Category Archives: Moon Colonization

Moon colonization. The very idea whips up images of interconnected biodomes, hovercrafts cruising the pockmarked surface, and ships darting to Earth and back again. The moon is the only planetary object whose features can be seen without the aid of a telescope. It's also the closest object to our planet large enough for humans to inhabit. When considering long-term space exploration and living, building a moon colony seems like the next logical step. We have the technology to get there and the innovative thinking to be successful. But what are the benefits of a moon colony? Do the risks outweigh the gains? How is such an expensive undertaking feasible in uncertain economic climates? Will we build on the moon in the next decade, or will the dream of a moon colony continue to hang on the horizon, just out of reach?

Let's take a look at some of the pros -- and cons -- of colonizing the moon.

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10 Pros (and Cons) of Colonizing the Moon | Curiosity ...

Anthropologist Cameron Smith talks about the cultural and genetic implications of long-term space missions

Cameron Smith, author, anthropologist. Courtesy of Perimeter Institute

If humanity ever travels to another star, the trip could take generations. Such a journey would present serious technological challenges, of course, but the social difficulties of keeping a large population happy and healthy on a spaceship could be no less daunting. Anthropologist Cameron Smith of Portland State University has studied these questions and will discuss the biological and cultural science of long-term space travel during a lecture at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario that will be broadcast live here on this page.

Smiths talk, Interstellar Voyaging: An Evolutionary Transition, will begin Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET as part of the Perimeter Institutes public lecture series presented by Sun Life Financial. The lecture will be viewable on this page as well as at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca. Online viewers can pose questions to Smith by tweeting to @Perimeter and using the hashtag #piLIVE.

Scientific American spoke to Smith about what it will take to mount an interstellar voyage. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Is it really plausible to discuss a multigenerational space journey? Are we even close to being able to do something like this? Im presuming that the physics people will give us high-speed propulsion. Im playing the same game as [space research organization] Icarus Interstellar. Their project is not to build anything now. They want to give humanity the option at the end of this century, in a hundred years from now, of interstellar voyaging. I think thats a smart approach. Its a mind-boggling thing to imagine, but so was going to the moon 100 years ago.

I think its a very good idea to start thinking about it now, and to spend a century thinking about the genetics, the cultural implications, the propulsion and designs. I think its possible, but I think it should be done carefully. I dont want to see a brief flurry of interest and then see it flare outthe American moon program did that.

One of your first projects in this field was to research the population genetics of a space colonization journey. What did you learn? If youre going on multigenerational voyages and you have a closed population, you dont have the natural interbreeding links that all human societies have. We have good evidence that human populations need to be well over 5,000 and into the tens of thousands of people to maintain healthy genetic variability. I suggested recently in a paper that 40,000 is a safe number.

People have proposed that you could send fewer human beings and store frozen eggs and sperm and maintain viability that way. But there are cultural reasons why thats not so great. I think we should go in populations that are culturally familiar. In evolution, generally speaking, radical changes in the short term are not too typically likely to work. And so I would propose a larger starship with tens of thousands of people aboard and let them sort out the new variety of social and genetic interactions that need to happen as theyre going. Dont try to invent it all here.

What are the other human evolutionary challenges associated with such a voyage? Its largely going to be developmental genetics in non-Earth environments. When we think of space biology now, we tend to think of adults. But Im thinking about the developmental biology of the young.

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Watch Live Tonight: The Challenges of Interstellar Flight

At a recent event sponsored by NASA and the Library of Congress, a group of scientists and scholars explored how we might prepare for the inevitable discovery of life beyond Earth.

n 1960, the astronomer Francis Drake pointed a radio telescope located in Green Bank, West Virginia, toward two Sun-like stars 11 light years away. His hope: to pick up a signal that would prove intelligent life might be out there. Fifty years have gone by since Drake's pioneering SETI experiment, and we've yet to hear from the aliens.

But thanks to a host of discoveries, the idea that life might exist beyond Earth now seems more plausible than ever. For one, we've learned that life can thrive in the most extreme environments here on Earth - from deep-sea methane seep and Antarctic sea ice to acidic rivers and our driest deserts.

We've also found that liquid water isn't unique to our planet. Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Europa harbor large oceans beneath their icy surfaces. Even Saturn's largest moon, Titan, could spawn some kind of life in its lakes and rivers of methane-ethane.

