MIT STUDENTS BASH MARS COLONIZATION PLAN
* BY DAMON POETER* OCTOBER 14, 2014 06:09PM EST
* 1 COMMENT
The Mars One Foundation's plan to send colonists to Mars in 2024 is judged unrealistic.
The Mars One Foundation's ambitious plan to send colonists to Mars in 2024 is an unrealistic goal given current technology levels, according to a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate engineering students.Most troubling for the tens of thousands of would-be Mars colonists who've applied with the foundation, lead author Sydney Do wrote that growing crops in a Mars habitat would quickly "produce unsafe oxygen levels."Do, along with colleagues Koki Ho, Samuel Schreiner, Andrew Owens, and Olivier de Weck, published an assessment of the Mars One program's timetable and likelihood of success, presenting the paper at the 65th International Astronautical Congress in Toronto.The Mars One Foundation, a non-profit based in the Netherlands, held an open casting call for would-be Mars colonists last summer, with the idea of forming a 40-candidate group that would begin training in 2015 for a series of colonizing missions launching in about a decade. More than 100,000 people from around the globe applied, according to the foundation, including 30,000 Americans.Mars One founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp claimed last year that it would cost in the neighborhood of 6 billion to send the first four-person crew to Mars, with additional colonists sent later.The good news for Mars One is that Do and his colleagues think that first mission could be done for even cheaper."The space logistics analysis revealed that, for the best scenario considered, establishing the first crew fora Mars settlement will require approximately 15 Falcon Heavy launchers and require 4.5 billion in funding," the MIT students wrote.Unfortunately, that's about the only positive about the Mars One program in the researchers' paper, titled "An Independent Assessment of the Technical Feasibility of the Mars One Mission Plan."Do and his colleagues figure the cost of maintaining the Mars colony while adding additional colonists would grow and grow, perhaps prohibitively. Though the colonists would presumably try to utilize Martian materials as much as possible, the graduate students estimated that only 8 percent of the colony's needs would be met by in-situ resource utilization (ISRU).Instead, the Mars One colonists would be heavily dependent on expensive resupply missions from Earth. Do and his colleagues reckoned that "after 130 months on the Martian surface, spare parts [would] compose 62 percent of the mass brought from Earth to the Martian surface."Growing food and manufacturing breathable oxygen in Mars colony is also a dicey proposition, according to the graduate students, who questioned the readiness of life support technologies for a mission intended to launch in just a decade."If crops are used as the sole food source, they will produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat. Furthermore, the ISRU system mass estimate is 8 percent of the mass of the resources it would produce over a two-year period," they wrote in the paper. "That being said, the ISRU technology required to produce nitrogen, oxygen, and water on the surface of Mars is at a relatively low Technology Readiness Level (TRL), so such findings are preliminary at best."Do and his colleagues are only the latest to criticize the Mars One Foundation for biting off more than it might be able to chew.Last year, NASA chief engineer Brian Muirheadexpressed skepticism that the complicated, touch-and-go process used to land the space agency's Curiosity rover on Mars could be duplicated with more precious human cargo anytime soon. Specifically, he said of the Mars One project, "that is way beyond our capability to do today."A Mars "concept mission" devised by a group of U.K. scientists working in collaboration with the BBC also highlighted the difficulties of sending humans to the surface of the planet. Among the major challenges to such a mission was the health risk to astronauts posed by exposure to cosmic radiation and unexpected solar flares during a trip that could require more than a year in space, the researchers noted. Once on Mars, human colonists would also have to deal with extremely dangerous conditions and the breakdown of their bones and muscles in a low-gravity environment.That said, NASA has made it clear that a crewed mission to the Red Planet is one of its long-term goals, and notable figures who have lobbied for the pursuit of a Mars colony include Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk.Pioneering space tourist Dennis Tito has also proposed a privately funded, crewed Mars mission, though his Inspiration Mars Foundation seeks to outfit a spacecraft for a fly-by of the planet in 2018 rather than a trip to the surface.
