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.