The Moscow Mars cosmonauts prepare to land

On Jan 27, 1:12*am, Pat Flannery wrote:

They thought that was going to work on the 1960's hippie communes
also..it didn't; either people started playing favorites or jealousy
reared its ugly head.

It is true that problems can be expected with mixed-sex crews on long-
duration missions, at least when they are of sufficiently small size.

It is possible that our society's emphasis on sexual equality has
reached such a level that the United States in particular, and Western
nations in general, are now *incapable* of either carrying out a long-
duration space mission, or fighting a major war (one in which
conscription or the draft, would be required). I think that humans in
the developed nations are sufficiently intelligent to step back from
the brink of suicide by political correctness, but that may be just
me.

My inclination is to choose a path which overcomes potential obstacles
in an obvious fashion, rather than allowing program success to be
critically dependent on developing a new solution to a problem not yet
solved.

First, use lunar materials to start building O'Neill-style L5
colonies. I have noted that a design is possible that avoids issues
with cosmic rays - basically, a modification of the MIT design that
places the rotating part of the habitat into what is like a long-
necked bottle of shielding material, with an additional slab of
shielding material behind the solar reflectors preventing cosmic rays
from going down the throat of the bottle.

http://www.quadibloc.com/science/spaint.htm

Then, start colonizing Mars by sending a village-size mixed crew there
using a space habitat placed in some type of cycler orbit.

John Savard

Quadibloc wrote:
Then, start colonizing Mars by sending a village-size mixed crew there
using a space habitat placed in some type of cycler orbit.

I agree with the approach but not the scale.

Why put the high cost of building out an L5 colony in the mix?

Why not focus instead on building a smaller habitat first in LEO that could
eventually be made self-sufficient for a small crew of say 6-12 people from
within LEO. Once self-sufficiency is obtained in LEO for a time-frame long
enough for an interplanetary trip, then enhance this "space-station" to take
on that mission, by sending it on its way.

We can work out the interpersonal "dynamics" while still in LEO where at least
there is a backup "return to Earth" option in case of a crisis and experiment
with mixed crews of increasing duration missions until we figure out what works.

A cycler to me makes sense as a means of supplying in-transit resources that
you don't want to bother having to duplicate in your habitat. But probably
makes sense only if starting a large scale colonization effort rather than the
initial exploratory missions.

radiation shielding how about placing the habitat's water supply along the
periphery of whatever pressure vessel is holding the crew. With a shielded
"hot room" inside the crew can go to in an emergency. Is that good enough?

A comment on cost: if the idea is just to get people on Mars, i.e. flags and
footprints, neither of our ideas is the probably the cheapest nor quickest way
to do it. Zubrin's plan may be the best if the goal is colonization of Mars;
ours works out better for crewed exploration of the inner planets, not just
Mars, maybe out to as far as the asteroid belt?

It's all a very highly speculative exercise. Enormously expensive and
politically unsaleable in the US at least right now.

Dave

On Jan 28, 11:43*am, David Spain wrote:

Why not focus instead on building a smaller habitat first in LEO that could
eventually be made self-sufficient for a small crew of say 6-12 people from
within LEO. Once self-sufficiency is obtained in LEO for a time-frame long
enough for an interplanetary trip, then enhance this "space-station" to take
on that mission, by sending it on its way.

I think slapping a booster on the ISS and sending it in the general
direction of Mars is a great idea. Especially if there were no
astronauts on board at the time. It would actually *save* money.

John Savard

On 01/28/2011 05:23 PM, Quadibloc wrote:
On Jan 28, 11:43 am, David wrote:

Why not focus instead on building a smaller habitat first in LEO that could
eventually be made self-sufficient for a small crew of say 6-12 people from
within LEO. Once self-sufficiency is obtained in LEO for a time-frame long
enough for an interplanetary trip, then enhance this "space-station" to take
on that mission, by sending it on its way.

I think slapping a booster on the ISS and sending it in the general
direction of Mars is a great idea. Especially if there were no
astronauts on board at the time. It would actually *save* money.

Good joke. ISS likely wouldn't survive the boost, and if it did, it
wouldn't survive the trip through the Van Allen belts. Good way to save
money if you wanted to destroy ISS, but wouldn't it be easier to deorbit
it rather than boost it?

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
On 01/28/2011 05:23 PM, Quadibloc wrote:
I think slapping a booster on the ISS and sending it in the general
direction of Mars is a great idea. Especially if there were no
astronauts on board at the time. It would actually *save* money.

Good joke. ISS likely wouldn't survive the boost, and if it did, it
wouldn't survive the trip through the Van Allen belts. Good way to save
money if you wanted to destroy ISS, but wouldn't it be easier to deorbit
it rather than boost it?

Alright you two, you forced my hand. I wasn't going to bring this up but...

http://www.youtube.com/embed/NAr2HkQr1YM

Dave

On Jan 28, 6:15*pm, David Spain wrote:

Alright you two, you forced my hand.

I should note, though, that there's nothing inherently absurd about
sending a smaller vehicle to Mars. I was simply annoyed that your
reply was irrelevant to my point.

Which point was: if we accepted (by declining to argue the point) that
sending a small crew to Mars, if it was mixed-sex, would have an
unacceptably high probability of leading to sexual jealousy causing
disaster or lost efficiency... and, furthermore, if the obvious
solution of sending a single-sex crew is out for some reason - this is
not an insuperable obstacle.

Since small villages survive despite the people in them having sex and
even raising families... an obvious solution exists. Merely take the
slogan "It Takes A Village" into account, and send a spacecraft with a
village-size complement to Mars. Problem solved.

My space habitat design took the same approach to the cosmic ray
problem. Assume the radiation dose from cosmic rays is, as some claim,
unacceptably high. Shielding only makes it worse, doesn't it?

Well, not if you _really_ pile the shielding on. Case in point: life
does pretty well on Earth, and the radiation levels here are pretty
low.

How do you put that much shielding on a space habitat, without its
weight (under the artificial gravity produced by rotation) tearing it
apart, and without plenty of radiation getting in through the areas
that have to be transparent to let in sunlight?

http://www.quadibloc.com/science/spaint.htm

There's even a flat mirror behind the secondary of the Cassegrain
system to protect against anything there being overheated.

Thus, the argument that Man Will Never Reach Mars is falsified by
showing an obvious brute-force solution to the problems that are
"impossible" to solve. There is no claim made that this obvious
solution is efficient, or good engineering, or likely to be what is
actually used in real life. It just shows - if the problem were really
as bad as the naysayers claimed, it still wouldn't stop us, it would
only slow us down.

John Savard