Earth Day

Some people may not be happy with me, but this Earth Day I've been daydreaming about another planet. For the past week, my before-bed reading has been "A Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. Lacking the discipline to do a proper book review, I want to share some general ideas that are put forward in this book.

Before going into a detailed description of how Mars could be settled, he does an inspiring job of arguing why we should do it. He is very clear that this is not just an endevour in setting a new altitude record, or landing people there just to plant a flag and head home. He says that Mars has all the elements necessary to not only support life, but to support a technological civilization. Unlike any other extraterrestrial planet, Mars possesses large quantities of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. These four elements are the basis of food and water along with plastics, wood, paper, clothing, and rocket fuel.

Mars has a 24 hour day/night cycle and an atmosphere thick enough to shield its surface against solar flares. It also happens to be tilted on its axis like our own planet which also gives it seasons (although each season is twice as long). It is the only other planet that will accomidate large-scale greenhouses lit by natural sunlight. The valuable isotope, Deuterium, is known to be five times more common on Mars than it is on Earth. Also leading to a future economy is the fact that Mars would provide the perfect base from which to mine the Main Belt asteroids known to be rich with valuable metals and ores.

He outlines some of the more incredible real-estate blunders in history: During the period of their global ascendancy, the Spanish ignored North America as being nothing but worthless wilderness. In 1803 Napoleon sold a third of what is now the United States for two million dollars. In 1867 the Czar sold off Alaska for a similar amount. Europeans knew about the existence of Australia for 200 years before the first colony arrived and no European power even attempted to claim the continent until 1830. He said that while these examples of short-sighted statecraft are legendary today, two hundred years from now the apathy of our current governments towards a prize like an entire planet will be viewed in a similar light.

He stresses that he is not just talking about natural resources and real estate; I love this quote: "The true value of America was as the future home for a new branch of human civilization, one that combined its humanistic antecedents and its frontier conditions to develop into the most powerful engine for human progress and economic growth the world has ever seen. The wealth of America was in the fact that she could support people, and that the right kind of people chose to go to her. Every feature of frontier American life that acted to create a practical can-do culture of innovative people will apply to Mars one hundredfold."

The book is heavy with the science and formulas involved and he has calculated his plan down to the smallest detail like how many kg of dry food and water required per crew member per day, but he also does a very good job of putting things in layman's terms. He is particularly harsh in his criticism of NASA with its ballooning budgets and inefficiencies born out of the habit of trying to include as many departments as possible in any plan, rather than doing things as simply as possible.

He outlined NASA's famous "90 day report" that estimated a cost of $450 billion to create 'battlestar galactica' sized ships capeable of carrying all the supplies and fuel for the return trip, and compared it to the failed attempts of the 19th century British navy to explore the Canadian Arctic using huge flotillas of warships loaded with fuel and supplies that either perished or had to turn around due to shortages. Contrast that with the amazing success that was being enjoyed at the same time by fur-trapping explorers who adopted the methods of the natives and traveled light, feeding themselves and their dogs with local game and accomplishing far more in way of exploration, all at an insignificant cost.

Zubrin's plan is basically to travel to Mars by dog sled. He calls the plan "Mars Direct" and outlines that it would require first, an unmanned launch which would deliver onto the surface of Mars an ERV (earth return vehicle) and an ISPP - an in-situ propellant production plant, a chemical production device which can produce rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere by combining carbon dioxide (95% of the Martian atmosphere) with hydrogen, producing methane and water.

This methanation reaction is a simple chemical process that has been practiced in industry since the 1890's. The chemical plant then splits the water produced into hydrogen and oxygen, storing the oxygen and recycling the hydrogen back into the chemical plant to make more methane and water. A third unit of the plant splits carbon dioxide into oxygen which is stored and carbon monoxide which is vented as waste.

At the end of six months, the small unit will have produced 108 tons of methane and oxygen, thereby eliminating any need for a giant ship to carry the return fuel all the way from Earth. He describes that this process of creating propellant from Mars' most freely available resource, its air, is actually a 19th century, "gas-light era" technology. He compares NASA's approach to what would have happened if Lewis and Clark had attempted to carry with them all the food, water, and supplies that they would need for their entire journey. To prove that this wasn't just theoretical, a working prototype of the chemical plant was built under contract to NASA Johnson Space Center for a total cost of less than $48,000.

According to Mars Direct, by the time the first manned capsule landed on Mars, the astronauts would have a fully fueled ERV sitting waiting for them. According to his plan, after a period of exploration and study, they would leave their habitation behind and return to earth in the ERV. This would be repeated every two years with two boosters being launched, one sending an ERV to a new site, and the other sending a piloted "hab" to rendezvous with an ERV at a previously prepared site.

Eventually, a site will be identified that has the most favorable location/resources, etc and at that point, subsequent flights will work to build up a more permanent base at that location. He outlines how giant domes of Martian-produced plastics could one day house huge areas of agricultural and human habitation where people could work in their shirtsleeves without any need for oxygen masks. The chapters that I am just getting to describe the process whereby we could go about terraforming the entire planet and returning it to the warm, moist state that it once was.

I am crudely summarizing his plan but the point of the book is that we can have people on Mars within 10 years of deciding we want to do it - using 1996 technology and 19th century chemistry - all at a cost of only $30 billion (and that he says, is if NASA does it. He puts forward a convincing argument that private industry could do it even cheaper).

Zubrin believes that if we aren't going forward, we are going backwards and gives the example of the ancient Romans who may have gazed at the ruins of the aquaducts and wondered to themselves "what kind of men were able to build that?" It has been 40 years since the Apollo moon landing and some polls report that up to 25% of people asked don't believe that the moon landing even happened. The possible conspiracy-theory is for another post, but I have to agree that it seems like we are less capeable of putting people on the moon now than we were back in 1969 - the first model year of the legendary CB750 (which coincidentally also causes me to wonder "what sort of men made this?")

That doesn't seem like progress to me...




- C