Mars, the Red Planet: A Futurist Perspective Part 3

So far, in relation to colonizing Mars, we have talked about getting off the planet and the psychology of the colonists. But to colonize Mars, there are more problems. Many more.

Journey to Mars

The journey to Mars depends on multiple factors. Those different factors are the speed of craft, alignment of earth and mars, how much fuel is burnt, the weight and size of the craft and many others. Those factors can change the time to get there from 150 to 300 days.

Most people think that getting to Mars quickly is an easy task. Just put on a few more engines on the craft and hit the go button. Then when you get to Mars, you press the brakes. Like a car.

But space travel is not like driving in a car. And it isn’t a forceless environment either. People think that just because you are floating in space that nothing is pulling at you. That is very wrong.

A large majority of the fuel used in rockets is to get off the surface of the planet. It is not to get away from the gravity, it is to get out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere of the earth causes friction on rockets, slowing them down. A rocket can get into orbit on a planet one foot off of the ground. If there was nothing to run into to, or any atmosphere to slow them down. Even the ISS has to burn for a few seconds every once and a while to lift them back into a better orbit.

Saying that, when you get out of the atmosphere and into orbit, then you burn your rockets and head towards Mars. The forces that will pull against you are the Earth’s gravity until you escape from it, then the sun’s gravity.

To get away from gravity, you need speed. The faster you go, the easier it will be. Now, to get to Mars, you only need to escape Earth’s gravity and then get your orbit out to mars. Once you get towards Mars, you need to slow down. If you don’t then you won’t stop. You will sail past mars in your orbit around the sun. Once you slow down, the Martian gravity will catch you, and you are there.

That all costs fuel. Fuel to speed up, fuel to slow down. Larger craft, more fuel you will need. More fuel, the larger the ship you will need to hold all of the fuel. It is an endless cycle that hives engineers ulcers.

The problems of that costly hard journey are many, and the risks are high. Boredom, depression, lack of gravity and radiation are major problems that are going to have to be faced.

SOLUTION

Luckily, all of these are engineering problems.

The Mars direct plan called for the ship to tether to another ship in flight and to spin. Which would then create centrifugal force. That force would give the colonists gravity and help fight against bone loss.

Boredom and depression are issues. Hopefully, the training and the screening has helped keep those susceptible to those issues from being selected. But easy entertainment, common rooms, and private rooms will help keep the colonists from suffering. A job on board the craft will also help. Whether it is a training course, or a job running the ship.

To put things into perspective, in the 1500’s it could take up to 3 months of travel to get from England to the new world. All of which was crammed into a small hold eating biscuits and other unsavory rations. This trip will be a luxury cruise in comparrison.

With good planning, increased speed, and acceleration/ deceleration times will speed up the journey greatly. Using a system like the BFR sounds very good on paper. I, for one, am keeping a close eye on the BFR to see if it lives up to its hype.

Mars, the Red Planet: A Futurist Perspective Part 2

So last time, I talked about the current methods of space travel. There will be future blogs about the problems with NASA and more details on the future methods of space travel.

But today, we are continuing the series talking about how to colonize Mars.

The second issue that we are going to have to solve with any attempt to colonize Mars is the Psychology of Colonists.

Psychology of Colonists

To go to mars, to set up a permanent colony, it has to be a one-way trip. The amount of money to spend to get people on Mars doesn’t make sense for them to come back.

But money is not the only reason for a one-way trip. It comes back to the mentality of the people themselves. People will take care of there homes and colony if they are there for the long term. If they have a sense of ownership of where they live, then people are more likely to take care of where they live than someone who is scheduled to rotate out in a month.

Take, for example, anyone that works for a business. More specifically those that are leaving the company. Most employees will lose productivity and care for the company cause any problems won’t have to be dealt with them. Whoever is taking the position after them will have that problem.

It is the difference between a renter and a homeowner. I have rented my home, and I have also owned my home. A renter pays his rent, and at the end of the lease, the house is the same to them. It doesn’t matter if the value of the house raises or falls. It doesn’t matter to them if the sink is falling apart. The only thing that they may lose is the damage deposit and a reference.

