Private Mars Colony Project May Not Be Feasible, Study Suggests

Organizers of a private Mars colonization effort may have to rethink their ambitious plans, a new study reports.

An analysis led by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has identified a few purported problems with the blueprint laid out by the Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which aims to land four people on the Red Planet in 2025 as the vanguard of a permanent settlement.

"We're not saying, black and white, Mars One is infeasible," study co-author Olivier de Weck, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, said in a statement. "But we do think it's not really feasible under the assumptions they've made. We're pointing to technologies that could be helpful to invest in with high priority, to move them along the feasibility path." [Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project (Gallery)]

The Dutch nonprofit Mars One aims to land four colonists on the Red Planet in 2023. Do you want to be one of them?

The study team looked at many different aspects of the proposed Mars One mission, from the rockets needed to get gear to the Red Planet to the details of how settlers would grow their food. The results are sobering for would-be colonists, more than 200,000 of whom have applied to be a one-way Mars One astronaut. (There are no plans at the moment to bring the settlers back to Earth.)

For example, Mars One aims to source the colony's drinking water on-site by baking Red Planet soil, which is known to harbor water ice, at least in some locations. But the technology needed to do this is not yet ready to fly on a space mission, study authors said.

Furthermore, the new analysis suggests that growing crops within settlers' habitats, as Mars One envisions, would generate enough oxygen to make the living spaces a fire hazard.

Piping in nitrogen could lower the oxygen to safe levels, researchers said, but this fix would likely deprive the colony of a vital gas needed to compensate for leakage into the surrounding Martian atmosphere. The possible end result? A space that would quickly become unlivable, suffocating colonists after about 10 weeks, the study found.

There are ways to prevent this scenario growing food in isolated greenhouses, for example, or implementing an oxygen-extraction system. But the best alternative is to nix the idea of Mars farms and bring all the colony's food from Earth, the study determined.

"We found [that] carrying food is always cheaper than growing it locally," said study lead author Sydney Do, an MIT grad student. "On Mars, you need lighting and watering systems, and for lighting, we found it requires 875 LED [light-emitting diode] systems, which fail over time. So you need to provide spare parts for that, making the initial system heavier."

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Private Mars Colony Project May Not Be Feasible, Study Suggests