Category Archives: Mars Colonization

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NASA astronomers have a major concern when it comes to human colonisation on Marsand it's aboutsex. Nobody is really sure how humans are going to reproduce in extreme conditions in space and the research on the same is still on.

Also Read:Chinese scientists to grow potatoes on Moon next year using this technique!

Spacefarers need to takevarious precautions to combat the extreme space conditions likeharmful radiations on the Red Planetdue to its thin atmosphere, low atmospheric pressure, icy cold climate during nights, the atmospheric composition of the planet and the dusty atmosphere.

What will happen if humans have sex in space remains a mystery. Researchers are curious to find out how radiations will impact reproductionon the Red Planet.

Assistant Professor Kris Lehnhardt from George Washington University said sex is one of the crucial aspects that need to be addressed, as reported by the Huffington Post.

"If we are talking about colonization, there is a key component to colonization that makes it possible and that is having babies, and this is something we have frankly never studied," Lehnhardt said in the video.

"If we want to become a spacefaring species and live in space permanently this is a crucial issue we need to address that has not been fully studied yet," Lehnhardt added.

Check out the entire webcast featuring Assistant Professor Kris Lehnhardthere:

Japanese scientists had carried out a study earlier this year, in January 2017, to find out whether freeze-dried mouse spermcould result in the birth of healthy offspring after being exposed to hazardous radiations on the ISS for 288 days. The radiation on the ISS is around a hundred times stronger compared to Earth.

It was found that, though the DNA of the sperm was slightly damaged due to the radiations, it resulted in the production of a similar number of embryos when compared to the sperm of the same mice on Earth, which possessed the ability to give birth to babies that would grow into fertile mice.

"The Japanese team have even suggested that it could lead to the first 'lunar sperm bank' allowing humanity to store samples on the Moon should a natural or manmade disaster take place on Earth," a Huffington Postreport quoted.

Link:
Human Colonization on Mars: Sex in space remains a major ... - International Business Times, India Edition

#Elon Musk, CEO of the commercial space flight company #SpaceX revealed some details of his plans to build a billion dollar self-sustaining city on #Mars. Musk and his company have been working on projects to help send humans to Mars in the next few decades.

He delivered his speech called "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species" revealing how he plans to make use of resources from the red planet to start a colony. SpaceX is currently working with NASA on some other projects leading to the agency's scheduled manned mission to the red planet called "Journey to Mars" set to launch in 2030.

Musk is confident that a Martian colony can potentially be erected on Mars.

Aside from their interplanetary transport system that is being designed to send humans to the red planet, Musk is also working on the steps to take to build a self-sustaining city on the red planet. This means all the necessary ingredient to keep people alive will be integrated into a secure dome in order to help keep future Martian colonizers alive.

Musk presented his Mars-colonization paper for everyone to see during a conference in Mexico. This was well received by the scientific community including Scott Hubbard, former NASA employee and now an editor in chief of a science magazine who says it's a great chance for the space community to share and understand SpaceX' vision.

The details on how SpaceX plans to build a self-sustaining city on Mars will also enable scientists and engineers to study the concept and make use their learning while planning for other deep space exploration programs.

It wouldn't be a SpaceX project if it won't involve the use of reusable rockets. SpaceX is known to have mastered the art of landing rockets on solid ground or on drone ships. Landing the boosters safely means they can reuse them for future rocket launches. By doing so, they managed to lower the costs of space flights.

Musk plans to use the same method for the mission to Mars with his Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). Parts of the rocket are still being developed but rumors say that the company will be ready to launch the world's most powerful rocket in the next few months. It is allegedly so powerful that it can take humans to Mars in a relatively short time.

It will be powered by the SpaceX Raptor engine: an engine that's about three times stronger that the former ones they were using. The booster will be launched using 42 raptor engines - making it the most powerful rocket in history. With his resources and cooperative NASA assistance, Musk is banking on the success of his plans in order to fulfill his dream of building a self-sustaining city on Mars.

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Elon Musk to build a self-sustaining city on Mars - Blasting News

Artist's illustration of colonists on Mars. Scientists don't yet know how babies would develop and grow away from Earth, and this lack of knowledge poses a possible hurdle to establishing sustainable space settlements, experts say.

If humanity is serious about colonizing Mars, we need to get busy studying how to get busy in space.

We just don't know enough about how human reproduction and development work in the final frontier to confidently plan out permanent, sustainable settlements on the Red Planet or anywhere else away from Earth, said Kris Lehnhardt, an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

"This is something that we, frankly, have never studied dramatically, because it's not been relevant to date," Lehnhardt said May 16 during a panel discussion at "On the Launchpad: Return to Deep Space," a webcast event in Washington, D.C., organized by The Atlantic magazine. [The Human Body in Space: 6 Weird Facts]

"But if we want to become a spacefaring species and we want to live in space permanently, this is a crucial issue that we have to address that just has not been fully studied yet," he added.