And then there's the discovery of exoplanets, with more than 1800 alien worlds beyond our Solar System identified so far. In fact, astronomers estimate there may be a trillion planets in our galaxy alone, one-fifth of which may be Earth-like. As Carl Sagan famously said: "The Universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."

Now some scientists believe the hunt for life beyond Earth may well pay off in our lifetimes. "There have been 10,000 generations of humans before us. Ours could be the first to know," said SETI astronomer Seth Shostak.

But what happens once we do? How would we handle the discovery? And what would be its impact on society?

This was the focus of a conference organized last September by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the Library of Congress. For two days, a group of scientists, historians, philosophers and theologians from around the world explored how we might prepare for the inevitable discovery of life - microbial or intelligent - elsewhere in our Universe.

The symposium was hosted by Steven J. Dick, the second annual Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. The video presentations can be viewed here.

"Three Horse Races" Of course, the impact of discovery will depend on the specific scenario. In a talk titled "Current Approaches to Finding Life Beyond Earth, and What Happens If We Do," Shostak described three ways - or three "horse races" - for finding life in space.

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Preparing for Alien Life

I grew up loving space. Outer space. That day I first pointed my telescope at Jupiter and Saturn, seeing the Great Red Spot, the bands, the rings, the moons ... these wanderers in the heavens looked more like paintings in the sky. I'll never forget the utter joy and happiness I felt when I first saw them. And how it changed me.

So yeah, I went to see Interstellar. How could I not? My review in a moment. No spoilers, either.

NASA is always fighting to prove its relevancy, ever since the honeymoon of wowing the world and landing a human being on the Moon ended. Why are we spending so much money to float things into space? Isn't it too dangerous? Shouldn't we be spending taxpayers dollars for people at home? Don't we belong here?

Sure, NASA has proven to act like a bloated bureaucracy at times, which is typical when you are part of a massive institution known as the US federal government. When I saw Interstellar this week, I felt as if Christopher Nolan summed up in so few words why NASA has been reaching past our planet's atmosphere - and why the agency, and more broadly we as a planet, should continue.

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." - Cooper

The Kardashev scale, proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in the 1960's, classifies human civilizations this way:

Type I: Able to utilize all of its home planet's resources

Type II: Able to utilize the energy of the star in its home solar system

Type III: Able to utilize the energy of its home galaxy

The great theoretical physicist Michio Kaku (whom I had the distinct pleasure in meeting one day years ago) says we may not even reach full Type I status until sometime well after 2100 AD. Yes, we as a human race have a long way to go. Don't let all of those iPhones, Segways and wrinkle-free jeans fool you. Our civilization is barely an infant when it comes to advancement.

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INTERSTELLAR - A Review by Matt O'Donnell

Leif Podhajsky

Zheng He! Zheng He! Is there a better icon for interstellar voyaging?

Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng set out from China on massive naval expeditions that reached as far as Mecca and Mombasa, journeys with more than 300 vessels and 28,000 crew, excursions far bigger and longer than those of Columbus more than a half century later. Staggering in price, formidable in technical sophistication, unprecedented in level of national commitmentZhengs voyages remain the closest functional equivalent to the cost, effort, and risk required to travel into deep space. Trying to picture what settling other planets might entail? One place to look is 15th-century China.

Zheng was an unlikely candidate for a life of far-flung adventure. At the time of his birth, China was torn by war between the Yuan dynasty and surging Ming rebels. Zheng was born into a Muslim family in the remote Yunnan province, then a battleground between Yuan and Ming. When he was about 10, invading Ming forces captured him and slaughtered most of his family. The boy was castrated. Forced to serve the Ming crown prince, Zheng eventually became his confidant and trusted adviser. After the last Yuan emperor fled in 1368, Zheng became part of an elite group of eunuch adventurers and troubleshooters at the Ming court in Beijing.

The Ming government backed Zheng for decades. Seven times the emperor arrogantly overruled his accountants and summoned the vast amounts of material necessary to provision thousands of people on years-long voyages. Ultimately, Zheng took the Ming banner as far as West Africa and the Middle East. These areas were poorer than China, but they were thriving and productive. Alas, traveling to Africa to buy its iron, no matter how high the quality, would be like driving a hundred miles to pick up a gallon of exceptionally good milknot a sensible use of time, money, or effort. In 1433, the voyages abruptly ceased; Ming bureaucrats had finally convinced the elite that they didnt make economic sense.

