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Old March 8th 20, 06:34 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Alain Fournier[_3_]
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Posts: 548
Default Why I believe in flags and footprints NOW.

On Mar/8/2020 at 12:10, Alain Fournier wrote :
On Mar/8/2020 at 11:01, David Spain wrote :
On 2020-03-07 3:45 PM, Alain Fournier wrote:
A Flags and footprints mission by SpaceX (Or Blue Origin or if
someone else wants to step to the plate it's fine with me.) would
also make SpaceXs plans to colonise Mars look much more real. That
would probably help convince others like for instance
https://cropbox.co
that they could make a buck by adapting their technology for a Mars
mission. I think that SpaceX will likely soon have rocket technology
sufficient to colonise Mars. But there is much more to colonisation
than to build the transport vehicle.


Agreed. And the US government could be assisting these efforts instead
of building a useless rocket.

Imagine a world where the government is providing funding to explore
having companies such as CropBox build food production technology for
long term space missions.

It's not the way we do it with today's NASA, esp. the way Congress
treats it. The way NASA is assigned priorities must change or it will
lose all relevance when it comes to human space flight, exploration
and expansion. To some degree this will be natural and inevitable.
NIST for example doesn't spend almost all of its budget and time on
research and development of laboratory steam engines and steam powered
locomotives these days. I'd just like to try to keep NASA relevant in
the 21st century.


They aren't spending all their budget on steam powered locomotives? Well
that explains why we no longer see those locomotives tooting by :-)

I think that we both see things the same way here. But I'd like to
emphasise that CropBox I mentioned above is only an example that came up
to me without really thinking about it. I'm not sure if they are the
best for the task of growing food on Mars. There are others that build
similar containerised food growing greenhouses which might or might not
be better than CropBox. But more importantly, there are numerous other
things on which work should be going on *now*. Not wait years until
SpaceX or whoever lands someone on Mars to start working on those
things. A few things that come to mind for which we need to think about
how to do it in a martian context: mining, pharmaceuticals (at first you
can't have every kind of medication available, you probably should be
ready to make locally some), air processing, micrometeorite damage
repair, radiation protection, energy generation ...

You can start a colony even if not everything is well adapted for Mars.
But if too many things aren't ready, you will get into trouble more
often. And if you get into trouble too often the colony will fail. If
one person dies because you don't have the medication to treat his rare
condition the colony can go on, but if every other day someone dies
because the spacesuits aren't well adapted, and the mining technology
isn't well adapted and ... You're in trouble.


What a conincidence, I just stumled on this while reading some totally
unrelated stuff:
https://squarerootsgrow.com
Square Roots is an urban indoor farming company that was started by a
guy named Kimbal Musk. You might have heard about his brother Elon :-)


Alain Fournier