Five Roadblocks to Mars
There are lots of technological challenges that must be solved before going to Mars. Even if a rocket has the delta v and capability to make it to Mars, right now such a trip would be a suicide mission. My list of the major (showstopper) technological challenges are:
- Refueling
- Food
- Radiation protection
- Artificial gravity
- Robotic construction of Mars base
When we have solutions for these five challenges we can reasonably think about going there, but if we want to create a settlement and stay there, we must first know whether only 38% of Earth gravity is enough to develop healthy babies. No healthy babies - no Mars settlement. Testing artificial gravity systems on the Moon would be a good way to try to answer this question.
Refueling
Propellant is the name of the game. With the current technology of rocket engines, we need lots of it, at convenient places. Fortunately, the Moon has copious amounts of propellant components laying around the surface – water and oxygen. Propellant depots in LEO and the E/M Lagrange points will be the catalyst for space exploration and a thriving space economy. I’m not that concerned about the technical complexity of refueling a spacecraft, I think the harder part is the logistics, timing, and economic incentives of building the propellant infrastructure.
Food
Everything eats – even galaxies. Humans will only go so far
as their food will take them. Growing food in microgravity and on other planets
will have to be worked out in advance, to a very high degree of
reliability and in bulk. The Moon is the perfect place to practice space
farming and learn from mistakes with the safety net of re-supply from Earth.
Radiation Protection
The initial trips to Mars are going to be months and months
and months long – absent some unexpected breakthrough in propulsion. This is
when humans will be most vulnerable to damage from galactic cosmic rays. I
think that protection once on the Moon or Mars will be adequate (3m of regolith
or a nice lava tube), but it's the long trips outside that are dangerous. Perhaps the protection strategy will be
multi-faceted; water stored in the spacecraft walls, drugs that enhance the
body’s natural resistance, better cancer treatments. I prefer to dream big on
this one and advocate the mobile mini magnetosphere (admittedly a technological
stretch).
Artificial Gravity
Every new study that comes out confirms that microgravity
plays havoc with animals who evolved in significant gravity.
Serious havoc such as:
- Bone loss
- Muscle atrophy
- Vision degradation
- Cardiovascular deconditioning
- Immune system malfunction due to gene expression changes
- Blood anemia
Artificial gravity systems are going to be needed on long-crewed missions.
Robotic Construction of Mars Base
The consensus strategy for a Mars base is to build as much
as possible before the humans arrive. I have no problem with that concept. The
question is how much can the robots do? They can do more on the Moon because of
human assistance with near real time proximity - but not on Mars. The Martian bots
will have to be smarter than the semi-autonomous versions on the Moon. Hardware
assembly routines will have to be practiced on the Moon and then coded for the
bots to perform on their own on Mars. Construction will take longer and, inevitably,
stuff will go wrong (Murphy’s Universal Law).
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