Mars exploration technology thread /mars/

ITT we discuss about a Mars colony.
For new comers -
Challenges :
-The surface gravity of Mars is 38% that of Earth.
-Mars is much colder than Earth, with mean surface temperatures between 186 and 268 K (−87 and −5 °C; −125 and 23 °F)
-Surface water on Mars may occur transiently, but only under certain conditions
-The maximum solar irradiance on Mars is about 590 W/m2 compared to about 1000 W/m2 at the Earth's surface. Also, year-round dust storms on Mars may block sunlight for weeks at a time.
-Mars's orbit is more eccentric than Earth's, increasing temperature and solar constant variations.
-Due to the lack of a magnetosphere, solar particle events and cosmic rays can easily reach the Martian surface
-The atmospheric pressure on Mars is far below the Armstrong limit at which people can survive without pressure suits.
-The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and traces of other gases including oxygen totaling less than 0.4%.
-Martian air has a partial pressure of CO2 of 0.71 kPa, compared to 0.031 kPa on Earth. CO2 poisoning (hypercapnia) in humans begins at about 0.10 kPa. Even for plants, CO2 much above 0.15 kPa is toxic. This means Martian air is toxic to both plants and animals even at the reduced total pressure
-The thin atmosphere does not filter out ultraviolet sunlight.

Also, if you can, would you accept an one way trip if it has a 100% success rate?
Do you think gormint funding is required for this technological breakthrough?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=tvTIdU_Gvyk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind#Fast_and_slow_solar_wind
oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

is tetraforming a meme

bumpreuno

I would totally fucking go if I had a chance. I have always been interested in space, and other planets.
Tbh I would go even if I could never come back.

>tfw too poor to go live on Mars

>adult male
>wears shorts in public
>is a NASA loving cuck
>believes Mars exist even though he LITERALLY can't see it himself

>believes Mars exist even though he LITERALLY can't see it himself
You can stand in your backyard with a tube containing a glass lens and a mirror and see this

Can't wait for SpaceX to build a solid ship and to start sending hoomans to Mars. Musk will send engineers first, I'm on that train boys. We'll leave the WEAK on the mother planet, to die without oxygen or food.

Nice try agent Smith

not before they actually pull off an unmanned roundtrip with that yet to build mega rocket.

The first to go will never come back, user
They will be heroes of our pathetic society
Here we are all, laughing at the failures of Spacex
But who cares about the fucking Facebook satellite
When we can unite and go to MARS THE RED

Sound pretty boring to be honest, the typical modern day human is very attached to the internet and instant gratification on everything they do, I can picture people wanting to go die alone on that place

In other words this planet is a barren fucking wasteland and SpaceX is going to be spending taxpayer money to get a couple retards up there.

Wow

Well you would have some dank ass internet for yourself after having to spend the rest of your life there.

>The first to go will never come back, user
That's wrong. The entire ITS model revolves around regular round trips

>year 0: send a massive (50 meter long, 17 meter diameter) unmanned ship to Mars with 300 tons of cargo
>year 2: send another ship of an identical design with 10 astronauts and another 100 to 200 tons of cargo to begin unpacking and building everything
>year 4: send another identical ship with 100 colonists to move into the outpost the first 10 astronauts have begun building. By now there's a rocket fuel refinery on-site meaning if they so wish, any or all of the first 10 astronauts can go home in any of the three ships that have landed there
>year 6: send two more of these big spaceships, carrying 200 colonists,plus additional unmanned supply ships, and another of the ships parked on Mars refuels and returns with any of the last expeditions' 100 colonists who want to go back to Earth
>year 20: by now every two years the launch window sees dozens of ships flying to Mars and a fraction of them flying back with returning passengers and scientific samples, anyone with $500,000 can purchase a ticket to fly to Mars
>year 40: a million people are living on Mars in a massive complex forged from Martian steel, with windows of Martian silicate, eating crops grown in specially treated Martian soil, breathing air filtered and compressed from the Martian atmosphere, anyone with $200,000 can emigrate there

No. ITS is receiving no NASA funding and SpaceX is funding the project with their own profit revenue from conventional satellite launches.

>Internet on mars
How? At 50kbps and 16 minutes ping?

Precisely, colonists. To me, colonists would not come back, unless those who feel really bad

>No. ITS is receiving no NASA funding and SpaceX is funding the project with their own profit revenue from conventional satellite launches.

Dont make me laugh, a manned mars mission would cost so much money SpaceX will either get funding from the government or it will never happen.

