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.

Differences between hard and soft

First, let’s get the elephant that is in the room, out. Happy New Year. There I said it.

Now to more important things.

A friend and I got into a discussion about a story. Well, that on its own is nothing new. We talk all the time about some story, whether it is his or it is mine. He doesn’t write novels, he works in film. He has many projects on the go, just like me.

We are planning to co-write a project in the next few months. At the moment, I can’t tell much about it. But in the course of discussing the project in question, we got into a discussion about hard and soft science fiction. He was leaning towards more hard sci-fi and I did not.

That got me thinking. A dangerous proposition, I know.

But I thought about the differences between hard and soft Science Fiction. You can take any sci-fi story, and you can place it into one of those two categories. It doesn’t matter what the sub-genre is. You can have hard space opera as well as soft space opera. You can have hard military sci-fi and as well as soft.

But what is the difference?

The difference is how you talk about one of the most important parts of a science fiction story. The science.

Hard Sci-fi has to use all known rules and laws of science. It must take them into account. That means no FTL travel. No Lasers. No handwavium artificial gravity. You can only use something if there is good science that explains it. This is a limiting factor.

A very limiting factor.

It means that you must have a Ph.D. in some field of space science to get the science correct and even then you will still get things wrong. And when an author gets things wrong, the reader will let you know.

Many times.

In angry emails and bad reviews.

There are a couple main reasons that an author gets the science wrong.

The first is obvious. Most people only think that they understand the science of space. Most have incorrect ideas that they haven’t been corrected on yet. High schools don’t always teach the correct science and it takes years in college to get to the real science. There is also the problem with the media showing incorrect science. Like a bullet throwing the victim backward. So you can get the science correct and people will still send you that angry email.

Another is that the science of space is changing at a rapid pace as new things are discovered. Most times the scientists only have theories on the reasons why. And there are usually conflicting theories. They just discovered the Higgs boson particle and that changed things. They are also discovering new planets and moons. As well as new anomalies. Like the colors of plutos surface. Who saw that coming? Most sci-fi that I have seen always showed Puto as a dark brown rock. Not as brightly colored as it is.

The third is that space science is very complicated. There are many different aspects to take into account in just a simple trip to the moon. Motion doesn’t work like it does on earth. Neither does navigation. You can’t just aim at your ship at the destination and hit the go button.

Well… you can, but you will burn up a large amount of fuel. You see, in space, there is no standing still. Even if you are are not using a single thruster, you are still moving. You are in some type of orbit. Either around a planet, or a moon, or the sun. And that means that you are moving. Sideways, but still moving.

The gravity of that planet will also pull you back towards it as you lose momentum. And you won’t follow the same path as you did before. You will curve in some fashion. And if there is another large object, like a moon, in your way, that will change your orbit more.

And speeding up doesn’t necessarily catch a target that you are chasing. Cause you are in an orbit, as you speed up, it changes the orbit in relation to your target. Meaning that you may miss them completely. Or catch up, but have a ten-second window to shoot at them.

See what I mean, complicated.

Soft Sci-fi is where you take the rules that you want to talk about and then ignore the rest. ‘Cause honestly, no one cares. Not really. They want to read about the space marines shooting things up or sex in zero-g or plethra of topics and plots. Not astro-navigation and orbital mechanics. And that is the best way to go.

The first rule of novel writing is that the story comes first. Do not put something in it unless it enhances the story in some way. If you want a story about an alien invasion or the first trip to another solar system, then don’t worry that FTL travel isn’t possible. Decide on a make-believe method and just write it.

But if it is better to write soft sci-fi over hard sci-fi, then what about hard and soft magic?

Well. That will have to wait until next time.

Until them.

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.

Futurism: Part Two

In part one, I talked about how the first colonists got off of the Earth and some of the reason’s behind it. In this post, I am going to talk about more specifics on how a corporation could make money sending people to space.

The first question the inevitably comes up is the extraordinary cost of getting anything into space. I’ll leave the politics out, but that basics of it is that it will cost approximately $10,000 per kg to send anything into Low Earth Orbit and approximately $30,000 per kg to send anything into Geosynchronous Orbit. Please note that LEO is anything around 160km to 2000km above the surface of the earth, while Geosynchronous Orbit is 35,786km above the surface of the earth. That means that it currently costs $75,000 to send an average human into LEO and 2.25 million to send one to Geosynchronous Orbit.

That price tag is huge. Impossibly huge. It is a huge barrier to human space exploration that it is what is holding everything back. It is not the risks to humans or the technologies that have to be devolved in order to make it work. It is money alone that is the barrier to space exploration and if anyone says otherwise, they are lying.

The biggest part of the cost to space exploration is the insane amount of fuel and material that it takes to get the cargo out of the gravity well of earth. The cost of moving cargo around the solar system is far cheaper. I am sure that you noticed the difference of moving cargo to Geosynchronous is only three times the cost for 17 times the distance.

A company can make a huge amount of profit by mining ice asteroids and providing the clean drinking water to the ISS. And that is only the tip of the iceberg for the amount of opportunities out there.

There are asteroids out there that are comprised of a large amount of rare earth metals. These metals are what make computers and modern life possible. But they are called rare earth metals because they are rare on earth. Out in space, however, they are not as rare as they are on earth. There is a nearby asteroid that has more platinum on it that has been mined from the earth since we knew of its existence.

