The thread for space cadets!

[warpus]

I totally did not think of medicine that would need to be shipped from Earth, that's a good point.

Are the power generators that they are thinking of sending going to be solar? If so, what happens during one of those super long sand storms? Seems like you'd need to have a lot of batteries that you can keep charged for a long time. Which I realize Tesla has some knowhow with, but maybe it's not going to be 100% solar?

They will need a massive communications infrastructure including an orbital relay network that provides full coverage over the settlement area and nearby resource-extraction areas as well as communication with Earth.

Say they have several comm satellites in orbit that covers the entire planet. What will they need on the ground, just a dish and a room some guys can sit in to look at the incoming data, talking to various satellites, sending/receiving messages to/from Earth, etc.? Or do you need more than that?

They will need a data center shipped in from Earth

You mean some sort of a central data repository, i.e. possibly the beginnings of a local version of the internet?

I agree there won't be a ton of people lining up to go for altruistic reasons to save humanity or whatever. However, you can't discount the plethora of personal reasons why people will go.

I would go for 2-3 years, help out with the work, then go home. But I'm not sure if they'd let me

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I believe the first generators to go over will likely be nuclear. Solar is too unreliable - especially so until they have the resources to build some sort of massive energy storage system. Eventually solar may be competitive over there but the much-lower energy density of sunlight at Mars will always discount it heavily.

One big aerostationary bird will likely suffice for the colony but there will be need for a GPS constellation and a constellation capable of talking to Earth regardless of the time of day. Eventually they will want relays at the Lagrange points to continue talking to the Earth during the times when the sun is between the Earth and Mars.

Yes, they will need a local internet, preferably with a good back-haul connection to the Earth. This won't be trivial given the time lag and distance. High-throughput laser communications are just now being tested out in space for the first time and will be essential for this.

 

[warpus]

Is SpaceX actively planning on sending over a nuclear powered generator right now? Or does that go against some treaties the U.S. has signed and it's just hypothetical

 

[red_elk]

I think "self-sustainable" in case of Martian colony would only mean a colony which is able to produce basic resources required for sustaining life - food, water, oxygen, etc.
It will obviously continue to import resources from Earth on regular basis, simply because many of them require complex industry to produce, which would be impossible to build on Mars in foreseeable future.
Not to mention raw resources, such as oil which is required for chemical industry, but can only be imported. Producing things like electronics, complex machinery, medicines, etc., in place would be impossible in short and mid-term future.

Even on Earth, there are no fully "self-sustainable" countries which would be able to isolate themselves completely from world economy, without dramatic worsening of living conditions.

 

[Samson]

I believe the first generators to go over will likely be nuclear.

Do you know anything about how you run a nuclear reactor without access to a large body of water to act as a heat sink or to evaporate in a cooling tower?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Is SpaceX actively planning on sending over a nuclear powered generator right now? Or does that go against some treaties the U.S. has signed and it's just hypothetical

I'm not entirely sure. Importing a nuclear generator wouldn't go against any treaties that I'm aware of so long as the US or another country signs off on it and it isn't sent over there in secret. The way the various outer space treaties are structured basically state that each state is responsible for overseeing/licensing the activities of the entities within it in the space realm. This applies to corporations and government agencies alike and is the reason why the FCC and FAA are able to levy such a heavy regulatory burden on space companies.

I think "self-sustainable" in case of Martian colony would only mean a colony which is able to produce basic resources required for sustaining life - food, water, oxygen, etc.
It will obviously continue to import resources from Earth on regular basis, simply because many of them require complex industry to produce, which would be impossible to build on Mars in foreseeable future.
Not to mention raw resources, such as oil which is required for chemical industry, but can only be imported. Producing things like electronics, complex machinery, medicines, etc., in place would be impossible in short and mid-term future.

Even on Earth, there are no fully "self-sustainable" countries which would be able to isolate themselves completely from world economy, without dramatic worsening of living conditions.

Fully agree with you here. The trick is that the people of Mars will have to quickly come up with some scheme for sustaining the imports given a Martian colony would currently lack anything of sufficient value to export back to Earth. It's a big unsolved problem with the whole scheme and until they figure it out it will be a major pain point for the colony as they will continue to rely on largess from the public for sustainment. I believe that even when launch costs drop through the floor that it will still be too expensive to export any hard goods back to the Earth and ultimately I think their primary export will be the IP for all the things they will have to invent to make a go at colonizing Mars.

Do you know anything about how you run a nuclear reactor without access to a large body of water to act as a heat sink or to evaporate in a cooling tower?