Give me a single good reason we should send people to a barren wasteland such as Mars, and maybe your paypal owning god will somehow convince actual business runners of using our money to get there.

To earth, yeah. But since the plan is for an actual city, there'll be an on-site computer network.

I bet you the first 10 people on Mars will have Quake and Starcraft tournaments.

I want to be specific because it is NOT the "Mars to stay" concept as in they save costs by only breaking Earth's gravity well and then staying in Mars' gravity well indefinitely. This model allows ships to come and go between both planets freely.

In particular, when tickets reach the six figure range, elite universities will almost definitely be sending professors and graduate students on two year expeditions

mars is australia?

around 2080 right... *sigh*

The Mars project will cost $10 billion.

SpaceX itself has market capitalization of $12 billion right now. That's not to say that they're going to pour the entirety of their company into the project immediately, but if the company continues growing then the Mars mission will just be one of their many endeavors.

Two private backers are paying $240 million this year for the privilege of flying around the moon for a week.

KeK

Faster than my internet provider.

>The Mars project will cost $10 billion.

Hahahahahahaha

*inhales*

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa


> Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion

Every precious Saturn V rocket was discarded after each use. The massive ITS rockets are reusable, the entire reason SpaceX has been running so many experiments on their Falcon 9 lander.

Thats not the point, reusable rockets arent exactly needed if its a one way trip.

Were going to MARS. Thats the real problem.

This entire idea is a beautiful, good sounding waste of money. Going to the moon was a waste of money, and its way easier.

medical advancement would be the most important. that change in gravity would really fuck us up for generations.

>Thats not the point, reusable rockets arent exactly needed if its a one way trip.
You're not listening to or reading anything, are you? There will be cargo missions, refueling missions, passenger missions, return missions. Hundreds of missions total. If you can conduct these missions with a small number of rockets then that means you're expending $250,000 of fuel instead of expending a $90 million vehicle.

SpaceX's proof is that they beat NASA in one important aspect already. It cost the Space Shuttle $450 million to deliver a 20 ton payload to the International Space Station. A Falcon 9 can do it for $62 million. And after the first successful Falcon 9 first stage reflight just yesterday, that price will soon be dropping to $40 million.

Oh, and FYI, the Space Shuttle itself was a failed "reusable launch" platform. In theory, it should have been able to launch after two weeks of refueling and inspection. In practice, the entire thing had to be rebuilt after every mission like a Ship of Theseus.

But both SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on true reusable spacecraft, vehicles that can be launched over and over for just the cost of fuel, much like modern aircraft. Imagine how much a New York to LA flight would cost if you had to parachute out at the end and let the 747 ditch in the ocean.

Well traveling on plane would be cool for a change

Forgetting how fast people are going to go crazy when contained in tin cans for months, running experiments on the same dirt samples.

Minimum comms delay from earth to mars is 4 minutes, rendering any use of live comms to earth useless.

You didnt read either did you? I dont care how much money you save by using reusable rockets. Its all wasted. Literally no one is going to gain anything from this mission. The moon race was a war effort to show russia who's boss. After that was done, literally no one bothered going back there.

But most importantly, a waste of money. What use do we have for the moon today? What the fuck is even left up there for us to use ? A couple mirrors , a bleached flag and biowaste ?

So why not go to Mars? Because its fucking pointless. Reusable rockets are a wonderful advancement of space travel technologies, but using it as the sole reason to say a Mars mission suddenly makes sense is ridiculous.

>unmanned ship to Mars with 300 tons of cargo

>people are going to go crazy when contained in tin cans for months, running experiments on the same dirt samples.
that would be fine for me but yeah, a lot of people would lose their shit.

>"dude why even bother sailing to America, you're spending three months in a wooden box full of rotted bread just to arrive in a shithole full of nothing but grass and Indians"

Also there's constant small-scale moon missions still going on. In the past decade, the US, China and India have all deployed new orbiters and landers. If you have a big, refuelable rocket you could do a manned landing and it would cost less than sending up the RC car/webcam combo does right now.

>people are going to go crazy when contained in tin cans for months
The ITS ship has more internal volume than the International Space Station and people spend a year at a time in that deathtrap.

>Because its fucking pointless.

Are you stupid? Learning to survive somewhere other than Earth would make humanity much more resilient and bring great technological benefits. It is the very opposite of pointless.

>Also, if you can, would you accept an one way trip if it has a 100% success rate?

Yes, you would have a guaranteed purpose there.

I've trained all my life to be a Martian colonist without knowing, neat.