Off-Earth reproduction isn't a completely ignored topic, of course. Just last month, for example, a group of researchers in Japan announced that freeze-dried mouse sperm that was stored on the International Space Station for nine months gave rise to healthy pups.

Those results suggest that the relatively high levels of radiation experienced in space don't pose an insurmountable barrier to reproduction.

But the mouse sperm was brought back to Earth to produce embryos, which grew here on terra firma. How a human embryo would fare when away from Earth in the microgravity environment of orbit or deep space, or on Mars, whose surface gravity is just 38 percent as strong as that of our planet remains a mystery, Lehnhardt said.

"We have no idea how they're going to develop," he said. "Will they develop bones the way that we do? Will they ever be capable of coming to Earth and actually standing up?"

And there's a lot to think about beyond the nuts-and-bolts developmental issues. For example, people who are born and grow up on Mars, or in huge Earth-orbiting space habitats, "are going to be vastly different from what we are," Lehnhardt added. "And that may be kind of a turning point in human history."

The panel discussion also featured former NASA astronaut Michael Lpez-Alegra; Sheyna Gifford, a member of the HI-SEAS IV simulated Mars mission in Hawaii; and journalist Alison Stewart. You can watch the entire discussion on the AtlanticLIVE YouTube channel.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Sex in Space: The Final Frontier for Mars Colonization? - Space.com

In the week leading up to the 2017 Will Eisner Awards voting deadline this Friday, the Comics Beat will feature a series of For Your Consideration posts highlighting a number of the nominees as a celebration of their well-deserved acknowledgement. Well feature some never-before-seen behind the scenes content and some of the books gorgeous interiors. We encourage all of our readers to check these titles out and all of the eligiblecomics industry members to vote for thetitles they think best exemplify what make comics great.

The word auteur gets thrown around on occasion in the creative industries, but among the minds that actually deserve it, Jessica Abel is up there. A cartoonist since 1992, Abels body of work plays with a wide range of forms and conceits. Her stories discuss growing up, cultural diasphora, and even what its like to make a radio show. Her narrative styles range from straightforward fiction to autobiographical comics. In 2015, Comics Beat contributor Alex Dueben interviewed Abel about her bookOut on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio.

Recently, Papercutz releasedTrish Trash: Roller Girl of Mars Vol #1 through their Super Genius imprint. The book is stewarded by Abel with, as her website explains, extensive assistance on layouts, design, and backgrounds fromLydia Roberts, and color by Walter. The story follows fifteen-(Earth)-year-old Trish Trash Nupindju, who dreams of becoming a roller derby star because when you come from a multiracial family of poor moisture farmers on Mars, making the local hover derby team seems like the only way out. But when Trish finally gets (AKA sneaks into) a tryout, will this fresh meat have what it takes to make the cut?

Trish Trash Vol. 1is up for the Eisner forBest Publication for Teens (ages 13-17). Abel is up for the award forBest Writer/Artist.

When asked for a quote about whatTrish Trashmeans to her development as a cartoonist and as a person, Abel said:

Living with Trish Trash for the last ten years has changed my life. Ive become a roller derby fan, a Mars-colonization aficionado, and a lot better at drawing nonwhite characters. Collaborating closely with a talented cartoonist like Lydia Roberts caused me to rethink how I approach panel layouts, perspective, and pacing. Building an entire world, instead of the smaller job of only figuring out the web of relationships among a group of people (though I had to do that too) stretched my writing abilities and my perspective. Thinking about, and depicting how political awareness grows sneakily, and is then sometimes thrust upon us, is maybe entirely too a propos at the current moment.

Trishs Mars is boiling under the surface, poised on the verge of breaking the Terran colonial grip. And Trish is just a kid; what could she possible do that could have an effect on the outcome of her unstable moment? Ive also got kids. Theyre also living in a time of incredible upheaval that could turn out fine, or turn into bloody disaster. Im grateful to Trish for helping me imagine a way out.

Check out this gorgeous excerpt fromTrish Trash:

Check out of all of our 2017 Eisner coverage.

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Eisner Watch 2017: Jessica Abel reveals how TRISH TRASH: ROLLERGIRL OF MARS changed her life - Comics Beat

At face value, it sounds delightfully goofyand totally useless: Swedish furniture company IKEA, known for creating impossibly cheap (and often incredibly chic) flat-pack furniture, has sent several of its engineers to live in a Mars simulation. Yes, the brave men and women who designed your beloved EKTORP sofa and GJRA bed frame are hanging out at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, playing at space colonization.

