September 6, 2012

• Sending Shipping Containers To Mars

  So, here's what I posted in reply to a Slashdot article:

  Why not send a vehicle every six months?

  Seriously. Wouldn't it make sense to launch several unmanned "shipping containers" of food and supplies well ahead of the manned craft, set to land near the proposed landing site, and to continue to send such craft during the mission timeline? (I'm aware that Earth and Mars are both in motion and travel times vary, but given the long run-up to a manned mission, there would be a lot of viable windows to launch such "advance craft".) Make plans for at least one, if not more, such launches during the on-ground mission time period. (Also, include the most advanced 3-D printers of the time on the main craft, and backups on the "shipping containers", along with plenty of raw material to feed them. The odds of needing to create a spare part, or a custom tool, to deal with unexpected events are pretty darn good, and it's better to send "tools to make tools" than to try to guess what parts you're most likely to need a spare of.)

  (Hell, while we're dreaming.... why not send some kind of self-assembling farm? I'm serious. Robot craft lands. It release a greenhouse-like structure that unfolds and assembles itself. It begins drawing water from the atmosphere -- there's not a LOT, but there's some -- or from the frozen ground (am I wrong, or is there evidence of lots of sub-surface ice locked in the soil? No time to check now...). When enough is gathered, it starts off a hydroponic process. As the plants produce oxygen, it's drawn off and stored, and CO2 is drawn from the surrounding Martian environment. Yes, I know sunlight is much dimmer on Mars. I do not think it's unreasonable that some plants can be found on Earth which can survive on lower levels of sunlight, or at least genetically engineered to do so. Even very simple plants can be processed into something edible, if not necessarily gourmet.)

  I'm not claiming this technology exists off-the-shelf today, but nothing strikes me as beyond 10 years or so of focused development efforts. It shouldn't require breaking any laws of physics or lifter/booster technologies orders of magnitude beyond what we currently have. (Regular, incremental improvements in lightweight materials, genetic engineering, and robotics are safe predictions, as such things go. Expecting significant breakthroughs in the cost of getting anything into orbit is probably not a safe prediction, so it's best, to my mind, to think about "What's kind of stuff could we put in a payload in 10 years?" than "How can we lift a bigger payload in 10 years?")

   

  Comments and criticism from my friends who actually understand physics and engineering on a level beyond that which can be explained my Carl Sagan or Burke?

  • 11:12 am
  • 4 Comments