If you have lots of open land you can use close-loop radiators to dump the heat - this would work a lot better there due to the low temperature of Mars and the availability of real estate there. You would also use as much waste heat as plausible to heat the living, working and farming spaces. In the end I think water access is a solvable problem to a bigger extent than most people realize due to the abundance of sub-surface ice deposits on the planet. You'd have to mine it like an ore rather than stick a pipe in it but still.

 

[red_elk]

Fully agree with you here. The trick is that the people of Mars will have to quickly come up with some scheme for sustaining the imports given a Martian colony would currently lack anything of sufficient value to export back to Earth. It's a big unsolved problem with the whole scheme and until they figure it out it will be a major pain point for the colony as they will continue to rely on largess from the public for sustainment. I believe that even when launch costs drop through the floor that it will still be too expensive to export any hard goods back to the Earth and ultimately I think their primary export will be the IP for all the things they will have to invent to make a go at colonizing Mars.

Yes, the most valuable resource the colony will be generating, is research data about Mars and Solar system. Unless they discover deposit of unobtanium profitable enough to send it to Earth, which is hard to imagine.
While research is very valuable, it's hard to monetize in modern market economy, so the colony will most likely need to be subsidized for a long time.

But as some people say, if a problem can be solved for money, then it's not a problem but expenses
Low gravity is a problem.

 

[warpus]

I bet the colony would be able to think up nonconventional revenue streams.. or even conventional ones. How much would big Earth corporations be willing to pay to have one of their ads prominently displayed at the colony somewhere, something that would be seen on TV each time there was a news report on the colony? So many funding opportunities there

 

[Broken_Erika]

Any martian colony will need a baseball team, the only question is how would they tweak the game to take into account martian gravity(heavier balls?)or they could just keep it the same and break every home run and batted ball distance record. Resulting in the scorn of every earth-based team and player.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Futurama has got that covered.

 

[Berzerker]

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-meteorite-bombardment-earth-oldest.html

Scientists have found that 4.02 billion year old silica-rich felsic rocks from the Acasta River, Canada—the oldest rock formation known on Earth—probably formed at high temperatures and at a surprisingly shallow depth of the planet's nascent crust. The high temperatures needed to melt the shallow crust were likely caused by a meteorite bombardment around half a billion years after the planet formed. This melted the iron-rich crust and formed the granites we see today.

 

[Colon]

Based on lots of scifi books, and some actual history, I've read, I'd say the minimal sustainable colony is in the 10s of 1000s of people. Less than that and too many skills will be lost.

I think you're going to vastly more people than that. To get back to my very crude example of a heavy equipment mechanic: you'd want more than a few of those, so that they can dedicate themselves to specific operations as well as to specific locations, so that they don't spend significant portions of their days shuttling around the planet. You'd also want shock absorption, so that the loss of single mechanic doesn't cause a crippling chain-reaction. Moreover, there are also economies involved with education. You'd want dedicated personel teaching how to work with such equipment, which would in turn require a continuous supply of students to be economical.
I'd you'd ask me, I'd guess that with today's technologies you'd need at least a few million people for a colony to survive without Earth.

My points still apply. I do not doubt that technology will eventually get to the point where a Mars colonization effort becomes much easier. That still isn't a reason not to push for it now which will accelerate the technology further and coincidentally improve life on Earth.

And yes, microsatellites have been helped enormously by the miniaturization of electronics brought on by consumer-oriented industries. But it's also true that consumer electronics were given a huge boost by the early efforts of the space program which pushed the overall technical sophistication to new heights and thereby made many of these consumer electronics viable in the first place. This isn't to say the space program invented Walkmans and iPhones but they did require the electronics industry to step up in a huge way to support the program which in turn fed back into the consumer side.

The thing is that a village-sized Martian colony would create nothing like the incentive for R&D that economic opportunities on Earth do. That's why I pointed to smartphones and microsatellites. From what I've read space barely features as a consideration when it comes to global R&D spending on MEMS, unlike consumer electronics or cars. That's not to deny the pioneering role space has played in a lot of technologies, it's to illustrate how small the role of Mars would probably in future R&D spending on autonomous technologies.
And before you argue even a little faster development is better than nothing, you said yourself that the Martian project that won't bear fruit for centuries. In light of that, I don't see why you wouldn't accept slightly slower development of autonomous technologies for several generations in order to properly investigate Mars for life, without the doubt positive results would be the result of contamination. Besides, it's not because there wouldn't be a Martian colony we can't experiment with a colony on the Moon, or to attempt mining the asteroid belt.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I think you're going to vastly more people than that. To get back to my very crude example of a heavy equipment mechanic: you'd want more than a few of those, so that they can dedicate themselves to specific operations as well as to specific locations, so that they don't spend significant portions of their days shuttling around the planet. You'd also want shock absorption, so that the loss of single mechanic doesn't cause a crippling chain-reaction. Moreover, there are also economies involved with education. You'd want dedicated personel teaching how to work with such equipment, which would in turn require a continuous supply of students to be economical.
I'd you'd ask me, I'd guess that with today's technologies you'd need at least a few million people for a colony to survive without Earth.



