002-11-22 13:21:09

I brought this article to this boards attention because 1) it argued about asteroids that I thought interesting, only for me to reread some of Zubrin's books and find the article's point's there not quite right, and 2) because the recent rethinking of the space program by nasa is to use the langragian points, so I thought this group's arguement's have obviously been influential and not Zubrin's mars direct program which had suppossedly been adopted by nasa. I guess not.

I see that just about everybody has said there own interests yea or nea about this article which show's that we are all in this for different reason's - interesting.

Phobos · 2002-11-22 14:54:42

I tend to favor joining the L5 "city in space" idea with Buzz Aldrin's ideas for free return cyclers.
Why use "ships" to transport people to and from Mars using a free return trajectory? Once there are settlements on Mars, a city in space could earn extra revenue by transporting people and supplies and the permanent citizens of the "cycler city" would be at home every day of the trip.
Eccentric orbits between Earth and Mars can be compensated for with solar ion propulsion.

Awesome idea. Instead of having a giant space city just sitting stationary in the middle of nowhere it could be a lot more useful if it visited places. It'd certainly be more comfortable getting to Mars on such a contraption than a little tuna can cycler. I just worry about the logisitics of keeping it supplied. It would have to be extremely self-sufficient unless it had a very small population. But by the time we get around to building things like that anyway we'll probably have those types of problems licked.

because the recent rethinking of the space program by nasa is to use the langragian points, so I thought this group's arguement's have obviously been influential and not Zubrin's mars direct program which had suppossedly been adopted by nasa. I guess not.

I'm going to have to read up on the L5 Society. I've known about them but haven't really taken the time to see where they stand on a lot of space issues.

TJohn · 2002-11-22 16:16:45

Oker56, post the letter. I think everyone would like to read it.

oker56 · 2002-11-22 17:43:17

Sorry, I must have gotten involved in other things.

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: David Oker
To: David Oker
Cc:

Subject: Bill Gates should establish a space program
Sent: 11/12/02 11:32 AM
Importance: Normal
I've noticed recently that Bill Gates is funding education through a variety of means. I recently heard about him spending five hundred million to India, and I also recently heard about his "Anytime Anywhere Learning Program."

Number one, I'm a space colonization enthusiast and am very concerned that humanity will miss their chance to establish themselves out in space. Space offers the solution to all our material needs and even some spiritual needs. By colonizing space, we drastically increase our chances for survival.

Number two, as Arthur C. Clark likes to point out many times, space satellites which he gave the first technical paper on have opened up humanity to each other for the most part for the good. Mr. Gates "Anytime Anywhere Learning Program" and in fact all the benefits of computers and internet are dependent on our satellite and rocket launcher ability. Yet, our space program is more dependent on the whim's of our government's on whether they want to do it or not. Clearly, they don't see our current electronic age as fragile because they don't realize how dependent it is on our space technology. Something tell's me Bill Gates doesn't see space technology as something to support either. Right now, because we are making all our space hardware and launching from the earth's gravity well, our space program is grinding to a halt. Not untill we have established ourselves out in space to the point where we are making all our space hardware and launching from outside the earth's gravity, will space development be established and practical. The video of the Lunar lander taking off compared to the Apollo Rocket should give you some idea of the magnitude difference in energy required to do thing's out there. A view of the full moon lighting up the ground should give you an idea of 1) the amount of untapped material resources that can be tapped(namelly: the moon as just a starter), and 2) the untapped energy that can be a boon to humanity reflecting off the surface of the mooon.

Bill Gates want's to spread education; he want's to inspire people in science and technology? Yet, he doesn't see how dependent his business is on the fragile space capability of humanity right now? Either I don't know about his support of the space program, or he doesn't see the big picture. One thing a space colony will do is inspire all of humanity about science; it will also make more pressure on humanity to learn science, yet our leaders(Bill Gates seems to be one) don't see all this.

