For general consideration, I've found this paper while doing some reading on Gas Core Nuclear Rockets (GCNR). It has an absolutely fantastic section on "the n-word," though, that I feel is a must-read (n being for nuclear, of course, heh). And looking over more of it now, the whole thing is just rather fantastic about spaceflight and Mars colonization in general.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060821143407/http://www.lascruces.com/~mrpbar/Space Policy 02.pdf
(I should note, though, that I don't really agree with his assertion that chemical propulsion doesn't foot the bill. I think it's failed so far, but SpaceX and commercial space are really the ones that will prove its ability to put payloads in LEO economically)
Drakkith said:
This is absolutely, positively, 100% wrong. The colonization of the Americas doesn't even compare to the colonization of Mars except in the most vaguest of ways. Colonists certainly didn't need to rely on technology in the way we would on Mars. Just look at the significant technological differences between the various cultures of the Americas and between them and the European colonists. You have everything from people living in dug out dirt hovels with spears all the way up to people living in cabins with guns, intercontinental ships, and advanced metallurgy. Plus, the climate of the Americas is generally much more temperate than Europe, especially in the southern areas of North America where many of the early explorers landed.
Well, that's coming off a bit strong, heh.
Actually, they relied on technology quite a bit. It took large sailing ships to get there and a lot of specialized equipment they had to bring to build the colonies when they arrived. As you pointed out, they used guns, intercontinental ships and advanced metallurgy, not to mention a host of other equipment needed to build the colonies when there. Going to Mars, we'd have a substantial advantage of being able to transport our habitats there instead of having to build them there (granted, we may have to inflate and move in there, or pile soil against it).
True, there's a huge difference in-between a wooden sailing ship and a modern spacecraft . But at the same time, in a way they're both very similar: they're technology; technology built by, crewed by, and carrying humans. Colonizing the Americas was, oh, let's say a hundred times easier than colonizing Mars will be. They didn't need to synthesize their own air, or maintain a pressurized environment, and the extremes of temperatures we face and lengths we'd have to go to grow food and extract potable water are much greater. But while going to Mars may be a hundred times as difficult, our technological capabilities are a hundred times superior.
And, yes, early explorers landed in the southern areas of North America, but later colonists had to deal with some rather harsh seasonal conditions further north.
I have ancestors who were Mormon pioneers, crossing the great plains, and there's plenty a tale of hardship that pioneers faced on those plains. One particular group suffered tremendously from freezing weather and food shortages, and suffered many losses. Now, with our advanced technological capabilities, I can make a trip ten times as far, in hours instead of weeks or months, across far more hostile conditions and through far worse environments, and my worst complaint might be not enough room to stretch my legs or being made to empty my pockets and walk through a metal arch.
It's much harder, yes, but we're much more capable now and we're ready to accept the challenge, certainly far more ready than we were to go to the moon in 1957, when we had never even put anything into orbit.
Chronos said:
I am in the skeptic majority on a manned Mars mission by 2030. Getting there is doable, building habitat [underground, obviously] is doable, providing power is probably doable. Establishing a self sustaining ecosystem on Mars - not even remotely possible. Ferrying supplies to Mars is uneconomical and unreliable. Miss a food shipment; possibly survivable: miss a water shipment; risky: miss an 02 shipment; game over. Any optimism for a manned mission to Mars by 2030 is a pipe dream. It would be far more sensible to first build a moon base, then assemble and launch the mission from there. I fail to see the logic investing effort in a Mars mission instead of a moon base. A moon base could even become profitable in less time than we could realistically work out the kinks for a safe Mars mission.
But that's the key - you don't need it to be self-sustaining. You only need it to be efficient enough that the loss rates are managable by extracting resources from the Martian environment.
Working the plasma hydrodynamics of a gas-core nuclear reactor is hard. Creating a fusion powerplant that breaks even is hard. Discovering the Higgs was hard.
Heck, designing a fully re-usable launch vehicle that is unprecedented in its safety, performance, uses new technologies and is 4x cheaper than anything currently existing? That is hard (That's SpaceX's Falcon 9), yet most of those goals have already been met, and progress is looking great on meeting the rest.
In fact, that's something NASA engineers have long called impossible.
Melting and filtering water that you can literally just dig out of the ground, though? Extracting nitrogen from the environment? Performing electralysis on that water to get hydrogen and oxygen? Then mixing some atmospheric Co2 with the hydrogen to get CH4 fuel in-situ? Growing an aeroponics garden? Compared to building the boosters to go to Mars, these problems are a piece of cake. I seriously don't see how any of those problems even come close to being show-stoppers.
A lot of new private aerospace companies aren't hiring experienced engineers - but are seeking out engineers fresh from college - because there's too much pessimism out there in the established field: They want engineers who "don't know what's impossible." We really need something like Mars colonization, I think, to quell a lot of that pessimistic thinking. At least SpaceX and Bigelow with orbital hotels should do that, as if Virgin Galactic's private spaceflight shouldn't have done that already.
But I think footage of people happily living and working on Mars could really give humanity a huge dose of inspiration and optimism that it needs.
enorbet said:
Other than boyhood dreams fueled by ScFi writers, I too see no compelling reason to leap to Mars when our Moon is vastly closer. While it isn't a direct analogy, just imagine if "The New World", instead of being 6,000 km was 600,000 km distant. That would be a daunting problem even today, let alone with sailing ships in the 16th-19th Centuries.
I think the best analog I've seen is Greenland and the continental Americas. Simply put, although Greenland is closer, the Americas are far more hospitable. Mars has nitrogen, co2, an atmosphere that can stop micrometeorites, plentiful water ice for oxygen and everything you need to synthesize fuel+oxidizer in-situ readily available. The moon... not so much.
And yes, physically speaking, the ratio in-between the distance to Luna and Mars is much greater than for Greenland and the Americas, but in terms of Delta-vee costs, employing aerocapture, Mars is even closer (that is, the Mars/Luna delta-vee ratio is smaller than the America/Greenland distance ratio).