Its a crazy, fun experience. Were basically completely isolated for three days to get a taste of what astronauts go through for three years," IKEA Creative Leader Michael Nikolic said in a statement.

"What does comfort mean for compact living? How do we feel in small spaces? This year IKEA is digging a bit deeper," the press release says, as if the next logical step after "Scandinavian apartment" is "tiny dome on a desolate alien world".

But the exercise, which IKEA announced this week at its annual Democratic Design Day event in lmhult, isn't just about helping NASA create cozier space habitatsthough WIRED reports that the team is hopeful they'll be able to come up with some interesting ideas in collaboration with Lund University, which in turn does work with NASA.

The primary goal is actually to use the extreme conditions of a Mars simulationimpersonal design, cramped quarters, space toiletsto come up with design solutions that will work even better on Earth.

IKEA engineers aren't the only folks thinking this way. In May, former PopSci intern Eleanor Cummins reported on farmers who hoped that in learning to grow food on spaceships and alien planetsa sexy avenue of research, to be surescientists might actually learn how to do things that are more immediately useful, like farm more efficiently in drought-stricken regions and get more nutritional bang for our energy buck. Designing with space in mind can help scientists and engineers think outside of the box, but given the fact that we don't even have a Mars mission on the books yetlet alone viable plans to colonize the planetit's great news if we can reap the rewards on Earth, too (whether those rewards are super-efficient farms or adorable modular furniture pieces).

If IKEA can design a clothing storage system that works well inside a Martian habitat, it can certainly design a clothing system that works well inside your horrible apartment in Brooklyn. And by gosh, that's what IKEA is going to do: In 2019, they plan to release a collection of 30 or so items inspired by space (reader, I'm buying it all).

I think that the essence of this collection will be about appreciating what we have on Earth: human beings, plants clean water and air," Nikolic said. "But also diversity and a sense of belongingthings that we take for granted on a daily basis. After this journey, itll probably feel pretty awesome to come home to my own bed."

As far as gimmicky PR moves go, a flat-pack mission to Mars isn't bad. But the exercise also serves as an important reminder of the design challenges we'll face in the coming century: as Earth gets more crowdedand less comfortablewe're going to entertain the thought of packing up and leaving more and more. But like IKEA's intrepid team of engineers, as we figure out ingenious ways to live off-world, we should remember to apply the same spirit of innovation to efforts to make our own planet a comfier place.

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IKEA engineers are pretending to live on Mars to help them design better furniture - Popular Science

If humans start a colony on Mars and live there for generations, will their descendants ever be able to visit Earth? Its possible that returning to their planet of origin would kill them.

Long-term habitation on another planet or in a traveling spaceship might pose a problem to human evolution because space is devoid of the germs that keep our immune systems firing, and without regular exercise, the bodys defenses could atrophy or even disappear over many generations. Scientists will have to figure out exactly what happens to the immune system when an astronaut goes into space before the travelers go on any far-reaching missions. Those missions could be just beyond the horizonas leaders like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk push for exploration and colonization of other planets, space agencies learn how to farm in microgravity and more advances are made in rocket technology.

They are getting closer to an answer all the time. NASA has a team of immunologists studying how astronaut immune systems react while the crew stays aboard the International Space Station, in orbit around Earth. Their project is called Functional Immune and scientists already have observed changes taking place in that microgravity environment.

Read: Could Humans Living on Mars Become a New Species?

Were seeing alterations in the numbers of immune cells in the blood, reduced function in some of these populations and changes in the proteins cells make, immunologistHawley Kunzsaid. Your immune system is relatively stable, so when you start seeing changes, it is often indicative of the presence of environmental stressors with increased clinical risk.

Although they are not making the astronauts sick, latent viruses are reactivating, NASA has explained, and that happens when the immune system is weakened in some way. As the space agency better understands what is going on, it may be able to develop interventions.

Until scientists solve the puzzle, living away from Earth in the long-term could be a dangerous business. Evolutionary biologist and science writer Scott Solomon said when an organ or other body part is not being used, the body will redirect energy from it toward something more crucial, which explains why, for example, organisms living in dark caves may not have eyes.

Our immune systems do require a lot of energy to maintain, he told International Business Times. And that suggests that our immune systems would start to break down, to atrophy.

A colony on Mars would have to have all of the comforts of home including germs, if space settlers don't want their immune systems to atrophy. Photo: Don Davis/NASA

It might seem impossible that we wouldnt be using our immune systems, but they may not have anything to do aboard a far-reaching spaceship or in a domed habitat on Mars. NASA itself has explained that astronauts are vaccinated ahead of time and aboard the ISS their food and drink is pasteurized and filters clear the air of bacteria and viruses. That doesnt mimic the natural environment on Earth.