If we traveled to other worlds, could we avoid the Zheng He problem? Back in 1978, the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, a science fiction fan, playfully laid out the basic economics of interstellar trade. To justify the cost, Krugman pointed out, would-be starfarers must bring back something worth more than what they would have made by putting the same money in an interest-bearing account and staying on Earth. Going to distant planets, in other words, means fighting one of the greatest forces in human affairs: compound interest.

Today, the cheapest rockets available charge a little less than $1,000 to send 1 pound of material into low-earth orbit. Sending that pound to other planets, let alone the stars, would cost vastly more. To be sure, time and expense might be reduced by building space elevators and (should the laws of physics permit) taking advantage of handy wormholes. But the lesson of Zheng He remains: Exploration of distant lands will be a short-lived venture unless it yields something really, really valuable.

If future space voyagers decided to exploit a barren, lifeless planet, few would be upset. But such an endeavor is unlikely. As far as we know, a world without life would be a world without oxygen, a stable climate, or the possibility of growing food. Barring the discovery of some immensely valuable substance that doesnt exist on Earth, there would be no reason to set up shop there, let alone despoil it. A world with functioning ecosystems would be more attractive. But if local species were valuable, it would be more sensible to carry back to Earth a snippet of their DNA than whole animals. The entire Alien series can be considered as a proof by negative example of this assertion.

The real jackpot, of course, would be finding a nonhuman civilization: a planetful of new ideas, techniques, and expression. Here the temptation to interactthat is, to intervenewould be enormous. China again provides an example. Travel costs today are low compared to those in the 15th century. West Africa, meanwhile, is still full of valuable resources, products, and land, so Chinese ships are again going to Africa. In the past decade, the nation has shipped in a million or more migrants. Buying and leasing swathes of land to grow food for export to the homeland, grabbing deals to extract minerals, locking up local water suppliesthe newcomers have been throwing their weight around. Even though the Chinese have built many badly needed roads, bridges, and power plants, their moves have created a furor. Landgrab! cry African newspapers. Chinese workers have been attacked in Zambia, Cameroon, Niger, Sudan, and Angola.

History suggests that if anything of value is involved, contacts between distant societies are fraught. Think of Spain and the Aztecs. Corts could have traded peacefully for Aztec gold and silver, but that would have involved the expense of ferrying over goods from Spain for barter. Conquest was more attractive (economically, if not morally), and greatly abetted by an epidemic of smallpox introduced to the Aztecs by the Spaniards. Stuck at the end of a trillion-mile supply chain, voyagers from Earth might be less likely to replicate the triumph of Corts than the fates of Thomas Drummond and William Paterson. The two men were leaders of Scotlands biggest mission to the Americas: the attempt to implant some 2,500 highlanders in Panama starting in 1698. A grandiose effort for a poor country, the expedition sucked up as much as half of the nations available investment capital. It was that rarest of events, an unmitigated disaster. The locals in Panama werent interested in trade. Unable to grow food in the unfamiliar ecosystem and beset by diseases they had no experience with, the Scots died by the hundreds. Drummond vanished; Paterson lost his wife. As the few survivors limped back to Edinburgh in 1700, Scotlands economy collapsed, forcing it to merge with England.

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The Tricky Ethics of Intergalactic Colonization

Although President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf officially lifted the national state of emergency last week, it was not to say that the battle is over, even as some new hotspots have developed, but rather to encourage the country that the situation is now enough under control to allow people to move around again and to reopen markets in the rural areas.

With the Ebola crisis so much in the news these days and the emphasis on fear-mongering, it is a bit surprising that so little is being written or broadcast in the United States about the actual area where this epidemic broke out. Who lives there? Why did the outbreak occur there? Why did it spread so rapidly?

I have wanted to write about the West African country of Liberia for a long time. Liberia occupies a deep space in my heart. It taught me about animism and love of nature. My first child was born and died there, resting, one hopes, in a peaceful field that later became a virulent battlefield. Liberia taught me about humor and music. It taught me to love the rainforest and anticipate the rising of the full moon. And now there is Ebola. Although its President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf officially lifted the national state of emergency last week, it was not to say that the battle is over, even as some new hotspots have developed, but rather to encourage the country that the situation is now enough under control to allow people to move around again and to reopen markets in the rural areas.

When I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia from 1969-72, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined the tragic future that lay ahead in just a short tick away. Two devastating civil wars from 1989 to 1996 and 1999 to 2003 spawned unthinkable violence and the virtual destruction of the entire country, and, now, Ebola. While the wars were in many respects internal cultural or "racial" fights, the fight with Ebola is for the soul of the country.