Another thing about establishing ourselves out in space is the ability to overcome an asteroid hit. Untill we have a mature space faring humanity established out in space, we will have such a weak ability to deal with asteroids. It would cost so much less to deal with asteroids if we launch from the moon or even an orbital space station built from the moon instead of the earth.

Zubrin in his "Case for Mar's" has pointed out that we have the ability right now to colonize mars within a decade of somebody saying "Go". The australians have built a scramjet that drastically reduce the cost of reaching orbit from earth for a few million dollars, beating the U.S. which failed and spent far more money. These two cases shows that we can accomplish establishing a space colonization if we are just smart about thing's and work efficiently

oker56 · 2002-11-22 18:04:08

I should note that I have not gotten a reply at all since sending this letter.

soph · 2002-11-24 21:11:38

bill gates is a busy guy.

the problem i have with the article is that "now" will always be a problem, because if we wait for Mars to be perfect, it wont be. mars isnt going to make itself perfect for us spontaneously, we have to do it for ourselves.

ive been rereading zubrin's books too. some truly great stuff....but then theres also some stuff that i cant really see happening.

as for cities in the sky, thats a logistical nightmare. where will the resources, not just capital, but the materials, come from? how will it be done? how will it be powered, and controlled? how will the city support size increases, population increases, etc? it just doesnt seem to work out in my mind.

dickbill · 2002-11-25 10:35:03

Hi Soph

I agree with your comments about the unrealistic projects we can read on this list. Many people here are more into science fiction than the immediate technology required to go to Mars.
That's fine to be into science fiction but reallity is more interesting IMO. Like rotating cities digged into asteroids and floating in space just to have a "cyclic" train for Mars. Why not to use just a spaceship ? Other examples are the space elevators, the moving cities on Mars and so on.

It's difficult enough to convince space agencies or private compagnies to built a shuttle-C launcher.
But this forum is a free chat of course, everybody is allowed to expose its mind experiment. That's the fun of this forum.

Phobos · 2002-11-25 18:41:53

Well, I wasn't trying to give the impression that we should build this giant city in space right now! I just like the idea! Of course it'd be a logistical nightmare using today's technology. I think we have a bad tendency to let "reality" get in the way of us developing our ideas sometimes. I guess they probably accused Michaelangelo of being a hopeless and impossible dreamer when he was thinking of powered flight five hundred years before it became "reality."

Tyr · 2002-11-27 17:59:08

The only problem with asteroids is that the launch windows are years, even decades apart. The velocity increment to get there may be small, but once your there, you are stuck there for years until an opportunity for return comes around. On Mars, the launch windows are 2.13 years apart, there is a reasonable amount of gravity, an atmosphere that although is thin supplies some protection from galactic cosmic rays as does the bulk of the planet itself, subsurface ice probably, and two nice asteroids in orbit. I favor working out the details of asteroid mining on Deimos and Phobos before heading out to some distant 'oid or NEO that comes near Earth every ten years. Mars is the next most freindly place in the solar system, it can be terraformed and we'd have to build 1000 L5 colonies every year for 1000 years to have as much surface area as Mars. As for space solar power-I think it's possible. All we need is a vast reduction in prices by privatizing NASA and mass producing space shuttles. The Moon can be explored and mined with teleoperated robots (Mars is to far away for teleoperation-hence the need for humans) and SPS can be contructed with teleoperated robots. Most Moon miners and SPS builders in the future will work at a computer center in Houston instead of in space!!

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Re: L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

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Re: L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

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Re: L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

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#17 2002-11-22 13:21:09

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#18 2002-11-22 14:54:42

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#19 2002-11-22 16:16:45

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#20 2002-11-22 17:43:17

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#21 2002-11-22 18:04:08

Re: L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

#22 2002-11-24 21:11:38

Re: L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

#23 2002-11-25 10:35:03

Re: L5 societies responce to "The Case for Mars"

#24 2002-11-25 18:41:53

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#25 2002-11-27 17:59:08

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