The thing is that a village-sized Martian colony would create nothing like the incentive for R&D that economic opportunities on Earth do. That's why I pointed to smartphones and microsatellites. From what I've read space barely features as a consideration when it comes to global R&D spending on MEMS, unlike consumer electronics or cars. That's not to deny the pioneering role space has played in a lot of technologies, it's to illustrate how small the role of Mars would probably in future R&D spending on autonomous technologies.
And before you argue even a little faster development is better than nothing, you said yourself that the Martian project that won't bear fruit for centuries. In light of that, I don't see why you wouldn't accept slightly slower development of autonomous technologies for several generations in order to properly investigate Mars for life, without the doubt positive results would be the result of contamination. Besides, it's not because there wouldn't be a Martian colony we can't experiment with a colony on the Moon, or to attempt mining the asteroid belt.

Because I don't. We have a massive surplus economically in the West and I'd much rather spend a fraction of it on developing Mars technology than on developing better ways to bomb villages in the third world. And I endorse an 'all of the above' approach to space exploration. I'd be over the moon with setting up asteroid mining or a Lunar colony even if it came at the expense of a delay to Martian colonization.

You are right in that current development in microelectronics has very little do with space development anymore. The space industry gave it the impetus to make a lot of new technologies but all the R&D money is now on the consumer side, not the space side. So much so that now it is space technology that is benefiting from the consumer world. There are a lot of companies active right now who are figuring out how to take the latest commercial and consumer electronics and apply them to space rather than the other way around. In the end though if the government were making this big push back into space it would again push technologies forward and feed back into the economy.

I'd also argue for a Mars colony (or any other huge space effort) as a great jobs program.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There's actually a good reason for their to be an independent Space Force, I just don't trust the Trump administration to screw it up.

Right now, the USAF is responsible for just about everything the military does in space. The problem is that the command structure of the military favors combat experience. The Air Force personnel who work on the space side tend not to be put in combat posts as their skills don't often directly translate into those roles. So you wind up with a situation where the people put in charge of the various space commands do not have a space background and have no vested interests in the field. This is about as effective as having ground-pounding generals head up the Army Air Force post-WWII and was why they split the Air Force off shortly thereafter. It's even worse on the procurement side where there isn't nearly as much institutional expertise in buying rockets and spacecraft as there is for buying air craft. Given how badly major aircraft acquisition projects tend to go, they really do need a smarter bureaucracy to handle the space side of the military.

Unfortunately, I fear the new Space Force will be a boondoggle that will just turn into another trillion-dollar cash grab by contractors with little benefit to the taxpayer or the military. I mean, this would mean more jobs for people like me but I'd rather not have the government waste more money on the military than it already does. Any notions that the Space Force will be 'budget neutral' (i.e. just shift money from the USAF to the SF) are fantasies.

 

[uppi]

They will need a massive communications infrastructure including an orbital relay network that provides full coverage over the settlement area and nearby resource-extraction areas as well as communication with Earth. They will need a data center shipped in from Earth as with pharmaceuticals, it will be a while before the infrastructure is to the point where they can make their own servers and computers.

Relays will be needed for communication with Earth, of course, but for self-sufficiency, a ground-based network is much more important. It will be a long time until a colony could launch their own communications satellites, but given enough spare parts, a ground-based network would be much easier to fix. Losing communications with Earth for a while would be bad, but any reasonable colony would need to be self-sufficient enough to survive that for a while. But losing local communications is a recipe for disaster.

Thinking in terms of data center is too Earth-centric in my opinion. Data centers on Earth are about economics of scale, which wouldn't apply much to a colony anyway. The better approach would be to go back to the original idea of the internet as a decentralized network of equal peers. The hardware needs to be as general as possible to minimize the amount of spare parts you need and you want the network to be quite redundant to avoid single points of failure.