This image of a country market in Liberia during Jack Kolkmeyer's stay as a Peace Corps volunteer is among photos he took between 1969 and 1972.

How is it that such tragic circumstances pick out a certain place or bedevil a certain group of people? More importantly, perhaps, is the question, how does a place recover from such incomprehensible turmoil? This isn't intended to be a scientific discussion about Ebola but rather an introspective look into the heart and spirit of this area fighting for its very survivala struggle of almost biblical proportions. While the number of deaths appears to be dropping in Liberia, they continue to rise in Sierra Leone and Guinea, and a new case has recently emerged in Mali. To date, an estimated 5,177 deaths have been reported by the World Health Organization.

The original Ebola outbreak in this area reportedly started in the forested area around Gueckedougo in northeastern Guinea as the result of eating infected "bush meat" (bats, monkeys and small deer, among many other things) and quickly spread into neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. As the disease spread, it became of immediate concern to France and Great Britain. Guinea was a French colony until 1958 and many Guineans live in France. Sierra Leone became independent of British rule in 1961, although it remained part of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Liberia was another historic matter altogether. Along with Ethiopia, Liberia laid claim to being one of the longest independent nations in Africa. But still, and regardless of who is now in control, the colonizers of these places are deeply affected.

After the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, a group of Americans, in large part Southern plantation owners, formed the American Colonization Society in 1816, with the intention of repatriating freed slaves back into West Africa. The first groups reached Sierra Leone in 1821 and Liberia in 1822. From the outset, the colonists met resistance from indigenous groups, including the 16 different linguistic groups in Liberia. The American Navy, however, intervened in numerous instances and provided the coastal stability that the original group needed to take root and eventually create their own independent state in 1847.

Indeed, coastal Liberia was and still is an anachronistic throwback to the southern United States. Rambling, two-story wood and zinc houses with verandas dot the swampy coastline and punctuate equally arcane small settlements with names like Virginia, Maryland, Paynesville, Harper, Buchanan and Robertsport. Each community in turn harbors a small church, usually Baptist, Methodist, Catholic or Lutheran. I remember driving through a small community one day and seeing a sign that read: Church of the Ladder Day Saints. Thats a short and easy way to get to heaven, I thought.

A house in Monrovia

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Liberating Liberia

According to the European Space Agency's newest video, humanity lunar future includes roving Roomba-esque 3D-printers and domed homes made of packed moon dust that will house four people in the ever-twilight of the Moon's South Pole.

As awesome as this looks, this video is admittedly government-sponsored science-fiction; it was produced by the British architectural firm Foster + Partners and based on the science they thought might be feasible for a 2050 mission. "In reality any lunar base remains firmly on the drawing board," the ESA said in a buzz-killing statement accompanying the video.

Still, the ideas here really could say something important about future missions. "Each small step forward in research makes future lunar colonization a little more feasible," the ESA says. As the video states, a few of the biggest issues in lunar colonizationthe radical temperature swings, radiation, the endless barrage of meteoritescould be dealt with cheaply and easily by insulating colonists with a scaffolding of moon dust and a 3d latticework skeleton extracted from the soil.

However, what's true for Mars colonization is true for the moon, too: Building living quarters isn't the biggest hurdle for living off-world. Rather, the largest obstacles involve the more mundane matter of infrastructurereplacement parts resupply, food production, and the biological hazards of long-term low-gravity life.

But let's be realthose issues don't make very snazzy YouTube video. Impatient viewers, skip ahead to about 1:50 in the video above to see the future moon colony come together.

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Watch 3D Printer-Bots Build the Moon Colony of 2050 ...

With Americas climate agenda in the hands of deniers. some people are considering leaving the country. But why stop there? Why not another planet? Christopher Nolans new film Interstellar foresees a not-so-distant future where a ruined Earth can no longer sustain human life, prompting the remnants of NASA to search for a new planet to inhabit. Neither the problem nor the solution are as science fiction as we might like them to be. The colonization of another planet may come as soon as 2022, if Mars One has its way. This Netherlands-based company has already accepted 200,000 applications to take a one-way trip to the red planet for the benefit of reality television. Once there, the new Martians will produce their own water and food and probably die almost immediately.