Being a homeowner, there is a different mentality that most homeowners have. The homeowner takes personal responsibility to the state of the house. When the sink is falling apart, they go out of there way to fix it. They are concerned with the value of the house, they have skin in the game.

To use that example in the context of colonists, those that rotate out are the renters, those that stay for life are owners.

Mars One is a leading example of a real-world company tackling this problem. They are planning to send a one way trip to Mars. The Mars One’s colonists won’t be coming back to earth. These people are going to care about their colony, and they will not want anything to fail. Cause any problems caused by themselves will have to be solved by themselves.

They are also doing everything in there power to gather up a list of potential colonists to make sure that they best colonists are sent. They have had phycologists go over what type of people that they want.

Mars One wants people that are resilient, adaptable, curious, trustworthy, trusting, and creative or resourceful. They have a lengthy process to select members that will not go completely crazy on the 5-month journey.

They put out a call for volunteers, and 2700 volunteers signed up. Which is not a very high number of people. They will have to figure out how to get more volunteers. I suspect that this will get higher when the colony is successful.

But why is this a problem? The colonists will be in a small ship on a five-month journey to the red planet. Once they get there, they don’t have green fields to run it.

Mars is a harsh planet that wants to kill us. We will rely on a habitat that must work properly to keep the people alive. Space will be limited. These colonists will be living in close proximity to each other. If they don’t get along, a fight amongst themselves could be deadly. And until the colony gets situated, with fail-safes and redundancy, it will exist on a knife-edge.

SOLUTION

What is the answer to this problem? Mars One is on the right track. By getting a large number of people to go through, they will be able to find the right colonists to go.

And volunteers will be the solution, no assigned personnel. Only people that want to go.

Training courses and simulations are also on the right track. Already in Russia, many mars simulations are going on or already have happened. And not all of them lasted. Some of them collapsed on themselves in failure.

And that is vital to the task of finding the right people. By understanding people and how they mend together, then it becomes easier to select the correct people.

Designing a habitat that has the potential to let the colonists have alone time. Star Trek and the Holodeck is a great idea. But that is beyond the scope of this blog. The idea is good, however.

Recreation will be vital. Giving the colonists Netflix and video games will be vital. The ability to allow them to unwind and destress will save lives.

By hand-selecting specific colonists on a one-way trip to set up a permanent colony will allow the colonists to care for about the colony and make it something better.

Mars, the Red Planet: A Futurist Perspective

Today, I am going to go back to a subject that I started, but then life got in the way, and I didn’t go back.

I am going to talk about Futurism.

You see, I am a futurist. I admit it. I enjoy talking about the future and studying the future. I am excited about the future, and in my honest opinion, it is not coming fast enough. And I want my flying car.

But, enough about that. Today I am going to go to the popular topic.

Mars.

More specifically, can we colonize Mars and if so, how hard would it be? So first things first.

Why Mars?

When anyone talks about anything to do in space, it seems like everyone is always talking about Mars. Can we go to Mars? What rovers are on Mars?

Well, Mars has a 24 hr rotation, which is important. Cause it allows us, humans, to adapt to the planet that much easier. It is also cool enough to land on the surface,  unlike Venus. It requires less delta-v, (or energy per unit of mass) than any other planet other than Venus. Which is important because getting to and around space costs lots and lots of money. The last thing that it has going for it is that it has water.

With those advantages, scientists and the media have latched onto it. A few movies and video games later and it is easy to see why there is an interest in the red planet.

What are some major problems to colonize Mars?

1. Cost to get things into LEO.

The price to get anything into Low Earth Orbit ranges from approx. 10k to 40k per pound. That is depending on who is launching things into space. Space X can do it for a different price than the Russians, etc.

That means that for a two hundred pound person, it can cost from 2 million to 8 million dollars to get just the person to the edge of space. That is not to the ISS, that is not including essentials like air, water, a space suit. That is just to get the naked human up there. That is it.