I believe that even when launch costs drop through the floor that it will still be too expensive to export any hard goods back to the Earth and ultimately I think their primary export will be the IP for all the things they will have to invent to make a go at colonizing Mars.

I doubt that a Martian colony will have much valuable IP to export. Yes, they would have a need for Martian inhabitants to make inventions that help colonizing Mars, but out of necessity these will have to be generalists, which are likely to be outclassed by much more specialized Earth inventors in anything that is useful on Earth. In combination with the limited infrastructure on Mars and the added difficulty of making it work on Mars, this will likely result in the Martian tech always being somewhat behind Earth tech in any aspect. The only exception is the knowledge of how to make things work on Mars, which the Martian inventors will certainly excel at. But this knowledge doesn't have much value on Earth.

 

[Cutlass]

There's actually a good reason for their to be an independent Space Force, I just don't trust the Trump administration to screw it up.

Right now, the USAF is responsible for just about everything the military does in space. The problem is that the command structure of the military favors combat experience. The Air Force personnel who work on the space side tend not to be put in combat posts as their skills don't often directly translate into those roles. So you wind up with a situation where the people put in charge of the various space commands do not have a space background and have no vested interests in the field. This is about as effective as having ground-pounding generals head up the Army Air Force post-WWII and was why they split the Air Force off shortly thereafter. It's even worse on the procurement side where there isn't nearly as much institutional expertise in buying rockets and spacecraft as there is for buying air craft. Given how badly major aircraft acquisition projects tend to go, they really do need a smarter bureaucracy to handle the space side of the military.

Unfortunately, I fear the new Space Force will be a boondoggle that will just turn into another trillion-dollar cash grab by contractors with little benefit to the taxpayer or the military. I mean, this would mean more jobs for people like me but I'd rather not have the government waste more money on the military than it already does. Any notions that the Space Force will be 'budget neutral' (i.e. just shift money from the USAF to the SF) are fantasies.

Ya know, I find it really extremely hard to believe that we wouldn't have been better off all these years had the Air Force remained the US Army Air Corps....

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.space.com/41573-black-holes-from-past-universes.html

We are not living in the first universe. There were other universes, in other eons, before ours, a group of physicists has said. Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of those long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radioactive remnant of our universe's violent birth.

Evidence of cyclical universes showing up in the CMB... Hmm, I predicted that a few years ago

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Relays will be needed for communication with Earth, of course, but for self-sufficiency, a ground-based network is much more important. It will be a long time until a colony could launch their own communications satellites, but given enough spare parts, a ground-based network would be much easier to fix. Losing communications with Earth for a while would be bad, but any reasonable colony would need to be self-sufficient enough to survive that for a while. But losing local communications is a recipe for disaster.

Thinking in terms of data center is too Earth-centric in my opinion. Data centers on Earth are about economics of scale, which wouldn't apply much to a colony anyway. The better approach would be to go back to the original idea of the internet as a decentralized network of equal peers. The hardware needs to be as general as possible to minimize the amount of spare parts you need and you want the network to be quite redundant to avoid single points of failure.



I doubt that a Martian colony will have much valuable IP to export. Yes, they would have a need for Martian inhabitants to make inventions that help colonizing Mars, but out of necessity these will have to be generalists, which are likely to be outclassed by much more specialized Earth inventors in anything that is useful on Earth. In combination with the limited infrastructure on Mars and the added difficulty of making it work on Mars, this will likely result in the Martian tech always being somewhat behind Earth tech in any aspect. The only exception is the knowledge of how to make things work on Mars, which the Martian inventors will certainly excel at. But this knowledge doesn't have much value on Earth.

A Martian colony wouldn't necessarily have to launch their own comm sats for a long time. If you really are sending BFS-sized ships (100 passengers) to Mars then you'll be able to send small relay satellites along with it and deploy them on the way.

I don't think data centers are too Earth-centric. I don't mean they'll immediately have to recreate AWS in situ - however, they will absolutely need a few servers at a minimum to store and distribute data. Everything that is produced in advanced societies is intractably tied to the internet. A Martian colony isn't going to be able to build itself without it's own local internet.

I disagree with you on IP but only in general. I don't really disagree with you assessment of the specifics, I just allow for a lot of innovations to come out of left field out of the necessities of living on Mars that have no precedent and can't be easily predicted.

Ya know, I find it really extremely hard to believe that we wouldn't have been better off all these years had the Air Force remained the US Army Air Corps....

Why is that?

