A number of years ago, I read an article stating that we could send all our
freon to mars using repurposed atomic missiles.
.
This would do three things.
use up the freon in a way that make doesn’t harm the earth.
use up all the boosters is a useful way.
puts a lot of greenhouse gasses on mars.
.
I don’t know how serious this proposal was because
could a missile without its bomb load and lofting a smaller freon tank
even reach mars.
could we send enough greenhouse gasses to mars to make a difference.
.
I am avidly rereading Heinlein’s “Farmer in the sky”…Just in case.:dubious:
I doubt that an ICBM has the launch range to break orbit. I’m also not sure that the freon would remain freon in an impact- it might denature or separate into component parts with the energy from impact.
That’s just it. No way to launch enough to make any difference.
Kind of like when people suggest we launch all our nuclear waste into the Sun and other people panic thinking we’ll damage the Sun by doing so. It’s a mere drop in an ocean.
Even if we could just teleport it there, how long would it last? Unlike Earth, Mars has no ozone layer and strong ultraviolet right to the surface. As soon as you released it, it would start to break down like it does in the upper atmosphere here.
as for getting the stuff to mars, (Discover magazine sept. 94)
taking a fuzzy orbit to mars would take many years.
or use a nuclear orion and get it there all in one shot.
As for the greenhouse gas, just a little change would be enough.
this way would take hundreds of years to work.
take a look at the great cathedrals, no one who started to build them sat in them
But, what a fantastic thing to leave behind.
One good volcanic eruption would do more damage than launching all
our nuclear arsenal minus warheads.
I just want to tip the balance on mars.
just one more degree, so the co2 doesn’t freeze out as much.
I want to cause a runaway greenhouse effect on mars.
Mars doesn’t have the magnetic field or gravity to retain much of an atmosphere anyway. And its current atmosphere is 2% of Earth’s. You need to add teratonnes of atmosphere.
(How much freon do we have lying around, anyway? It’s not as if it is an unavoidable by-product of macguffinite refining. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to send a swarm of self-replicating freon nano-factories to Mars and have the greenhouse gasses created on-site?)
Even if our entire nuclear arsenal could reach Mars (which is borderline absurd) there’s no chance it could deliver a meaningful amount of Freon. Heck, a mass of Freon equal to the unlaunched mass of all those rockets would probably be a pitiful amount for the purpose of altering the Martian climate.
A few larger ICBMs like the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’, LGM-25C ‘Titan II’, and the R-36M (NATO reporting name SS-20 ‘Satan’) can loft a few hundred kilograms of payload into a low energy escape orbit with the addition of a kick motor like an Agena or Inertial Upper Stage (IUS). There is hardly any reason to manufacture a reason to “use up” ICBMs, as they’re already being used as surplus space launch vehicles. The Titan II was used for years, repurposed as the Titan 23D and 23G, also serving as the family design template for the Titan II Gemini Launch Vehicle, and Titan III and IV space launch vehicles. The Peacekeeper is in use today as the OSP-2 Minotaur IV space launch vehicle and sounding rocket (with the addition of Orion 38 and Star 48 kick motors in place of the operational Post-Boost Vehicle), and will be used for the Minotaur V (with an additional Star 37) for the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LAD-EE) mission. The R-36M is in use as the Dnepr SLV.
As there is very little existing atmosphere on Mars and no magnetosphere, freon would break down into constituents, with free hydrogen and lighter compounds escaping into a wide halo around the planet while the heavier hydrocarbons and the reactive chlorine and fluorine compounds reacting condensing. This would not make Mars habitable even if we could send the almost unimaginable amount of mass to Mars. There is no viable means to make the surface of Mars habitable with extant technology, or that such a system could be sustained indefinitely. Nor is there any particular need to do so; if we were capable of supporting the kind of energy and infrastructure to alter the surface of Mars, we would be better off constructing orbiting habitats out of space-borne materials like water ice and silicates, which are a much more efficient use of space and energy.