Proposal for large scale habitat on Mars.

Gawdzilla Sama said:
If you don't get over it I'll send flowers.
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What is to get over? That little overused homily rings hollow. Comments that facile deserve calling out every time. Sure, it's a bit of a bubble here with a preponderance of space dream optimists who want so much to believe it is all quite reasonable they pass over the objections to keep the faith. A bit of pushback will be good for you.

Planting planned societies and economies at extreme distance and isolation in lethally dangerous, resource poor circumstances with extremely limited ongoing supply at enormous expense and expecting them to survive and grow into full self reliance - for advancing a dream of multiplanet-species-ness - is not reasonable.

Leave aside the economics? - right, leave out the foundational, unifying connections between human labor and the effective utilisation of resources to produce goods and services? I haven't even seen a comprehensive list of essential mineral resources such as a technology dependent "colony" requires, let have assurance they do exist and have maps of where they are with reasonable cost effective proposals for exploiting them. How many mines (and refineries) would be essential? A lot more than an ice mine for water and oxygen.

SpaceX has moved rocketry along in much larger leaps than Orville and Wilbur ever did for aircraft but those leaps still fall short. Even working Starships at the most optimistically low costs will fall short. A long, long way short.

There is no shortage of much better goals for space agencies than Mars colonies - like meteorite detection and defense - and better goals for commercial space entrerprises, like asteroid mining - where real resources of high value exist in abundance. Technological advancement for other reasons than aircraft gave the Wrights the abilities to build engines. Space technologies will advance without requiring Mars colonies as a goal.

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Zero Point Native -

Similar reaction from me to that article -
Mars is abundant in the raw materials required for humans to "live off the land," in other words, achieve a level of self-sufficiency.
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Seriously? A shovel full of dirt from my backyard has a better range of raw materials required for human survival - better than the average given it is a geologically complex region with gold, silver and copper mining - but making everything required out of it is just not feasible. I didn't spit my tea over the keyboard reading it but... well, it is in keeping with how Mars colony optimism is presented by enthusiasts to the world.
 
Ken Fabian said:
There is no shortage of much better goals for space agencies than Mars colonies - like meteorite detection and defense - and better goals for commercial space entrerprises, like asteroid mining - where real resources of high value exist in abundance. Technological advancement for other reasons than aircraft gave the Wrights the abilities to build engines. Space technologies will advance without requiring Mars colonies as a goal.
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Yep. And indeed, such industries will set the stage for eventual Mars colonization. For example, something we need now is a deep-space transport - a space-only vehicle with a very efficient engine (VASIMR or ion) to deliver payloads from, for example, LEO to GEO or LEO to an insertion orbit for a planetary mission (like asteroid exploration, or mining, or capture.) Once we have that, any mission to Mars becomes much easier, since costs go way down and mass needed also goes way down.

I figure we are 50 years away from a permanent base on Mars based on the technology needed.

To go back to the Wright Brothers analogy, keep in mind that the first manned flight - the Cayley Boylifter - occured in 1849. An adult flew a much larger version across a courtyard in 1853. This had the layout of a modern aircraft with large main wing and a controllable tail. But it was 50 years before the Wright Brothers would add a powerful enough engine.
 
Why does the "we can only do one thing at a time" schtick come up so often? Is it just a struggle to say nay without having to justify that attitude in the face of reality? Whatever it is, have fun with it, then wash your hands.
 
I know I am not saying that. Never had said that. But Mars sucks and I can't take the enthusiasm for "colonizing" it seriously.

Quite the contrary to "only one thing at a time", I think it is the aggregation of a whole lot of developments that makes the leaps possible - and each one dependent on near term commercially successful uses to get taken up and over time to rolled back into the "what is possible". The motivations of better ships, better rail engines, better traction engines, better armaments made the Wright's success achievable and whilst there were people chasing powered aircraft all along the way too they were hobbyists who were irrelevant to that progress. There will be people chasing Mars colony ambitions along the way to... wherever we end up (in space) but the developments needed aren't going to come from that motivation. I don't think Mars colonies are where we will end up, not even with the averred commitment to it from the current leading rocket company.