That can be done by robots up to a point. At some point it becomes essential for humans to go and live in space. Only certain experiments can be done in a micro gravity and then there is the entire question of the asteroid of death issue that a multi-planet species will fix.

Once they get to space, human’s have a wide range of different needs that will need industries to meet. The best way to do that is to produce those goods in space. Where they don’t have to pay for the goods to be shipped out of the earth’s gravity well.

That means that the best way to develop long term space colony’s before we are able to build a space elevator is to cut the earth out of the equation for as many things as possible. No high prices of goods from Earth brings down the cost of living in space.

In my fictional world, that is what the corporations fight for and get. The ability to go space and the ability to ship materials back to Earth and to expect to make a profit of goods and services.

These corporations start by mining asteroids and building space stations in space. The develop Mars as a Space Colony and it is the private industry moving forward that prompts NASA to send a space mission cause heaven forbid a private industry getting to space before NASA.

That brings up a rather large amount of different issues as well, which will be talked about in a later blog post. Most of which aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things as the the story takes place in 2500 CE and not 2025 CE.

The story world changes from the time of the first explorers and settlers to the time of Des and the Jovian Empire. Just look at how life was like at 1525 CE to now in 2017 CE.

Next time I will go into more detail on what I think that brief history of what happens to each of the planets. Well, maybe one planet. We’ll see how it goes.

Futurism: Part One

This is the first part of a many part series of blogs that are going to talk about the science fiction world that I have created for my son’s Serial ‘Space Courier’ and others.

(Part One of Space Courier is nearing completion in editing and I expect to publish as an ebook on Amazon and a print version on Create Space.)

As a general declaimer, the information created for the world building of these stories is not intended to be thrown completely at the reader, but shown slowly throughout the stories as it becomes relevant to what is going on. Example, the main character, Des, in Space Courier lives on a giant space station Jov 1-H. He does not care what is happening on Venus or the price of tea there. As such, there is no mention of Venus or its Psychedelic Tea leaves.

So the story of Space Courier is set 500 years in the future. Why 500 years?

Good question. I picked it out of my ass.

Well. Kinda.

I selected 500 years as it is a good point in time that is far enough in the future that it gives me freedom to decide what has or hasn’t been accomplished at that point, but it is not too far away to be completely unmanageable. I didn’t want to be so far away that it I show life similar to modern day in many ways that it would break the story.

To start, I decided on a very rough history of how we, as a race, escaped the confines of Earth and became a multi-planet species.

There are two main schools of thoughts that have sprang up when you talk about us colonizing other planets.

The first is that it is obvious that it is a National or multi-National government that colonies other planets and moons.

But I don’t fall into that camp. I sit firmly in the other camp. I think that while governments have will power and money to do expeditions of this type, I don’t think that it is the case with interplanetary travel.

Christopher Columbus revolutionized travel to the Americas. He led an expedition to India and found North America. Everyone knows the story. He was also paid by the Spanish monarchy to do so.

But the numbers don’t add up.

Columbus was using old technology. Sailing ships have been around forever and the style that he had were around for many years. Further more, he knew that the Earth was round. They had known that for a while. He was an idiot and did not bring enough food to last the journey to India if there had been no North America around for resupply.

Nothing in his trip was experimental or difficult. They could navigate by the stars and the currents would bring him to the Americas even if he had no sails. His trip was nothing special in relative terms to what the first Space Travelers seek to do.

When we go to space, in real life as well as my fictional world, every piece of technology used is going to have been invented in the last 30 years if not sooner. That is getting all of the supplies, personal and material into orbit. The multi-month trip to the planet or moon, as well as that habitat that they will be living in.

The struggles that they have to face, especially the environment, is so much harsher that what Columbus faced that there is no comparison. I can’t come up with a single metaphor or simile.

Stating all of that and looking at the social and economic problems that are around today, I feel that it is not going to be governments that take people permanently to space. Governments will take Astronauts to space to play golf and maybe do some experiments when they can. They will not be taking people to space for permanent settlement.

They do not have the money or the political will power to do so.

What one government takes years to build up, it is often ripped apart by the next. NASA cuts programs all the time as one congress takes money away almost at a whim.

Also, the fact that the Spanish Monarchy payed for Columbus is not the same as the U.S Congress funding NASA. It would be like SpaceX going to congress for a lump sum of money to outfit an expedition to colonize Mars. Not a government bureaucracy getting a quarterly budget allotment that it MUST spend.

So, politics aside.

In my fictional world, NASA and China send over a couple manned missions to Mars and they play a killer game of golf. Among some really good discoveries that manned missions tend to do. There is no wind storm that disables stuff and causes a botanist to be forced to grow potatoes from his own shit. Sorry.

What happens after that is that there is a landmark legal case where a private corporation sues the world governments and opens up private space travel and privatization.

The legal basis of that idea is shaky at best, but it is something that happened 450 years before the main characters of my books were born. It’s okay for it to sound off. Listening to a history professor is like that. I know many times where I heard the history of what happened and thought to myself, “Really?”.

In my fictional world, the first permanent space colony was funded and built by someone that wanted to make money in the enterprise. I will go into more detail on some of the stuff that a corporation could be making money on in space next time. For now, this blog has gone on long enough.

Until next time.