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from the don't-tell-the-little-green-men dept.
SpaceX organizes inaugural conference to plan landings on Mars
No one can deny that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has thought a lot about how to transport humans safely to Mars with his Big Falcon Rocket. But when it comes to Musk's highly ambitious plans to settle Mars in the coming decades, some critics say Musk hasn't paid enough attention to what people will do once they get there.
However, SpaceX may be getting more serious about preparing for human landings on Mars, both in terms of how to keep people alive as well as to provide them with something meaningful to do. According to private invitations seen by Ars, the company will host a "Mars Workshop" on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the University of Colorado Boulder. Although the company would not comment directly, a SpaceX official confirmed the event and said the company regularly meets with a variety of experts concerning its missions to Mars.
This appears to be the first meeting of such magnitude, however, with nearly 60 key scientists and engineers from industry, academia, and government attending the workshop, including a handful of leaders from NASA's Mars exploration program. The invitation for the inaugural Mars meeting encourages participants to contribute to "active discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions happen." Attendees are being asked to not publicize the workshop or their attendance.
The meeting is expected to include an overview of the spaceflight capabilities that SpaceX is developing with the Big Falcon rocket and spaceship, which Musk has previously outlined at length during international aerospace meetings in 2016 and 2017. Discussion topics will focus on how best to support hundreds of humans living on Mars, such as accessing natural resources there that will lead to a sustainable outpost.
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:45PM (5 children)
Demonstrate the adequacy, will you?
Consideration for self-sufficiency:
- an average human under average physical workload needs 8700kJ equiv food per day when the oxygen is for free like on Earth.
- the max photosynthetic efficiency light->food is about 3%. Grow it underground under artificial light (red and blue) and you maybe obtain 10% - and you will need to go underground, otherwise radiation and the loss of heat through the transparent panels gonna kill your crop.
- a good solar panel has an efficiency of 25%, go 35% on concentrated. The weight of solar panel mounted in Earth conditions is between 10 and 20kg/sqm. Ok, take half of the minimum, 5kd/sqm
- in a good day, you'll get about 5 hours equivalent full-Sum. At a solar constant of 560W/sqm.
Based on the above, you should be able to compute the mass of the photovoltaics required for food-only self-sufficiency for one person. Feeling of guts, if you come under one tone of PVpanels/person you made a mistake somewhere.
Ah, yes, how could I forgot about? You will only need to borrow some energy from the local bank and dig a borehole 2-3 kilometres down and install pipes and turbines, get a thermal transport fluid and all is set.
But I'm sure the Martian Energy Bank has low fees and the loan rate are resonable. How much you reckon you'll need? In the high GWh or low TWh range?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 10 2018, @04:20AM (4 children)
Make the solar panels on Mars and you don't have to worry about the mass.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 10 2018, @05:57AM (3 children)
That's cool.
Except there's that nagging problem: the energy to make those photovoltaics and be still alive by the time you manage to have enough of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 10 2018, @11:53AM (2 children)
Use that nuclear plant or some starter solar panels from Earth to get it going. Nobody will just drop naked people on Mars and expect a civilization.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 10 2018, @12:20PM (1 child)
Remember where you inserted in the thread? At:
My point: the kickstart is not gonna be cheap and not gonna happen over a short period of time. We may not be alive to witness the beginning of the first colony on Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 11 2018, @02:59AM
Send a few small nuclear power plants to Mars and build small automated factories that build solar cells. Shortly thereafter, you start building more such plants powered by the solar cells you just made. You didn't have to send more nuclear power plants from Earth past the starter ones. What was sent was sufficient to build local power generation and that in turn is enough to build more.
Now, it may be that fission power is out of reach for early development of Mars. In that case, we still have solar. It's not as mass efficient so the start would be likely more expensive and slower. But once you get to a certain point, it doesn't really matter if you started with nuclear or not.
Unless, of course, it is. My view is that we aren't seeing attempts at Martian colonies now for non-technological reasons (such as a huge misdirection of our resources into centralized national space programs for the past 60 years and substantial regulatory and government obstructions of the past). We don't know how much faster such progress will happen now that much of these impediments have been removed and the cost of access to space is going down significantly. We may well see such colonization in our lifetimes.