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Looks like we will have to say goodbye to V'Ger 1. She's obeying commands but hasnt returned readable info in 3 months....


AUS-97HORN

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20 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

from the wiki:

"The Sabatier reaction has been proposed as a key step in reducing the cost of human mission to Mars (Mars Direct, SpaceX Starship) through in situ resource utilization. Hydrogen is combined with CO2 from the atmosphere, with methane then stored as fuel and the water side product electrolyzed yielding oxygen to be liquefied and stored as oxidizer and hydrogen to be recycled back into the reactor. The original hydrogen could be transported from Earth or separated from Martian sources of water."

Once you have the ability to manufacture CH4 in situ on mars, you can start moving asteroids from the asteroid belt to martian lagrangian orbits.  Once you have enough mass, you move everyone off the planet for 5 years.  They live in orbit while you crash thousands of small asteroids in to the poles, releasing all of the water and oxygen.   When the "dust clears" you should have something to work with.

The terraforming part (flora) is easy.  We could start today.  It's just a matter of money.

It's the fauna part that is going to require getting medievial, because of the lack of the magnetic field.

Call me crazy, but in addition to travelling to Mars, then establishing a colony both of which take tons of resources, you then have to build an orbital hotel/docking station to vaca off the planet for 5 years (meaning food, water, medicine, etc); but this seems like a bit much. Sounds like a 100 year plan, where everything has to go just right. 

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1 hour ago, Hagbard Celine said:

from the wiki:

"The Sabatier reaction has been proposed as a key step in reducing the cost of human mission to Mars (Mars Direct, SpaceX Starship) through in situ resource utilization. Hydrogen is combined with CO2 from the atmosphere, with methane then stored as fuel and the water side product electrolyzed yielding oxygen to be liquefied and stored as oxidizer and hydrogen to be recycled back into the reactor. The original hydrogen could be transported from Earth or separated from Martian sources of water."

Once you have the ability to manufacture CH4 in situ on mars, you can start moving asteroids from the asteroid belt to martian lagrangian orbits.  Once you have enough mass, you move everyone off the planet for 5 years.  They live in orbit while you crash thousands of small asteroids in to the poles, releasing all of the water and oxygen.   When the "dust clears" you should have something to work with.

The terraforming part (flora) is easy.  We could start today.  It's just a matter of money.

It's the fauna part that is going to require getting medievial, because of the lack of the magnetic field.

So the idea is to bombard Mars with asteroids until it has sufficient gravity? Mars has 11% the mass of Earth. You’d have to crash 8 Marses worth of asteroids into it to create an Earth-sized rocky planet. What does that do to the planet? And is the result just a pile of loose rubble or do the collisions result in seismic and volcanic activity of the type necessary to create a stable crust? And we need to make sure there’s enough water in those asteroids to create oceans. Which would in any event be freshwater for the next few billion years or so.

And none of that addresses the absence of a magnetic field (creating problems in both the short and long term) and the difference in sunlight intensity. 

So… what’s easier: building thousands of rockets to propel asteroids into Mars, resulting — at some point in the far future — in at best a shitty imitation of Earth that won’t last long without the protection of a magnetosphere, or shutting down fossil fuel use here on Earth for a short period while we ramp up renewables?

Terraforming is fun to think about as an engineering project, but that exercise reveals just how silly the Mars bugout plan is. 

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