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This week at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, SpaceX CEO and Lead Designer Elon Musk will provide an update to his 2016 presentation regarding the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars.
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SpaceX: Making Human Life Multiplanetary
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I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday October 01 2017, @06:19PM (7 children)
The problems with any space habitat are:
1) a closed ecosystem
2) radiation hardening
Everything else has answers that are known, though they may need engineering development.
As for 1), it's really impossible, as even the Earth doesn't have a closed ecosystem, so you need to include predictable inflows of resources sufficient to balance predictable outflows. And use pessimistic predictions with lots of internal storage.
As for 2), the only answers known are lots of shielding with mass.
So for planetary habitats, this means essentially sub-surface dwelling. And it means severe limits on the amount of atmospheric leaks allowed. Etc. And it's going to be different for every site. So these two problems don't have global solutions. The tertiary problem, energy to drive the system, is really a subset of the first problem. Solar power works in many sites, but you need lots of storage. Nuclear is dubious, because you'd need enough power plants so that when one failed you could start up another before the storage ran out. Over a decade this is probably not a problem, but over multiple decades it gets dubious....until your habitat is quite large. But nuclear works in the dark and far from the sun, so if you're sited near Jupiter or further out your choice is pretty much forced. On Mars there are lots of dust storms, so solar may have problems, but perhaps there's a chemical power supplement, or perhaps you need to have a nuclear "hefty trickle charge" for your "batteries".
IOW, space civilizations are going to be highly limited unless they run nuclear power plants, but each habitat will need multiple plants that normally run far below top performance, so that when one goes down the others can pick up the load.
I still think that planets are the wrong direction, and that the right direction is space habitats, but a lot of the same problems will need to be solved in either case...and perhaps there's reason for both.
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 01 2017, @07:39PM
I am a NEET on UBI and I already live in a closed ecosystem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 02 2017, @12:50AM (2 children)
Or... terraform. Earth is a closed ecosystem for all intents and purposes: input: solar radiation. output: infra-red re-radiation back to space. Anything else is trivial.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 02 2017, @04:38PM (1 child)
Sorry. With current technology the only planet we could reasonably try to terraform is Earth. And that's dangerous...not that we aren't doing the equivalent without thinking about it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 02 2017, @05:41PM
Sorry. With current economic focus the only planet we could reasonably try to terraform is Earth, and we're doing a poor job of that within current economic priorities.
FTFY
We have the technology, we have the resources, what we lack is the consensus.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @09:43AM (2 children)
Where are the citations to scientific research saying that Mars gravity is enough?
If it turns out it's not enough, it's a lot easier to do artificial gravity in space habitats than planetary ones. Spinning people around on the Mars surface is probably going to make many people ill...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 02 2017, @10:16AM
If you want the Mars gravity research, you have to send people or at least mammals to Mars.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 02 2017, @04:41PM
Unless you deny Einstein, gravity and acceleration are equivalent. So if Mars gravity is a problem (dubious) you could build a big wheel with tilted flooring. Which makes it an engineering problem. But I really doubt that gravity is a problem on Mars, and I'm dubious about how much of a problem it is on the moon.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.