Mars colonization

>Deal
The meek shall inherit the Earth.

The rest of us shall go to the stars.

>And aren't more valuable than an average piece of rock or ore

False.

If you're looking for iridium, outer space has way more of it.

This is why they look for a layer of iridium when they're trying to figure out if a meteor created a crater.

>iridium
Costs less than $1000 per troy ounce.

Power is critical. If you can't make solar panels on Mars then it will fail.

Did someone say parabolic mirrors and molten salt loops?

That is even harder to manufacture. That said Mars will also need a gigafactory to make all the batteries for solar voltaic.

>That is even harder to manufacture.
Did someone say mylar?

You want to make a solar thermal system with mylar? Okay and what about the pumps, pipes, etc. That stuff is heavy and all would have to be made on Mars.

All you need is a pole lathe, optical flat, and a sodium lamp. From there you can reach modern civilization in under 50 years.

>That stuff is heavy and all would have to be made on Mars.
Also, you're wrong. even absurd overkill would be absurdly less than 100 tons.
That is way less than our current upper limit of 550 tons.

I remember something about massive lava tubes. Those could potentially be sealed, shored up, then pressurized for very basic space.

I don't think you understand the size needed for a Mars colony. Keep in mind the sun isn't as strong on Mars as it is on Earth.

I was thinking a very small nuclear reactor, manufactured on earth and then assembled on Mars.

Launch costs would be a lot but after you have it built, the only input it needs is HEU.

Bonus points for breeder reactors.

>radial design requiring continual adjustment throughout the day
Fucking civils.

>I don't think you understand the size needed for a Mars colony.
I don't think you realize how stupid it is to seed a colony with a full sized colony.

>Keep in mind the sun isn't as strong on Mars as it is on Earth.
Yes. But it only amounts to like a 30% reduction if my head math isn't blatantly wrong.
That just means 30% more area for intake relative to earth. The only thing that is required is enough capacity to become self-sustaining until mars can be turned into a shell world.

Actually it's a 44% reduction

inverse square bruh

>I don't think you realize how stupid it is to seed a colony with a full sized colony.

Even a small number of people requires lots of area for food and if they are using grow lights, then they are going to need lots of power.

I was thinking you start with a power generation module and a habitation module, and then the initial mission uses a tunnel boring machine to create livable spaces underground.

From there, you try and use plants to free up O2 from atmospheric O2 and N2 from nitrate bearing minerals.

You've got tons of sand to make into concrete, giant chunks of ice from the poles to melt for water, lots of caves already on Mars (underground is a must because the very thin atmosphere will not block out cosmic & solar radiation. Mars' puny gravity makes generating an atmosphere a pipe dream, any Oxygen you produce just escapes into space. Biodomes & greenhouses are a must. Any colonization project will have lots of stuff robotically delivered to Mars just waiting to be employed. A crew of 20 or so people could make a good start. Watch National Geographics' MARS show from last year.

Are you going to sudoku if it starts in your lifetime?

Wtf is wrong with that martian's right arm?

If all the lames that complain about not getting to explore space in their liftime picked up the books and went to work for space companies instead of vidya all day, maybe we could get off this planet. Probably not though cause those types arent motivated enough anyway.

Anyone else here part of /aspiring to be in the space industry?

Read pic related, exactly as you describe. Zubrin proposed this to NASA they turned him down and opted for ISS/ space shittle instead.

brainlets

...

>solar power on mars

How would you get nitrogen on Mars?

Mutation.

Are you all teenagers? Theres no planning or organisation here at all. The first question you have to ask is why...

The only answer I have for that is that Mars is a rich source of iron and other resources which could be used to fuel the first real space manufacturing industry. Why do this on Mars?

Mining asteroids is fucking difficult. They crumble to dust, debree breaks off and clogs or damages your equipment... Even if, and this is the best idea I have come up with yet, you could envelop the asteroid in a sturdy balloon you have only solved two problems. Containment and lack of atmosphere. These both make the process possible but now you still have no gravity so to filter, seperate or move material easily you are going to have to spin the asteroid, or large parts of it around a central point... Im sure youre getting the point.

Material can be mined, processed and manufactured in an environment which is much easier to work in, and the thinner atmosphere and lower gravity would make it possible to construct space elevators using current technology, not even kidding a Mars suitable space elevator could be built.

This is something which needs to be done in phases though, and right now the first phase is the hardest one, and it involves sending the initial research team who will not establish a permanent base and who will return to earth.

Nobody wants to pay for that...

>Nobody wants to pay for that...

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/mining.php

I would trust your opinion way more if you could spell debris.

