Habitation and Manned Missions, By John Daugherty

After browsing the web on this topic I stumbled upon a book by Robert Zubrin called The Case for Mars. I have decided to use this book as my guiding light while discussing this topic because after reading his plan, I have become convinced we can live on Mars. There is a “low budget” plan to get to the red planet outlined by Zubrin called Mars Direct. This plan takes advantage of a principle not yet used in space travel: living off the land. The Mars Direct plan will send chemical plants ahead of any manned missions to Mars and have the small probes churn out fuel for the manned mission’s return home as well as the exploration vehicles that will follow. This approach saves a tremendous amount of cost (it's expensive to lift the tremendous weight of fuel into orbit and then to Mars) in the mission, bringing down the price tag from $400 billion in the famous 40 day plan to something around $30-50 billion.



Once there are resources available, the Mars exploration team will be sent to the red planet in search of answers to the most important questions we have: has life existed on Mars? can life exist once again? The unmanned gas harvesting probes and the manned missions will alternate, giving us multiple small bases on the Martian surface. Each of these manned bases will have living quarters that will sustain astronauts for the 18 months it takes for Mars to align with Earth for the shortest possible travel time between the two. With each base there will also be a vehicle that will allow humans to travel long distances on the surface, looking for a key ingredient for life: water.



Eventually, one of the manned frontier bases will be chosen for a long term habitat on Mars. All flights from that point after will be routed to that location, and a base of multiple habitation units will be constructed. To turn the base into a permanent Martian settlement, we must again use a live off the land approach and construct buildings with available materials. Bruce MacKenzie published a series of papers outlying a method to build structures on Mars with a low-tech concept of brick. The probes on Mars have already identified the soil contents of the Marian dust to be feasible for constructing brick. Brick buildings with Roman-style vaulted ceilings with 2.5 meters of dirt on top could be pressurized to habitable gas levels. Other advantages to these structures include decreased cosmic rays (thick, solid ceiling) and great insulation.



Once we have some pressurized space, the plan outlined by Zubrin calls for geodesic domes made from materials like Plexiglas and Kevlar to increase the amount of living space in our permanent home on Mars. There is still a debate on what the best type of dome would be; suffice it to say the math outlined in the book points to the conclusion that a very feasible amount of safe living space could be sent from earth with relative simplicity.

The book goes into making plastics, glass, ceramics, getting water, building green houses, farming crops, manufacturing steel, refining silicon, using solar, geothermal, and wind power to augment and replace the nuclear reactors that powered the beginnings of the program, and eventually grow a small base into a colony for humankind. I hope you use this post as impetus to go out and read this adventure-inspiring book.



-friendly blog master.

References:

-Zubrin, Robert-The Free Press-The Case for Mars: The Plan to settle the Red Planet and why we must; 1996
-Wikipedia
-http://www.redplanethost.com/images/bak/Red%20Planet.jpg
-http://www.eyalyurconi.com/yurconi/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/the-case-for-mars.jpg
-http://www.geocities.com/marsterraforming/miss_seq.jpg