Mining Mars for a self-sufficent colony

[fredinno]

22 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Added, that's a good question.

 

I edited the OP to make it more realistic, and after reading through this forum post, I guess I was to hasty with this.

I was only pointing out that if we put our minds to it, we can achieve big things within a couple of decades or less, as well as pointing out that NASA originally wanted to begin research on a Lunar colony with the Apollo program.

Yeah... again, reading through this post, I guess it is.

Yeah, Apollo was going to do Lunar BASES, not colonies. Not even the ambitious Space transportation system proposed colonies of any kind.

6 hours ago, KSK said:

Well, I'd have a tapered hatch, such that the higher pressure inside your hab forces it into its frame. I'd also go with a tubular gasket - just extrude your synthetic rubber through a circular die and melt the ends together to give you a continuous loop. Stick loop to hatch frame, done.

But your point still stands - manufacturing stuff off-world is going to be difficult and everything that you need to import from Earth, makes you that bit less self-sufficient. Like I said - I think a truly self-sufficient colony is a very long way off, even in the context of OP's thought experiment.

You're absolutely right about Stardust. On the other hand, I would think that any crewed mission to Mars will probably involve going into orbit around Mars and then descending to the surface from orbit, rather than re-entry from interplanetary speeds. The g-loading would be more survivable that way. Apparently the Apollo capsules would be peaking at around 7g on re-entry, so we do have some data on low g reentry.

For radiation studies, I would use an unmanned probe. Basically a collection of boxes with radiation detectors in, wrapped in whatever shielding you want to try. Measure the radiation dose inside your box and see if it's low enough that the risk to crewed flights is acceptable. I'm honestly not sure how much use any biological models would be.

For growing crops, to be honest, I'd go straight to Mars and make that the first priority and go/no-go point for the colony. Assume that your colony is going to start off entirely supplied from Earth. Their first task is to grow food. If they can't then you bring them home (because the colony is never going to be viable), or just commit to regular supply runs from Earth. If you really wanted to do some studies ahead of time, go for an Elon's Greenhouse approach and do those studies on Mars.

Technically, we already know the radiation levels in transit to Mars- Curiosity measured it. What we don't know is how living beings react to that radiation.