At this very moment, NASA and SpaceX both have scheduled manned lunar orbits, elaborate re-enactments of the Apollo 8 mission signifying mankind's return to deep space.

NASA's will be a SLS mission costing $2 billion
SpaceX's will be a Falcon Heavy mission costing $240 million

NASA's will be taxpayer funded
SpaceX's will be funded by the two rich tourists traveling on the mission

>the colonist analogy

You're fucking retarded, there is absolutely nothing of use to be found on Mars.
There is nothing to do on Mars that will be useful on Earth.
There is nothing to invent on Mars that will be useful on Earth.
There is nothing to learn on Mars that will be useful on Earth.

Its a barren fucking wasteland, impossible to sustain life as we know it. If Elon Musk isn't personally going, no one should.

No it wont. This entire thing is a way for Elon Musk to make even more money from stupid idiots who buy into his bullshit. If we want to learn how to survive on another planet, why arent we using the moon ?

Fucking hell if you want to go somewhere life is basically impossible except if you are living in some sort of contained environment, look no further than our own poles.

At the very least you can go outside and get some fresh air from time to time.

Even NEETs will lose their shit.

>ITS ship

Nice meme.

>Learning to survive somewhere other than Earth
Humans aren't resilient and investors will want their money back in a way, not just in imaginary victories for mankind in a desert planet full of death.

>SpaceX's will be a Falcon Heavy mission costing $240 million
>Literally anyone ever paying money for a round trip to a shitty wasteland

Hahaha

The billionaires have already paid the deposit to SpaceX

What are you laughing at?

> If we want to learn how to survive on another planet, why arent we using the moon ?

In all likelihood we will, going to Mars without trying out the technology on the Moon first is unlikely. We aint going to Mars anytime soon, but a moon base is a realistic goal in coming decades.

some of them. it depends. im not a neet, just a antisocial psychopath so i would be ok. people here are straight up nerds who never even been in the woods or planted anything.

At the stupid idiots who are going to be crying to get their money back and turn around when they realize its a fucking month of travel to the worst destination on our solar system.

Get me a trip to saturn's rings and I will pay just for the view. Mars on the other hand... I'd rather spend a year, inside a tin can lost in the desert

On them.

reading

fucking

comprehension

That makes much more sense than any idiot who believes doing shit on mars is useful.

A moon base can be used to mine materials which are then easily brought into orbit. The low gravity makes it a very good candidate for low cost material processing and hauling.

Getting all that shit there and it being self sustainable is another story entirely, but its still a better idea that fucking space tourism to the worst destination possible.

>worst destination on our solar system
That's Venus or the gas giants, but it doesn't change much and it's not even a sour grape.

Yeah, I know some idiots already paid.

Remind this to me again when comes the time to actually depart.

Then, ask the passengers if they want to pay twice the amount they already paid just to turn around after the first week of being contained with a bunch of idiots to get to an airless version of the death valley.

This mission will only be a week long, they're going into a lunar orbit and returning to earth just like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders did in 1968

That experience is apparently worth $120 million to each of them

The demand must be there, look how much people paid to dick around on the ISS.

That's for a lunar flyby you fucking retard. Oh my god kill yourself, all you've done this entire thread is shit it up with "LA LA LA LA LA I'M RIGHT YOU'RE STUPID I'M NOT LISTENING"

So basically no one paid money yet to get to Mars.

I figured that payment was kinda early.

>A moon base can be used to mine materials
It's not allowed by treaties, but it would cost too much anyway and the surface is more or less the same as on Earth.

Im sorry that your dream mission is being hatched by a cash grabbing moron. Its a tough pill to swallow, but look on the bright side, maybe people are going to see the truth before its too late to turn the spaceship around.

And a mars mission wouldn't cost too much ?

At the very least you could use the fucking materials harvested on the moon is what im saying.

This mission SOUNDS good, but its retarded, kinda like Tesla.

Nigger you literally can't tell the difference between the moon and Mars in posts that you're reading and responding to, why am I supposed to respect your opinion about anything else?

We need to genetically engineer dandelions so they can survive on Mars. Then just plant one, it will eventually spread to the entire planet and will convert the CO2 into oxygen. In a couple years humans will be able to breathe there.

Well remember you are talking with someone who thinks advancing in a wide range of scientific fields is the wrong move for humanity and that there is no use for the incredible low gravity on Mars when it comes to how cheap it will be to send shit into space compared to Earth

...

I never asked you to respect my opinion you stupid faggot, I'm just trying to tell you that your Mars dream is stupid as fuck.