The good news is that getting the cargo and crew from Earth’s surface to orbit is the part that costs the most. Getting things through the atmosphere is the killer. The trip from Earth orbit to Mars is pennies in comparison.

To colonize Mars with a serious and sustainable, long-term colony, that price will have to come down a lot.

SOLUTION

There are many ways to bring down the price of space travel. There is a lot of work on new engines that are more cost effective and faster to use. But the major hurdle is getting cargo and crew into orbit.

There are futuristic solutions that scientists and engineers are talking about. The most famous of which is the Space Elevator. But whether the futuristic space flight system we use is a Space Elevator or some type of Rail Gun, those are far from being a reality.

What is happening now is that we have a large number of private companies that are developing or have developed new space flight systems. They vary in size, scope, and functionality, but they all will help bring the price down until someone figures out the issues with the Space Elevator and such.

For Cargo launches, there are three main contenders. They are Orbital ATK with the Cygnus Enhanced that flies on the Atlas V rocket. Sierra Nevada Corp with the Dream Catcher on the Atlas V rocket. But the biggest one is Space X.

Space X has its Dragon and Dragon 2 capsules that launch on the Falcon 9 rocket. It is mostly reusable and has already started to bring the price down. But they aren’t done, they have recently announced that they are designing the BFR that will fly on its own reusable launch system.

And no, the BFR doesn’t stand for ‘Big Fucking Rocket.’ It stands for ‘Big Falcon Rocket.’ It is a heavy lifting multi-purpose rocket system that will be able to put cargo into orbit, take cargo to the moon or Mars. From what I can tell, it is the system that will be used.

For Crew launches all private space companies, save one, are developing rockets to go to the ISS. Only one is planning anything long term. Those companies are the Blue Origin with the Biconic Space Vehicle on the New Glenn System, Boeing with the CST 100 on the Atlas V, Sierra Nevada Corp on the dream catcher.

The company that is planning for the future is Space X with its BFR. It can be configured to hold up to 100 passengers for the trip. The founder and CEO want to bring down the cost to get a person to mars from its current 10 billion to a more reasonable 100 thousand.

In my opinion, Space X is the best short-term solution to the space travel problem.

Elon Musk is not the only person that is wanting to go to Mars, and he is not the only group that is developing missions to go. There is Mars One, Inspiration Mars Foundation, and Boing Affordable Mission as a few examples.

But there are many current private and public companies that are wanting to fund missions to Mars or to set up colonies. In Wikipedia, there are 23 listings since the year 2000. Some are defunct, some are not.

Now to close up today’s blog, you will notice that I did not talk about NASA. And there is a reason for it. NASA has a big problem, that will be a subject of a later blog post. But in short, it is a government department that doesn’t know where it wants to go.

It plans to go to the moon, then not the moon, then an asteroid, then mars, then the moon again. It’s all very confusing. They have the constellation program from 2005 to 2009 which was then canceled, then the Orion on the Space Launch System.

And I heard that they are planning a moon mission once more. For a permanent colony on Mars. I am not sure what to think, and I don’t trust them. I will believe a Mars mission from NASA when I see it.

Next time, problem 2. Psychology of Colonists. Because getting off the ground was the most expensive part, but not the hardest. That is yet to come.

Creating a Military Sci-Fi Novel

 

So I have decided to change my writing schedule a bit. Nothing official yet. Once I finalize things, I will post them here.

The reason for it,  I have wanted to write a military sci-fi novel for a while. I have decided that I am going to write one.

I have also decided to talk about my methods for creating my world as I build it. Cause why not.

I create a story world there are two basic methodologies. Big to small or small to big. Some people world build in a more discovering writing style and fly at it. They do very little world building before writing ‘Once upon a time.’ It isn’t necessarily bad, it just has a tendency to run into plot holes and re-writes. This is the small to big method.

I prefer the big to small. I will use a smaller and smaller brush to design the world that I am writing in. Most of which will not go into the story, but will help with making the little parts of the story make sense in a macro way.

As such, I first start with the base writing universe.

