Mars manned mission, who will get it done?
Posted by preimert1 8 years, 6 months ago to Technology
Before seeing "Martian" I did a little research on
the "Mars Direct" proposal of Robert Zubin and Elon Musk's pal to use a SpaceX Dragon Heavy Lift booster. So I put it to y'all: Could a commercial venture by Zubin, Musk and Donald Trump get it done?
the "Mars Direct" proposal of Robert Zubin and Elon Musk's pal to use a SpaceX Dragon Heavy Lift booster. So I put it to y'all: Could a commercial venture by Zubin, Musk and Donald Trump get it done?
What you really want to know: would the community of private capital ever hope to gain materially from such a venture to agree to finance it, and take the risk? What would they hope to gain? For I don't think you want an answer that depends, in whole or in part, on tax financing. I fail to see--at this time--any military justification for a public project of this kind. (It could not possibly serve a police or judicial function.) If someone here wants to lay out a military case for going to Mars, I'm willing to read it. (It could be as simple as "before someone unfriendly does it first," but must include the likelihood of said unfriendly doing it first--or anyone but Americans doing it at all.) But private capital will not finance anything for "abstract knowledge." At least, I don't think they will. John Galt was a theoretical physicist who subsisted by lecturing--to hard-nosed businessmen who saw a way to apply his discoveries to whatever they wanted to invent.
might provide::: Supermax. . Let's See You Escape From There!!! -- j
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Even colonizing the Moon (which is what the Red Chinese say they're going to do) is unlikely to be worthwhile anytime soon. Economically it's Antarctica -- we have the technological ability, but unless something really valuable like a huge oilfield is found there, it can't make economic sense to do it. That's even more true of the other planets.
The Moon and other planets also share with Antarctica the additional difficulty that present treaties forbid any country on Earth to claim territory there. Of course, the colonists could immediately claim independence and their sponsors could recognize it, but that's likely to lead to a war, not necessarily right away.
If I were in a position to invest money in space, the projects I'd consider now are (1) solar power satellites in high Earth orbit; (2) space tourism (and potential colonies in space, either Earth orbit or L4/L5); and (3) exploration/mining in the asteroid belt (which requires claiming only the few rocks you decide to mine). Even those will take years to pay for themselves, which is one reason that they're not being tried yet, except space tourism.
Probes have to be designed to look in specific places for specific things. This means there is a terribly large "turnaround" if you do find something that looks promising or interesting. You have to then go and design, build, and transport a probe dedicated to looking at the one thing you found interesting in the one location you found it or hope to find more of it.
Using probes to "explore" (map, really) Mars is like using disposable thimbles to empty a bathtub. Sure, you can do it and maybe the monetary cost of those thimbles is much less than the cost of a bucket. But that bucket is far more effective and cost-efficient in the long run. This isn't a mystery, either. In one mission the Apollo 17 crew covered more ground and did more exploration in terms of ground covered than Opportunity did in eight years.
If we determine the "amount of science" which comes out of the two avenues on published papers, manned exploration again dominates. Most don't realize that papers are still being published based on the data gathered by Apollo's manned landings. Contrast this to today: once a robot is "dead" no "new science" comes out of it. Think of it like bandwidth.
With a nice fat network pipe you can get a lot more data downloaded in a shorter amount of time - perhaps faster than you can process. Meaning your movie is buffered and downloaded quicker than you can watch it. With, say, a 56K dial up (anyone else remember those? ;) ) you can't. This is directly analogous to manned vs robotic "exploration" of space.
Add to this the fact that the cost of robotic missions increases as you try to do more with them and the differential shrinks in terms of raw costs, while the temporal cost increases for robotics yet decreases for manned missions. In effect, humans are actually cheaper when you factor in what you get out of the trip. To toss in yet another analogy: sure you can go grocery shopping for a sports team on a motorcycle. That individual trip may be more fuel efficient than taking an SUV. But the SUV will only need one trip, whereas the motorcycle will take many - resulting in a net cost which is higher for the motorcycle.
As to investing in solar power satellites (SPS), I'd advise against it. The political will against microwave beam transmission is far too great. NIMBY will prevent it. Plus the orbital mass needed is tremendous. I used to be a proponent of them until I got into the actual requirements. We'll have fusion before these bad boys. Hell, we'd probably see a renaissance of fission power in the U.S. before we got a single SPS in place.
