Mars 2014 - One Way

At about 2014 if George Bush's Lunar Program holds up we may have astronauts
walking on the surface of the Moon once again. With the capability of sending
something to the Moon and bringing it back also comes the capability of sending
and equal sized payload to the Surface of Mars. In a book I've just read,
Zubrin's idea of manufacturing rocket fuel on Mars was considered infeasible.
("The Real Mars" by Michael Hanlon). In another book that is out in print,
("Destination Mars") a mission is outlined that takes place in 2033, involving
a second generation space shuttle, the ISS, a Moonbase, a refueling stop at
Phobos, and a landing on Mars. It seems to me that most of this infrastructure
would be required only if you plan on returning the Astronauts back to Earth at
the end of the Mission. The cost of this mission is bound to be huge, so it is
stretched out over many decades.

Now imagine the alternative. We get a single rocket with a Hab on it and launch
it to Mars. The Hab lands on the surface, at it has been proven to operate for
a certain amount of time, lets say 4 years. The Hab is capable of supporting
humans on Mars for 4 years, assuming they do things like grow their own food
and whatnot. Now if we can send 1 hab, we also can send 2, and another after
that and so on. Each Hab would come with a 4 year supply of spacesuits and
their replacement parts. So what we do is send two Habs to Mars, one which has
astronauts living in it and one that lay dormant right next to it. There is an
air lock that connects the two, but the astronauts only live in one hab leaving
the other available in case of emergencies. The astronauts explore the surface
of Mars, grow food, and every 2 years NASA send another un occupied Hab to the
Surface of Mars. The Astronauts move out of their old Hab and into the spare
one, leaving the newly arrived Hab for emergencies. I understand that the cost
of a round trip crewed mission to Mars could be 4 times that of a one way
mission, that could be 4 additional habs instead to extend the mission to Mars.
The Astronauts are basically colonists. They have a spare hab just in case NASA
misses a launch window, and each hab is designed to last for 4 years, this
means that NASA can miss two launch windows and still send a hab in time to
save the astronauts. And we can do this much sooner than the time it would take
to develop the technology for a round trip mission. Anyway if we plan on
colonizing Mars, why not start right away?

Tom

"Tkalbfus1" wrote in message
...

In a book I've just read,
Zubrin's idea of manufacturing rocket fuel on Mars was considered
infeasible.
("The Real Mars" by Michael Hanlon).

Wow. Could you talk about that a bit more? I've been Googling around, but
haven't found anything about this particular assertion.

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Member of the National Non-sequitur Society. We may not make
much sense, but we do like pizza.

lid (John Savard) wrote:

We have to settle the question of life on Mars first before we can think
of colonizing it.

Colonizing Mars would be a great way to answer the question in the
affirmative. :-)

lid (John Savard) wrote in message ...
On 03 Dec 2004 16:46:59 GMT, (Tkalbfus1) wrote, in
part:

Anyway if we plan on
colonizing Mars, why not start right away?

We have to settle the question of life on Mars first before we can think
of colonizing it.

Lucky Homo Sapiens didn't have that attitude when they came out of Africa.

"We can't cross the Sinai till we've settled the question of life in Asia!"

Alex Terrell wrote:

Lucky Homo Sapiens didn't have that attitude when they came out of Africa.

"We can't cross the Sinai till we've settled the question of life in Asia!"

Luckily coming out of Africa didn't require a Eurasian Exploration Program,
with all the exploration fans moaning about how it didn't get a big enough
share of the federal budget.

Paul

We have to settle the question of life on Mars first before we can think
of colonizing it.

John Savard

If life is easy to find, we can settle the question right away, if it is not we
have a choice. Either we assume there is no life and send the colonists or we
look harder. We can always look harder, it all depends on how much importances
we attach to finding life on Mars. If we don't find life, someone could always
say that we didn't look hard enough and its a big planet, we could always look
harder and still come up with a negative result and yet not disprove the
existance of life on Mars.

Why do I say we should colonize it, because compared to the mission I just
outlined earlier. Colonization is cheaper than a temporary 2 way mission to
explore Mars. A permanent colonist would be on Mars for much longer, and so
long as we keep on supplying him with new equipment for his team, he can keep
on exploring. I would say, start with a crew in their 20s with intelligence and
dedication being the deciding critereon for selecting the crew. We don't need
multiple PHDs and alot of exerience, because that would make the crew older and
reduce the amount of time they would live on Mars. The mission should be
designed for very intelligent young 20 somethings that can be trained very
easily. Now I mean that these young people are very intelligent, they're the
sort of people who skipped multiple grades when they were children, not normal
folk like myself.

Also if we colonize Mars we own it, it becomes a home for humanity. Most of the
effort in a 2-way Mars mission goes for getting the crew back to Earth.

Expansion of the human race into space is good and important.

But it should not be done in a wasteful and destructive manner.
Indigenous, independently-evolved Martian microbes would have an immense
scientific value.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html

If they can survive Mars, they certainly can survive us. We probably couldn't
get rid of them if we wanted to. Your forgetting one thing, Mars is no Eden.
Any life that exists there will live underground and our colonists will live on
top of it. We clearly won't be competing with them for resources.