>Mining asteroids is fucking difficult. They crumble to dust, debree breaks off and clogs or damages your equipment... Even if, and this is the best idea I have come up with yet, you could envelop the asteroid in a sturdy balloon you have only solved two problems. Containment and lack of atmosphere. These both make the process possible but now you still have no gravity so to filter, seperate or move material easily you are going to have to spin the asteroid, or large parts of it around a central point... Im sure youre getting the point.
Are you a civil engineer or something? FFS, I'm chemical and even I have enough manufacturing and aero knowledge and basic logic to not be so obtuse.

>Material can be mined, processed and manufactured in an environment which is much easier to work in, and the thinner atmosphere and lower gravity would make it possible to construct space elevators using current technology, not even kidding a Mars suitable space elevator could be built.
You are a niggerfaggot. The solution is a mass driver. And all that is good for is for martian orbital colonies.

>This is something which needs to be done in phases though, and right now the first phase is the hardest one, and it involves sending the initial research team who will not establish a permanent base and who will return to earth.
Or... we just drop an automated tunnel borer.

>Nobody wants to pay for that...
That's because we still have spare orbits for orbital colonies at earth.

>debree

>Are you a civil engineer or something? FFS, I'm chemical and even I have enough manufacturing and aero knowledge and basic logic to not be so obtuse.

Less smartass and more explanation. Youve pretty much only created a troll post by quoting people in the thread and typing random garbage at them.

Mass driver is a great idea for lunar or orbital material transfer, not for getting material into orbit from the surface of a body the size of mars.

Your tunnel ideas are retardedly expensive. With some basic refining and processing a moderately sized crater or pit could be covered in a steel/glass roof. Living spaces could be dug into the surrounding regolith or mars dirt hail the grammar/phrasing/spulling nazis...

But you are never going to set up a permanent population on Mars, and for long term explotation of the resources there you are going to need an orbital station with earth gravity or close to it and and heres why...

As I explain in every one of these threads i visit, after several generations on Mars, those reproducing there, through epigenetics will mutate and adapt to the lower air pressure and gravity, effectively becoming a new branch of human which would never be able to return to earth due to physical frailty.

>people keep trying to work out what resources you need to live on mars
>they still don't know how you're even supposed to get there along with your equipment
>forgets that humans placed in crowded/small in an incredibly stressful environment have a tendency to go retarded/apeshit and can substantially increase risk of mission failure over time
>keeps on forgetting we don't even have an official ship that will take people to mars and stay there as an orbital outpost for years at a time
and no, elon musk's meme ship that's supposed to somehow take 100 people who got on because they have money to mars is not going to work, unless you like the idea of 100 dead people in space after the first few weeks because of fights and chaos among the crew

>people
Person. Also stop reddit spacing and quote people properly. Greentexting adds context and prevents shitposts like yours.

>not for getting material into orbit from the surface of a body the size of mars.
Gravity is only double the moon. Material requirements, even with a robust safety factor, are still well below their limits.

>Your tunnel ideas are retardedly expensive.
No. Martian colonies can only exist underground, anything else is a meme outpost for the sake of being a meme outpost.

>With some basic refining and processing a moderately sized crater or pit could be covered in a steel/glass roof.
Yes. But a tunnel borer is easier and can be made to prevent almost all air loss. Nitrogen is worth more than gold.

>heres why...
Nope.

>the lower air pressure
Mars will never be terraformed while it is not a shell world. The original martian surface will likely never be terraformed because it is unique. The pressure issue doesn't exist.

>gravity
You don't need an orbital habitat to simulate earth normal. You can do it with a cone on the planet. Sleeping, playing, and training/exercising in a gravity cone should be more than enough.

>effectively becoming a new branch of human which would never be able to return to earth due to physical frailty.
No.

Why we would go to Mars?

sick 0.3G slam ball.

Okay, so numbers for mass driver may be better than a space elevator. Certainly it would be a cheaper and simpler option. Still interested to hear how you propose to make asteroid mining simple though...

Im aware the human habitation should be below ground, and there should certainly be space to shelter livestock as well, however I propose the crater as it is a simple and effective way to reduce labour, earthwork and material input so you can create a microclimate conducive to plant growth by maximising sun exposure and heat retention through use of thermal mass and also potentially an orbital solar reflector.
It also gives cheap convenient access to lower layers of the surface strata for say mining or habitation.

This is jumping ahead. Step one is to send a manned mission to drill for ores and take core samples in likely resource hotspots.

Several supply drops would be placed along their proposed route, and the vehicle would be sent ahead of them. A landing module would be sent into orbit.

The crew module would be as small and light as possible, consisting mostly of shielding to protect the crew from radiation. The crew would spend the majority of the trip in torpor, probably very uncomfortable. Several would probably not survive and this should be accounted for.

You want your crew to be expendable. Life sentence prisoners with narcissistic traits could be coerced into performing the mission, driven by the knowledge that their return to earth would be dependant upon their success.

They would need to harvest fuel for the return journey themselves. The cheapest option would be to set them an impossible task for returning and just abandon them there... Of course this runs the risk of them surviving and interfering with future missions.

