Mars anyone?

[Eric Mc]

TheHeretic said:

LordFlathead said:

It will never get off the ground

I suppose many said the same about Space X.

In actual fact, I don't recall anyone saying that SpaceX wouldn't succeed.

This Mars project does have a ring of lunacy about it, I have to say.

I'd like top knoow -


who is going to provide the launch vehciles to get each component off the ground and on to Mars?

what particular manned spacecraft are they planning on using to take the (minimum) nine month flight to Mars?
The only spacecraft currently being designed that has the capability of being developed for long duration flights is the Orion spacecraft - which hasn't even flown in space and won't for around three more years.

[Eric Mc]

I suppose it's all about the presentation. It may be as likely or as unlikely as an asteroid mining project, but, based on that initial video, it doesn't come across as that well thought through. I think it was their own linking of the project to TV's "Big Broherr" (which is a Dutch programme after all) is what put me off a bit.

Like the asteroid project, I wish them all the best.

[jmorgan]

Well, the asteroid has a bigger carrot for investors methinks.

[Eric Mc]

From a commercial return point of view it almost definitely has.

[Happy82]

Is there any reason why Mars would be preferable to the Moon for a first non-Earth settlement?

Setting up colonies on both the Moon and Mars would be a good way of sorting out the overpopulation issues on Earth

[Eric Mc]

Mars is a lot bigger. It has an atmosphere (although not a very dense one). It also seems to have a plentiful supply of available water.

People need to realise that these are substantial "worlds" in their own right - even the moon - and will take years if not centuries to explore properly.

[otolith]

I wonder (a) if there are terrestrial (micro) organisms capable of colonising Mars (b) what the risk of contaminating Mars with them is if there are repeated dumps of large amounts of material from Earth and (c) how much effort would need to be made to ensure that didn't happen.

[Eric Mc]

Quite a few earth made objects have already been landed on Maers starting with the Russians in 1974. So, I reckon the damage muight already have been done.

[Du1point8]

call he wary about it... but the machine to get water and oxygen will create 1500 litres of water and however much O2 for 4 people per 500 days from 60kg of rock a day.

So they have to find 60kg of different rock a day for each person to be allowed 750ml of water.

Im assuming they have some fancy machine to do that otherwise I doubt the person doing all the hard work getting the rock is going to be happy on 750ml of water.

or is that just me?

Wont 60kg be quite an effort too? 60kg to the machine, 60kg to the dump... every day assuming its 100% efficient on their calculations.

[Simpo Two]

Du1point8 said:

Im assuming they have some fancy machine to do that otherwise I doubt the person doing all the hard work getting the rock is going to be happy on 750ml of water.

One of the crew will be Polish, silly


ETA But water can be recycled - that would have to be a major part of the scheme too surely.

Edited by Simpo Two on Monday 4th June 14:28

[Eric Mc]

If they landed near the poles they wouldn't have to extract water from rocks anyway. The water is just sitting there, wiating to be melted.



The bright material in the picture is pure water ice and the animation shows that bits of ice that had broken off during the digging process melted within minutes of being exposed to direct sunlight.

That ice was literally two inches under a covering of surface sand and dust.

[otolith]

Eric Mc said:

Quite a few earth made objects have already been landed on Maers starting with the Russians in 1974. So, I reckon the damage muight already have been done.

Quite possibly, although I guess everything on the outside of the probes had been heavily exposed to solar radiation en route, and everything inside had been made in clean room conditions. Might be harder to do with much larger payloads. There is some documentation on the web talking about the need to avoid contamination, so perhaps it has always been considered.

It would be a terrible shame to think we'd found life on Mars, only to realise it was something we put there thirty odd years ago!

[Gwagon111]

I have a couple of my FOG's on Mars already. Schmoke and a pancake anyone?

[Eric Mc]

otolith said:

Eric Mc said:

Quite a few earth made objects have already been landed on Maers starting with the Russians in 1974. So, I reckon the damage muight already have been done.

Quite possibly, although I guess everything on the outside of the probes had been heavily exposed to solar radiation en route, and everything inside had been made in clean room conditions. Might be harder to do with much larger payloads. There is some documentation on the web talking about the need to avoid contamination, so perhaps it has always been considered.

It would be a terrible shame to think we'd found life on Mars, only to realise it was something we put there thirty odd years ago!

It definitely was and is considered. Whether all the precautions have been good enough over the decades is almost impossible to tell.

When the Apollo 12 astronauts brought back pieces of the Surveyor 3 probe that had landed on the moon two year earlierr it was discovered that earth microbes had survived on the lunar surface for that length of time.

[Simpo Two]

Surviving is very different from reproducing. If there's no energy source nothing can reproduce. OK so there's light but you still need the right chemical elements/compounds in the environment to make new bacteria from.

[Eric Mc]

Of course. I doubt if anything could reproduce on the moon.

Mars might be a diferent matter though.

[Eric Mc]

PW said:

Eric Mc said:

People need to realise that these are substantial "worlds" in their own right - even the moon - and will take years if not centuries to explore properly.

We still haven't finished with this one, and that's with billions of people and thousands of years.

Du1point8 said:

or is that just me?

Well, as they say, hopefully they'll invent technology. So that's all taken care of.

It's all vey exciting though, isn't it?

[otolith]

Simpo Two said:

Surviving is very different from reproducing. If there's no energy source nothing can reproduce. OK so there's light but you still need the right chemical elements/compounds in the environment to make new bacteria from.

My concern would be photosynthetic extremophiles - some species of cyanobacteria in particular. They wouldn't live on the moon, even if being there didn't destroy them, but somewhere with carbon dioxide, enough atmosphere to lessen the harshness of the solar radiation and a little water might be another matter.

[aw51 121565]

Engineer1 said:

I like the idea of a oneway trip provided it is the start of a colonization rather than a publicity stunt more a founding fathers get there, get it habitable, work towards being able to build their economy and a transport system back to earth.

This reminds me, for some reason, of Douglas Adams' writing regarding a space ship full of telephone sanitizers . The B Ark, if I recall? (Could be wrong, it's been a long time since I read his books .

Subsequent posts on this thread have just reaffirmed my thoughts that Mr Adams had some damn good ideas & insight!

[jmorgan]

Yeah, but the premiss was getting rid of the wasters and the irony was they (the people that sent them) died after contracting a from a bug dirty telephone.