We evolved to exist in a sea of microbes, and we evolved an immune system to mitigate that, NASA immunologist Brian Crucian said. Changes in physiology we are seeing on station have the potential to be greater on the way to Mars.

And even if we could leave a space habitat and breathe out in the open on the Mars surface, unless there is life on that planet, there are no germs in the air to make us sick.

As far as we know, the only microbes on any other planet would be the ones that we bring with us, said Solomon, a professor at Rice University. But there may not be too many of those vaccinations would knock out infectious diseases before boarding, and the transit time between Earth and Mars could be like a quarantine period that illnesses would not survive.

Although new infectious diseases develop on Earth all the time, that may not be the case on another planet if there is no livestock. Often illnesses from animals jump to humans and create outbreaks, but there are no native animals on Mars, as far as we know. And there are alternatives to bringing livestock like cows and chickens: Insects other than mosquitoes are a viable option, Solomon said.

Insects are at least as, if not more, nutritious and require a lot less resources to raise than mammals and birds, he told IBT.

Read: Cancer Risk from Space Radiation for Astronauts Could Be Double

If all those factors, from sterile air to clean livestock, came together, they would create conditions under which human immune systems might atrophy, or even be phased out through natural evolution over the generations of space pioneers. But then that community would be doomed to stay on Mars, isolated from Earthlings. Solomon called it an artificially induced separation because of the risk of an infection passing to immune system-less Martians,killing them.

Thats a legitimate possibility. Similar things have happened on Earth, such as when European settlers first encountered Native Americans and transmitted the smallpox virus, which killed many of those indigenous people because their immune systems were not prepared to fight off the European pathogens.

If the Earth humans and the Mars humans no longer have contact and are no longer exchanging genetic material they will begin to evolve separately and eventually may become different species.

Theres reason to believe that could happen much more quickly on Mars or another planet than on Earth, Solomon said.

In that case, whether space explorers finally find living creatures on other planets or not, the colonists on Mars would become actual alien life.

More:
Can Humans Live On Mars? Colonist Might Find Planet Deadly For The Immune System - International Business Times

The colonization ofMars is one ofthe most daring and audacious human endeavors the greatest minds ofour time are trying tobring intoreality. The Mars Society, established in1998, has now become the world's largest and most influential space advocacy organization dedicated tothe human exploration and settlement ofthe planet Mars, withmore than6,000 members from50 countries aroundthe world. People voluntarily live ina desert, conduct experiments and exploration campaigns, improve needed skills and strategies and leave their station only wearing space suits this is how a human Martian colony has modeled inUtah.

Another station, which is NASA's Mars project, is located beyondthe Arctic Circle, inthe Haughton impact crater onDevon Island, Canada. Geological and glacial features ofthis island are close tothe Martian ones, and its daytime temperatures are similar tothe "summer" temperatures onthe Red Planet.

But could people create an autonomous colony onMars now, using only the technologies mankind has atthe moment? Would those pioneers be able tolive inthe proper conditions?

"To establish the colony, which would be entirely self-contained, would be very difficult right now. In the first decades, such a colony would entirely depend onsupplies fromEarth. They will be inneed offood, spare parts forsophisticated equipment and building materials," said Aleksandr Smoleevsky, a researcher atthe Institute ofBiomedical Problems ofthe Russian Academy ofSciences, who was a member ofthe Mars-500 program in2010-2011 duringa 520-day psychosocial isolation experiment conducted bythe Russian space agency Roscosmos, the European ESA and China.

"Almost all scientific experiments onthe creation ofa ground-based autonomous colony have failed one way or another. Only two ofthem were more or less successful: BIOS-3, a Soviet experiment ofthe 1970s, when a crew ofthree managed tosurvive six months, offsetting upto 50 percent oftheir demand forfood bytheir own forces; and Lunar Palace 1 carried outby China in2014," Smoleevsky told Sputnik.

Sputnik/ A. Belonogov

Five-month experiment at "Bios-3" station, conducted by the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Biophysics, USSR Academy of Sciences, during which research in space biophysics was carried out

STR

Student volunteers are seen inside the Lunar Palace 1, a laboratory simulating a lunar-like environment, in Beijing on May 10, 2017.

Another large-scale experiment, American Biosphere 2, which simulated a closed ecological system, has practically failed. It was a massive structure built bySpace Biosphere Ventures and Texas billionaire Edward Bass inthe Arizona desert. The construction occupied an area ofone and a half hectare (15,000 square meters), withseven climate zones arranged there: they had their own mountains, a savanna, a desert, a swamp and even a little ocean upto 10 meters in-depth, witha living coral reef.

AP Photo/ John Miller

This 1991 picture shows the Biosphere 2 complex in the desert near Oracle, Ariz.