Elon Musk is a scrub.

And dank fashy Martian memes

We're wasting our time contemplating a mission to Mars. It's currently technologically impossible to get a Human to Mars. We should colonize Luna (the Moon) instead, it's closer and has resources like Helium-3. Luna can be a staging ground for missions to Mars and vice versa .

Since the surface temp of mars is about -50c and there is volcanic activity, would some sort of thermopile array work as power?

No. Volcanic activity is weak and very deep. Thats why radiation is such a problem there. The core is almost cold and dead and theres no magnetosphere so the atmosphere constantly evaporates. You want giant superlight orbital reflectors and solar concentrators on the surface.

Otherwise send an LFTR. Send one anyway to start.

You need large quantities of raw materials like iron and debree for radiation shielding to build orbital stations. From there you can start sending them out to all the planets to conduct research and harvest materials.

You cant do that from the moon. It has low mineral density.

Just wanted to add that he3 is not usable in the next thirty years. Leace it in the pipedream category where, for now at least, it belongs.

>Leave it in the pipedream category where, for now at least, it belongs.
This entire thread is pipe dream category, user. It'll be a hundred years before we attempt a non-robot, non-suicide colony on Mars.

>adapt to the lower air pressure

Sorry but no mammal is going to be breathing mars almost nonexistent atmosphere.

No Im talking about their skin, bones, etc. After enough generations mars colonists would become taller, weaker, less robust and they would adapt to be less reliant upon pressure skins outside of pressurised environments.

They arent ever going to be breathing primarily co2 either. Ideally the loger you can keep the initial team on the surface the cheaper it would be overall. If the initial team could also seal a dome over a crater and seed it with plants and a basic environmental monitoring system. More co2 from outside the dome could be fed in to pressurise the environment, and the high levels of co2 could induce rapid conversion of the high co2 into o2 and fertile carbonacious material for surface preperation of future poly tunnel equivalent structures used to grow grains.

To be honest a lot of the stuff you want to build on the surface could be built automatically using robotic cranes and 3d printers. No need to send prisoners. 3ven the drilling could be done by a rover.

Drumpf will destroy us fucking Putin is a racist madman

I think resources has been an old reason to explore.

New reason to explore.
being exiled, or leaving a "Shithole" country.

The ultimate reason why people will start colonizing mars is becuase mars will be akin to the "new world" for pilgrims, i.e. a place to escape the bullshit that society is starting to become.

or an austrialia to all those prisoners of the english empire, i.e. a place where societies rejects and outcasts gan go becuase everyone else hates them.

The inner /pol/ in me says that taken with these two together. I think the first people to go to mars will be the jews. Becuase they are rich enough to fund it, and disapproving of current "putianical/ christian culture". And also alot of people don't really trust the jews becuase they are tribal.

Better go live in Antarctica, bottom of the ocean or the Sahara.

this is the exact mentality why the chinese will fuck the western world in the ass in this century

I'm assuming that there will eventually be simple shit like degunking treads and getting rovers out of craters that will simply be easier for a human to do than an AI.

...

Lmao you are just repeating what I said in the other thread. You really rob ideas. Bunch of nigger thiefs.

>martian rally
Cool movie idea

>>forgets that humans placed in crowded/small in an incredibly stressful environment have a tendency to go retarded/apeshit

bullshit, just look at submarines or the ISS

this retarded notion that colonists will go crazy is just a meme

You are too stupid to even comprehend economic matters.

>You cant do that from the moon. It has low mineral density.

Wrong, Moon has lots of aluminum and titanium which is what spaceship hulls are made of. The trouble with Moon is not lack of minerals, it is lack of volatiles such as hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. There may be some hidden in polar regions, tough.

the moon is made out of about the same thing as the ocean floor or the Earth's mantle

Primary power demand on any Mars colony will be ISRU propellant production (methane and oxygen from water and CO2). You need like 2 megawatts to fill one BFS spaceship per year. Power needed for the colony itself will be just a rounding error in comparison.

This requires lots of solar panels, roughly 50,000 square meters. Or a small nuclear reactor.

Would it be possible to beam energy from earth to solar farms on Mars in the form of lazer or mazer beams?

No.

Same thing but minus precious volatile elements. We really need to send a probe to lunar polar regions. If there are lots of volatiles frozen in there, then space colonization just got a lot easier.

I think we'd be able to see it from Earth if it was there
there's still oxygen in the crust in for form of silicon dioxide

we cannot see it from Earth because if there are volatiles they are frozen in eternally shadowed craters

oxygen is abundant everywhere

we are talking about hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, much needed elements that are lacking on the Moon

how cold do think it gets in those craters? Cold enough to freeze those gases? And carbon isn't volatile

Learn to live in underground cities on earth, conquer the solar sistem in 30 years.

