You say that as if it wasn’t the reason why we landed on Luna. Which, incidentally, is a reason @ZonexandScout left off of the list: For the prestige.
I can see needing a lot of extra mass for cyclers that carry living things. Shielding will need to be especially massive if it’s to significantly protect the occupants on a nine month trip. Life support is another thing that is likely to be more massive. The ships that carry the living things to and from the cycler can probably get by with minimal amounts of these things, since they will only be in use for a few days at either end of the trip.
I suspect one of the first colonization attempts will have a quasi religious motivation. Likely some Atlas Shrugged kind of thing where they can enforce their ideals of humanity without interference.
I can only imagine that happening if the colonization effort is a private enterprise and despite what Elon Musk is saying, I think space colonization (especially a Mars colony) is going to be a government project or even one sponsored by multiple governments.
Resources. Gravity.
There are a large number of different resources that exist on Mars, but not necessarily in quantity anywhere else. Water, so oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel. While launching from Mars is not trivial, it reuires a lot less than from Earth. Presumably, too, there is the possibility of finding assorted minerals deposits and other resources just like Earth; but in a more shallow gravity well. I’m not a geologist, but I gather iron is plentiful; likely a chance of nickel due to meteor craters, like in northern Ontario. Silica, calcium, etc. Metal construction materials, glass, silicon for computer chips, etc. The less hauled from earth, the better. (Yes, the moon may have these materials too. The big one perhaps, is water which appears more accessible on Mars.)
I think the first step is a flotilla of robots to begin stockpiling resources and basic manufacturing. Until we can do that, no point in humans trying to stay there for appreciable lengths of time.
I don’t know how complex the process is for building pressure habitats, but I imagine it will be a long time before we can safely build them in a hostile environment. It’s not just the metal pressure vessel, it’s the complexity of insulation, piping, wiring, airlocks, pumps, etc. It’s not like a log cabin or lean-to where the only important thing is a roof to keep the rain off and a safe place to start a fire. The main advantage of building on site with local materials is that launch weight does not figure into it.
One of the big problems of space travel is the effect on the human body of extended periods of zero-g, I’m not sure how much Mars (40% g) or the moon (16% g) mitigate that. Arthur C. Clarke in a discussion of 2001 Space Odyssey mentioned that a rotating environment simulating 1G would have to be 300 feet diameter to avoid coriolis force discomfort. In true Hollywood style, the movie simply fudged over that detail for the spaceship.
Given that there are flat-earthers, Scientologist, and, I’ve recently found out, nuclear bomb deniers, I can buy that a cult might arise that could be made to believe that there is a place already set up for believers that they could jet off to and be welcomed into a comforting bosom of religious sanctuary. However even at that it would be nigh impossible for them to pull off a launch.
To construct a launch pad alone would prohibitive, IMHO. Even if they could scrape together enough tithings, they would still need scientist to draw up the schematics. And I’m sure some governments might frown on the project. And that’s not even considering the Adam and Eve vessel itself.
Interesting idea, though.
I’m imagining shuttles that fly out with minimal life bubble and a load of supplies, dock with the Cycler, and now the humans have a much larger living area behind heavy shielding until they reach the other end, at which point they board their shuttle to disembark. The shuttle refills with fuel to do the same on the return.
Perhaps each shuttle also carries and extra few bricks to enhance the radiation protection on the living space until it is very robust. Once launched, the cycler itself never undergoes significant acceleration, so can be a lot more structurally fragile than the shuttles but with a massive radiation protection…
The Cycler would start with a small protected bubble, then add bigger modules and their protection as each shuttle contributes some bricks. perhaps that would be nothing more than an outer shell or bag that surrounds the habitat with moon or Mars dirt and gravel, one partial shipload at a time. Or chunks of steel Lego.
The cycler could also be the solution to the gravity problem. Make it a large ship that rotates, whereas the shuttles would be smaller ships that do not. Minimally, the cycler could be a couple pods at the ends of tethers with a central hub for docking and storage of goods not needed for the trip. Or it could be a large cylinder. Whatever it is, it needs to rotate to simulate gravity and avoid all the medical issues of extended microgravity. OTOH, the shuttles will be maneuvering ships that will not rotate. But since people will only be in them for a short time, that’s not a problem.
Eh, most of the mass that gets lumped into the category of “life support” is consumables. And if you’re going to have a spinning ship, I’m not sure if it really buys you anything if the spinning ship is a cycler: You just make your ship with the engines on it in two pieces, keep the pieces together for burns, and then spool them apart in the long zero-g phase, then reel them back together for the next burn.
Nitpick, IIRC, tests have concluded that rotating simulated gravity doesn’t eliminate all of the medical issues and introduces a couple of it’s own. Though, it’s certainly a lot better than no simulated gravity.
Yes, it was prestige, and on an epic scale. The future of humanity lay in the outcome of a race to the moon. However, the traditional reason for such feats is a lesser level of prestige, such as climbing a mountain because it’s there.
A reasonable standard to distinguish space colonization from space exploration.
We have plenty of gravity down here. It’s actually a nuisance. We can live in space by building immense structures. And we want to build them in space so we don’t have to expend resources getting them out of these gravity wells. In space we can grow food if we can get enough water, carbon, and nitrogen there. Finding that on the moon will be a tremendous advantage, but we don’t need many people there. Hopefully none. All of our mining and building should be done by non-oxygen consuming robots and people can occupy these habitats when they are completed. And yes, they’ll need to be gigantic in order to rotate fast enough to simulate gravity, Anything that can be produced there, like food, can be sent down here inexpensively.
Who wants to live on Mars or Luna? 100 years from now both of them will look pretty much like they do now. They aren’t going to magically develop atmospheres. Might as well live in a giant space station that has 0G fun rooms where you can fly,
The idea proposed by O’Neill in the High Frontier was that the Moon would be a useful source of construction material (metals, silicates) for rotating space habitats and spacecraft. The Moon also has a lot of oxygen, (although it is poor in carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen). If we send a bunch of remote-controlled, semi-autonomous robots to mine the Moon, we can start the first stages of O’Neill’s dream. But you may be right - there need not be many humans living there.
Don’t expect any viable space colonisation until robotics and teleoperation are much better than they are now. Luckily that seems to be an inevitable consequence of advances in information technology. Give it a hundred years and we’ll be up to our eyes in autonomous systems that we will barely notice.
What kind of tests did they do to conclude this? There certainly haven’t been any rotating habitats in space for such tests, at least not large enough for humans to live in. Did someone make a small one for rodents or something?
The worst problem with small rotating habitats is the nausea caused by Coriolis forces. To reduce this you have to build big. We are nowhere near building big yet.
Will they name it after Jim Jones?
I never suggested small rotating habitats. For a minimal one, I suggested a couple pods connected by tethers. The tethers can be long enough to avoid the Coriolis problem.
Sorry. I was responding to Lucas_Jackson. A tethered rotating habitat would be a good start, although there are some practical problems to be ironed out. How do you get from one pod to the other one?
We also don’t know how much gravity we need to mitigate the effects of weightlessness. We know that 0 g is bad for us, but we don’t know how much we need.
Personally, I suspect that many problems will be severely reduced with as little as 10% gravity, enough for the body to feel an up and down, though obviously I have no studies to base that on. It will, if nothing else, make things like eating and using the bathroom much easier. If that is the case, then that means that the cycler doesn’t need to be as large and robust as it would be if we need 1 g.
The real problem comes when we start actual colonization, as in having babies in our new home. That’s when we will learn a number of things about gestation outside of a 1 g environment, and it’s quite likely that some innocent children will suffer for it.