This planet is fucking worthless, I dont give a shit if people are paying money out of their own pockets to fly by the moon so that some rich fuck can then send more people on the aforementioned worthless planet.

Its stupid, worthless and a cash grab. There is NOTHING of value to be earned on the red planet. Moon tourism is just a little less retarded, but paying millions just for a flyby is IMMENSELY moronic.

Literally the only people considering such a trip are rich business owners who have no fucking idea what to do with their money.

do you even realize what fucking short life of hardship you'd be signing up for? it's like moving to fucking non industrialized africa or the middle of the jungle, wild west.

>Well remember you are talking with someone who thinks advancing in a wide range of scientific fields is the wrong move for humanity and that there is no use for the incredible low gravity on Mars when it comes to how cheap it will be to send shit into space compared to Earth

Here is one of my previous posts

>That makes much more sense than any idiot who believes doing shit on mars is useful.

>A moon base can be used to mine materials which are then easily brought into orbit. The low gravity makes it a very good candidate for low cost material processing and hauling.

>Getting all that shit there and it being self sustainable is another story entirely, but its still a better idea that fucking space tourism to the worst destination possible.

>cash grabbing moron
Say you want to put a 20 ton satellite in orbit.

SpaceX will do it for $62 million
Roscosmos will do it for $81 million
Arianespace will do it for $137 million
NASA will do it for $450 million

That is the fraud and money-grubbing that Elon Musk brings to the table right now, completely discounting any other dreams he has that you may think are foolish

How many individuals have paid for a satellite launch so far ? Cheap launches sounds like the way to steal every launch opportunity from the other companies. Once you have the monopoly on space travel, you can start rising prices.

you sure about that?

those who think it's going to be fun, exciting or anything of that sort is dead wrong

>follow strict procedures 24/7
>do tests tests and then more tests on a lot of things
>store all that data
>wake up always at the same time
>same fucking workout sight and routine
>chance of being paired with boring fucks
no thanks

also
>there's nothing on mars
i wouldn't call raw materials nothing, but yes, with our current tech level it's just stupid and inefficient to start draining another planet when the transport consumes more than the actual cargo can provide back

the only reason to go there right now is to do a shitton of tests for the future when terraforming might be available so we will have more data

>you can start rising prices
The price will be going to $40 million next year

>How many individuals have paid for a satellite launch so far?
It's typically companies, a 20 ton LEO package is one of the most common payload launches you'll see.

During any given month there's 5 to 10 launches that size, carried by the full spectrum of Proton, Soyuz, Falcon 9, Ariane 5, Delta IV and Atlas V rockets

It's a dream of mines though, and it honestly wouldn't be so bad.

>nuke/drop meteorites on the ice caps
>water vapor is an excellent green house gas
>oxygen on earth is actually a side effect of plants proliferating on the high CO2 atmosphere that the earth used to have
>self replicating machines are doable, working automatically harvesting resources and pioneering usable bases


>even if the ice caps fully melt the atmospheric pressure wouldn't go up that much
>solar winds will still fuck up the atmosphere in the long run

the principles to do some minor terraforming are there, and well documented with a bunch of papers you can find on google scholar, but all of them come to the conclusion that the biggest challenge is creating a thick enough atmosphere
they also leave the magnetic field outright out of the question since there's no known way to feasibly reactivate the martian core
the simplest way at going at it is living in caves or domes

Also all that radiation to kickstart the genetic mutations needed for humans to survive on this stupid planet.

Keep in mind that solar wind is slow. If an earthlike atmosphere was somehow induced on Mars it would take two million years to dissipate.

Which is a blink of an eye in astronomical terms but a looong fucking time in human ones.

yeah, that's why you'd want to have an active planetary core generating a magnetic field, or live on a shielded structure
the former is essentially impossible for us today
the later is doable with current technology, if someone would be willing to run with the costs, and aside from asteroid mining that is still a questionable economical activity, I see no actual reason why someone would want to try to colonize
not even for research, since a robot can do way more than a human can for a tiny fraction of the cost

low quality b8

OP left out a critical point of solar. Yes they get less solar energy because they are further away from the sun. But the thin atmosphere makes up for some of that.

Cons
>low gravity
>cold
>little water
>less sunlight
>no magnetosphere
>no atmospheric pressure
>no oxygen
>more UV radiation

Pros
>it's not the planet that's going to have four billion Africans on it
just rocket my shit up senpai

Mars would be an interesting place to test space based sollar power and beaming it to the surface
Cheap, not nuclear so hippies won't try to hijack it and also lighter, nothing to worry if something goes badly

youtube.com/watch?v=tvTIdU_Gvyk

Every human will die near Earth due the extreme cosmic rays after you leave the shield of the magnetic field.