Your item 3 is an argument for Mars, not against it. Same with item 2. The masses required in orbit for floating colonies are far too high. Anywhere you can not grow food is not a viable starting point. You'll need somewhere to import food from, and Earth is terribly expensive to do so. No, you can't (as much as I argued for in the 80's) make orbital greenhouses. The glass requirements for protecting crops from the "raw sunlight" is absurdly high - and that isn't even accounting for solar flares. Nor can you produce air and water in these colonies. Also, though it sounds backward, you need a lot of mass to manage thermal loads. Yes, space is "cold". It is so cold it is very insulating as well.
Thus in order for mankind to inhabit LEO we need a cheap source of these resources. And it doesn't get any cheaper than Mars' surface.
Barring some breakthrough space elevator, Virgin Galactic is probably working on the lowest cost per pound approach at getting into orbit. Getting into orbit at a lower cost will likely remain the commercial venture focus for some time to come.
- and as telepresence continues to advance, actually having a human aboard becomes less and less of an advantage, and more and more of a huge cost and potential liability.
The primary factor in getting around the solar system is inertia or momentum. We have a saying regarding rocket flight: "Once you get to orbit, you're halfway to everywhere". This is due to the resulting delta-v you are left with being then "recycled" into the delta-v needed to get to any point in the solar system. A space elevator removes that delta-v from the equation. A space elevator puts you into orbit without the momentum to get anywhere other than the other end of an elevator. If you want to take an elevator up to go to the Moon, for example, you still have to burn a lot of fuel to generate the delta-v needed to get there. Given you lack to delta-v you generated to climb up the gravity well, you have to burn practically the same amount, and depending on trajectory you ave to burn more.
Barring some seemingly-magical tech or the use of a tether relay system, this means you still have to have nearly the same amount of fuel as you would if launched from the surface. And of course that fuel isn't going to be handy at the other end of the elevator - it has to be imported. So where does that fuel have to come from?
From Earth. The reality is that until we have a fuel production facility on Mars to ship it there, you still pay the costs associated with a direct launch. On top of that you also pay the costs for the elevator. You can't really have much of a storehouse of fuel in LEO because the best fuel we've come up with simply bleeds away in space. As such you need that fuel to be delivered last in order to not lose massive portions of it - thus increasing the cost.
As to the financial benefits of a Mars colony, it has the best opportunity for development. Consider this: why is it Lunar colony advocates always position themselves as "the next step to Mars"? Because Luna has no economic value until we have He3 powered fusion. The cost of acquiring everything else we know to exist there is far too great to be of actual value.
The lack of atmosphere, the higher delta-v needed to get there (compared to other locales such as Mars' surface), and the lack of in situ resources make it the case. Yet the vast disparities in the two environments, Mars vs Luna, mean that the tech used for one isn't that useful for the other.
As to the economic offerings of Mars, it may well be that the best ones is it's ideal position for exploiting the asteroids in the belt. There is nowhere else which provides it's low cost leverage for harvesting precious metals, and mass, from the belt. Space elevator? You need a massive amount of mass at the top to keep it stable. Far too much to be launched from the Earth. If you want an elevator on Earth you need to get the mass from space; you need asteroid mass.
But the other, more pressing, economic benefit is a time honored one: real estate. If Gulchers as a group were able to come up with, say, 300K/person for a fully ready and self sufficient in the core requirements (food, base industrial, air, power, water, etc.) habitat with wide open spaces and the ability to build housing inside a large dome in an environment very similar to Earth's surface how quickly would we have our Gulch? There is no other location in the solar system which provides this at such a comparatively low cost.
This is the same process as was "used" when developing "The New World". You start with a very small portion going there to produce things to ship back, but wind up building a functioning economy based on locals. Eventually the local economy takes over the dominant position. What could we ship back from Mars? As things bleaken on Earth for even basic products to be produced and shipped, the costs of shipping from Mars decrease in comparison.
At the rate we are currently going, many things we make will become expensive, if not infeasible to produce on this planet. As countries try to "decrease their carbon footprint", Mars' facilities become much more attractive. Even beyond the actual products, the innovations which will be made as we produce such basic goods on Mars will be valuable in and of themselves. This brings in the the third leg: exporting ideas.
As we expand our knowledge of more efficient crop production, metal production, plastic production, etc. that knowledge will be increasingly valuable in a world which is seeing (primarily through political pressure) an effective tightening of resource availability. The ways and means of squeezing more out of what we have available on the planet will be quite valuable. The next engine of the world will not be on this world.
Which would make shrugging even easier to do.
Some online accessible resources for digging deeper:
http://www.marspapers.org/papers/Zubr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4P2o...
Note that in the latter around 20-25 minutes in, you will see that even the Luna He3 available is minuscule compared to the outer planets' availability. Now for those who don't like three legged stools energy becomes the fourth leg of a Martian economy. Eventually if and when we get to He3+Deuterium fusion reactors that He3 has to come from somewhere and there is nowhere more accessible than the gas giants. The best location for such a arresting operation is, again, Mars.