However, they failed tocalculate all the possible scenarios. For example, the experimentalists hadn't considered the uncontrolled growth ofmicroorganisms. As a result, bacteria and fungi multiplied, absorbed too much oxygen, so that an additional portion ofgas had tobe pumped forother organisms tosurvive. Ants and cockroaches also bred inlarge numbers. In addition, water condensed onthe glass roof inthe morning, and an artificial rain was pouring. Moreover, the researchers did not take intoconsideration such a phenomenon asthe wind: it turned outthat trees become fragile and break withoutregular swinging.

Biosphere 2 from the inside

Aleksandr Smoleevsky also highlighted some other very important problems that hinder the creation ofan autonomous colony onMars. "The colony has tobe provided withspecialists invarious spheres, such asengineers, technicians and doctors, aslong asa great number ofproblems will have tobe solved. But it is impossible toforesee what professionals will be necessary most ofall. Moreover, there may be some loss duringa long flight. And another problem is the compatibility ofthe first colonists withthose who will arrive onMars later," he explained.

"Women's issues" is likely torise inthe first Martian settlement, too, Bozhko believes. "Perhaps the first colonies must be formed exclusively bymen, and women should be sent later. Female colonizers will have tosacrifice their procreation fora lifetime. Several generations ofwomen will be forced tobecome likemen and just work. Children could be sent toMars asteenagers, butit will be impossible tobring them upwith very small amounts ofwater, the dangers ofbacteriological contamination and a lack ofthe right atmosphere. This situation may last fordecades or even centuries," he said.

"I think the first woman, who will successfully give birth onMars, will become history forstarting new kinds of 'protein bodies' inthe universe," Bozhko concluded.

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Autonomous Martian Colony: A Pipe Dream or Future Reality? - Sputnik International

Forbes

Will Humans Land On Mars In The Next 50 Years? Forbes Elon Musk burns with a passion to colonize Mars (yay!) but he also isn't concerned with any sort of race to Mars. He'd be delighted to see others get to Mars first, and has openly said so, if only others would hurry up and get busy. But he faces ... and more »

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Will Humans Land On Mars In The Next 50 Years? - Forbes

Forbes

Will Humans Land On Mars In The Next 50 Years? - Forbes Forbes Will we have landed on Mars in the coming 50 years? This question was originally answered on Quora by Nicolas Nelson. and more »

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Will Humans Land On Mars In The Next 50 Years? - Forbes - Forbes

Elon Musk will likely reveal more details about the Interplanetary Transport system on the one year anniversary of the first announcement at the 2016 International Astronautical conference. IAC2017, hosted by the Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA) will take place in Adelaide, Australia from 25 29 September 2017.

Robert Zubrin, Longtime Mars Colonization advocate, gave a Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System.

Zubrin was struck by many good and powerful ideas in the Musk plan. However, Musks plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical. Still, with some corrections, a system using the core concepts Musk laid out could be made attractive not just as an imaginative concept for the colonization of Mars, but as a means of meeting the nearer-at-hand challenge of enabling human expeditions to the planet.

Zubrin explains the conceptual flaws of the new SpaceX plan, showing how they can be corrected to benefit, first, the near-term goal of initiating human exploration of the Red Planet, and then, with a cost-effective base-building and settlement program, the more distant goal of future Mars colonization.

Robert Zubrin, a New Atlantis contributing editor, is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, Colorado, and president of the Mars Society.

Highlights * Have the second stage go only out to the distance of the moon and return to enable 5 payloads to be sent instead of one * Leave the 100 person capsule on Mars and only have a small cabin return to earth * use the refueling in orbit and other optimizations to enable a Falcon Heavy to deliver 40 tons to Mars instead of 12 for exploration missions in 2018, 2020 etc * Reusable first stage makes rocketplanes going anywhere point to point on Earth feasible. Falcon Heavy would have the capacity of a Boeing 737 and could travel in about one hour of time anywhere

There are videos of the Elon Musk presentation and an interview with Zubrin about the Musk plan at the bottom of the article

Spacex Falcon Heavy

Design of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System

As described by Musk, the SpaceX ITS would consist of a very large two-stage fully-reusable launch system, powered by methane/oxygen chemical bipropellant. The suborbital first stage would have four times the takeoff thrust of a Saturn V (the huge rocket that sent the Apollo missions to the Moon). The second stage, which reaches orbit, would have the thrust of a single Saturn V. Together, the two stages could deliver a maximum payload of 550 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), about four times the capacity of the Saturn V. (Note: All of the tons referenced in this article are metric tons.)