I have a dislike of creating a new writing world for a new story. Don’t get me wrong, I love world building. If I could get a job where I create worlds for people all day, I would be in heaven. It is just that I have many already and I don’t need more. So I am going to put it in my Shattered Worlds Writing Universe. It will take place after my ‘Inescapable Game Novels.’

That means that anything that I create to this writing universe is more flavor for my current world. Even though my Shattered Worlds Writing Universe only exists in the Sol System. But that shall change.

Using the nations and peoples that I have in my Shattered Worlds, and a time frame of when this story is going to happen, I can brainstorm how it is going to happen. A war still needs to make sense.

I am not going to go into detail on who is fighting who in this story. Not yet. I will. Cause why not. That’ll be in a later blog post.

For now, onto the fun part.

I need to create a military force.

That is the hard part.

For research, one of my main sources of information was this book. It was well written and had lots of information on how military forces work in the current model. It also has some ideas on what future wars may or may not look like. I recommend anyone interested in writing Military Sci-Fi to grab this book.

For the uninitiated, most people think that a military is a bunch of men with no-senses of humor, a drinking habit, and some guns. But a military is much more than that. Don’t get me wrong, it includes all of that, but it is so much more.

A military is a very set, organized organization that is capable of moving thousands of men and material over long distances through hostile, rough terrain. Men and women who are willing to fight to the death for there cause.

On paper, there is a couple way of creating a military organization. Top down, or bottom up.

I am very strategic minded, so I am going to do the top down.

That means that I am going to create the larger structure before I get to the individuals. But take note. A story is about the individuals. Not about the organization or unit.

Now. My story takes place 600 years in the future. Humans have spread across the stars and will be at war. I am thinking other humans, but that is for ease of storytelling and not anything to do with the aliens. I will write other stories where the fighting will be against aliens, but that is not this one.

In order to create the structure for my soldiers to fight in, I need to make some assumptions. The first one is that there will only be two branches of the military. In most current armed forces, there are three.

Airforce, army, and navy.

In the future, there will only be the army and the navy. Sorry Airforce, you go the way of the Doto.

In this story universe, the army has been re-named the Ground Defense Force. The GDF. It is tasked with defending the specific world from threats. The Airforce has been merged with it.

To make the GDF fight harder, a unit based on a planet has there personnel families relocated to the planet. Someone that is defending there home and the family will fight that much harder for it.

The Navy, now named Fleet, is everything outside of the atmosphere. The structure of it stays pretty much the same. Ship personnel, the ‘air power,’ and the marines. It stays the same.

With those assumptions made, I can create a rank structure. For the GDF, I only go up to a Brigadier-General, while the Fleet, I go all the way up. I figure a defensive force will only have so many men in it. I have also decided to use modern ranks instead of creating new ones. The less I have to explain the better. More pages for more explosions and gunfire.

I then created unit structure. This part I was inspired by a video game. Hearts of Iron 4. In it, you create divisions by putting pieces of different companies together. I used that idea and created some base unit types. How many men in squads, platoons, etc. That way if I talk about a full strength platoon of Infantry having 40 men on page one, on page 300 it should have the same.

Also, the specific structure of the platoon? Do they use squads? Do they use fireteams? Are they like the USSR or the US? For clarification, communists use masses of men to win fights. The US use LMG’s and accurate firepower to defeat the enemies.

Do they have some type of fire support? Do they have artillery at the battalion level or the division? Does each company have a mortar unit? Or maybe it is a heavy weapons company that gets split up per platoon as needed.

These are all important pieces of information.

The reasons why comes to one of the basic tenants of storytelling that I follow.

It is more interesting to read about a character overcoming the disadvantages that he has with any specific skill, force, power or technology. In a military sci-fi setting, I can throw them into power armor and with flechet rifles and send them into battle. And that is all fun, but the good war stories, the ones that resonate with the reader/viewer are the ones that even though they are skilled and equipped for war, they still have an enemy to overcome and figure out how to defeat.

It is more interesting to have your men get pinned down by enemy sniper fire and force them to think outside of the box to get the enemy defeated. Or I can make them unstoppable killing machines, but who wants to read a story about that.

