Just a mere 29 years ago, after President George H. W. Bush proposed a manned mission to Mars by 2019 (the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing), NASA conducted a study to project a cost estimate. Ninety days later, they came back with a package consisting of ideas from every NASA facility in the country. This scenario required six launches to assemble a spacecraft in Earth orbit and would cost the taxpayers around half a trillion dollars. Congress put a kybosh to that idea on the spot.<\/p>\n
Around that same time, Dr. Robert Zubrin and others at Martin Marietta came up with a plan they called Mars Direct, which would utilize some of the natural resources found on Mars. The theory was that if you don\u2019t have to take the fuel along with you for the return trip, your spacecraft doesn\u2019t have to be the size of the Battlestar Gallactica.<\/p>\n
By reducing the size of the craft and utilizing a few other specialized modifications, the total cost was $50 billion, one-tenth of the NASA sum. NASA was even impressed with the ideas that the team had devised, but chose to add one more element to the mission scenario (an Earth Return Vehicle parked in Mars Orbit) as well as two additional crewmembers. NASA then called their mission profile Mars Semi-Direct.<\/p>\n
As outlined in Phase One of the mission, an unmanned and unpressurized workshop was blasted to Mars in 2016, by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy (heavy-lift launch vehicle). Onboard was a fuel processing plant stocked with a few tons of liquid hydrogen, together with foodstuff for the flight that would follow. Along with these was an unpressurized lightweight truck carrying a One Mega Watt Electric Thermonuclear Generator mounted on a winch in the bed. Once on Mars, the truck was off-loaded and driven (remotely from Earth) onto the surface. The truck spooled out a few hundred meters of power cable as it rolled, then dropped the generator into a small crater (which provided shielding) before it was fired up. That generator is now providing the power needed to run the fuel processor.<\/p>\n
The fuel processor is designed to produce methane and water, then breaking down the water to make hydrogen and oxygen: the process only produces twice the oxygen as methane. As it is used to oxidize the methane for the return trip to Earth, a lot more oxygen is needed: four and a half to one is the ideal ratio.<\/p>\n
Another way to produce oxygen is to distill it directly from carbon dioxide, making one part oxygen and the other part carbon monoxide. Normally, you wouldn’t need the carbon monoxide and would discard it back into the atmosphere, but in the spirit of living off the land, one of the mission coordinators came up with a novel use for it: inflating the greenhouse\u2019s superstructure. Not the interior where the plants will be located, but the exterior structural envelope of the greenhouse.<\/p>\n
Shaped like a Quonset hut, the greenhouse is an arched structure made up of three layers of inflatable, transparent, Mylar tubes. As an air mattress contains tubes running back and forth from head to foot, the tubes of the greenhouse run up from the ground on one side of the canopy, over the open area, and down to the ground on the other side. By inflating these tubes with carbon monoxide, it is a way of using the non-breathable gas and not dumping it back into Mars\u2019 atmosphere. Steel cables running over the structure every meter, and anchored on the ends, will keep the building from blowing away in a windstorm.<\/p>\n
If the outer layer were to be breached, another layer can be moved into place on the inside and inflated. The breached layer can be left in place for quite a while before needing to be removed, and that can be done in pieces. As long as it lets in the light, keeps in the air, and keeps out the cold, all is well.<\/p>\n
Included on that flight was a pressurized rover for exploring the surface in a shirtsleeve environment, and a SpaceX Dragon, Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV). Eventually, the crew will use the MAV to leave Mars and rendezvous with the Earth Return Vehicle (ERV).<\/p>\n
In 2017, the second unmanned Falcon Heavy deposited the fully fueled, fully stocked ERV into Mars\u2019 orbit. The third launch, happening this year, will consist of the manned crew module (the habitat: Bolo One), which is supplied with just enough fuel to last them until they reach Mars. This will be a lengthy expedition. The time line for the journey consists of six-months traveling to Mars, eighteen months spent on the surface, and then a six-month traverse back to Earth: two-and-a-half years total. The final launch will occur two weeks after Bolo One lifts off, and will propel an identical workshop\/fuel processor to the planet. This is the mission these six brave pioneers have chosen to undertake. And so, here in May of 2018, they are about to make that next giant leap.<\/p>\n
Back in July of 2011, at the end of the Space Shuttle era, the Obama Administration was vacillating between the George W. Bush Return To The Moon initiative and a manned mission to Mars. Mars appeared to be a much better target, but NASA\u2019s timetable for a manned mission was set in the sphere of the 2030s. Then, an association of private investors came forward with a unique proposal. This group, who became known as The Sponsors, would front money for the radically new equipment from SpaceX. The Sponsors devised their plan based on economic analysis from the 1980s, which showed that for every dollar spent on the Apollo Program, seven dollars had been put back into the economy in creation of new products, spin-offs, and jobs. An updated study has now put that figure at more than fourteen dollars per dollar spent.<\/p>\n
Based on the Mars Semi-Direct scenario, NASA\u2019s plan called for five consecutive manned missions over the next ten years. Because the orbits of Earth and Mars are so different, the five missions would consist of different travel times between launch and landing. The first manned mission will launch on May 11, 2018 to take advantage of the perigee, or closest alignment between the planets, for the shortest travel time of six months each way. As the perigee distance changes every two years due to Mars\u2019 elliptical orbit of the sun, travel times vary on a fifteen \u2013 seventeen year cycle, optimizing again around 2030.<\/p>\n
Using economic models of industry, The Sponsors estimated that all five missions could be completed for less than $10 billion. In exchange for their support, The Sponsors would be awarded all patent rights to products developed specifically for the missions, gleaning a 15% return from sales. They would also be granted mineral rights to any and all discoveries on Mars. The Sponsors expect to recover their investment before the fifth mission. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. \u2013 Alan C. Kay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just a mere 29 years ago, after President George H. W. Bush proposed a manned mission to Mars by 2019 (the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing), NASA conducted a study to project a cost estimate. Ninety days later, they came back with a package consisting of ideas from every NASA facility in the country. This scenario required six …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/83"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}