At the top of the rocket, the spaceship itself where some hundred passengers reside is inseparable from the second stage. (Contrast this with, for example, NASAs lunar missions, where each part of the system was discarded in turn until just the Command Module carried the Apollo astronauts back to Earth.) Since the second-stage-plus-spaceship will have used its fuel in getting to orbit, it would need to refuel in orbit, filling up with about 1,950 tons of propellant (which means that each launch carrying passengers would require four additional launches to deliver the necessary propellant). Once filled up, the spaceship can head to Mars.

The duration of the journey would of course depend on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits; the shortest one-way trip would be around 80 days, according to Musks presentation, and the longest would be around 150 days. (Musk stated that he thinks the architecture could be improved to reduce the trip to 60 or even 30 days.)

After landing on Mars and discharging its passengers, the ship would be refueled with methane/oxygen bipropellant made on the surface of Mars from Martian water and carbon dioxide, and then flown back to Earth orbit.

Zubrins Problems with the Proposed Spacex System

The SpaceX plan as Musk described it contains nine notable features. If we examine each of these in turn, some of the strengths and weaknesses in the overall system will begin to present themselves.

1. Extremely large size. The proposed SpaceX launch system is four times bigger than a Saturn V rocket. This is a serious problem, because even with the companys impressively low development costs, SpaceX has no prospect of being able to afford the very large investment at least $10 billion required to develop a launch vehicle of this scale.

2. Use of methane/oxygen bipropellant for takeoff from Earth, trans-Mars injection, and direct return to Earth from the Martian surface. These ideas go together, and are very strong. Methane/oxygen is, after hydrogen/oxygen, the highest-performing practical propellant combination, and it is much more compact and storable than hydrogen/oxygen. It is very cheap, and is the easiest propellant to make on Mars. For over a quarter century, I have been a strong advocate of this design approach, making it a central feature of the Mars Direct mission architecture I first laid out in 1990 and described in my book The Case for Mars. However, it should be noted that while the manufacture of methane/oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide and water is certainly feasible, it is not without cost in effort, power, and capital facilities, and so the transportation system should be designed to keep this burden on the Mars base within manageable bounds.

3. The large scale manufacture of methane/oxygen bipropellant on the Martian surface from indigenous materials. Here I offer the same praise and the same note of caution as above. The use of in situ (that is, on-site) Martian resources makes the entire SpaceX plan possible, just as it is a central feature of my Mars Direct plan. But the scale of the entire mission architecture must be balanced with the production capacity that can realistically be established.

4. All flight systems are completely reusable. This is an important goal for minimizing costs, and SpaceX is already making substantial advances toward it by demonstrating the return and reuse of the first stage of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. However, for a mission component to be considered reusable it doesnt necessarily need to be returned to Earth and launched again. In general, it can make more sense to find other ways to reuse components off Earth that are already in orbit or beyond. This idea is reflected in some parts of the new SpaceX plan such as refilling the second stage in low Earth orbit but, as we shall see, it is ignored elsewhere, at considerable cost to program effectiveness. Furthermore the rate at which systems can be reused must also be considered.

5. Refilling methane/oxygen propellant in the booster second stage in Earth orbit. Here Musk and his colleagues face a technical challenge, since transferring cryogenic fluids in zero gravity has never been done. The problem is that in zero gravity two-phase mixtures float around with gas and liquid mixed and scattered among each other, making it difficult to operate pumps, while the ultra-cold nature of cryogenic fluids precludes the use of flexible bladders to effect the fluid transfer. However, I believe this is a solvable problem and one well worth solving, both for the benefits it offers this mission architecture and for different designs we may see in the future.

6. Use of the second stage to fly all the way to the Martian surface and back. This is a very bad idea. For one thing, it entails sending a 7-million-pound-force thrust engine, which would weigh about 60 tons, and its large and massive accompanying tankage all the way from low Earth orbit to the surface of Mars, and then sending them back, at great cost to mission payload and at great burden to Mars base-propellant production facilities. Furthermore, it means that this very large and expensive piece of capital equipment can be used only once every four years (since the feasible windows for trips to and from Mars occur about every two years).

7. The sending of a large habitat on a roundtrip from Earth to Mars and back. This, too, is a very bad idea, because the habitat will get to be used only one way, once every four years. If we are building a Mars base or colonizing Mars, any large habitat sent to the planets surface should stay there so the colonists can use it for living quarters. Going to great expense to send a habitat to Mars only to return it to Earth empty makes no sense. Mars needs houses.