Until next time.

And p.s. Sorry for the space of time between posts.

Cheers.

Title changes

Just a short note today.

The Space Courier is no more. So in the light that I have made no sales from the Space Courier Book, I have replaced the name of it.

It is now, “An O’Neal Spy Adventure.”

That is the new cover. I also tweaked the marketing copy, so maybe people will be more interested in it. We shall see.

Now I have to get back to the land of Agersolum. I am working on Felix Book 2.

Cheers.

Update: Dec 9, 2017

Well, time is a fickle thing. It tends to run slowly at some points, usually when you don’t need it to. Like when you are waiting for something to happen. Like when you are waiting for work to end.

Or time will go really fast. Like when you are having fun, or you are on a vacation or the weekend. At that point, time is like a runaway train that doesn’t seem to want to stop. One moment you are yelling TGIF, the next it is Monday Blues.

Well, time has slipped by, and it is now December 9th, 2017. It is almost Christmas. I have yet to walk into a shopping center to buy a single thing. Our Christmas tree is still in the storage bin. I do not have the time to get myself out there to get it all.

The last post I did was the lyrics of a song that I altered. Well, I didn’t modify it. It was my wife. You see, I have been prepping a novel idea, the Inescapable game, that I am going to pitch on the Archivos Podcast. In the new year, I am scheduled to go on the podcast. I will pitch the story idea to the crazy guys, and we will be brainstorming it. So I thought that I should have a couple points of the story fleshed it out.

Well, I have a fickle issue with world building. I love worldbuilding, but I also hate having to spend too much time doing it. I’d rather be working on the actual story than the world. So to combat this, I tend to create worlds that I can write multiple stories in. My Agersolum world, I have at least a dozen stories planned for it.

To get back to the point about those lyrics, I have figured out a way to attach my Inescapable Game to my 500 Years Universe. Then I figured out how many novels that the Inescapable Game story will stretch to. I plan to write 15 books in the series. Split into three parts.

It was at that point that my wife started to sing that dreadful song.

So that is the backstory to that last post.

Until next time.

Futurism: Mars Part 2

In this blog post, I am going to go into details in the different changes that happens to the Martian Colony over time.

The obvious one is that the colony grows larger. With 12 different colonies with different agendas and sponsors from earth, Mars becomes a real life version of the computer game Civilization. A hundred years and multiple generations pass. Most colonists, no matter which colony that they are from view themselves as Martians first and only the place of there ancestry grudgingly.

But before the advent of hostilities between the different colonies, the situation changed.

The colony’s themselves have a wide range of different problems and issues that must be fixed. The biggest one is taxation. The sponsors of the colony’s take a large portion of any money made by the colony for themselves before it is left to pay it’s people. Little money is reinvested in the colony itself and the expansion and maintenance of it comes out of the colony’s own funds.

From the colonies, all of the industries of space were controlled. The bosses all lived on the earth, but the people fixing the machines, building the probes and sending shipments back to Earth were all from Mars. The governments of Earth came to rely on the money from the Martian colonies more and more. Each year, they took more and more to support the failing societies on the planet Earth.

The colonists were also not allowed free travel between the different colonies. All communication between the colonies are controlled and regulated. Only official communications can happen. That means friends can’t have a phone call if they love in a different colony.

The colony’s are also directly controlled from mission control back on Earth with the colonists themselves having no say in what they do. They are only there to carry out there orders and not to question the minds of the people on earth.

The only colony not following orders in that regard, the only one that has gone off the reservation, is the first one. The Mars Corp. They are considered very rebellious in nature. Doing what they want and not listening to the corporate bosses. The bosses are happy about it. There profits are high, while the other colonies are barely surviving.

Then the corporate bosses of Mars Corp does the insane crazy thing. They move there Head Quarters from Earth, to the Mars Colony. They also move all of the personal that want to go and there families. The colony pulls all ties from earth except to pick up new immigrants to the colony.

Mars Corp becomes the first Mars Colony to become free. Free from the tyranny of being ruled by a group of people millions of kilometers away.