The goal itself - "Mars colonization"- just isn't compelling or convincing to me, despite growing up with SF as my favorite reading. There is no burning need - or any need at all. There aren't genuine commercial opportunities in it. Quite the opposite. The feelgood motivations, no matter how good they might feel are not enough for it - too woke - and if "humanity must build the means to survive Earthly catastrophes" truly is the motivation we would start with bunkers not space. Yet I would hope that the commitment to avoiding and surviving disasters will continue to extend to defense of the whole and not focus on refuge for the few.

Space habitats next to or inside asteroids offer a more credible pathway to independent survival off Earth than Mars ever will - building from a commercial opportunity (platinum group metals) that might result in high grade iron and nickel accumulating as a "waste" product.

If anyone thinks that because I think Mars colonization is not credible or even desirable I am some kind of Luddite that opposes ongoing technological progress you will be very wrong. But I do think Mars sucks.
 
Ken Fabian said:
The goal itself - "Mars colonization"- just isn't compelling or convincing to me, despite growing up with SF as my favorite reading. There is no burning need - or any need at all. There aren't genuine commercial opportunities in it. Quite the opposite. The feelgood motivations, no matter how good they might feel are not enough for it - too woke - and if "humanity must build the means to survive Earthly catastrophes" truly is the motivation we would start with bunkers not space. Yet I would hope that the commitment to avoiding and surviving disasters will continue to extend to defense of the whole and not focus on refuge for the few.
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Yep.

I might believe there is a need to colonize Mars after we colonize Antarctica. It is thousands of times easier; the area is far more hospitable and forgiving than Mars. And it's a great place to wait out any otherwise-disastrous event that makes the rest of the Earth uninhabitable.

It's cool because it's just like Star Trek, and people imagine whole new frontiers out there. And we will almost certainly explore it in times to come - the Starship vehicle will make that a lot easier. But people who work in Antarctica call it "the big dead place" and Mars is that many, many times over. Not a great place to live.

Now, 50 years from now there may well be value in living there - it's closer to the asteroid belt, and it's easier to support the miners there from Mars than from Earth. Or something similar. But until we have a good reason I don't see it.
 
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact, it's cold as hell.
And there's no one there to raise them if you did.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
Fine. But why wade in if you don't give a fuck? Just curious.
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It is a discussion forum - why do any of us participate? I am very interested in what we can achieve in space. Would you really prefer a venue where only people who agree can participate and no criticisms or challenges to your beliefs are allowed?

billvon - thanks. Being contrary for the sake of it wasn't the point. I AM interested. And interested in how we get there from where we are, with minimum reliance on hopium.

With respect to asteroid mining I think objects like Bennu (in an Earth crossing orbit - about 6km/s/s of delta-v from NEO, about as 'close' as destinations get) will be better than looking past Mars to the Asteroid Belt. Excellent 24/7 solar power. Lots of water rich carbonaceous material, confirmed - which can be rich chemical feedstocks and raw material for making plastics. No special mention has been made of nickel-iron within the samples from the reports I've read but going by meteorites it seems ubiquitous and I expect it will be there in sufficient abundance to mine and partially refine down to PGM rich residue. Which refining using Mond method should leave a lot of iron and nickel behind. Not that raw nickel-iron could not be a construction material, but I'm thinking it more likely remote operated mining will come before any attempt to include live crews.
 
Ken Fabian said:
It is a discussion forum - why do any of us participate? I am very interested in what we can achieve in space. Would you really prefer a venue where only people who agree can participate and no criticisms or challenges to your beliefs are allowed?

I just get a lot of inane babble which I try to be patient with. Doesn't always work. Only people who aren't saints will understand.
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I'd go with the Rocketman side of this - not only for the forbidding environment, insane cost of removing perchlorate, and solar particle flux, but also just the cost of lifting exports out of a gravity well (v asteroid scrapings). Hard to use starship drives for lifting from the surface to orbit - you'd need old-fashioned impulse or a Clarke 350 SpaceVator and those babies don't come cheap. I speculate there would also be the problem of homesickness cubed - a couple years cooped up on Mars and I suspect most people would remember just what it is that makes a terrestrial environment so pleasant. Mars would become a place where people were stationed, not resident. (and by the second year of a stint at Mars station, there would be some anxiety about bone and muscle tone loss from the .4 G, and wondering how you'd manage in the first months back on terra firma)(I suppose folks would go around in heavy suits, sewn-in chunks of lead, to prep for their return home)
 
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