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GIDDYUP: Astronomer Sees Possible ‘Wild West’-Style Mars

LEICESTER, England (Reuters) – Mars could resemble the lawless Wild West if privately funded adventurers seeking to exploit the planet get there before government-backed expeditions, a leading British astronomer said on Wednesday.

Hmm…the Wild West includes California, right? The state with happier and healthier people and more wealth than most of the countries on Earth?

This would be bad because…?

Before humans make it to Mars, the entire solar system will probably have been explored by flotillas of tiny robotic craft, but within a century there could be a permanent presence on the planet, Sir Martin Rees of the Institute of Astronomy told a science conference.

Thank you Sir for your faith in human abilities. There could be a permanent human presence on Mars in a decade, or less, with a little effort.

I can picture this guy’s counterpart in 1903 suggesting that man might someday establish regular air routes between the continents, in say a million years or so.

Once an infrastructure is established the costs of getting to Mars will go down, which could open up the possibility for different types of expeditions.

“If they were governmental or international (expeditions), Antarctic-style restraint might be feasible. On the other hand, if the explorers were privately funded adventurers of free-enterprise, even anarchic disposition, the Wild West model would be more likely to prevail,” he said.

What is so admirable about Antarctic-style “restraint” applied to a whole planet? Heaven forbid humans actually go there to settle the place, stay permanently, and make a new home. Nope, gotta bring ’em home after thirty days, lest the pristine Gaia Mars be bespoiled by our mere human presence. And let’s not even think about the horror of horrors: that someone might actually turn a profit there or something.

Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, was first photographed from space in 1965. More recent missions landed on the surface of the rocky, cold Red Planet and discovered the possible presence of liquid water.

But if humans shouldn’t settle there, of what importance is this discovery beyond mere scientific curiosity?

(Besides which, it’s not entirely correct. The landers — Vikings 1 and 2 and Pathfinder — did not discover the possible presence of liquid water. MGS has discovered evidence of “recent” outflows of water on the Martian surface, but these were only recent in the geological sense, having taken place thousands or perhaps millions of years ago.)

Amateur astronauts have already paid millions for a trip in space. If more efficient propulsion systems and fuel needed to escape the Earth’s gravity could be situated on the ground, rather than as part of the cargo, the trip would be much easier and cheaper.

And we can’t have that…then, (gasp!), there might be space tourists running around everywhere on the surface of Mars, wearing annoying Hawaiian-print EVA suits, gawking at the scenery, barging into queues, and complaining about the food.

No, we must piously maintain space as the province of professionally trained astronauts and titled astronomers, and primly forswear any interests in space beyond the purely scientific.

Rees envisions a type of “space elevator” that could lift people and payloads from the ground to a satellite.

“The rest of the voyage could be powered by a low-thrust, perhaps nuclear, rocket,” he told the British Association science conference.

This guy can’t seem to make up his mind. First he says that humans going to Mars permanently, for ordinary human purposes (profit and pleasure), is wrong. And then he blue-skies about just how to get there, cheaply and easily. If he only wants Mars to be visited by scientists, how does he expect to ever get to the volume of traffic sufficient to bring down the costs of launch and transit? Oh, silly me…he probably never thought of travel to Mars in practical, real-world terms.

MORE LUNAR THEFT: It seems some moon dust has been stolen from the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm.

IT’S GONNA BE A BIGGIE: NASA announced today the winner of the Next Generation Space Telescope project.

The new telescope, named after Apollo-era adminstrator James Webb, will be parked at L2, be shaded from the sun by an inflatable shield the size of a tennis court (to enhance infrared sensitivity), and carry a mirror of at least 20ft in diameter.

Hopefully they’ll do some systems checks this time around, before they launch the thing…because if it’s at L2, how exactly do we repair it? There is no way a Space Shuttle can get out there, and it’s doubtful the telescope would be transferred back to LEO due to size and the needless loss of observation time it would entail. Perhaps no servicing capability will be required, considering the thing is much cheaper than the Hubble ($824.8M is darn near expendible, by NASA standards) and isn’t being built with justifying the Shuttle’s existence in mind. If something goes wrong with it, it’s an expensive failure to be sure, but not so expensive that the Agency couldn’t afford to build another one from spares.

On the other hand…if it does require servicing, this could provide an incentive/justification/rationalization for building an orbital transfer vehicle. Note that L2 is further away than the Moon — a manned OTV capable of reaching L2 would thus be useful for lunar orbit missions as well.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF INDUSTRIAL PLANT: Here’s and interesting review of phytoextraction/phytoremediation: Phytoextraction of Metals from Contaminated Soils.

While this article deals with phytoextraction as a means for remediating sites polluted with certain metals, there is no reason why this technology couldn’t someday be adapted for use on Martian soils. Using plants to extract useful metals and other resources directly from the soil would have several advantages for an early Martian colony:

• Less equipment, and specifically heavy equipment (mining machines and the like), would need to be transported from Mars to Earth, versus subsurface or strip mining.
• Extraction crops would require large domed enclosures, along with the equipment to maintain a suitable interior atmosphere, but these need be no different in principle or design from domed enclosures used for growing food crops.
• Processing and refining equipment would still be required. Ovens for drying the resulting biomass and chemical/electrolytic systems for refining the bioaccumulated metals, etc. to usable concentrations would be needed, but again it would not be the type of heavy equipment (stamp mills, etc.) associated with typical mining operations.
• Extraction farms would eventually become “exhausted”, their soils depleted of extractable amounts of useful elements. These farms would then be suitable for food growth, essentially having been “remediated” like a terrestrial brownfield site. The soil could be reconditioned using the biomass byproducts left from the refining process and (later) sewage from nearby settlements, and used to grow traditional food crops to feed colonists.
• Since crops are self-producing and self-repairing, the need for spare parts and replacement units imported from Earth is eliminated.
• Unlike mining machinery, the crops would produce oxygen as they worked.
• I’d hazard a guess that the energy requirements would be somewhat lower, as well. The plants grow by sunlight. They produce breathable oxygen (which doesn’t have to be manufactured instead, consuming power). No large trucks, boring machinery, crushing/stamping mills, or other energy-intensive equipment would be required. The refining processes would probably be similar to and therefore no more energy intensive than with methods that take crushed rock as their input.
• The farms can be tended in a shirtsleeve environment, with little human input/supervistion required, important considerations where a poisonous micropressure atmosphere necessitates wearing a bulky suit outside and makes such work inherently dangerous at all times, and where labor of any kind would be scarce and therefore expensive.
• Such farms would have far less impact on the Martian environment than traditional mining. This is sure to appeal to the Red crowd — once the soil has given up its goods, the dome and other equipment can be dismantled and moved to another site, leaving behind little (or possibly even no) permanent footprint on the landscape.

Just a few ideas off the top of my head. I’m no biologist or mining engineer, so I could be wrong on every one of these points. However, it’s hard to imagine this approach being less of a logistics and maintenance headache than traditional mining approaches.

Thoughts?

NASA NUKES: Perhaps this is what Sean O’Keefe had in mind when he was talking about power R&D at NASA.

It’s good to see this going on.