It could be as cold as 30 K above absolute zero. Cold enough to freeze those gasses assuming they collect there in the first place.

>And carbon isn't volatile

carbon dioxide, monoxide and methane is

right, so they should be there
they would just be locked up in the rock they when the rock gets warmer it'll start giving off gases

>le Helium-3
Off yourself. Instead of trawling billions of tonnes of regolith for kilograms of the crap you could just use big ass solar powered particle accelerators to make tritium or something.

The moon has much more value as a source for near-earth building materials.

this

should have been done long ago, but NASA in their infinite wisdom has barely researched long term self-sustaining life support systems, despite it being a crucial technology for space colonization and possible to perfect even without leaving Earth

such technology would probably find many applications on Earth, too

yet last such attempt was Biosphere experiment two decades ago, and even that was underfunded and then cancelled

A manned mission would be infinitely more efficient and effective if only by reducing the time delay of signals sent by human operatots on earth. An on-site human can react much more quickly.

Yes. But inefficient and stupid. Just put a couple of giant aluminium mirrors in mars orbit and you triple your solar energy in a given area on mars surface.

Earth cannot support us forever, above or below ground. I also think you will have greater difficulty convincing people to live underground than to live on a giant torus shaped space habitat with an environmental paradise inside.

You cant do that underground as well.

Lmao, I'm really just repeating myself from the other thread. You're a nigger faggot.

holy shit, how can you be so retarded.
many heavier elements are rare on earth because (simplyfying it) the pretty much sunk into the earth in its early days when it was a hot chunk of molten rock, the only reason we have some of those materials now is because of damn asteroids falling on earth. Those asteroid have likely never been melted, and/or are small enough to get those rare elements that are rare on earth quite easily (as long as you are able to land on one).
if you can get to one and succesfully mine it and distribute its resources then you are made for life.

>envelop asteroid, and pump the balloon with air or other gases
>explode the shit out of it
> vaccum out the dust/rocks
> centrifuge them in a tube that is connected to the balloon
solved your problem
now, you just have to decide if the ballon is single use or reciclable. If recyclable then the explosions need to be smaller, or even just use drillbots to shred it. disposing of it after every use is stupid but faster.

I hope I can see something like this in my lifetime.
Could martian soil be used to grow plants? Also, could GM plants be able to survive in its atmosphere?
What propulsion system could we use to get there? Would multiple launches be viable?

>giant glass domes
it's gonna be bricks from martian soil

Humans only need 4 psi to live. Which is easy enough to do on mars. Start with a huge space station at the mars sun l1 orbit. Which will generate a magnetic field to shield mars from solar radiation. Martian co2 and water will build up the atmosphere naturally. Since it is no longer being blown away by the sun.

Then extremeophiles can make oxygen.

why do faggots propose a solar sail between the sun and the planet? Do they even understand newtonian physics?

Very nice. If you picked your asteroids carefully you could avoid the expense of injecting gasses by engineering the balloon to absorb solar energy and insulating it from the cold of space. Any gasses or liquids could be vaporised and may be enough to provide atmosphere for a vacuum to work. I wasnt sure how to pulverise the material properly but explosive pressure waves would probably be easiest. Im not an engineer.

Originally i had intended to heat the pulverised matsrial and use magnets to get some ferric materials out but without gravity the process was confusing. How to refine ores in zero g.

Ideally you want to apply as many processes prior to having to spin it, because the spinning is expensive. Even the size of the centrifuge should be as small as possible for many reasons.

Definately open to the concept because it would make everything a lot easier while cleaning up a lot of neos.

>sail

Can you read?

I'm proposing an oneil cylinder colony. That puts out a huge magnetic field.

Thats some engineering challenge. Do you know of any materials or a way to generate that kind of field passively using solar energy?

>That puts out a huge magnetic field.
So you don't actually know newtonian physics?

>a huge space station will generate a magnetic field to shield a planet
This must be the dumbest post in the history of Veeky Forums

>immense O'Neill cylinder that generates a magnetic field capable of shielding a planet
Welp, here's an idea for a dumb sci-fi WMD.

There is more than enough people willing. There is more than enough people who would die for it.

The barrier is $.

>forgets that humans placed in crowded/small in an incredibly stressful environment have a tendency to go retarded/apeshit and can substantially increase risk of mission failure over time

People traveled around the world in rotting wooden ships for months.

I'm really fucking tired of this argument. Idiots act like if some accidents or deaths mean the entire thing isn't possible. People die building supermarkets for Christ's sake. They die crossing the street.

Of course people will die during space colonization. So what?

>t. Retard of the ages
Humanity will never cross the ocean
Humanity will never fly
Humanity will never communicate with another over continents in seconds

I hope you live long enough to see your doubts shatter.

They will once we become an interplanetary species.. that is until some universe ending thingamajig comes along.