>solar wind is slow.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind#Fast_and_slow_solar_wind

Slow as in slow working. Even without a protective magnetosphere, an artificial atmosphere on Mars wouldn't be swept away overnight.

People always thought it'd be great to live their own fantasy, until they do. And regret.

I might take that trip if they figured out a way to radically extend human lifespans to something like 200 years.
Because I wouldn't want to spend the next 60 years on a dusty rock, possibly just to see it turn out to be Antarctica 2.0, slowly filling up with research stations without any real infrastructural progress.
If I go, I want to see the place grow to a proper colony with an economy and that might take far longer than anticipated.

>Every human will die near Earth due the extreme cosmic rays after you leave the shield of the magnetic field.

Most of the scientific research claims that the actual effects for prolongued stays in space far away from Earth's magnetosphere are still unknown, especially since there hasn't been any real attempt or hard data at testig some actual shielding for biological specimens.
How do you even conclude you'd die right near Earth? Take into account that the ISS for example frequently passes through a high radiation south atlantic anomaly, and their crew has just a slightly over the average cancer rate.

oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY16/IG-16-003.pdf

I'd rather send a probe to check out Europa in order to see if there really is a sea and if there is one, if it has life.

We will never colonize the moon or mars, even long term space habitation is unlikely, there's no getting around our bodies need for earth's gravity.

> the Agency may be unable to develop countermeasures that will lower the risk to deep space travelers to a level commensurate with NASA standards for low Earth orbit missions

literally what every other paper about radiation in space and its effects on potential human exploration say: the measures known to mitigate those effects also make your ship heavy as fuck, and even hard to put in LEO in the first place. Solvable by slowly assembling one and refueling it in space, piece by piece. Costly, sure, but we're talking about fucking colonizing Mars, we can assume money is not a problem at that point.

>37 million allocated to Space Radiation Research
>In FY 2014, HRP funded 55 research tasks to help close 38 knowledge gaps associated with space radiation exposure.
Nearly a fourth of their whole funding for their human research program, and the biggest one, that tells me they're considering actual technologies to put in use. Once again far from "you die as soon as you get far away from Earth"

>Over the next 13 years, HRP expects to develop countermeasures for and bring to an acceptable level most of the risks associated with a human mission to Mars. However, several HRP researchers we spoke with characterized the PRR as overly optimistic and believe it will take longer than NASA anticipates to reach the acceptable level for several risks.
Ditto. Even the less optimistic guys involved on research say that it will take time, but it will happen.

>First, despite a nearly 50-year history of human travel in space, scientists do not fully understand many issues and there are many unknowns, particularly about extended human travel in deep space.
It's almost as if the guys that have spent their whole lives doing rocket science recognize they're not sure if you'll 100% will die if you go to space and are trying to fund research programs to mitigate it's effects.

>Ditto. Even the less optimistic guys involved on research say that it will take time, but it will happen.
>in the future we will cure cancer
>for sure
Thanks for nothing. Make a shortcut and send this little guys to Mars. At least they will survive it with little help.

>"the effects of radiation are complex and the mitigation process unknown, but being researched upon with millions of dollar each year"
>you die as soon as you leave the magnetosphere, this is guaranteed!

aight man
guess heavier than air flight will never be possible

>he effects of radiation are complex and the mitigation process unknown
Maybe there is a reason why Musk don't come up with things like that. Talking about a large colony is easier than talking about what can a human mentally and physically survive for long term.
He should do tests in a desert of Antarctica as it can model what will be Mars after the so called terraforming (if it's possible at all).
Biology is full of uncertain shit anyway but it's clear that cosmic ray isn't healthy.

that I can agree with
I don't really see a point with colonizing Mars, at some point the money you have to put to take advantage of something like that would be better spent at solving the disadvantages here on Earth that would make you want to go and colonize other planets

>38% Gravity
>body will weaken if you lived on this gravity level for so long.
>Go back to earth after 10 years
>Multiple bone fractures upon reentry

Humans need to die off.

Dumb argument since there's plenty of people alive today who are 38% of the mass or 38% as active as other people

It's zero gravity that really fucks people up

Can't you make an habitat with 1atm pressure, and maybe even centryfuges to create artificial gravity?

...

>38% of the mass

that's not how gravitational forces work on your body