8. Quick trips to Mars. If we accept the optimistic estimates that Musk offered during his presentation, the SpaceX system would be capable of 115-day (average) one-way trips from Earth to Mars, a somewhat faster journey than other proposed mission architectures. But the speedier trips impose a great cost on payload capability. And they raise the price tag, thereby undermining the architectures professed purpose colonizing Mars since the primary requirement for colonization is to reduce cost sufficiently to make emigration affordable. Lets do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Following the example of colonial America, lets pick as the affordability criterion the property liquidation of a middle-class household, or seven years pay for a working man (say about $300,000 in todays equivalent terms), a criterion with which Musk roughly concurs. Most middle-class householders would prefer to get to Mars in six months at the cost equivalent to one house instead of getting to Mars in four months at a cost equivalent to three houses. For immigrants, who will spend the rest of their lives on Mars, or even explorers who would spend 2.5 years on a round trip, the advantage of reaching Mars one-way in four months instead of six months is negligible and if shaving off two months would require a reduction in payload, meaning fewer provisions could be brought along, then the faster trip would be downright undesirable. Furthermore, the six-month transit is actually safer, because it is also the trajectory that loops back to Earth exactly two years after departure, so the Earth will be there to meet it. And trajectories involving faster flights to Mars will necessarily loop further out into space if the landing on Mars is aborted, and thus take longer than two years to get back to Earths orbit, making the free-return backup abort trajectory impossible. The claim that the SpaceX plan would be capable of 60-day (let alone 30-day) one-way transits to Mars is not credible.

9. The use of supersonic retropropulsion to achieve landing on Mars. This is a breakthrough concept for landing large payloads, one that SpaceX has demonstrated successfully in landing the first stages of its Falcon 9 on Earth. Its feasibility for Mars has thus been demonstrated in principle. It should be noted, however, that SpaceX is now proposing to scale up the landing propulsion system by about a factor of 50 and employing such a landing techniques adds to the propulsive requirement of the mission, making the (unnecessary) goal of quick trips even harder to achieve.

Improving the SpaceX ITS Plan

Taking the above points into consideration, some corrections for the flaws in the current ITS plan immediately suggest themselves:

A. Instead of hauling the massive second stage of the launch vehicle all the way to Mars, the spacecraft should separate from it just before Earth escape. In this case, instead of flying all the way to Mars and back over 2.5 years, the second stage would fly out only about as far as the Moon, and return to aerobrake into Earth orbit a week after departure. If the refilling process could be done expeditiously, say in a week, it might thus be possible to use the second stage five times every mission opportunity (assuming a launch window of about two months), instead of once every other mission opportunity. This would increase the net use of the second stage propulsion system by a factor of 10, allowing five payloads to be delivered to Mars every opportunity using only one such system, instead of the ten required by the ITS baseline design. Without the giant second stage, the spaceship would then perform the remaining propulsive maneuver to fly to and land on Mars.

B. Instead of sending the very large hundred-person habitat back to Earth after landing it on Mars, it would stay on Mars, where it could be repurposed as a Mars surface habitat something that the settlers would surely find extremely useful. Its modest propulsive stage could be repurposed as a surface-to-surface long-range flight system, or scrapped to provide material to meet other needs of the people living on Mars. If the propulsive system must be sent back to Earth, it should return with only a small cabin for the pilots and such colonists as want to call it quits. Such a procedure would greatly increase the payload capability of the ITS system while reducing its propellant-production burden on the Mars base.

C. As a result of not sending the very large second stage propulsion system to the Martian surface and not sending the large habitat back from the Martian surface, the total payload available to send one-way to Mars is greatly increased while the propellant production requirements on Mars would be greatly reduced.

D. The notion of sacrificing payload to achieve one-way average transit times substantially below six months should be abandoned. However, if the goal of quick trips is retained, then the corrections specified above would make it much more feasible, greatly increasing payload and decreasing trip time compared to what is possible with the original approach.

Changing the plan in the ways described above would greatly improve the performance of the ITS. This is because the ITS in its original form is not designed to achieve the mission of inexpensively sending colonists and payloads to Mars. Rather, it is designed to achieve the science-fiction vision of the giant interplanetary spaceship. This is a fundamental mistake, although the temptation is understandable. (A similar visionary impulse influenced the design of NASAs space shuttle, with significant disadvantage to its performance as an Earth-to-orbit payload delivery system.) The central requirement of human Mars missions is not to create or operate giant spaceships. Rather, it is to send payloads from Earth to Mars capable of supporting groups of people, and then to send back such payloads as are necessary.

To put it another way: The visionary goal might be to create spaceships, but the rational goal is to send payloads.

Alternative Versions of the SpaceX ITS Plan

To get a sense of some of the benefits that would come from making the changes I [Zubrin] outlined above, lets make some estimates. In the table below, I [Zubrin] compare six versions of the ITS plan, half based on the visionary form that Elon Musk sketched out (called the Original or O design in the table) and half incorporating the alterations I [Zubrin] have suggested (the Revised or R designs).