Other (and perhaps more serious) efforts are also underway. Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the explicit mission of establishing a permanent Mars base. A firm proponent of space migration as a necessity to save the species, Musk believes we can have a million people on Mars within a century. Even closer to hand, NASA is a month away from the first test launch of Orion, a spacecraft designed to take humans to Mars by the 2030s. When we do land on Mars well be prepared thanks to the Mars Society, which just began its third simulated manned mission to Mars on the slopes of a volcano in Hawaii. Six people will spend the next 254 days living in a 1000 square foot pressurized dome and wearing spacesuits whenever they venture outside. Thinking even further ahead, both NASA and DARPA helped establish the 100 Year Starship project, a private foundation aiming to get humans out of the solar system.

But are such efforts worth it? As the crash last week of Virgin Galactics SpaceShipTwo demonstrates yet again, human space flight is fraught with peril. It is also expensive. It took $150 billion (adjusted for inflation) to get humans to the Moon, and NASA estimates that Orion will cost as much as $22 billion by 2021, when it plans a flyby of Mars (the GAO thinks it will be much more.) Meanwhile, the European Space Agencys Rosetta mission will attempt to land a robotic probe on a comet on November 12th, for only 1.4 billion Euros. NASA own Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars for over two years, at a cost of $2.5 billion. India recently sent its own satellite to orbit Mars for an astonishing $74 million. Is the physical presence of human beings necessary if machines can do all this?

Fighting against and adapting to climate change is a pressing need that will require money and resources, but prospects for action let alone success often seem grim. Should we be spending money preparing for human spaceflight and colonization when spending it at home might have greater returns? Or should we press forward in order to keep this as an option of last resort? What other benefits could human space habitation have for the planet and the species?

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Community Discussion: Should we colonize space?

History will record 1998 as the year technology demolished the barrier for entry into filmmaking, bringing together high-quality digital cameras and desktop computer editing to enable resourceful would-be directors to bring their visions to fruition. But just because you can make a movie doesn't mean you can get it to an audience to be seen, so that year, a group of Memphis film geeks put a sheet up on the wall of a downtown bar and projected movies they had made and movies they wanted to see.

A lot has changed since the Indie Memphis Film Festival's humble beginning. Cameras and editing software have capabilities undreamed of at the turn of the century, rendering celluloid all but obsolete. Home theater and streaming video have opened new avenues for distribution that have theater owners looking over their shoulders and Hollywood studios pushing out bigger and more elaborate spectacles. Indie films still struggle, but now there are thousands of them produced each year, by specialty studios and plucky visionaries with DSLRs. The festival itself has grown from its underground bar-room roots into one of the most respected and fun festivals in America. For audiences, the problem has evolved from "How can I find something different to watch?" to "How can I make sense of all these choices?"

That's where carefully curated festivals like Indie Memphis remain relevant. This year, more than a thousand entries were winnowed down to two dozen competition features, as well as showcases and gala screenings that not only explore the state of the art, but also celebrate classics that have left indelible marks on indie history.

The lineup of narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and experimental videos that will roll out over the four-day weekend at Overton Square venues Playhouse On The Square, Circuit Playhouse, The Hattiloo Theatre, and Malco's Studio On The Square is among the most diverse in the festival's history, offering something for every taste. Choosing from such a wide selection of movies can be a daunting task, so we'll break down your choices by areas of interest to help you explore one of Memphis' premiere cultural events.

HOME-GROWN

The Bluff City cinema underground looks healthy, as 2014's crop of local features include both veterans and newcomers. Three narrative features and one documentary will vie for the Hometowner prize.

Eric Tate, star of The Poor & Hungry, which launched director Craig Brewer's career at Indie Memphis in 2000, returns to the screen in Chad Allen Barton's Lights Camera Bullshit. Tate leads as Gerard Evans, a film school graduate who returns to Memphis to direct art films, but instead finds himself embroiled in a sordid comedy of filmic errors by his unscrupulous boss Don (Ron Gephart). Tate plays straight man to a cast of Memphis indie all-stars, including Markus Seaberry, Don Meyers, Jon W. Sparks, Dorv Armour, Brandon Sams, McTyere Parker, and the late John Still as a terrorist disguised as president William Henry Harrison.

Director Anwar Jamison returns to the festival with his second feature, 5 Steps to a Conversation. Jamison stars as Javen, an easygoing guy who is having a great day until his wife leaves him, saying he needs to grow up and get a job. He signs on with a sleazy, cult-like multi-level marketing company selling free pizza coupons door to door for $20. The film manages to be both funny and affecting (imagine Glengarry Glen Ross as a comedy) featuring strong performances by Jamison, David Caffey, Memphis slam poet Powwah, and 4-year-old Amari Jamison.