There are plenty of microbes living underground on Earth that we do not
disturb. What we disturb are those complex life forms that live on the Earth's
surface, Mars clearly does not have any of those. I don't think Mars life has
anything to fear from us. And if we conduct one-way colonization missions, we
don't have to fear bringing anything bad back from Mars. The Colonists will
probably stay there for years, and as our technology and resources improve they
will eventually have company and even the option of returning to Earth if they
want to.

The Konstantin Tsiolkovski would clearly be a neat spaceship to have and it is
reusable, its a single stage reusable interplanetary spaceship, all you have to
do is refuel it after each mission. I think the refueling would take place on
Phobos of another asteroid, its VASIMR Engine requires and electrical input and
reaction mass in the form of hydrogen. The nuclear reactor generates 25
megawatts to power the VASIMR, but in the neighborhood of 2033 AD, I could just
as easily imagine a fusion reactor generating that same amount of power. The
VASIMR doesn't care where its electricity comes from. This sort of ship would
be useful for asteroid prospecting as well as transporting things and people to
and from Mars. The Mars Mission outlined in the book requires that 1000 tons be
lifted into low Earth orbit, 2/3rds of that are 2 unmanned cargo ships that use
nuclear reactors directly heating the propellants as opposed to a VASIMR. The
nuclear rockets use minimum energy transfer orbits to get to Mars while the
VASIMR uses a high energy sontinous acceleration trajectory to get in the
vicintity of Mars in 85 days, it can also go to the Asteroid Belt or to
Jupiter.

The ability to lift 1000 tons into low Earth orbit is a requirement for this
mission, but the ship can refuel at Phobos or another asteroid and have some
reaction mass left over for another mission when it returns to Earth, but I
don't feel like waiting till 2033 for a Manned Mission to Mars, and I think it
could and should be done sooner, perhaps in the 2020s.

Tkalbfus1 wrote:
Wow. Could you talk about that a bit more? I've been Googling around, but
haven't found anything about this particular assertion.

I've got the book. "Destination Mars" by Alain Dupas, it imagines a mission to
Mars in 2033. [...]
The astronauts then mine Phobos for a
month and a half for regolith to process for
fuel and water for the Tsiolkovski
and the Mars landers (There are 3).

I don't mean to be rude, but a proposal which calls mining Phobos for
water credible and the Sabatier reaction ISRU on the Mars surface
impractical is more than a little whacky.

The Mars surface ISRU concepts can easily be tested on smaller unmanned
landers before we ever commit a manned mission to launch. I haven't seen
any good proposals for how to mine Phobos without having people there...
and if the mission's return is dependent on the mined fuel, finding out
that you have a glitch after the people arrive there would be a bad bad
day for all concerned...


-george william herbert

I don't mean to be rude, but a proposal which calls mining Phobos for
water credible and the Sabatier reaction ISRU on the Mars surface
impractical is more than a little whacky.


Yes, I know. I didn't write the book, so I'm not offended. I think the
interplanetary spaceship is interesting though. If you could mine Phobos for
reaction mass, you couls also mine an asteroid. That ship has an electric
plasma rocket. In the book its powered by a nuclear fission reactor, but if
fusion becomes available by 2033, we could substitute that. The Tsiolkovski is
not just a Mars ship, it was designed to make a fast transfer to Mars, which
means it can also reach the asteroid belt, it can mine an asteroid for reaction
mass and then return to Earth with a load of ore. The Tsiolkovski doesn't use
areobraking to slow down on approach, instead it uses its VASIMR Thrusters to
brake. That means it can brake into high circular orbits around Earth, just the
sort that would be ideal for building space colonies.

The Mars surface ISRU concepts can easily be tested on smaller unmanned
landers before we ever commit a manned mission to launch. I haven't seen
any good proposals for how to mine Phobos without having people there...
and if the mission's return is dependent on the mined fuel, finding out
that you have a glitch after the people arrive there would be a bad bad
day for all concerned...

Actually, the ship's crew doesn't land on Mars until they've extracted all the
fuel they need to make a return to Earth. I haven't read the book in any depth
yet, but it seems to me to be a good idea to extract enough fuel to make the
round trip from Mars to Earth and back to Mars again.

Assuming the existance of Lunar Shuttles, I also see no reason why such a ship
would have to be brought all the way back down to low Earth Orbit either. The
Interplanetary spaceship can stay in a high Earth orbit, out beyond the orbit
of the Moon, with enough fuel for a return voyage back to Mars and Phobos. It
must have been very expensive to get enough fuel into the Tsiolkovski for the
initial voyage to Mars, I see no reason to pay that expense again. Another crew
can be shuttled to the Tsiolkovski for the next mission to Mars or the
asteroids.

Tom

"John Savard" wrote in message
...
Indigenous, independently-evolved Martian microbes would have an immense
scientific value.

As what? As possible bio-weapons? No thanks.

RT