I recommend the message board http://nasaspaceflight.com if you want to learn a lot more about all the issues.They know more than the journalists do.
SpaceX may have the technology for a serious Mars effort around the 2025 time frame. When they launched a major new project to provide satellite internet to the whole world (no joke), Elon Musk said they needed the revenue to pay for colonizing Mars. So he may fund something big in terms of a Mars project. However, they haven't built the "Mars Colonial Transporter" system yet (it's in work), and Musk wisely seems more interested in creating self-sustaining businesses than in engaging in personal charity as such. And it remains a big question who could make money colonizing Mars.
Another plan not mentioned so far here is MarsOne. It's a private foundation with a business plan to send a private, permanent colony to Mars (with no return planned, thus saving a lot of cost).
I'm all for people following their dreams even when people like me tell them it can't be done. I am often wrong.
I think they should build a business incubator/accelrator in a remote location on Earth that has special tax treatment, Maybe they could put the money that would be spent going to Mars into a trust fund to pay for taxes and regulatory costs of the remote incubator. They would document it carefully. If that remote area of the world launches successful businesses, they can show the world the model and the documentation of how they got their simply by getting gov't out of the way.
If I found honest people (you can find a Rand villain trying to do it.) trying to do that, I would get involved. The Mars people should work on their dream in parallel if they think they're right.
Speaking as an aerospace engineer, I'm very disappointed and baffled why my colleagues in aerospace and the Mars advocates aren't promoting a permanent Moon base first. It's the most logical, lowest risk, yet greatest step change of beyond-Earth human settlement that we can achieve. And it's a much much better launching point for a Mars mission than from planet Earth.
A trip to Mars will be a one-way suicide mission for a very very long time. But Musk has said he's happy with that. Direct quote: "My goal in life is to die on Mars. Preferably not upon impact!!"
Build a permanent lunar colony, send robots to Mars and let them construct infrastructure. When they've built a fuel depot and a Hilton, then we can go.
My goal isn't just to get to Mars so that we can talk about how we did it once for the next 50 years but to have ongoing research.
There is nothing in favor for the moon. Everything you can do on the moon you can do cheaper, more efficiently, and better on Mars. Many crucial things you can do on Mars you can not do at all on the moon. If you want a long term presence in space, as I do, the only effective way to establish it is to go to Mars and build from there. Everything else is a sinkhole for money.
Consider this. It is cheaper to put mass into earth orbit from Mars than Earth. It is cheaper to build a Luna base if it is sourced from Mars, or from the asteroid belt, than it is from the surface of Earth. Space is all about moving mass, and lots of it.
One of the most efficient ways we currently know of would be an interplanetary tether launch system. The sheer amount of mass required will not come from Earth. It will come from asteroids in the belt. And Mars is the ideal place to do it from.
Look into history, at what the Canary Islands served as, for the path before us to mining the asteroids. Mars is close enough to make it viable, and cheap enough to do it. And we can do it from indiginous materials. Mars has virtually everything needed to bootstrap a full economy. From plants to metals, fuel, air, water, plastics, it has nearly everything - and may have things our toys haven't been able to even bother looking for let alone find.
The moon doesn't have these things. The moon isn't viable economically until we realize He3 based fusion.
If you want anything more than flags and footprints, Earth's moon is out of the picture for a long time. Private entities are not going to take the overly expensive route, and government won't have the political will for the spend either.
A Mars colony has a path to independence from Earth. A Luna base does not. A space station in Earth orbit has none either. Both of those will be heavily dependent on large sums of cash constantly flowing into fuel, requiring a long term political will.
How often have we seen a long term political will for anything requiring large sums of money short of territorial conquest? In addition to the financial aspect of the political will it would also require a political will to fight the misguided environmental aspects of enormous amounts of space launches in ways we don't do now, but have known how to do for decades (such as the inspiring Sea Dragon). Even a private company or consortium would face practically insurmountable political opposition absent a catastrophic event on the horizon all can see, and one that requires such Herculean efforts to get into space.
Earth is a cradle. But great achievements don't happen in the cradle. You have to get out of the cradle first. In this case it is as much physical as metaphorical.
It takes less energy to get to Mars than it does to get to Luna. The calculation can be found in n easily accessible format in Zubrin's The Case For Mars. Indeed, it shows it is cheaper to get to Luna from the surface of Mars than from the surface of Earth.
Factor in the costs of building a lunar base and it becomes even more impossible to be cheaper than going directly to Mars. It is like building an airport in Hawaii to fly from Dallas to New York by way if that Hawaii airport.