Thread: Permanent Human Colony on Mars?

One of the main goals of modern aerospace engineering is to reach Mars. It will finally extend our reach to another planet. But there are many worries: wouldn't all the propellant needed for a return trip be ridiculous? Wouldn't a round-trip, 2.5-year journey cost over a trillion dollars? Would traveling to Mars become another Apollo mission, with us going there just to say "I'm here!" and never come back? Is all that really worth it?

Well, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, NASA, and DARPA have different plans.

Their idea: a permanent settlement on Mars. Astronauts would travel there, set up a colony and prepare for more colonists, and then spend the next 30 years or so living on the red planet. Such a trip would cut costs incredibly, and would ensure that the world would shift more attention to science and space travel. It would also teach us important lessons about living in space, and would help us prepare for colonizing more faraway destinations such as Jupiter and Saturn's moons, or even extrasolar planets. But there are some setbacks. The main one the cost on human life. There are a number of dangers about traveling to Mars:
1. Radiation. Not only will astronauts be subjected to cosmic and solar radiation during transit, but Mars has a thinner atmosphere and lacks Van Allen belts, so they would be also be exposed to some radiation on Mars.
2. Systems failure. This is pretty self-explanatory. The question is not if the equipment will fail, it's when, and what will protect them when it does?
3. The "Mars Curse." Frankly, getting to Mars is difficult. Its atmosphere is too thick to only use thrusters (like the Apollo lander) and too thin to glide down on (like the Space Shuttle, X-47 and SpaceShipOne). To this day, nearly two-thirds of all missions to Mars and its moons failed, and not a single one has ever returned to Earth.
4. Psychological effects. Humans have almost gone over the edge just from a six-month jaunt on Mir. The psychological and societal effects of a two-and-a-half-year journey, let alone a 30-year mission, would be unimaginable. What would happen to a person who lived in a space the size of a two-room apartment for 18 months? Who never saw a blue sky or trees for the rest of their life? Who never interacted with anybody except the other five or six people he/she lived with and the occasional mission commander? This is arguably one of the biggest stumbling blocks of long-term space travel.

Despite all this, many people are optimistic about one-way travel to Mars. Ad Astra's Franklin Chang-Diaz and NASA administrator Charles Bolden both bragged about how VASIMR can be used for travel to Mars. Dr. Buzz Aldrin has pushed (and has been pushing) NASA to not return to the moon and instead focus mainly on settling Mars. In a conversation with a NASA engineer, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, had the following discussion: Engineer: "Yeah, I'd say that a one-way trip to Mars would cost, say, 10 billion dollars." Sergey Brin: "Is there any way we could lower the cost down to $1 or $2 billion?"

Jim, you're posted some very good points about problems we would have in traveling to Mars. Call me an optimist, but I believe we can create systems to address these problems. I certainly think that fuel expenditure is another logistic they need to consider. As for the psychological, I'm pretty sure that men in submarines spend months at a time with only their crew mates. Granted that's not 2 years, but I believe they could be taught and trained for such an occurence. Also holographic chambers with atmospheric parameters (heat or cold, moisture) would help with factor #4. Redundant capsule shielding along with individual shielded sleep capsules (along with suits) could help to reduce the radiation levels to a sustainable level. One of the other questions is the ability to come up with a segment of the ship that would rotate to create at least the same gravitational pull as exists on the red planet. In that way, they could slowly adjust to conditions there. I think you are entirely correct about the when aspect of #2, but I think another (supply?) ship could be sent out ahead and remain in orbit until the manned capsule arrives. This needs to be done in 2 year increments as that's when the planet comes closest to us, every two years. As I said before, I am optimistic about this and what the hey, I think it can be done.

Okay, I've got a couple of points that may or may not pertain to your post.
I certainly am in the same boat as you with being optimistic. My ideas differ slightly from yours, but are generally the same. For fuel, I don't think that it will be a major problem for a one-way trip to Mars, as the VASIMR system and ion engines would just need a couple of tanks of hydrogen to keep it running. Fuel would only be a problem for a return trip, because you would need to lug the same amount of propellant to Mars to get back, which would be extremely costly and would require several multi-billion-dollar rockets just to get all the equipment into Mars orbit. To protect astronauts from radiation, I've always favoured the idea of an electromagnetic field generator. Such a device would create an electromagnetic field much like the Earth's around the vehicle that would protect it from harm and reflect cosmic rays at a cost easily acheived by a couple fusion reactors onboard. That would be a lot less cumbersome than several feet of Teftlon, water and polyethylene! As for resupply ships, I don't think that it necessarily should be every 2 years, because several NASA and Ad Astra scientists have stated that VASIMR engines can get a payload to Mars in as little as 40 days (strangely, it is longer for shorter flights, with a trip to the moon relying solely on VASIMR lasting over 6 months!). I think that at our level of technology, we can easily get to Mars by 2030 or earlier.

