Surprised the article doesn’t mention the recently published A City on Mars — a book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, of Bea Wolf and SMBC. It talks about lots of other stuff but covers this too.
Prove that you can do it on the moon first then we can talk about Mars.
The only real estate upside to Mars is a tenuous wisp of atmosphere. Other than that, the Moon is superior in every way.
I’d consider a Moon colony, a floating Venus colony, a Titan colony or a space station. You couldn’t pay me enough to go anywhere else, since there’s nothing there to spend it on anyway.
Liquid water under Mars’ surface could be a huge upside if we can confirm it’s there and figure out how to get to it
Seriously. I don’t understand and never understood how this wasn’t the very obvious first step.
People might still die. Unfortunately there’s no way around that. But there’s a massive difference between “help is 7 days away with an emergency launch” and “help is never coming”. I’m not sure the exact time scales they could get emergency readiness for, but I can tell you it’s a whole hell of a lot faster than it is for everything to align for a mars mission.
Also, if deaths do happen, you can learn a whole hell of a lot more about means of failure investigating the issue on the moon.
Plus once you get it working, you can set up retirement communities up there. Gives old people a chance to take a pioneering risk so we can sort out the kinks and grow the space with purpose, and makes them feel a lot better being in microgravity.
I’ve even got a slogan! It’s cheesy and totally 1950s sci-fi, so perfect!
“Retire in comfort on the moon, where 1/6 gravity makes old bodies feel new again!”
Yep, figure out Moon dust solutions and Mars becomes a bit easier. But absolutely the distance is key, and the Moon isn’t THAT easy to get to, but at least it’s less than years away, one way.
help is 7 days away with an emergency launch
It’s more like 3, and you can talk to people on the ground with just some lag, too (although you need a satellite rebroadcast when over the dark side).
Mars, on the other hand, is months away, may not even be exitable at all at a given time with a given craft, and has latency similar to a carrier pigeon with an SD card strapped to it.
I just didn’t want to pretend it was an hour. Response time would definitely be dependent on your investment, the urgency of the situation, etc, but even on the longer end of the spectrum, there are a lot of failures you are able to recover from that you couldn’t on Mars. “This critical component we will die without is degrading 1% per week” gives you plenty of time to solve the problem on the moon and no chance in hell on Mars.
I was going to make a joke that The Verge’s definition of “easy” seems to be different than mine, but the first sentence in the actual article is “Sending people to Mars won’t be easy”. I get the feeling the writer and the editor are not in speaking terms.
Well duh. We haven’t even solved living on the ISS for more than a year at a time yet.
That is primarily an issue with the lack of gravity’s effect on the human body. It is hard to get enough exercise to maintain strength in muscles, maintaining bone density, and other bodily functions so that the astronaut can have a regular life back on Earth.
Mars has enough gravity that bodily atrophy should not be a significant issue for people that return, and it shouldn’t be an issue at all for people who stay on Mars.
There are a ton of other massive hurdles on Mars, but they are not related to the cautionary limitation on individual’s trips to the ISS.
Mars has enough gravity that bodily atrophy should not be a significant issue for people that return, and it shouldn’t be an issue at all for people who stay on Mars.
That’s actually totally unknown. I could be, or it could be that you need almost a full G to stay healthy.
I’m disappointed that the ISS never got a rotating torus module. Maybe Lunar Gateway or one of the upcoming commercial stations will get one.
That type of concept feels like it needs to be its own thing and not a module on a larger station. The added rotational inertia and potential for vibration seem like pretty high risk factors for anything connected that wasn’t designed for it.
I hope starship can make a rotating station viable though.