Our starting assumptions: The ship begins the mission in a circular low Earth orbit with an altitude of 350 kilometers and an associated orbital velocity of 7.7 kilometers per second (km/s). Escape velocity for such a ship would be 10.9 km/s, so applying a velocity change (DV) of 3 km/s would still keep it in a highly elliptical orbit bound to the Earth. Adding another 1.2 km/s would give its payload a perigee velocity of 12.1 km/s, sufficient to send it on a six-month trajectory to Mars, with a two-year free-return option to Earth. (In calculating trip times to Mars, we assume average mission opportunities. In practice some would reach Mars sooner, some later, depending on the launch year, but all would maintain the two-year free return.) We assume a further 1.3 km/s to be required for midcourse corrections and landing using supersonic retropropulsion. For direct return to Earth from the Martian surface, we assume a total velocity change of 6.6 km/s to be required. In all cases, an exhaust velocity of 3.74 km/s (that is, a specific impulse of 382 s) for the methane/oxygen propulsion, and a mass of 2 tons of habitat mass per passenger are assumed. A maximum booster second-stage tank capacity of 1,950 tons is assumed, in accordance with the design data in Musks presentation.

Using the improved plan to send 40 tons (3.3 times more) to Mars with Falcon Heavy

Consider what this revised version of the ITS plan would look like in practice, if it were used not for settling Mars but for the nearer-at-hand task of exploring Mars. If a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle were used to send payloads directly from Earth, it could land only about 12 tons on Mars. (This is roughly what SpaceX is planning on doing in an unmanned Red Dragon mission as soon as 2018.) While it is possible to design a minimal manned Mars expedition around such a limited payload capability, such mission plans are suboptimal. But if instead, following the ITS concept, the upper stage of the Falcon Heavy booster were refueled in low Earth orbit, it could be used to land as much as 40 tons on Mars, which would suffice for an excellent human exploration mission. Thus, if booster second stages can be refilled in orbit, the size of the launch vehicle required for a small Mars exploration mission could be reduced by about a factor of three.

In all of the ITS variants discussed here, the entire flight hardware set would be fully reusable, enabling low-cost support of a permanent and growing Mars base. However, complete reusability is not a requirement for the initial exploration missions to Mars; it could be phased in as technological abilities improved. Furthermore, while the Falcon Heavy as currently designed uses kerosene/oxygen propulsion in all stages, not methane/oxygen, in the revised ITS plan laid out above only the propulsion system in the trans-Mars ship needs to be methane/oxygen, while both stages of the booster can use any sort of propellant. This makes the problem of refilling the second stage on orbit much simpler, because kerosene is not cryogenic, and thus can be transferred in zero gravity using flexible bladders, while liquid oxygen is paramagnetic, and so can be settled on the pumps side of the tank using magnets.

Dawn of the Spaceplanes

Toward the end of his presentation, Musk briefly suggested that one way to fund the development of the ITS might be to use it as a system for rapid, long-distance, point-to-point travel on Earth. This is actually a very exciting possibility, although I would add the qualifier that such a system would not be the ITS as described, but a scaled-down related system, one adapted to the terrestrial travel application.

For a rocketplane to travel halfway around the world would require a DV of about 7 km/s (6 km/s in physical velocity, and 1 km/s in liftoff gravity and drag losses). Assuming methane/oxygen propellant with an exhaust velocity of 3.4 km/s (it would be lower for a rocketplane than for a space vehicle, because exhaust velocity is reduced by surrounding air), such a vehicle, if designed as a single stage, would need to have a mass ratio of about 8, which means that only 12 percent of its takeoff mass could be solid material, accounting for all structures, while the rest would be propellant. On the other hand, if the rocketplane were boosted toward space by a reusable first stage that accomplished the first 3 km/s of the required DV, the flight vehicle would only need a mass ratio of about 3, allowing 34 percent of it to be structure. This reduction of the propellant-to-structure ratio from 7:1 down to 2:1 is the difference between a feasible system and an infeasible one.

In short, what Musk has done by making reusable first stages a reality is to make rocketplanes possible. But there is no need to wait for 500-ton-to-orbit transports. In fact, his Falcon 9 reusable first stage, which is already in operation, could enable globe-spanning rocketplanes with capacities comparable to the DC-3, while the planned Falcon Heavy (or New Glenn) launch vehicles could make possible rocketplanes with the capacity of a Boeing 737.

Nextbigfuture notes that reusable first stages are now technically functioning but safety and reliability would need to be improved by about 1000 to 10,000 times for point to point manned travel.

SOURCES- Spacex, Zubrin, the New Atlantis, Twitter

Read more from the original source:
Elon will likely reveal more details on his Big Mars Colonization Rocket at IAC 2017 Sept 25-29 2017 - Next Big Future