I would like to see people living on mars like they do here on earth. But, what about things like economy and social classes. Certainly the citizens of mars would feel detached from the troubles of earth. And would reject earth's governments laws. Granted, can't really think of any examples of where this might happen off the top of my head,but hey--thats how the US was born....mostly. The last thing we want, after we colonize mars, is an interplanetary war for whatever reason. Theres lost of social/economic things that could go horribly wrong. It's my belief that before we work out "how to get there" we should at the very least think about "how it would work." It would be lovely if it could just be a utopia of scientific discovery open to anyone with a hungry mind...but I don't have that much faith in humanity.(politicians to be precise) internationally owned places like antarctica and the moon are only so, i believe, because theres no money to be made. if anyone can point me in the direction of some literature on the subject of social problems of colonizing mars I'd be grateful.

You're right, there is a lot that could go wrong. One problem is the Us/Them philosophy, where the astronauts feel that the mission commanders don't understand them because they are on the ground. Almost all of the "political turmoil" in space has happened on the space station Mir (and to a lesser extent on Skylab). During 1997, the worst fire in the history of spaceflight broke out onboard. Several weeks later, an unmanned resupply ship crashed into the station and caused the ship to tumble through space haphazardly. A second crash just months later caused parts of the station to depressurize for over two hours, during which one cosmonaut almost attempted suicide. But this was nothing compared to what happened with Skylab-4: the team actually went on strike because they said they were "pushed too hard," and they refused to work! So, even in the fifty or sixty years we've been in space, we've already experienced "space political turmoil."

Jim, some great ideas there! I, unfortunately, have had no time to research this field ( trying to finish my 6th album, "Sacred Garbage," if you'd like; check me out on My Space Music) and so have no idea what's out there. As for Joe's question, though it is fiction, the Red Mars-Blue Mars-Green Mars triloogy by Kim Stanley Robinson presents quite a few ideas. Worth the read, especially if you like geology. Jim: What are the possible hazards of having fusion reactors onboard to generate electromagnetic fields? What possible hazards might the fields themselves create?

I think space-travel is just too dang hard for people to do. Unless we come up some seriously brilliant idea's, any real space travel is beyond our reach. It's to hard, slow, and dangerous for us. I think real space travel will be up to the future machines with adequate AI. They would have to be smart enough to solve problems, collect resources, and replicate, but for use biological organisms, its just too much for us.

Tim: Well, fusion reactors certainly would be quite dangerous to have onboard a ship traveling at 123,000 mph, they pose less of a threat than, say, fission reactors. They can't have a runaway meltdown because the hydrogen plasma would just disintegrate into regular hydrogen gas within seconds. If the tritium got out and contaminated the ship, it would be less dangerous than fission fuel because uranium and barium decay much more violently compared to tritium (also, the tritium would be completely decayed after barely 40 years, compared to 10,000 years with uranium!). And if you artificially created a magnetic field around the ship, technically nothing bad would come of it. The only problem one would pose is it shutting off while the ship is traveling so extremely fast!

JCammon: I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but I think you're completely wrong. It may be extremely hard and dangerous, but it's not too hard for people to do! We have been successfully sending rockets into orbit for over sixty years. We have created space stations that are relatively safe and are almost 80% efficient. We have sent probes to all of the planets except Pluto, and four probes are due to leave the heliosheath within 30 years. As for the seriously brilliant ideas part, it's pretty hard not to see all of the ideas that are popping up! Space elevators/fountains, ion engines, holograms, cheaper rockets. Not to mention all of the ingenious ideas that got us to space in the first place!

I think we are really close to cheap, reliable ways of getting to and traveling through space. I might be overly optimistic, but I think that it is perfectly within our reach!

As usual, Heinlein covered this 40 years ago. To have a successful colonization, one simply finds brilliant, multi-functional couples. He also covered the legal issues involved in claiming a new planet in the name of an existing Earth regime. Launch from the ISS, get there and set up shop...2 years in space is not that long when you're fascinated by what you're doing and you're doing it with a psychologically stable, committed sex partner, but with multiple couples, even that would have to be a fluid situation, and jealousy would have to be a filtering factor in the psychological profiles of mission candidates. Multiple missions as well, just to ensure genetic diversity in the colony and a refreshing of the talent pool. Psychology, while complex, will not be the issue that stops the Mars colony from happening.

Originally Posted by Robert Nicholson

As usual, Heinlein covered this 40 years ago. To have a successful colonization, one simply finds brilliant, multi-functional couples. He also covered the legal issues involved in claiming a new planet in the name of an existing Earth regime. Launch from the ISS, get there and set up shop...2 years in space is not that long when you're fascinated by what you're doing and you're doing it with a psychologically stable, committed sex partner, but with multiple couples, even that would have to be a fluid situation, and jealousy would have to be a filtering factor in the psychological profiles of mission candidates. Multiple missions as well, just to ensure genetic diversity in the colony and a refreshing of the talent pool. Psychology, while complex, will not be the issue that stops the Mars colony from happening.

I can see your reasoning, and I generally agree. Here's my stance on psychology on a Mars colony, revised: if they went on this mission, they would have wanted to! I guess my using Mir as an analogy wasn't exactly right. The astronauts and cosmonauts on Mir knew they were going to return home after three or four months, so they weren't required to have as much determination; in other words, they were just your average scientist (but in space!). Someone who wants to spend the rest of their life on Mars would certainly be determined to live there! What I'm saying is they would want to spend their entire lives there, and be dedicated to colonization. So, they most likely would not have many major psychological breakdowns or issues.