 

[uppi]

A Martian colony wouldn't necessarily have to launch their own comm sats for a long time. If you really are sending BFS-sized ships (100 passengers) to Mars then you'll be able to send small relay satellites along with it and deploy them on the way.

I don't think data centers are too Earth-centric. I don't mean they'll immediately have to recreate AWS in situ - however, they will absolutely need a few servers at a minimum to store and distribute data. Everything that is produced in advanced societies is intractably tied to the internet. A Martian colony isn't going to be able to build itself without it's own local internet.

I disagree with you on IP but only in general. I don't really disagree with you assessment of the specifics, I just allow for a lot of innovations to come out of left field out of the necessities of living on Mars that have no precedent and can't be easily predicted.

If you need to replenish your comm sats by getting them sent from Earth, you aren't really self-sufficient, are you? Of course that is what you need to do if you want to talk to Earth, but as you point out, having a network is extremely important. Too important to rely on sats that the Martians would be unable to fix anytime soon.

I totally agree that you need servers. But if I were to design the marsnet, I would probably go for an edge-computing model instead of a data center model: Many small(-ish) servers that aren't too important on their own so that their functions can easily replaced by other servers when they fail. I would then distribute those all over the colony instead of sticking them into one building in order to avoid single points of failure as much as possible.

I agree that the necessities of living on Mars will create many innovations that have no precedent. But if they have no precedent, what value would these have on Earth? Now, I don't doubt that there will be spin-off applications on Earth, but I consider it much more likely that their origin will be on Earth rather than on Mars.

Edit: There will be undoubtedly much innovation of the Apollo-13-air-filter kind (Build an adapter from round to square air filters using only materials on board without dying of CO2-poisoning in the meantime). A huge achievement that saved lives but had little value afterwards.

 

[Cutlass]

Why is that?

There's an old expression in organizational theory: "Where you stand depends on where you sit." The meaning of this is that where you stand on any given issue depends on where you sit in the organizational chart. If you happen to be sitting in the Air Force, you tend to see everything in terms of air power. Which brings us to the more generalized old expression: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails." Modern military actions are very much a 'combined arms' situation. While some specific actions need only specific unit types, an overall war scenario uses multiple unit types, in varying combinations.

As the US Army Air Corps evolved into the US Army Air Force, and then finally, after WWII, into the US Air Force, the air commanders got more and more of the mindset that air power was all that was necessary. So even entering WWII, the air commanders had absolutely convinced themselves that air power, given enough freedom of action and resources, would be the decisive force of the war. They were wrong. Now let's look at the price of that wrongness. The 8th Air Force, which was the heavy bomber part of the European theater in WWII had the highest rate of casualties of any part of American forces in the war. The idea that daylight precision bombing would bring Germany to its knees drove raid after raid at German targets. These raids were inadequately defended by fighter cover, for until 1944 the US just didn't have a fighter of the abilities and numbers to cover the raids, and the commanders falsely believed that the defensive guns of the bombers would be sufficient to protect the bombers. Results of those beliefs, immense numbers of dead, wounded, and captured, aircrews.

Did strategic bombing bring Germany to its knees? Really no. That's not to say that it didn't have an effect. But the effect was incremental, and not decisive. Think of this in terms of 2 heavyweight boxers entering the ring. If one doesn't get a knockout right away, they pound away at each other over time, and wear each other out. There was no knockout from strategic bombing. Just wearing the enemy down over time incrementally.

But the price wasn't just the highest casualties among American forces. For at the end of the day, "precision daylight bombing" was something that the US in WWII simply was not technically capable of. It could take 100s of aircraft to destroy a bridge, for example, for a bridge is a small point target, and high altitude strategic bombers scattered their loads far and wide. The bombs themselves were not aerodynamic, and so didn't fall in a predicable pattern. What this resulted in was the mass bombing of cities. Rather than being able to precision hit point targets, the Air Force in Germany, and then later in Japan when the B-29 brought that country into bomber range, just set about leveling cities. Or burning them to the ground. With all the civilian casualties that that represents. And even at that Germany and Japan's total military production continued to rise until 1945.

So while the Air Force did contribute to the war's being won, it did so at immense cost to everyone involved. And this is the result of the flawed vision of "we're the air force, so the air force is the solution to the problem". They resisted as much as they could tying air power to the overall strategic direction of the war. And this trend has never really ended. There's a great deal more that I don't like about the Air Force. But the core of it is that the AF is just too interested in the greater glory of the AF. And not the actual accomplishment of national objectives.