The other colonies took notice. The Mars Corp sent messages to each colony offering assistance with there transport shuttles if required.

Earth-side blocked all communication to Mars Corp. They couldn’t help as no message would go through.

Then after a couple years, one of the colonies failed. The one sponsored by the European Union. A sand storm damaged there oxygen processing and there power generation. An easy fix if you have the supplies. Mars Corp had the supplies. No message went through.

The colony went dark. It was two weeks before the news got out. A rouge agent of the EU Space Agency leaked the news to the colonies. Tensions boiled and 125 years after the first colonist set foot on Mars, the people rebelled.

In the year 126, the United Colonies of Mars was created. This started the first inter-planetary war as the governments of Earth cried out from the lack of money to run there nations.

Again. Information that probably will not make its way into a book, but this sets the stage on what the People of Mars are like.

Next time. Terra-forming. A mistake? Or intentional?

 

Futurism: Mars Part 1

In this post, I am going to talk about what I think will happen to the colony of Mars and how that will effect the story world that I developed.

First. Some information about Mars.

Mars is cold. Duh. It also has a very small atmosphere with no magnetosphere. Meaning that the solar wind has stripped the planet of its atmosphere over the course of a billion or so years. It also has no air pressure and is regularly blasted with solar radiation.

Mars does have water on it. Very important. It was also wet at some point in its history. Meaning that it was warm at one point.

The first colonists settle on the surface of mars in pre-fab shelters. They do bring with them very sophisticated 3D printers so that they can manufacture items from the resources that Mars provides.

There goal at this point is self-suffencincy. How do they provide all of there needs without relying on Earth. The trip from Earth opens up only once every two years to get help. We have all seen ‘The Martian”. If not, go see it. That is probably the most accurate dipection of what living on Mars would be like. It does get some stuff wrong, but it is a movie. Forgive it.

After nearly a decade of work and a population nearing a hundred colonists, the colony still hasn’t reached self-sufficiency. It’s corporate backers, are getting worried. They had planned for a span of 15 years before they could start sending resources back to Earth. Now 10 years was up and they had still not gotten close.

They have a stockpile of food and water. Oxygen tanks full of breathable air and shelter for there current population.

The problem with the situation is that they are having a problem of building new structures to house new colonists, or expand food production, or to build anything. They are having to spend a large amount of resources and time to build the structures to be radiation proof. The lack of the planet’s magnetosphere is the source of the problem.

How is that a problem with self-sufficiency? Population of a settlement without anyone from the outside should be at a large enough number to be viable. Scientist call this minimum viable population. It is usually used for wild animals, but it works for space colonies as well.

If the colony doesn’t get to at least 2000 people, then there is a risk of genetic issues as the generations roll by. Without the additional people they will not have the manpower to start sending resources back to Earth for profit.

The colony discovers some caverns nearby. These caverns are spread out over the course of a thousand square kilometers and some go deep into the Martian crust. They discover that the Martian crust shields the caverns from solar radiation.

The colonists decide to move the colony from the surface to the caverns. They decide to live underground.

The caverns allow for the construction of the colony to happen at a faster pace. Each piece of the structure needs less material as it is only holding in the pressure for people to live and not keeping radiation out.

The colony expands exponentially. The population shoots up and by the year 20, the colony has it’s 2000 people.

Then its population really expands. With the invention of a magnetic launcher, the cost of space travel drops to about $500 per kg. That open’s up space travel for more people. Nations finally get off there butt, other corporations are founded, and the single Mars colony become 12 separate colonies each with it’s own backer.

I will leave the history lesson here. But the main question is, how does this affect my story that takes place a few hundred years from now?

And the answer is absolutely nothing. It will never show up on the page. The only thing that it does is that it creates the culture and people of Mars. You will see some similar aspects that will distinctly shape the people until the time of my stories.

That part does have a big deal in the present date of my story world.

I will stop there for today. Tomorrow I will go through some of the different aspects of Martian Culture that is adopted over the years and some of the details on the changes to the colony.