Satan (Sylvester Brown) tempts a married couple on the rocks in Just a Measure of Faith, the debut feature of husband/wife team Marlon and Mechelle Wilson. This sincere expression of religious conviction envisions a pair of souls hanging in the balance after a car wreck leaves Jacob (Tramaine Morgan) near death while his wife Kayla (Maranja May-Douglas) is haunted by past sin. It also features stirring musical scenes by gospel singer Euclid Gray.

Director Phoebe Driscoll's debut documentary Pharaohs of Memphis traces the history of jookin', Memphis' indigenous dance form, from its inception in the 1980s as a way to defuse tense situations on the street to its present as an international sensation, through interviews with the form's pioneers and its present star, Lil' Buck. Archival and contemporary footage illuminate the dancers' athletic beauty.

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Indie Memphis Film Festival 2014

Mars One has generated a lot of debate about its one-way mission plans. Can history be a guide to them? (credit: Mars One/Bryan Versteeg)

Mars One is promoting the challenging goal of establishing the first colonists on the Red Planet only 11 years from now. NASAs Apollo program had an even shorter time horizon (eight years from John F. Kennedys public national commitment to place a human on the Moon to the Apollo 11 mission) so its inevitable that these two very ambitious space projects will be compared.

A general impression is that the crew risk for the Mars One mission and for Apollo expeditions may be of a similar order of magnitude. However, some aspects of safety are not comparable. For example, in all segments of an Apollo mission there was a way to terminate the trip and bring the crew back to Earth. The lack of a return-to-Earth option is the key feature that makes Mars Ones goal feasible, but it also makes the risk harder to quantify.

Equipment failures are inevitable on an open-ended Mars colonization effort. This was not a big concern on the one- to two-week Apollo lunar expeditions. Machine technology has advanced tremendously in the last 50 years, so mechanical and electrical failures are less frequent, better understood, and more predictable that ever before. Techniques to detect impending failure can drastically reduce the risk of adverse consequences from that hazard.

Apollos early preliminary design concepts, though feasible, were soon obsolete as more efficient and safer ways to accomplish the mission were developed. In similar manner, Mars Ones plans may change a lot before they freeze the concept and progress on to detailed design. Flaws that appear as major risks in the current preliminary scheme should not be viewed with undue alarm.

In the early 1960s, the Apollo program gambled that it would be able to take advantage of several newly emerging technologies. NASA judged these developments to be so very desirable as to warrant the risk that they might not be perfected in time. These technologies included high power transistorized electronics, miniature on-board guidance computers, and the liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engine. If there had been problems that slowed development of any of these, the lunar landing would not have occurred in the 60s.

Problems with major new hardware did come very close to delaying the lunar landing program. Two examples were the catastrophic failure of bearings on the giant crawler transporters that moved the Saturn rocket out to the launch pad, and the structural failure of a huge space simulation vacuum chamber built to qualify the Apollo Command and Service Modules for space.

Mars One will also have to gamble that new, enabling technologies (such as advanced spacesuits) will be perfected in time for use on the planet.

From the earliest years of the human space program, NASA and its contractors faced unprecedented technical problems. For solutions they needed the best talent they could find. Many of the countrys most motivated engineers were attracted to the program because they wanted to be part of something exciting. And it wasnt just engineers. Other people, from nurses to machinists, wanted to make history so they migrated to the NASA centers. The working environment was especially stimulating because the Space Race with the Soviet Union to land humans on the Moon was a real competition. Employees felt like they were on a team participating in a sporting event.

NASAs efforts to obtain outstanding talent included personal visits by managers to college campuses, where engineering school deans had been asked to look for exceptional students. When such individuals were identified, the agency would encourage them to come work for the government after graduation. Thats how legendary engineer Max Faget (whose name is on the patent for the Mercury capsule) and Guy Thibodaux (designer of the Scout solid fuel satellite launcher) were recruited. NASAs talent search was not restricted to just the US. In the early 1960s, Canada cancelled its AVRO Arrow supersonic interceptor aircraft project, and suddenly scores of top engineers and designers didnt have a job. NASA was able to scoop up these Canadians and relocate them to Texas to take critical roles in the Apollo program.

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Lessons from Apollo for Mars One